What Comes After Zoom? - <AUTHOR> https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2020/6/22/zoom-and-the-next-video <comment><USER2> I feel video conferencing is a sidetrack. It is an approximation of a physical meeting that never captures the spirit of the real thing and prevents us from moving on to something better.

The real power of digital communication is that it is searchable, remixable and that you don't need to be at a specific place at a specific time to take part, and yet we now all have slots in our calendar requiring us to be in something that has none of those benefits. This is an anti-pattern.

Group communication needs to be async, written and structured for easy access. The linux kernel mailing list is a much closer approximation of how it should be than any video conference, but it too is a high friction system. No tool so far has cracked this, although some like discourse and basecamp are trying. Google tried to once upon a time with wave, but they've given up and joined the physical meeting proxy club.

<comment><USER3> I fundamentally disagree. The reason synchronous video communication continues to dominate is because it's more information dense than text in many situations, and more interactive than asynchronous alternatives.

Asynchronous communication has its place, and it's amazing what has been accomplished over the LKML and similar. Software projects tend to make this sort of communication ideal, since they are amenable to individualized contributions. But the prescription that efficient digital communication must be asynchronous and textual is incorrect.

<comment><USER4> I work as IT-Support for a university and during the last months I mainly had to do with video conferencing both on and off work (a person living in my household still studies and they have been in conferences as well).

My feeling is: video conferencing took hold for two main reasons (in the university context):

1\. It is the most straightforward continuation of whatever existed before (those who talk, talk and those who listen, listen)

2\. People have desire for beeing close with others

However in terms of efficiency, I noticed that the raw educational value of some (often 4h+ long) meetings could have been summarized by watching a well produced 15min video and reading a 10 page PDF, if one were to skip all the chitchat and pointless hollow remarks. In terms of information density the seemingly unlimited nature of video conferencing doesn't work out well in practise (especially if paired with people who like to hear themselves speak).

Most of our educators are certainly not happy with what it does to the way they have to teach (less interactivity — anything other than a 3-way conversation is nearly impossible, the rest has to be passive). They say it leads to more frontal and less communicative education.

As musician, artist and programmer i know async collaborations and projects — the best stuff was always a combination of sync and async. This is why I tend to recommend to our educators to view video conferences not as _the_ replacement for their usual seminars, but as part of a strategic mix with synchronous (video conferences) and asynchronous components (email, collaborative text editing, etc).

<comment><USER5> > well produced 15min video and reading a 10 page PDF,

It is surprisingly difficult to create a useful 15 minute video. Go ahead and be rich if you find it easy. It takes me about 8 hours to produce 15 minutes of truly information-packed video content. And it is not as re-usable as you think.

> if one were to skip all the chitchat

Many people need the social chitchat to feel OK. It is not a negative side of video conferencing, it is added value.

<comment><USER6> > It is surprisingly difficult to create a useful 15 minute video. Go ahead > and be rich if you find it easy. It takes me about 8 hours to produce 15 > minutes of truly information-packed video content. And it is not as re- > usable as you think.

This is the problem. Why does it matter if it takes 8 hours?

What this comment replies to talks about 4 hour meeting but just with 3 people it nets 3 hours saved as a collective (assuming all 3 watch the 15 minute video).

This past week there was an article on HN that talked about the benefits of written communication. The argument of effort to produce such "memos" was throughout the discussion but it is the very same as the conversation about video here.

I've seen this at multiple places that contributors don't want to put the upfront additional work for the collective benefit. Human nature at it's best, selfishness.

<comment><USER7> > Why does it matter if it takes 8 hours?

It matters because letting impatient people get rid of social conventions placing boundaries on their access to others' time is a dangerous thing to do, doubly so when the pretext for doing so is dumping responsibility for creating deliverables on small subsets of an org, which they will never be able to escape once the expectation is established.

The thing about synchronous is that the important people who refuse to read anything all have to sit in a chair and fidget at the same time to get the answers they want. There is no fiction that I will produce an artifact allowing me to disseminate information 1-to-M, and each important person enforces with the others that they can't interrogate me out-of-band and skip the meeting. There's only collective benefit if the document author can tell people "fuck you, read the memo." Otherwise, you're just spending hours putting up a sign-post for lazy people to bother you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My company uses WebEx not Zoom, but I have found meetings far more tolerable since I started disabling inbound video. I've always turned off my own video, but turning off everyone else's has been a game changer. The important parts of a remote meeting are the audio and screenshare; video is a net-negative. I get no value from watching people type, fidget around with a phone, have random family members and pets walk by, etc. and actually find it quite distracting.

<comment><USER9> Yup. The worst on Zoom and Google Meet is:

a. the person with feedback or background noise causing the video to flip to them

b. someone displaying their lunch for everyone to see

c. Zoom specialty: obnoxious video backgrounds

Zoom helps you block trolls, but does nothing for the pain of having to listen to someone's feedback during an hour long meeting. And you often don't want to interrupt the meeting to pester people about their microphone.

It's a similar problem to Slack. We have some people who overuse @here and various similar sins, and Slack's answer is there's no reason to block, just fix your company.[1]

What this misses is there's a broad range of behavior between pleasant and malicious. There are also a broad range of social remedies we normally use to deal with this behavior.

Most of those social remedies don't work well online. It's surprisingly hard to craft a written correction that doesn't come across as an attack, especially if you're senior and don't want to unintentionally throw that rank around.

[1]: [https://twitter.com/stewart/status/624239660529684481](https://twitter.com/stewart/status/624239660529684481)

<comment><USER10> We also use WebEx at work (university setting) and for smaller meetings, we require everyone to use (at a minimum) a set of basic headphones to avoid echo. If they don't use them, they need to keep their mic muted whenever they aren't speaking.

For class-related stuff or larger meetings/seminars, we use the Events portion of WebEx instead of Meetings. It's basically the same thing, but there are more "roles" so there's a host who can mute/unmute participants or assign privileges. Panelists are the speakers who can turn their audio and video off by themselves but can only screen share if made a "presenter". Attendees are just the people watching the thing, and they can chat with text but can't turn their own mics on. They can raise their hand or the host can find them in the attendee list if they need to unmute them.

Once people got used to how it works, it has been surprisingly effective. You don't need to make sure every attendee in a 300-person seminar has headphones on--just the people who are presenting. If one of the presenters is unwilling or unable to use headphones, I can mute them if they have a live mic that's just causing echo while they sit there and listen. Students and other attendees can still speak with their mics, but only when called on.

Incidentally, this also does away with all of the issues of people disrupting Zoom calls because you can only join as a panelist if you are on the list and have the right link. You can still publish the attendee link publicly because the worst thing an attendee can do is type in the chat (and even then, they can only send to "all participants" if you enable it).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why do we have RFC standardized and decentralized email but never could make standard chat/call protocol?

XMPP and now Matrix made good progress in that direction but are mostly obscure to date.

<comment><USER12> 1) Because email predated everybody trying to become a monopoly and extract rents from the Internet.

2) NAT _really_ screwed us all by breaking the end-to-end nature of the Internet.

<comment><USER3> Could you explain how NAT is relevant to the growth of walled gardens to someone was born after the development of the World Wide Web?

<comment><USER13> If nothing else, NAT makes it harder to leave a walled garden for a small chat program between you and your friends/family/interest group. Without it, you could potentially all run the program and talk. With it, someone has to be technical enough to do port forwarding, someone has to be on a connectin without carrier-grade NAT so that port forwarding is an option, and/or someone has to pay with money/time to setup and run a server on a dedicated IP or upgrade their connection to a static IP.

The most easily accessible alternative is another company's closed system.

I suspect NAT wasn't involved in that developing as much as money was - IRC, email, Newsgroups were hard to profit from. Having a distinctive service which is different from your competitors so customers can be attracted, and which is closed so customers want to bring their friends and family in to talk to them and then can't leave without the whole group leaving, is bound to be more profitable for the winners than taking part in a federated system where only one user can join and talk to their contacts with relays to other servers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think Facebook is ultimately right, just too early, betting on VR being the next thing.

Spatial presence is incredibly important: you can face towards the person you're speaking to. You can whisper to the person next to you. Crowded rooms naturally organize in cliques/groups. In a video chat all of this is broken or awkward.

VR today is way too bulky and annoying. It's in the "luggable microcomputers" stage before laptops and phones, but it shows a glimpse of the future.

For example, standalone Oculus is less of a hassle than thethered headsets. Camera-based hand tracking demos show how people can freely gesticulate in the VR space. Imagine that extended to full-body tracking and in-headset sensors that capture facial expressions and "deepfake" you in VR.

<comment><USER15> I agree 100%.

Speaking of spatial presence, I recently came across tonari[0] through a post[1] here on HN and thought it looked really cool. In case any of the tonari developers happen to hang out around here: I would love to try this out sometime! :)

(Side note: The blog post linked in the HN discussion below does a much better job at explaining what it is that they're doing – at least to me as a techie.)

[0] [https://tonari.no](https://tonari.no)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23540586](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23540586)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you want to play in hard mode, figure out how to get video calls working for someone calling their grandma in a nursing home, when she doesn't have a laptop or smartphone.

It would have to be a device that's as simple to use as a phone. Not a cell phone, a regular phone that sits on a desk, the old-fashioned kind.

I bet a whole lot of people wish that they had something like that working during the pandemic.

<comment><USER17> My 100yr old grandma is using KOMP right now, and that's going very well. She can understand us better than on the phone. The device is on the expensive side, though, with 600 £.

[https://www.noisolation.com/uk/komp/](https://www.noisolation.com/uk/komp/)

<comment><USER18> Thank you for sharing this, I've never seen KOMP before and it looks wonderful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> IMO, Zoom has the worst user experience of all video conferencing tools by a long shot, at least on Linux, regardless of whether you are a paying user or not. And while Skype was doing a terrible job for years, these days it's light years ahead of Zoom. Google Meet is also doing an incredible job and lately I've been using it a lot. I seriously don't understand how a horrible product such as Zoom made it so big... So whatever comes after Zoom, I hope it will do a better job.

<comment><USER20> You haven't tried Cisco WebEx,have you? For a good chunk of time Skype was dead while MS was busy figuring out how to assimilate it. Google was out because companies didn't want google to spy on you, so your options were WebEx or zoom (which we didn't know was a spying dumpster fire yet). We eventually also had to give up on WebEx because it simply did not work consistently on our Linux Dev's laptops. So our option was "or zoom"

<comment><USER19> The spying argument is not exactly applicable for most scenarios. I mean you know you are taking a risk when you're using proprietary software running on servers that aren't yours, whether the privacy issues are intentional or design flaws(both of which exist in every solution, whether that be zoom, google, microsoft or any other competitor in that context). So with that I personally pick reliability over anything else, hence my personal choice - meet. And realistically speaking, very few people are of any interest to Google or even state agencies. I most certainly am not: I've applied for positions at Google in the past so they have my near - complete resume(now lead developer as opposed to senior developer when I applied), I use some of their paid services so they know my bank account, full names, address and telephone number and I use a ton of their products in general. I'm way past the "on the internet no one knows I'm a dog" state. I'm with Torvalds on this one - I'll use proprietary solutions so long as they do the job and there are no viable alternatives.

<comment><USER20> Well in the case of Google I was working at a company that was interested in partnering with google competitors, so it didn't matter whether we thought we were targets or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What on earth happened to Skype? Over a decade of head start, why wasn't it completely untouchable when COVID-19 came along?

Another thought. Last year at the peak of Fortnite hype, when top DJs were hosting parties live in game etc, there was talk that the next big thing in communications might be everyone hanging out in games, Fortnite or whatever came next. I do think that lots of young people are meeting friends in games, but it hasn't had the enormous breakthrough in culture that Zoom has. We can probably retire our expectations of some kind of Metaverse for a few more years.

<comment><USER22> >What on earth happened to Skype?

Microsoft happened

<comment><USER23> eBay happened, then Microsoft happened.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I feel part of Zoom's initial foothold in the market was that inside of a conference room it "just worked". Or at least more so than other options I'd tried, especially a couple of years ago. Even earlier this year I had issues getting Google Meet to work in our office's conference rooms. Minimizing or removing the "fiddling with the AV software" phase of meetings is huge.

</comment><comment><USER25> Very interesting post. One thing I'm thinking of is if an enterprise uses something like Slack then you could have persistent video rooms similar to the audio rooms in Discord.

The last paragraph makes a good point though. As good as Slack is, there is something that still feels inefficient to me. When I'm trying to communicate with people it's almost like shouting out into the ether. Did they see my message? Why haven't they responded yet? I need this question answered now.

It's strange. Email for the most part you were reasonably assured when you hit the send button that it was off into their inbox. It would be kind of cool to see what the Snap of business comms could look like.

<comment><USER26> Tandem has done a really nice job with persistent video/audio rooms for distributed teams: [https://tandem.chat/](https://tandem.chat/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> With my experience Microsoft Teams is actually a better choice than Zoom. You don't even need to install the program and it works on the web, unlike the fake "web interface" of Zoom that just loads infinitely and forces you to install their suspicious client.

</comment><comment><USER28> I haven't used Zoom, but I have attempted to use Google Meet for video chat and it was an abysmal tire fire.

My mom wanted to do a family video chat over Easter and I thought, "Hey, we use Google Meet at work. I bet it will be great for this." It was a completely unusable experience of frozen videos and dropped audio. I was ready to just completely throw in the towel on the entire idea.

My mom said, "Well, me and my sisters have been using Skype for years and it works just fine." So I begrudgingly downloaded Skype and created an account. It just works. It's amazing.

We've been doing video chats every Sunday evening with my mom and my brother's family for a couple months now. I thought I hated video chat. It turned out I just hated Google's idea of video chat.

My wife uses Facebook video chat with her mom and it works pretty acceptably too. I think Skype is still better, but Google Meet is absolute bottom of the barrel in video chat technology. Which is a shame because Google Meet works great for audio with screen sharing.

Maybe Zoom works comparably well to Skype. I hope so.

<comment><USER29> Duo is a much better choice for family video chat than Meet/Hangouts

<comment><USER28> I've never heard of it before you mentioning it. That does look to be more in line with what I'd want. A bit confused why they wouldn't leverage the same technology in Meet since that seems to be the product that gets more press.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The action MMO is the final medium, in VR or not, I suspect in 3rd person!

Positional 3D audio is the last frontier. But I'm not sure you will want it for public gatherings,

it should be a friends only thing in a sea of chat bubbles above the characters heads.

The chat feed is not interesting because the context is lost and trolling is too easy.

<comment><USER31> 2d positional audio works really well too. Check out [https://rambly.app](https://rambly.app) for a 16-bit rpg feel. Works great for virtual happy hours / groups of 5+.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The thing that comes after Zoom is another app that makes the experience of teleconferencing easier.

If I were to guess maybe some kind of Mixed Reality system. Having Audio, Video with Video sharing is good. For some niche industries like CAD / CAM and also VR /AR / Video game design if you had some kind of Mixed reality system that could allow people to collaborate with 3D data you could actually have an interesting product.

</comment><comment><USER33> Certainly I can see Microsoft simply integrating video chat into the Office suite. I'm kind of shocked they haven't yet really solved real-time collaboration given that they own Skype and Office.

<comment><USER34> It's called Microsoft Teams, and in its current iteration, it's surprisingly good. I actually prefer it to Slack. It is highly integrated with Office 365 (supports live collaboration etc.).

The HD video quality is surprisingly solid -- comparable to Zoom, far surpasses Webex and Google Hangouts -- and uses a different protocol, codec(s) and network than Skype for Business, which I have always found spotty. MS Teams is the slated successor to Skype for Business (good riddance).

[https://www.djeek.com/2018/01/microsoft-teams-and-the- protoc...](https://www.djeek.com/2018/01/microsoft-teams-and-the-protocols-it- uses-opus-and-mnp24/)

It can handle up to 250 participants for group video chat (similar to Zoom), and there's an MS Teams Live Events edition that can handle 10k participants. (20k during COVID)

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams- live-e...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-live- events/plan-for-teams-live-events)

It actually does a few things better than Zoom -- its virtual background feature is able to better detect and eliminate complex backgrounds. It recently introduced on-the-fly automatic closed captioning (through speech recognition). Later this year, it will have a larger video grid (currently the limit is 3x3) and AI-based noise cancellation on mic input -- previously the domain of offerings like krisp.ai.

On iOS devices, it even lets you do live screen-sharing on mobile (using Apple's Screen Recorder mechanism), which makes it easy to demo mobile apps on a video call.

EDIT: --I don't think Zoom let you do this (yet?)-- not a true statement, but leaving this here with strikethrough.

<comment><USER35> My company tried MS Teams for about two days before canning it and switching back to Slack + Zoom. I've never encountered such a poorly designed product [1] other than the one it was supposed to replace, Skype for Business.

Why the does chat need to take up so much space on the screen and why is everything presented in basically an old school SMS layout (I'm looking at you too, Signal). I tried a handful of their integrations nothing worked correctly. Trying to simply enable github commits/PRs/etc was a confusing nightmare of authenticating multiple parties and ultimately all it did was have a chatbot privately spam me, but couldn't have it reside in a channel.

Screen sharing is a disaster for everything business oriented too (ms teams, zoom, slack, whatever google's thing is called this week). They're slow, laggy, frequently crash, and resolution is unreadable most of the time. If you need to have screen sharing where your voice chat happens at the same time as your video actions, Discord is the only thing that works flawlessly. It's superior on simple voice chat too, persistent voice chat rooms, etc. It's lovely software.

[1] [https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2017/02/teams- bet...](https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2017/02/teams-beta- windows-100708530-large.jpg)

<comment><USER34> Screen-sharing on Teams has been pretty solid -- after all, screen sharing is an enterprise's bread and butter. As someone who averages 10-15 meetings a week, most of them with screen shares, I think I have a pretty good sample size to come to that conclusion.

I can't comment on aesthetics since that's fairly subjective. I can't comment on integrations either since I've only tried a few, but I find it integrates fairly effortlessly with Azure Devops (ie Microsoft's attempt at replicating Github in what was previously Team Foundation Server) [1].

Here's the thing about Microsoft stuff -- generally things work well if you remain in the Microsoft ecosystem. Otherwise, you'll likely have to do extra work.

That said, Teams has improved drastically since 2017. Microsoft's philosophy these days seems to be move fast, ship crap and get better quickly. Not in every product line, but I've definitely seen this happen with Teams development and I've actually come to like what the Teams product has become today. I have to confess, Microsoft under Satya Nadella is a very different company from what it once was.

[1] We're not allowed to use Github in my organization (bigcorp, IP etc.) but I've found Azure Devops to be quite a decent substitute. It plays well with a git pull-request workflow, has almost full feature parity with Github as far as I can tell, plus has a built-in kanban board.

I like Github -- it's more tightly focused and simpler -- but I've been able to carve out a part of Azure Devops that is similar to Github and maintain my previous git workflow without much trouble. Azure Devops is not the dumpster fire I'd expected it to be -- it's actually fairly good in parts.

(the only pain-in-the-neck with Azure Devops is licensing cost -- it's not free. In the enterprise, it has named-user licensing which can get costly. I wouldn't have used it if we didn't already have it and couldn't use private Github.)

<comment><USER35> > We're not allowed to use Github in my organization (bigcorp, IP etc.)

Is your organization aware that Microsoft owns Github and your Azure stuff is most likely hosted inside Microsoft data centers exactly like Github? Seems like a weird line in the sand to draw.

> Microsoft under Satya Nadella is a very different company from what it once > was.

Yeah, Microsoft is doing great things in other areas. VS Code, Windows 10, WSL, DirectX on WSL, the massive focus on open source and giving back to the community. I just found MS Teams in particular is unusable garbage, but I'm very happy with Microsoft otherwise.

I don't know if you're old enough but MS Comic Chat was significantly superior to Microsoft Teams.

<comment><USER34> Our source control has to be on-prem (our Azure Devops is on-prem).

I've never used it but I'm old enough to remember Comic Chat. Fair enough, we have different positions and that's ok.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> What I think is interesting is how much worse the conversation experience is today vs. during the days of circuit-switched landline phones. There was no perceptible difference between a live conversation and one by phone between New York and Washington DC.

Today the conversations seem so stilted because there's 50+ milliseconds of latency at a MINIMUM that makes interrupting and a back-and-forth conversational flow absolutely impossible. Also lost completely are the little "ahs" and "ums" that add color to a conversation.

</comment><comment><USER37> Virtual reality meetings? Ideally to truly replicate the in-person experience since I feel like the body language/phyiscal presense ocmponent is important.

<comment><USER38> This could be it, but current headsets are not that comfy after too much use, and if you don't have AC at home (tons of EU homes won't have them) they can be a nightmare in the summer...

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> The biggest opportunity in video was YouTube hence Google acquired it. Zoom is only for business users: institutions, companies etc. Personal users use WhatsApp, Skype, Viber or whatever they prefer.

"we are waiting for the Snap, Clubhouse and Yo." If products like this emerge they will be niche like Twitch is for gaming video live streaming.

<comment><USER40> Wow, does Yo still exist? What have they been doing lately?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I believe integrated groupware is the future. No separate tools for chat, discussions, calls, screensharing, collaborative editing, email and filesharing.

For example somebody pulls up document in a call. For team work it would make sense if it was editable by everyone right there in the conference tool.

<comment><USER42> This was Google Wave. A bit ahead of it's time.

<comment><USER43> Wave was an awesome product too. It's really a shame it succumbed to the fickle and careless whims of Google's upper management. They've had so many solid products that didn't get a properly good push, and instead pushed products which were destined for failure, all to the same result.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Why don't you ask Bernadette? [https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0946288/](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0946288/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Everything has voice ... that nobody wants.

Customer service is now so terrible that I don't want to talk to you and I _damn_ sure don't want you to talk to me. At this point, I've kinda bought into the whole Millennial "If I can't do it online without interacting with a human, go die in a fire cause you aren't making a sale."

Quit hiding the price--you simply lost the sale. Don't ask for a quote-you simply lost the sale. Don't make me sign up before paying--you simply lost the sale. If I can't do a return solely through online interaction--you simply lost any further sales.

I see Zoom and its ilk the same way. Ubiquitous video chat--that nobody really wants.

<comment><USER45> I don't understand. Can you explain the connection between desire of online convenience (this part is understandable) and Zoom?

<comment><USER12> The fundamental question is: "Do people actually _want_ video?"

Audio and, especially, video are very synchronous. Normally, the _last_ thing I want in my schedule is another synchronous event.

Do I need _some_ video? Maybe. Perhaps my one-on-one with my manager.

Do we need video for a weekly group meeting? Do we even _need_ that weekly group meeting? Sure, it was convenient when everybody was in the office. How convenient is it now that everybody is at home?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I don't get why Zoom got such attention. I've never even heard about it before the pandemic. But I've heard of other video conferencing tools.

<comment><USER47> even before the pandemic, it was known as the most reliable chat for largish meetings. Nothing else worked so well, and it still doesn.t

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> An underappreciatd feature of Zoom is the 40 minute restriction in the free version. Meetings are more productive with an enforced time limit.

</comment><comment><USER49> We have Jitsi, which is Free Software. Zoom shouldn't even be considered for anything in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER38> Is there a way to have good async group video chat?

I haven't given this much thought but maybe this is an interesting direction to explore?

<comment><USER50> Check out [https://www.marcopolo.me/](https://www.marcopolo.me/)

It will even stream an in-progress video message to you as it's being recorded if you happen to be looking at the app then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Well after I just got to experience the Oculus Quest, I'm going to say, after a few more VR generations, Zoom with VR avatars

</comment><comment><USER52> As an educator, Zoom is clunky and not designed for the use case. We built an interactive live streaming platform during COVID-19 that we've found powerful. A few keys features have been moderated chat, the ability to invite students to join via video, embedded quizzes, and various screen sharing layouts.

Check out a stream today to see it in action: [https://dexter.live/](https://dexter.live/)

</comment><comment><USER47> Has someone repackaged the decades-old phone hotlines as an app and named it Clubhouse?

</comment><comment><USER53> Why do they write about Zoom as if it invented video conferencing? Who is blind here?

<comment><USER54> I think the author is noting that, as with Dropbox, video conferencing isn't new (Skype has it), it's just then when the chips were down and millions of people needed it Zoom seems to have worked better for more people than more established entries, and part of this is probably that some fiddly things are done well in Zoom. I'm making no comment personally about Zoom or its ethics, just trying to clarify how I see the post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> At its end, the article suggests a wonderful question.

What is Zoom's Yo?

<comment><USER56> Video voice mail? TikTok for enterprise?

<comment><USER55> I feel like those might convey too much content?

Perhaps a link to a three-second "Never gonna give you up..." Rick-roll video?

Yo was one-bit Twitter. I don't know what one-bit video looks like?

<comment><USER56> Instagram with a 1kb upload limit

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Zoom out?

</comment><comment><USER58> Crop.</comment>


The answer to California's housing crisis is more housing - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/27/opinion/california-housing.html <comment><USER2> You can't just demand more housing. You have to make people want it. This is why I'm strongly in favor of taxing land by area.

A ten story condo with 100 units takes up as much land as 8 houses with yards. By reducing everyone's taxes then making up the difference via a land tax, you effectively lower the taxes on people using high density land use homes. You make it a more desirable lifestyle.

Demand from voters leads to changes in law.

<comment><USER3> That would significantly increase the taxes on agricultural use. Is that your intent? To incentivize high density residential, while making it hard to grow food?

<comment><USER4> There isn't much agricultural land, if any, in cities and suburbs. In the US, land is taxed at the local level (municipality and county), not at the state or federal level.

<comment><USER5> Not always. Here in KS side of Kansas City suburbs you will find crop fields between dense, multi-story developments. The agriculture land tax is applied throughout the state. The developers exploit this to pay vastly lower property taxes than if it were vacant land.

One instance in particular, they'll run a harvester right next to a 6 story development, and it probably only takes 10 minutes of run-time. Pretty crazy, but it's a tax savings.

<comment><USER6> KU seems to have an excellent emag staff, from your comments. Would you recommend sending a son there for EE (out of state)? Also, did you take any classes under Dr. John Schmalzel? I had a few classes with him and he went there.

<comment><USER5> Yes, if your son is interested in RF and RADAR/Remote Sensing, they have an excellent program.

No, looks like he was there before me. I did an MSEE in '96, under Moore and Gogineni.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think there should be a national effort to "spread out" the economy and fight the trend towards centralization in a few areas. If you build more housing in CA, even more people will move there and the overcrowding will become even worse. There should be incentives for companies to move away from places like SV and NY.

More acceptance of remote work would help too but I wouldn't hold my breath for it.

<comment><USER8> This is an instance of Jevon's paradox. The more housing you build to meet housing need of people then even more people will come in creating even larger demand for housing.

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

<comment><USER9> Jevons paradox is a nice example of bikeshedding. It doesn't change the decision making process at all because it looks like this:

supply < demand: build more housing.

demand > supply: build less housing

If demand grows faster than supply then it just means that you need to build more housing.

And let's be honest in a world with massive amounts of liquid capital but nothing worthwhile to invest into an infinite money sink that keeps increasing ROI the more you spend on it is actually almost magical and you know what? It's impossible in a world with physical constraints. You just haven't reached them yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > because developers mostly would build high-end units

This is such a frustrating perspective.

<comment><USER11> It's frustrating because, as propaganda, it's been _extremely_ effective.

If you're an opponent of increased housing supply in California, you can roll out that talking point whenever threatened. It's tested, emotionally resonant, and most people don't have the time to be explained why it's wrong.

Supporters of increased housing in CA need to come up with their own powerful rhetoric, rather than whining about the fact that their opponents' rhetoric works.

(Whining further that bad rhetoric shouldn't be allowed is even worse--we live in a democracy; you have to influence people; rhetoric matters.)

<comment><USER12> It's effective because there's a measure of truth in there, especially in California. Prop 13 will limit taxes on existing housing stock, so cities and counties will levy fees on new developments to make up for it. Additionally, the cost of labor in much of California is such that just building any structure is extremely expensive (to the extent that only luxury units will make any money for the developer).

<comment><AUTHOR> Prop 13 allows a 2% increase a year. That's more than enough to keep up with inflation.

<comment><USER12> Housing price growth well exceeds inflation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There is so much wasted/poorly optimized land in SF. I cringe whenever I see the massive surface level Safeway parking lot in Duboce/Church.

<comment><USER14> They should tear down the Fed Mint building behind that Safeway and turn it into housing. I don't even believe that branch does anything other than print proofs. A waste of space, but it's not happening during this presidency for sure.

<comment><USER15> Organizations that live on indefinitely- governments, universities, churches- don't give up land almost as a rule. One or two hundred years from now, they might really need this or that plot, and it could be nearly impossible to acquire then.

One easy to appreciate example are universities & other schools holding (& sometimes leasing) land adjacent to them. If they didn't, in the distant future if they need to expand, some scalper or holdout could cause large problems.

<comment><USER14> The US Federal government sells land/property all the time.

And as a consequence of the old adage "time is money", an indefinitely existing organization has an indefinite amount of money. Those institutions you mentioned have no issue buying whatever they want; holdouts be damned. A government pretty much has infinite money, churches are quite wealthy as a whole, and universities have a substantial pool of donors to tap despite having insanely large endowments that are quite well managed.

I don't think your argument holds up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is true, but I also think the answer is addressing the problem of seemingly all opportunity being concentrated in less than 10 cities. Cities face inevitable scaling limits.

There has always been regional inequality of opportunity, but never to this degree.

A great way to see the problem is to look at where the top ten most popular early personal computers came from. You will see places like Philadelphia (C64), Miami/Boca Raton (IBM), Dallas (TI), and Albuquerque (Altair). These days it would be almost all the Bay Area and maybe one from Seattle, NYC, Boston, or LA metro.

<comment><USER17> Strong disagree. Urban aggregation is a global phenomenon in modern times, literally every country is seeing a rise of "mega cities". It's because workers are choosing to move to these cities as these cities have more opportunities for workers due to efficiencies of scale. The most dynamic economies are encouraging moving to mega cities (ex: China). Cities might have "scaling limits" but there is no evidence that any city in the world has approached these limits.

<comment><USER16> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> How does ownership of apartments work in California?

In the UK, owning a flat is decidedly inferior to owning a house. In large blocks you will almost always have a leasehold, which almost always means being subject to a whole host of onerous conditions from the actual building's owner.

Share of freehold arrangements exist in smaller properties like old converted houses. But that only increases density slightly, and these sorts of places aren't really built any more; new developments are usually huge tower blocks or little houses.

I'm looking at buying a place soon and will be going for a small freehold house simply because that's the only way to actually own property in the UK as far as I can tell. I've wasted far too much time on attempting to negotiate sane leasehold conditions.

<comment><USER19> Maybe just a matter of semantics, but high-density housing in the U.S. is mostly comprised of "condos" and "apartments".

Condos are owned but must comply with homeowners association (HOA) rules on upkeep and maintenance.

Apartments are rented and maintained by Landlord.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> And what will be the source of the water for additional California residents to subsist on? We just went through a 7-year drought, and they seem to be becoming more frequent and longer; never mind that climate change is making it all worse, as the snow-pack gets smaller and melts quicker.

We can cut agriculture and build more dams somewhere to buffer more snow melt, but these are politically difficult to pull off, and of course have other negative effects on various constituencies (including migrant workers, like the ones who used to pick the crops where Silicon Valley now sits).

<comment><USER21> Not too long ago during the Camp/Paradise fires, just about everyone in northern CA was breathing a toxic cloud of burnt drywall, cars, chemicals, etc. for over a week. Think of the millions of gallons of water wasted, flame retardants dumped, and carbon emissions created. Californians need to live in denser construction near jobs. No more sprawling, low-level construction where fires can easily spread and jump from one building to the next.

<comment><USER15> _Californians need to live in denser construction near jobs. No more sprawling, low-level construction where fires can easily spread and jump from one building to the next._

I don't necessarily disagree with your conclusion, but you don't exactly solve the problem of fire propagation from house to house by putting everyone all into one building. A given suburban house _might_ propagate and burn down. But if a 500 unit apartment building goes, you're losing 500 units, no ifs ands or buts.

<comment><USER9> Denser construction is generally more resistant against fires.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Could this crisis be an instance of induced demand? [1]

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

<comment><USER23> What is induced?

California has been growing at a rate slower than other states. When it comes to domestic migration, it exports more people to other states than it accepts.

When it comes to international migration, net migration is less than births minus deaths, and that's with a low birth rate.

In the early 1960s, California had a population of 15 million and built 250k-300k homes per year. Currently California has a population of 40 million and build 80k homes per year.

After the next census, California is expected to lose representation in the House because most other states are growing faster than California.

California has had a major major change in population and building styles since 1980, but policy decisions are still made under the assumption that we are living with the 1960s numbers for building and population.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Have there been any studies examining the impact on the market of banning career landlords and REITs? What happens if you restrict residential housing to being owned by a single person who cannot own anything else in that area, rather than letting capital have the run of the place and treating homes as an investment plaything?

<comment><USER25> Would this mean no apartment buildings? Many people prefer to rent, and banning that seems a little selfish and short sighted.

<comment><USER26> Many people have to rent, from a purely economic aspect owning is better than renting - there are social aspects to it as well.

<comment><USER25> Owning is better economically _if_ you're going to stay in that house for a while. If you're living there less than a few years, all the costs associated with purchasing and selling g a house can hurt pretty bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Let's overturn Prop 13 first.

<comment><USER28> >government creates zoning laws that cause prices to skyrocket

>person wants more government

I've been confused about this perspective, can you break down the thought train you have?

<comment><USER29> Don't confuse "more government" with "different policies".

If abusive parents exist, our first thought shouldn't be to ban the existence of parents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The problems with this is developers would love to abolish the green belt - but guess what when it came to selling the price wont go down.

</comment><comment><USER30> If more housing was the answer then NYC would not have a housing problem. The answer is not more housing.

<comment><USER31> Absolutely agree! In my opinion the only way is to make smaller cities attractive! No matter how high or wide you build. People want to move to cities. Except they see a chance in smaller viliages. So we need more / attractive jobs in villages and better infrastructure. Including theaters, cinemas, shops, kindergartens etc etc.

<comment><USER32> Much easier said than done. For this to happen you'd have to convince multiple companies, hopefully across several industries, to risk opening offices and shops in such towns on nothing but faith that they'll fill up in a somewhat timely manner, and then you have to convince a bunch of folks to move to these towns. Neither is particularly simple or straightforward.

And of course, there also a large portion of people who have no desire to live in towns or suburbs, and these plans wouldn't appeal to them at all. I'm personally in this camp — I've had enough small town for a lifetime already.

<comment><USER31> I don't think it about people. In my old town a bunch of offices closed and moved to big city. They didn't hire new people. (probably also a way to get rid of old people which didn't want to commute 1 hour to the city)

Also : why must it be 4 million city? Shouldn't it a 500k also enough?

But right now, even those cities bled people. Moving to big cities.

<comment><USER32> For my situation at least (and likely for many who move to large cities), more people means more freedom in several ways. Better choice of jobs, often the ability to walk straight out of one job into another, more variety in social circles, more things to do, bigger dating pool, and improved likelihood that people have better things to concern themselves with than each other's personal lives. It doesn't come without downsides, but the negatives are comparatively trivial for many.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> California has a 'too many people problem'. Housing is less critical than transportation, infrastructure, fire safety, jobs for all demographic groups (as opposed to tech jobs for well born young white men), and so on. Building housing is like giving candy to calm a child's tantrum.

<comment><USER34> Since you're race baiting, I'd like to point out that there are plenty of us white guys out here who are _not_ from privileged backgrounds and who have worked very hard to get to where they are. Please stop with the prejudice, for all people.

<comment><USER33> I'm talking job growth and demographics. The answer isn't to make everyone learn to code. We need jobs for other demographic groups. Look at San Francisco and the displacement that's occurred. To pretend it's orthogonal to race or age or parental ses is simply wrong. Yes, you and many others may be somewhat exceptional, somewhat. I'm referring to aggregate statistics, not exceptional cases.</comment></comment></comment>


Senate majority vs. national debt - <AUTHOR> http://iamwil.posterous.com/senate-majority-vs-national-debt-getting-at-p

<comment><USER2> From the article: "The first surprising thing was how fast the national debt has grown in the last 30 years."

The sharp incline coincides with Nixon's 1971 end of the Bretton Woods system. Domestically the dollar has been off the gold standard since 1932, but up until 1971 foreign banks could still redeem US dollars for gold. Since gold is a limited commodity there's a limit on how much we can spend or borrow. Once that tie was broken, we were free to run unlimited debts.

</comment><comment><USER3> Without being inflation adjusted it is not too revealing.

Here is a link to CPI since 1913: ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt

A quick modification would make the data more powerful.

<comment><USER4> Also, perhaps it should adjust for population growth.

<comment><USER5> And it would have been more useful to show it as percentage of GDP.

<comment><USER6> Some graphs here <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt>

Plotting as a percentage of GDP can also be misleading, eg US military spending is 4% of GDP but 30% of tax revenue according to wikipedia. They also discuss debt expenditures getting too high on that page.

<comment><USER7> Those military spending statistics suggest that tax revenue is 12% of GDP, which my libertarian heart only wishes were the case

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The federal debt dropped in the 1830s because Andrew Jackson withdrew all federal funds from the national bank, then the Second Bank of the US.

No federal debt, but it resulted in the Panic of 1837!

</comment><comment><USER9> The vast majority of the unfunded liabilities of the government (most Social Security obligations, Medicare, pensions, various new bailout programs) aren't captured in the official national debt data at all...total federal obligations under business accounting standards amounted to $65.5 trillion in 2008.

If you really want to geek out there is a lot here: <http://fms.treas.gov/fr/08frusg/08frusg.pdf>

<comment><USER10> "Unfunded liabilities" are an incredibly terrible and misleading measure of debt; it's like saying I owe two million dollars because of the money I'm going to have to pay over the rest of my life for food and housing. Obviously, I'm going to have to pay it one way or another--that doesn't mean you can count it as part of my "debt"!

<comment><USER11> > Unfunded liabilities" are an incredibly terrible and misleading measure of > debt; it's like saying I owe two million dollars because of the money I'm > going to have to pay over the rest of my life for food and housing.

Except that it's not. The money that you'll pay for food in the future comes from money that you'll earn in the future. Note that both are "the future". If you stop earning, you're only on the hook for future eating.

We've promised (via SS) to pay people money in the future based on what they've already paid, that is, in the past. If we stop taking in money, we still owe.

The food comparison would be that you owe money for food that you've consumed in the past and you're plannning to pay for it with future earnings. If you're eating in the future while you're earning, said future earnings will have a shortfall or will have to cover both future and past eating.

Unless you're really careful, and we haven't been, at some point, the "future earnings" will exceed what is owed for past consumption.

In the case of SS, workers will see see 20-30% of their income being given to old people. They're going to wonder whether their children will pay enough to them to make up for that 20-30%. If they decide that their children won't, they'll figure out that keeping said 20-30% for themselves is their best move. At that point, where does the money to pay old people for their "contributions" come from?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> <http://www.iousathemovie.com/>

For an insightful look at the US national debt.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'd say that it is less than "terrifying" to plot the national debt on a log scale. Most numbers in economics (and in nature) vary in an exponential manner. Consider, for example, inflation, interest rates, and population growth. Nature deals in ratios; it is only human afterthought that adds units to measurements.

One incidental result of the fact that numbers tend to vary exponentially is that the first digit of a measured number is most likely 1 and least likely 9. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law> .

<comment><USER14> Most are actually sigmoidal. Exponential growth is unbounded, but most growth functions in nature have some upper bound set by the environment.

Debt's a curious one though. It grows exponentially, but it tends to "reset" at times through various currency crises, at which point the currency is replaced entirely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> From what I've seen in the past few years the graph looks a little better when inflation is taken into account, but not so much that the shock value is taken away.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, sorry. I mainly did it as an exercise to find and suck down public data as a result of some bullshitting with Ian.

I'm going to guess that even if it's inflation adjusted, it's still exponential growth. I'd use inflation adjusted, if it were easier to find, but historical debt outstanding is what I found first.

Even then, it was interesting seeing how it matched up with the senate majority and how it compared to the past.

I find myself wanting to see these graphs when I read some article in the papers, or someone goes on ranting about economics or politics. Does anyone else have these inclinations?

<comment><USER15> You just have to find the price index and adjust it yourself.

edit: someone already linked it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How nice. There's two paragraphs of which the author says it's about programming, but in reality it's about how hard it is to fact check political statements. The rest of the article is politics pure and simple. If you don't believe me, you need only look at the comments here.

Flagged.

<comment><USER17> Oh, so politics is acceptable on HN now?

Well, another site down the drain :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wouldn't Wolfram Alpha help aggregate some of this data?</comment>


Have we forgotten to make heat traps? (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://www.esbe.eu/it/en/news/have-we-forgotten-to-make-heat-traps <comment><USER2> I designed and installed a complete hydronic heating system in our house last year, replacing a conventional forced air system. It being the first time I'd ever done such a thing (and indeed, the first time I'd ever really been exposed to hydronic heating at all) I learned everything through reading (mostly the excellent idonrics series at [https://www.caleffi.com/usa/en- us/technical-magazine](https://www.caleffi.com/usa/en-us/technical-magazine)). I went _really_ deep on the reading so while I had/have a pretty solid theoretical understanding I was/am a complete novice on the craft side of the field.

Overall, the practice seems to be very heuristic based, with every installation being a bit different and rules of thumb being the norm. Our system seems to work fairly well in practice, but I've been curious to get a professional's opinion on it (the only pro that's seen it was the gas guy who did the final hookup, who seemed impressed but didn't really offer any specific criticisms).

Repo at [https://github.com/mtrudel/boiler](https://github.com/mtrudel/boiler)

I've since added an elixir based graphing system to it, at

[http://mat.geeky.net/boiler](http://mat.geeky.net/boiler)

<comment><USER3> That's interesting, as Hydronic heating is the standard heating method over here in the UK. Reason its not done in the US I image is we don't often ever need AC, so we only need to be able to turn the temp up.

<comment><USER4> UK hydronic systems usually use radiators. US systems are almost always under- floor.

<comment><USER5> I once had a new house with hydronic under floor heating - the worst heating setup I've every had - horribly slow to respond and expensive to operate. We turn down the heat to sleep and finally I just shut off the heat to the bedrooms and heated them a different way.

Our initial experience with the system was even worse than it might have been. The people who installed it including the thermostats were plumbers and did not realize there was a switch inside the thermostat to choose among three types of heating systems. They left all the thermostats at the default forced air heating setting. We suffered for two years with terrible overshooting and undershooting of temperatures before my own research revealed that the hidden setting existed and that it was set incorrectly. This helped but it was still not great.

We were glad to get back to a forced air heated house. I do believe however that hydronic heating with radiators is somewhat better than underfloor hydronic.

<comment><USER6> I wonder if better PID tuning would help, maybe adding stuff like ambient outside temperature or weather prediction as a system input.

I know the nest thermostat does a lot of systemic learning and understands the outside temperature. (I'm not recommending that system, just that a little modern control theory might make things workable)

<comment><USER7> I have a 2nd gen Nest thermostat since they first came out in 2012 or so with a hot water system, so I can speak from my experience.

There is a setting on the thermostat (True Radiant) that takes into account the long heat-up times of radiant systems. With this setting off, overshoot is real. On cold days, True Radiant does start the system earlier. For example, it take about 2-3 hours in the deep of winter vs 30-60 minutes now.

However, it seems to be based to on a look-up table rather than an algorithm. It doesn't take into account forecasted conditions, such as a temperature rise overnight, strong winds or decreasing/increasing radiance of the sun over the season. Those latter factors do make a difference in whether the house reaches the target temperature on time or whether overshoot occurs, and whether I am slightly uncomfortable.

As far as I can tell, there is an automatic set-back for heat pump systems. I wish this was given as an option for manual scheduling in True Radiant mode. To this day, I can't tell whether there is an effect on efficiency (based on run-times which the thermostat dutifully displays).

I also wish the thermostats (in a dual-zone system with a single boiler) be "genlocked" or run on common firing times with demand prediction for temperatures to make use of boiler run-time, rather than running the boiler just when there is a request for heat in one zone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Simpler article: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_trap](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_trap)

<comment><USER9> It also largely answers the question in the first paragraph:

> _Newer water heaters have built-in heat traps._

So it's "no, they're just done by default and hidden". Seems like a reasonable thing to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Seems like something trivial to make with PEX these days. I have no idea if it's regular practice or not. The only downside I can see is if there was recent hot water, it might take slightly longer to reach the faucet.

<comment><USER11> My water heater has one made from PEX. From memory, I would guess it adds about 18".

With 3/4" PEX at a relatively slow 1.5 GPM flow rate, that adds about 1.4 seconds to 'hot water delivery time', though that's not entirely accurate, because the loop itself has some heated water trapped in it.

<comment><USER12> Shouldn't you also adding the length of pipe/water you are preventing from being heated to that 18"?

<comment><USER11> I actually don't think so, because you end up with only a gradient of lukewarm-to-ambient temperature water, which you still have to purge in order to get actual hot water. Even if you're going for just warm water, you still have to purge some of it, then after a few seconds start continually adjusting cold until the hot water from the tank gets to you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > _it saves you time and hazzel_

<comment><USER14>
      - '-'---'---,---- '-'---'---,--- ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Since the submitted link has a download disposition we've updated it from [https://www.esbe.eu/it/en/~/media/ESBE%20Public%20web_BRserv...](https://www.esbe.eu/it/en/~/media/ESBE%20Public%20web_BRserver/Documents/News/Heat%20traps/Heat%20traps%20in%20installations%2020120508.ashx) to the abstract.

<comment><USER16> This could use a (2012), per the article date.

<comment><USER15> You got it. Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Four philosophical questions to make your brain hurt - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7739493.stm <comment><USER2> #1 seems simple enough, case 2 is different to case 1 where the 1 healthy person is not going to die even if the other 5 die. So it would seem harder to kill a perfectly healthy person (who is not going to die) for 5 who are going to die, as opposed to kill 1 person who will die anyway to save 5.

The third case is again different to the second case because in the second case you have to pull the trigger, where as in the third case the trigger is essentially already pulled and so the responsibility is just to direct the bullet - this puts you in 'damage control' mode.

</comment><comment><USER3> #1 is like "would you rather kill your son or your daughter?" Yeah I know philosophers like such questions.

#3 has a simple answer: duh, yes, it is really a computer screen in front of me. I have proved it to you by writing this comment.

</comment><comment><USER4> I always thought that #2 was illustrated very well by the Ship of Theseus paradox (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus>).

</comment><comment><USER5> The second relies on definition of "to be the same". :-)</comment>


We Live in Fear of the Online Mobs - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-22/we-live-in-fear-of-the-online-mobs <comment><USER2> I will probably be down-voted to hell for this, but here's my 2c.

This is the result of a PC culture. It has made it impossible to have an open and honest discussion about anything. It is easier to just label someone a racist, sexist, or other "buzzwords", than to strengthen your argument. Where are the times when we fought ideas, not people?

From my observation the kind of people doing things like this are the ones losing the intellectual argument. If you KNOW someone is wrong, why not debate them? Why go after them personally?

I wrote this in a rush, I apologize for any mistakes or inconsistencies.

<comment><USER3> > From my observation the kind of people doing things like this are the ones > losing the intellectual argument.

So you're saying that, in your opinion, the KKK and those guys with the swastika face-tattoos are winning the "intellectual argument"?

Because that's literally what you're saying. Unless you're trying to say that this has been a learning experience; And that maybe there are instances where after, say, fighting a World War over the topic, it no longer needs further intellectual debate?

<comment><USER4> > the KKK and those guys with the swastika face-tattoos

They, and the violent parts of anti-fa, are not the only groups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I couldn't care less if people say mean things about me on Twitter, and I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't lose any friends if I became the target of an online mob. My significant other certainly wouldn't think less of me.

The scary bit is employment. If a bunch of Twitter users wrote me mean emails, I'd spend about a minute creating a filter to drop them all and then go back to my life. If those emails went to my employer, on the other hand, there is a very real chance that they would determine that I'm more trouble than I'm worth.

This is a new and unique security hole in our social fabric, and it's one that didn't exist 20 years ago. I don't have a good solution, but this will keep getting worse until we find one.

<comment><USER6> > "I don't have a good solution"

You do. You're already using it (on HN at least). Pseudo-anonymity. The chances of someone doxxing you over a small-scale Twitter dispute is slim.

<comment><USER7> I don't disagree that anonymity offers protection against situations like this, but bear in mind that anonymity is very much a factor in the lack of civil discourse online. I'm not suggesting for a second that stripping anonymity is a solution to any of these problems, but personally I feel like I'm less likely to engage in the sort of behavior which might invite an angry mob while posting under my real name.

<comment><USER8> > but personally I feel like I'm less likely to engage in the sort of behavior > which might invite an angry mob while posting under my real name.

The problem with this is the 'sort of behavior' you are referring to is posting any statements that disagree with the worldview of the majority of the people in your circles.

Without anonymity you will also lack civil discourse when all of the sane people on the minority side know not to speak up because they fear retribution.

Anyone who publicly considered voting for Trump was accused of being a sexist, racist, xenophobic, Islamophobe. So instead of any sane discourse, there was just a surprise upset when Trump won because everyone was convinced the strategy of accusing all Trump supporters of 'isms' until they shut up was working.

<comment><USER7> FWIW, most of what you're saying here is my rationale for the first half of the sentence you quoted. Specifically, there are times when it makes sense to speak up, and being able to do so anonymously definitely quashes fear-driven self censorship.

While generally I'd agree that self censorship is a bad thing, I'd also agree that an ability to control one's impulsiveness is just the opposite. Impulse control is what I was referring to above as my general reasoning for why I default to using my real identity online, not self censorship.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is why public sentiment has become hard to measure. The result of elections, for example, will become increasingly harder to predict as individual opinions become more private. It used to be fun to share who you are voting for when randomly called. Now sharing your true beliefs or opinions comes with a risk of mob reprisal.

In future, the future will be less predictable.

</comment><comment><USER10> Town squares used to be small so that mobs couldn't get too big. Now the town square is infinite and we are seeing the result.

Maybe in a hundred years we will have sorted out how to maintain free speech but limit the bloodthirsty mob. But in the meantime, we all need to survive through this period while as a culture we figure out the answer.

The only answer I can think of is to opt-out of social media, ignore trolls online and cultivate more meaningful in-person connections.

<comment><USER3> > Town squares used to be small so that mobs couldn't get too big.

See, that's the sort of thing that must be terribly difficult to write, knowing that thousands were tortured, maimed, and killed by small-town mobs in the US: [http://www.naacp.org/history-of- lynchings/](http://www.naacp.org/history-of-lynchings/)

<comment><USER11> How is that relevant at all to the discussion?

<comment><USER3> It's a direct contradiction of the parent's point that the past was somehow better?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The online mob fear is the result here. The source is people judging others by their morals (as people have for some time) and those shifting morals. It always goes back to that, which is what is causing the increasing divide in the US that then results in the growing power in these mobs.

The problem with that is that all of these arguments are clearly colored by what moral side the author is on. The author focused on Damore, but didn't mention the dozens of Google employees harassed and sent death threats online for being against his memo. The article is clearly coming from the perspective of conservative thoughts being reprimanded online, but lightly tries to hide behind the guise of generality. The "fear" is not felt on all sides really.

The level of inconsistency is another source of the divide on both sides. I think people need to be more willing to follow logic they use for their own beliefs and apply it to other issues and perspectives.

Edit: Not just follow the logic, but speak out about the issues in the same way. When someone uses logic X for issue Y and speaks out about it, but fails to speak out against issue Z when X is also applicable is a huge problem. It's usually one of the easiest ways to see through someone's beliefs when they try to be "objective". It's often even more obvious when Y is a much smaller issue in scope than Z. If you believe in logic X, how much you advocate/support each issue should be in proportion to the size of their scopes when X applies to both.

<comment><USER13> > The author focused on Damore, but didn't mention the dozens of Google > employees harassed and sent death threats online for being against his memo.

I think you might be doing what you're criticizing here. Damore and his supporters are likely getting just as many death threats and harassment, the "progressives" generally dish out just as much, it even get's tolerated at by the likes of twitter. The "conservative" side just doesn't make a big deal out of it.

<comment><USER12> I wasn't aware of that - the ones I am mentioning are the ones who had their profiles directly posted in a targeted harassment attack. As far as I know, that hasn't happened in the opposite direction to be fair.

<comment><USER14> Googlers publicly tweeted that people like Damore should be punched in the face. For having an generalist opinion about certain demographics, and policies based on those.

Let me re-iterate that: Actually encouraging _actual_ violence against a named individual.

Funnily enough Google and twitter had zero issues with that. Unlike what Damore did, that was _not_ against their code of conduct.

This really is PC culture, it's intolerance, and the terrible things it drives fully and perfectly exemplified.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Social media seems to be living by the maxim "It's not enough that I succeed, others should fail".

It's not enough to simply be a good person, win an argument, or see your personal political beliefs become widely adopted - you also have to point out how bad others are, how badly your opponent lost the argument, or how anyone holding a different political beliefe to you is a Nazi. There is value to social media in general and Twitter in particular, but it does appear to me to be increasingly toxic.

<comment><USER16> Yes, labelling a person who disagrees with you _Nazi_ seems like a perverse application of Godwin's Law. It means you are intentionally ending the discussion. Why do it?

<comment><USER17> Because there are people marching with swastikas? [http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/media/2017/08/inventor-...](http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/media/2017/08/inventor- godwin-s-law-says-it-s-fine-call-charlottesville-rioters-nazis)

<comment><USER18> Yes, those people can credibly be labeled Nazis, but I assume roceasta is referring to the wider halo around them, of people also being labeled Nazis. For example, Trump was frequently labeled a Nazi for condeming violence, in his words, "on both sides. On _both_ sides."

Which I found disturbing, but I don't see how it makes him a Nazi.

<comment><USER19> It suggests that he sympathises with Nazis, which is close enough to being a Nazi for most people.

<comment><USER20> Yes, because anyone who disagrees with Antifa's tactics should reasonably be assumed to be a Nazi sympathizer... I can't roll my eyes hard enough at this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Someone should let the members of these mobs know that they are not actually liberal or progressive. For example, they appear to prefer mob justice instead of due process; ideological blacklists instead of tolerance; and censorship instead of freedom of expression. The bedrock principles of a liberal society appear to be missing from their world view.

<comment><USER20> To those of us who've been paying attention, those principles always have been missing from a large percentage of people.

<comment><USER22> It seems comfortable to be a fascist, your moral principles are simple and your path forward, too.

I wonder if the health upsides of having simpler and easier to follow moral principles, would outweigh the downsides of being offended and angry all the time.

I sure hope I won't have to find out. It's a privilege to be a non-partisan, although perhaps I can't quite say I am, because I despise communism even more than I despise fascism. The intellectual dishonesty with which mainstream (which is to say, leftist) media praise communism and attack Nazism is revolting.

<comment><USER20> Really the most despicable party here is TV media. The coverage has driven recruitment for two really inconsequential groups, both Antifa and the KKK.

A minor dust-up between a few hundred people with weapons and 6000 people yelling and holding signs/shields has become major coverage, like it's the most demanding thing of our attention. It's not like these groups just suddenly appeared...but now because of the attention, we have to do something.

You can barely fill 15% of a minor sports team's stadium with the count (and public influence) of the people involved here. You're not even close to having to pick a side.

<comment><USER22> I guess I illustrated your point then, the coverage makes it seem like we have to do something; we have to pick sides!

I feel the pull and it sucks. How does one immunize themselves to this?

And could it be done to one or more percent points of the population, or even to the point that herd immunity takes over? How could advocating "mass redpilling" be portrayed as "domestic terrorism" to those deeply immersed in the mainstream narrative?

<comment><USER20> Turn off the TV. There's a wonderful, beautiful world outside if you look around and participate in it.

You can avoid the conflict completely and actually reach people bring out their reasonable side if you go out there and treat everyone with love and respect.

<comment><USER23> Unfortunately, just because I turn off the TV, doesn't mean everyone else does too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> For every time people pat themselves on the back about getting some nazi fired, consider there's others where the mob gets it wrong (see: Reddit and the Boston bombers).

This stuff is dangerous.

<comment><USER19> >some nazi fired

Did you actually read the memo? If he's a nazi, then so is 95% of the world's population.

<comment> ryan-allen I think he was being sarcastic with the 'some nazi' part?

<comment><USER25> Does that make it any better?

<comment> ryan-allen Better than what? Are you a little hot headed at what he said, a little outraged, perhaps?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I don't think people live in fear of the online mobs. People post vile opinions all the time in the Facebook comments sections of new stories, with open profiles and what is ostensibly their real names.

I agree that online mobs have changed the game as far as speech consequences go, and I agree that most of those changes are for the worse. I do not see a way out, however, except to delete your social media and do not post things to the Internet that could possibly be linked back to you.

I don't really like the Web anymore.

<comment><USER27> No, people really do live in fear of online mobs. You don't hear from them because they can't participate due to their anxieties. Sure, these fears can be irrational and overblown but they are real to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think one of the backstops that would ordinarily prevent online mobs getting out of hand is good journalism. In the case of James Damore, I think there was a lot of shoddy journalism going on due to some combination of laziness, a desire to stir up controversy to drive ad views, a desire not to present complex ideas that readers might find uncomfortable, and willfully misunderstanding a point of view that's unpopular.

I'm inclined to put most of the blame on the rise of clickbait journalism. Explaining all sides of an issue takes effort, but feeding people enough information to make them angry while allowing them to fill in the details according to their own imagination is easy and cheap.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, this was really all about ethics in google journalism.

Or, alternatively, you just happen to be among the people in the manosphere that pretend the last 20 years didn't happen. Because otherwise there would have been a minimum of engagement with the actual argument, namely that some (alleged) statistical difference between the genders just isn't relevant, it's only confusing what is with what ought to be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think she's correct to compare our situation now to a primitive band of people. Marshall McLuhan famously called this the _global village_. Close communication is paradoxically causing the fragmentation and balkanisation of the internet. A process which nations like China (with its own internet) and companies like Google (by getting into politics) are accelerating.

The goal of political correctness, adopting Daniel Dennett's _intentional stance_ , is to control thinking. Individuals who are able to resist are in some ways more isolated now than the old communist dissidents. They at least got moral support from each other in prison.

[http://www.beyondeasy.net/2015/09/mcluhan-new-tribalism- equi...](http://www.beyondeasy.net/2015/09/mcluhan-new-tribalism-equivalence- of.html) [https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/intentional- stance](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/intentional-stance)

<comment><USER29> I don't know what you mean? The Internet makes it easier than ever to find people who think the same way you do.

<comment><USER16> It _has_ been easier. However if present trends continue and new forms of 'badthink' emerge it may be necessary to start looking under stones in dark places. This (a) is hard to do, and (b) presupposes that you know others are out there. Which you may not, especially if you are young.

<comment><USER17> So it's not that they _are_ more isolated, just that hypothetically in a possible future they could be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Isnt really online mobs the sort of thing we signed up for when people started using email and then Facebook?

See Zuck's own words: [https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10100933624710391](https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10100933624710391)

Theres really two sides to this, one where the positive is that information is no longer closed and flows freely and the other is that negative information about other people flows so fast and wide that it cannot be fathomed.

Its an interesting feeling because its really similar to dystopian notions such as the Giver where too much of a good thing easily turns bad.

<comment><USER31> Due to some bug (or is it a feature?) in human psychology, we seem to be predisposed to spread controversial or negative press (tweets, posts, articles etc) more than good press.

<comment><USER30> probably both bug and feature, humans havent stopped evolving yet

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I don't think any protections are needed. People just need to stop participating in those "online mobs" and not take them seriously.

It's the same tactic that needs to be employed against terrorists. The more seriously you take them, the bigger threat they are.

The people who fired Damore are the problem. They escalated the conflict. They are the ones who should have known better and not get involved in mob justice.

<comment><USER33> Everyone is. A company will always fire the troublemaker, because it's a PR nightmare if they don't.

<comment><USER32> > Everyone is.

I think that sentence is missing a word that turns it into a point you wanted to make.

> because it's a PR nightmare if they don't

Why it should be a PR nightmare? Why cannot his bosses say, we are not doing vigilante justice here, and refuse to yield to "angry mob"? It seems to me like a morally better position to take.

Compare this to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands- Posten_Muhammad_carto...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands- Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controversy)

<comment><USER33> Make no mistake: I completely agree with you. But it seems that companies these days are willing to go any length to avoid a PR scandal. The standard company response in highly-publicized "angry mob" cases seems to be firing. Justine Sacco, the "dongle" guys, Damore, etc.

So I'm guessing that in their profit/loss charts, avoiding a PR scandal is higher than resisting the will of the mob.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Personally I think the failing fourth estate has particularly enlarged this problem, since by not correctly performing their duty of informing the citizenry they instead fan flames for the clicks with halfassed writing lacking what used to be first year journalistic integrity.

<comment><USER35> I think it's worth saying that the fourth estate is also falling prey to the changing economic landscape of the times. It's not like the old days anymore where access to publishing tools was heavily gated. Everyone fights for eyeballs now. Everyone fights to be first.

The growing result is that we're seeing more and more news organizations gravitating towards providing a specific kind of narrative tailored to their target audience. People in general don't want to have their views challenged. That approach is tiring as you have to fight through your own cognitive dissonance each time. Rather, they want to hear what they believe to be already true. This is why Twitter and other social media companies drive us towards echo chambers. It's how they keep people coming back, and thus make themselves more appealing to advertisers.

It's easy to talk about the duty of the fourth estate, but writing a well balanced narrative does not pay the bills these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The wrongly accused suffered for thousands of years before public and fair courts became common.

The court of public opinion needs a counterpart for the social media age.

Proof-of-work juries might be a neat way to orchestrate fair voting in anonymous spaces

<comment><USER18> Maybe proof-of-empathy? Demonstrate that you understand how someone is thinking and feeling in their vote to be able to cast your own?

Or proof-of-research?

Proof-of-rationality?

<comment><USER35> I'd be for proof of empathy if it would somehow help reduce the number of straw men I see being constructed on a daily basis.

I wouldn't hold my breath for proof of rationality. Humans are rationalizing animals, not rational animals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> How does the signal spread across the network?

What are the critical nodes (influencers) to disseminate the mob message?

This would be an interesting big data social science experiment to see how mob fire propagates.

And the data sets? [https://thenewinquiry.com/taxonomy-of-humans-according-to- tw...](https://thenewinquiry.com/taxonomy-of-humans-according-to-twitter/)

Disclaimer: I am not part of the Dalai Lama clique.

</comment><comment><USER38> We use to live in fear of tyranny of the majority. The internet is so large that it can magnify extreme views of the minority, such that these views can rapidly have such large impact on people.

This happens on twitter where someone says something and then it gets signal boosted such that an online mob harasses, threatens and in some cases ruins livelihoods (the prototypical case is Justine Sacco)[1]

[1] [http://www.salon.com/2013/12/23/justine_saccos_aftermath_the...](http://www.salon.com/2013/12/23/justine_saccos_aftermath_the_cost_of_twitter_outrage/)

</comment><comment><USER39> I mean historically speaking this is endemic of human nature. Revenge mobs today in Pakistan, lynching mobs in the US for over a century, ancient Rome, Greece, the 30s in Germany, regular riots against lenders in every ancient civilization. This is nothing new - but technology is undeniably aiding a different form of it. We need to address both technology's impact and how it seems to be rooted in our culture.

</comment><comment><USER40> I have absolutely changed my behavior with regards to how public I decide to voice a view or opinion. Most of the time, it isn't that I hold some view that I know to be unpopular but rather it isn't always even clear to me which "thing" could cause reprisal from some zombie mob hungry minority that catches wind of something and decides a couple sentences voiced about something is now deemed worthy of crucifixion.

But perhaps more sinister than the mob responding to something said online is that as the moral landscape continues to shift (as it has since... forever) what you have said online a long time ago can ALSO come back to haunt you, even if at the time you said it was considered perfectly acceptable or normal or whatever.

This is why, I think, that social media in general is not really something I find very enjoyable to participate in. As they say, the internet never forgets.

</comment><comment><USER41> Where is dystopian literature when you need it? Anybody know some good sci-fi exploring these ideas?

<comment><USER42> Not literature per se, but two episodes of Black Mirror come to mind:

"Hated in the Nation." Online mobs lead to death in real life because of a scifi twist involving artificial swarms/hives of bees. I won't get into details so as not to spoil the ending, but it deals rather directly with the issues raised in the article.

"Nosedive." Less directly related, but hits the nail on the head with respect to the employment concerns raised by the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> We actually do live in fear of the mobs, and in the future I foresee more anonymous / distributed content on the Internet and more services / projects facilitating the publication of such a content ([https://ipfs.io/](https://ipfs.io/), [https://datproject.org/](https://datproject.org/), [http://telegra.ph/](http://telegra.ph/)).

What if Damore circulated his memo anonymously an untraceably? He would still be at Google's. Just wait until anyone gets the hint. You can't really just shut people up :)

</comment><comment><USER43> The overriding conclusion is that people online have the intelligence of a squirrel and we are fast approaching a Global Cargo Cult mentality

</comment><comment><USER43> We could or should use online pseudonyms that can be erased if the mob attacks. Perhaps its time to protect our public personae with masks and sub masks. Why not the same for employment? Have a work personae as well. The mob are crazy and not very clever

<comment><USER43> Nature imitating art, the mob are mobilizing ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I've noticed a growth of righteous indignation from people, particularly over the past 10 years. It's not enough that one person disagrees with another, now this disagreement is manifesting itself in proactive rage. This rage gets directed in a vengeful, sinister effort to gravely harm someone, by getting them fired from their job etc. It seems like it's increasing, and no one is being held accountable. I've not seen this level of vitriol and other cultures, it seems uniquely American.

<comment><USER45> How disagreements used to happen: I think [idea]. Here's my evidence.

How they happen now: Speaking as a [member in X class], I believe [idea].

We've started to tie up our identities into our arguments, and when you do that you can't get around attacking who someone is as a person when they link their membership in a group to the epistemology of why they think something. This is my working theory for why people have started to equate speech with "literally violence". Disagreeing has become an attack on their identity, so it's only natural to interpret that in an extreme form.

<comment> xxXXxx- You have a very, very misguided view of the past, we have _always_ tied up our identities into our arguments. In fact, I would say less so now than in the past not moreso.

<comment><USER46> it's perhaps misguided, but not very, very misguided. hyperbole fuels the mob.

<comment> xxXXxx- _Hyperbole_?

The definition of hyperbole is "exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally."

My statement is not hyperbole, it was not at all exaggerated is meant to be taken literally. _People have gone to war over this shit._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> This article sounds woefully out of touch with the realities of the modern web.

So many of the arguments surrounding Damore talk as if this is in a vacuum, when frankly, it isn't. Much of the message it carried(and did little to discourage) came off as insulting to a group of people who commonly spend every day harassed just for what they are, anytime they have gone online.

The article talks a lot about the fear of an online mob shaming people for doing something, yet completely ignores that many of those in said mob are harassed daily based on their mere existence, and often their "shaming" comes from a place of just not wanting to be hurt again.

Is it necessarily the most effective means of accomplishing this? Certainly not, and I'm not about to claim to support what it becomes, but to call question to that and speak from such a "Nice problem to have" place to people suffering a much worse version of what you're talking about reeks of "Let them eat cake".

<comment><USER19> >So many of the arguments surrounding Damore talk as if this is in a vacuum, when frankly, it isn't. Much of the message it carried(and did little to discourage) came off as insulting to a group of people who commonly spend every day harassed just for what they are, anytime they have gone online.

That would, presumably, be women in software? Because as far as I can tell, the only people being regularly harassed on Twitter are people that don't think women should get special rights...

<comment> xxXXxx- You can't be serious. I literally got harassed by a stranger yesterday.

<comment><USER14> If you consider discussing policy changes you don't like "harassment", I can see how your daily life must be a true struggle. You have my condolences.

I hope you don't consider this online disagreement "harassment". If so: recurse, see above.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


2020 13-inch MacBook Pro review: The standard macOS workhorse - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/05/2020-13-inch-macbook-pro-review-the-standard-macos-workhorse/ <comment> frosted-flakes Duplicate of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23153863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23153863)</comment>


Ask HN: Lowest salary for a programmer? - <AUTHOR>

How much should an entry level programmer/web developer charge for work?
I'm thinking either for a company or maybe freelancing at home.
What's the lowest salary ($/hr) you would lower yourself too? <comment><USER2> Competing on price is a losing game. The customers that want a cheap price will be the most work and hassle. They simply don't value the product or you i.e. "Why should I pay someone much to type for a few hours?"

It's not intuitive, but raising your price will signal that you and your work are more valuable AND you will get more and better customers. Consider this: when _you_ shop for something (that you don't have a lot of knowledge about) I bet you use the price as one indicator of quality. Same for services: Your customers will think "If he can charge $XXX hour, he must be good."

It is so common to devalue your own abilities as developer that it is a cliche' (Google "imposter syndrome"). In reality, your ability to deliver real value to a business/client happens long before you consider yourself an "expert".

I have 2 rates. (1) Free (2) Full price. In my experience, customers don't appreciate introductory discounted rates. Instead, they feel ripped off when you start charging them the full rate.

I don't have time to find the links now but HN'er Patrick McKenzie "Patio11" has written great stuff on this. See his blog on Kalzumeus Software.

</comment><comment><USER3> In London, Cyanide Springs, Oklahoma, or a rural village in Vietnam?

</comment><comment><USER4> Depends on the country. In The Netherlands (and perhaps most of Western Europe) I don't think it's wise to go much below 50 EUR an hour (ex. VAT) when freelancing.

</comment><comment><USER5> back when I was still in the university around 1999, I would charge $15 to $20 an hour for freelance web based projects. I think with a greater demand and the general price of things you could charge a bit more if you are in the US or Western Europe. That being said, $15 an hour is a top rate for a senior software engineer in the Philippines. I recently interviewed a few programmers when I was in Manila.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Seattle, WA</comment>


Looks like github is down x___x - <AUTHOR>

Let us call cry synchronously... <comment><USER2> <http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/github.com></comment>


HN NYC: RSVP for Hackers & Founders #11, Tomorrow (4/29) at Shake Shack - 6 PM - <AUTHOR> http://anyvite.com/dfmansnctp <comment><USER2> .. but it's May 3rd.</comment>