4.2″ and 7.5″ NFC-powered e-Paper Displays Work without Battery - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/03/17/nfc-powered-e-paper-displays-work-without-battery/ <comment><USER2> This could replace your printer really nicely. Anytime you want to print something out, you swipe your phone by this and use it instead.

Any kind of reference, recipe, directions, notes. This would even be cool instead of a second monitor. Just to put up a reference page or cheat sheet.

<comment><USER3> The resolution is only 800x480. What reference page or cheat sheet would fit on that?

<comment><USER4> I'm always surprised that e-ink readers have such good readability at low resolutions. I think an accidental by-product of how they work is a little "fuzziness" when translating from digital data to analog atoms, so the text looks more like organic newspaper ink than a pixellated screen.

Anyway, most e-readers are in the ballpark of 800x600; and I expect if the concept got traction, there's no reason it couldn't be scaled up to 8.5" x 11" at equivalent pixel densities (at the cost of hovering your phone for a few seconds longer or whatever).

<comment><USER5> > Anyway, most e-readers are in the ballpark of 800x600

A Kindle Paperwhite is 1072x1448, 300 PPI, 16 levels of grayscale.

I personally couldn't tolerate reading on a kindle until they reached 212 PPI. 800x600 may be acceptable for a simple sign, but it's not gonna wow anyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Would be interesting for use on a boat. Generally you want a fast refresh rate but once a minute would be fast enough for most users. The problem with navigation displays on boat are

1\. daytime visibility 2\. long term waterproofing in a saltwater environment

With this setup you could mount a raspberry pi W on one side of the fiberglass to interpet NEMA 2000/0183 data and the NFC chip, and the waterproof, hermetically sealed e-ink display on the other, held on with velcro or neodymium magnets etc.

<comment><USER7> I've gone through multiple RPi on my boat. Maybe if I epoxied the board it would have a chance.

<comment><USER8> Most epoxy isn't very flexible, and cracks leading to leaks over time.

For something you can do at home, try heating the whole thing to 120C and dipping in hot glue.

<comment><USER9> Idk about new hot glue, but I have some old projects with hot glue from about 15 years ago and it's starting to dry out and crack. Something to keep in mind if looking for longer term.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It would be a good choice to replace tablets that are used outside conference rooms to show the schedule and/or book the room.

<comment><USER11> If you could parasitically power the unit from Wi-Fi beacon frames that would be _awesome_. The idea of a sign that "magically" updates itself over the air gives me a giddy "I live in the future" feeling.

<comment><USER12> WiFi -> electric current rectennas announced a year ago[1] were in the range of 40 microwatts, and the blog post says this NFC system runs at 1.4 Watts, that feels a long way away. But years ago LCD calculators could run on a solar cell the size of a finger and powered by ambient room lighting - surely must be some close to crossover level available.

[1] [http://news.mit.edu/2019/converting-wi-fi-signals- electricit...](http://news.mit.edu/2019/converting-wi-fi-signals- electricity-0128)

<comment><USER13> I'm wondering if that was a constant 40 microwatts, and if that could be stored in capacitors so that every 4-5 seconds (the refresh rate of the panel) there would be enough energy accumulated to power the circuitry for an update.

<comment><USER14> Yes is the answer, but it would be much slower. Assuming 1w for 6 seconds (4s refresh + 2s transfer), it would take about 42 hours for a lossless storage + regulator circuit. 40uw is an incredibly small amount of power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Open source code to write the image using libnfc and node.js 8.x: [https://gitlab.com/bettse/wne_writer](https://gitlab.com/bettse/wne_writer)

<comment><USER16> Does it not work with standard NFC libraries?

<comment><USER15> Like contactless payments, it uses NFC (the protocol), not NDEF (the data format) to write the image. You're not writing the image as an NDEF message, so NDEF-only systems (like early iOS support or WebNFC) won't be useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Many people on this thread are complaining about the poor performance of this passively powered screen. PSA if you care about resolution and speed, and don't mind powering it; pick up the ED060KC1 panel. 300ppi 6" panel for around $75, base refresh is 450ms. If you're brave, it seems mostly stable down to 300-350ms. It's the same panel most high end ereaders use.

<comment><USER17> when I looked it up I was finding listings for at least $150, what sellers are you getting the $75 estimate from?

<comment><USER14> Aliexpress/eBay market prices. You can even get them cheaper than that, it's just that $75 is more available.

[https://m.aliexpress.com/wholesale/ED060KC1.html?keywords=ED...](https://m.aliexpress.com/wholesale/ED060KC1.html?keywords=ED060KC1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Excerpt:

"e-Paper displays have great readability under sunlight, and only consume power when updated. But their refresh rate is limited, and most displays are fairly expensive."

I've been searching for a tiny computer / screen combination that would work under absolute minimal power; that is, if you were in deep space (or in the deep wilderness), and only had a small (say, 5W or less) solar panel for power, then what tiny computer / screen / keyboard combination would you use?

Well, this screen seems like it might be ideally suited to be the screen component of a setup like that...

<comment><USER19> Jailbreak a kindle. They are super low power and cheap with lots of features - I'm guessing a 5W solar panel would be overkill if you only update the screen irregularly.

<comment><USER20> On that note... The remarkable sipposidly allows access for writing software (I think their dev documentation leaves something to desired..). Might also be an option.

Ed: [https://remarkable.engineering/](https://remarkable.engineering/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If this can be made thin and small enough, it'd be cool to use it to put your remaining balance and perhaps recent transactions on transit cards.

<comment><USER22> Let's talk that through a bit more.

I wonder if it could be used to create one-off cryptographic notes - that, when used (scanned), are somehow deleted and can never be used again.

Can't think of a way off the top of my head, but I wonder.

<comment><USER23> [https://www.gemalto.com/financial/cards/payments/dynamic- cod...](https://www.gemalto.com/financial/cards/payments/dynamic-code- verification)

Already used to make dynamic CVV codes for cards which change every 30 minutes.

<comment><USER22> That's cool

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> If I worked at Waveshare, I'd partner up with a phone case manufacturer and sell user-customisable phone cases.

They could also offer a SDK so apps could publish high utility info with low update frequency on the case itself: weather, public transport realtime schedules, etc.

(Edit: had originally written "low-latency" instead of "with low update frequency", because of the strong conditioning to associate "low latency == good")

<comment><USER25> Seems to be a bit thick for a case at 1cm thickness [1] + it would probably need a screen protector itself.

1- [https://i.imgur.com/dY1YHkU.png](https://i.imgur.com/dY1YHkU.png)

<comment><USER24> Yes, for now it is, but it's also stacked so it looks like it's "all screen". Maybe if you could spread components around, it could be thinner.

<comment><USER26> Somebody else commented this: [https://www.gemalto.com/financial/cards/payments/dynamic- cod...](https://www.gemalto.com/financial/cards/payments/dynamic-code- verification) I suppose if you can fit it inside of a credit card it would fit a case, and it would be really cool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Oh, I wish it came with a USB NFC device so I could send it an image from my desktop. Not sure what I'd use it for, but at that price point I can figure something out :-)

I've always been highly annoyed that I cannot set the screensaver on my Kindle to "the last page I read". Then I would set it to things like my itinerary when I travel, to an editor cheat sheet when I'm learning an editor, etc.

<comment><USER28> Found this one.

[https://www.evelta.com/er302-high-frequency-nfc-writer- usb/?...](https://www.evelta.com/er302-high-frequency-nfc-writer- usb/?gclid=Cj0KCQjw6sHzBRCbARIsAF8FMpXIikW8oKpfY_yYlVV6Ovz8W0z2d0SCl5JNmHLuYwzVjHCUzW1Mx0IaAhuvEALw_wcB)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think Chrome 81 has WebNFC too [https://googlechrome.github.io/samples/web- nfc/](https://googlechrome.github.io/samples/web-nfc/)

<comment><USER30> Yes, but this particular board uses the low-level i/o that are mentioned as not supported.

That said, IF the board firmware was open, you could probably get it to speak NDEF if you were willing...

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Clicking "Read More" on the cookie banner sends you to Google for "How to remove cookies."

No, I want to set a cookie to tell y'all not to set tracking cookies and just limit it to strictly necessary ones.

I can remove them and their server will go ahead and set them again.

And no, sending me to a property owned by one of the worst offenders in this space is not what I want.

</comment><comment><USER32> These look similar to the ePaper price tags I've seen starting to pop up

<comment><USER33> I wonder if the same app will allow updating those.

<comment> fraidy-cat I would hope that electronic price tags make use of some sort of authentication in order to set the price that they display.

In Norway, where I live, big retailers will often allow you to pay the price that is shown on the shelf even if their cash register is returning a different, higher price.

I have personally experienced a difference between shelf price and cash register price a few times, and in all of the cases where this happened at a big retailer they allowed me to pay the shelf price.

I actually thought that they were required to do this by law, but looking into it now I find that it is only a recommendation that they do so and not something that they are required to do by law.

The Norwegian Consumer Ombudsman (the government-appointed ombudsman in Norway for consumer affairs [1]) has an article on their website about this topic [2]. Translated from Norwegian, here is an exceprept of what they say:

> * Do you have the right to buy the item at the price at which the item was > marked? The Marketing Act does not grant such rights, and it is disputed to > the extent that one has a legal right on other grounds to demand the > purchase of the item at the shelf price.

> * The stores should still allow the customer to pay a shelf price. It is the > store that made the mistake, and it would be very bad service to allow for > this to negatively affect the customer who notifies them of the error so > that they can correct it.

Anyway, as mentioned you will often be allowed to pay the shelf price rather than the cash register price when you're at one of the stores of the larger retailers. So obviously it would be bad for their business if someone was able to manipulate the price tags without them noticing it.

In closing I should also note that there are probably limitations to how big of a difference in price that they would be willing to accept. In my case it has often been a matter of $20 in difference at most. So, don't expect that you would be able to pay like $99.50 for something that was supposed to cost $995 or anything like that, even if the shelf price somehow ended up showing $99.50 :P

And also, any consumer that changed the price-tags of the things they were buying in order to con the store into selling it to them at a lower price would see no sympathy from me when they inevitably eventually got caught for doing so. Remember, kids: Just 'cause it's technically possible don't mean you are legally allowed to do it. If you notice a vulnerability in a system I strongly recommend that you don't touch it and that you at most let them know about it anonymously unless you have prior written consent to investigate and/or mess with the electronic systems that belong to other people, businesses or other kinds of entities.

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

[2]: [https://www.forbrukertilsynet.no/regler-for-prismerking- buti...](https://www.forbrukertilsynet.no/regler-for-prismerking-butikk)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Wow, this looks wonderful! It reminds me of my old solar-powered Casio calculator. I have a Boogie Board already, but I can see how computer access can change the game (accurate drawings, NFC to save, etc.). Hope to see these guys around more!

</comment><comment><USER35> Oh that's great. I wanted a nice, updatable eink screen for things like "this weeks recipies" and have been trying to work out how to drive it / power it without spending too much. A jailbroken kindle and a server somewhere could work nicely, but there's a lot to that and I don't _really_ want to spend too much time maintaining things.

Would be interesting to know if people have got it working with other NFC apps / how hard it is to add to your own app.

<comment><USER36> I'd be happy with just taking a screenshot of the recipe and scanning it on to the e-ink - this will save my phone quite a few run ins with oily/dirty hands while cooking.

<comment><USER37> My phone screen locks quickly and uses a long PIN so it's terrible for recipes. I've been trying to think of a cheap simple alternative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is really excellent. Various projects I've wanted to do with old iPads all require a power source. Price is a little steep but hopefully lower in the future?

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm really impressed they've got current requirements down to the level where NFC can power the refresh. Geometry has to be the next step. When eInk busted out of MIT in the late 90's, they kept revisiting flexible formats without too much luck. I hope the flexible screen folks are cross pollenating with the eInk brains. In this example, even though the display is small, the electronics around it are very bulky.

</comment><comment><USER40> Awesome! I'll be getting a couple of these for my sound studio .. these are the ideal things to use to put up the daily recording schedule/sessions, plus "RECORDING - QUIET PLEASE" type signs.

I've wanted to put an e-ink display up on the door for a while, but always stumbled when it came to actually routing power to the door - but this just elegantly solves the problem completely.

</comment><comment><USER14> This could be great for a calendar or schedule at work, network a bunch together and push updates whenever needed. Or weather forecasts. Or acting as a live sign for reserving conference rooms, allow people to reserve on a web portal or at the sign. For ~$100 (with a raspi or similar) this competes with whiteboards.

</comment><comment><USER41> I wonder if you could somehow get this to work with some form of passive wifi, maybe slowly harvest energy from available radio signal to trigger a screen update. Maybe someone knows if this is theoretically possible?

<comment><USER42> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22610276](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22610276)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Very cool. I love ideas that seem super obvious after you hear of them.

</comment><comment><USER44> I wonder what sort of security it has? Wouldn't want anyone to be able to deface it.

The photos make it looks like there's a micro-USB port on the bottom. Any idea what that's for?

<comment><USER45> Then, just undeface it.

<comment><USER44> Doesn't help much if the display is in a public place like a supermarket.

<comment><USER46> I've seen e-ink price tags in grocery stores, and it doesn't seem to be any more of a problem than someone writing over a paper price tag with a Sharpie.

<comment><USER47> But maybe more of a target?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Anyone find if the NFC protocol is documented somewhere?

<comment><USER48> >Anyone find if the NFC protocol is documented somewhere?

You won't probably like this (between 100 and 600 US$ per document):

[https://nfc-forum.org/our-work/specification-releases/specif...](https://nfc- forum.org/our-work/specification-releases/specifications/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Just a tad too slow to be a cool e-reader.

</comment><comment><USER50> Why can't I navigate the world without running across hideous, overly sexualized imagery of women at irrelevant, random times?

<comment><USER25> If it stinks everywhere you go maybe it's time to look under your shoe.

Dude is some anime fan and boss told him to make a video demonstrating photos so why not take a pic of his anime figure? You're overreacting to say the least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Not cheap (USD 42) but still cool [0]

[0] [https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000418859190.html](https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000418859190.html)

<comment><USER48> It's roughly 10 US$/inch, and is not that there that many uses for the smaller 4.2" model, the US$ 70 for the 7" model is IMHO more than "not cheap", "rather expensive".

I guess that for the "this week recipe" a more traditional printed paper remains cheaper and more practical.

For "daily" or more frequent need of refresh, maybe it may become a valid choice.

<comment><USER46> I see at least one good use for the smaller one: Price tags at a supermarket.

Instead of a team of clerks changing the labels for three hours at night, you can have one guy do the whole store in that time. The savings in labor would quickly make up for the initial expense.

<comment><USER52> I don't know where you live, but here in France I haven't seen a paper price tag for years. Every chain store has been using e-ink tags for a long time.

<comment><USER53> Only one of the grocery stores near me uses LCD price tags.

There is a constant hiss/buzz from the power and I presume they aren't OLED because I can see the inconsistent backlight that goes out in places along the strip.

Feels cheap and crappy overall.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Building affordable housing - <AUTHOR> http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2016/08/building-affordable-housing-where-has.html <comment><USER2> The most novel part of that article for me was all the way at the end:

> But what about the existing starter homes built after WWII, aren't they > still affordable?

> Well, no. The big problem of a starter home is that it's only cheap when it > is first built, because it is barebone. Once the owners start making the > house theirs to accommodate the growing needs of the family, the house gets > bigger and more luxurious. Every addition to the house results in higher > market value because of increased desirability. So once the original owners > are ready to move out, the house is no longer a starter home, but a big, > well-furnished home from which the owner will expect to recover the costs of > remodeling.

> That is the issue of the "starter home" or "grow home" idea. That home is > only affordable once, for its first owners. So for every generation to get > its "starter home", every generation has to build entirely new neighborhoods > in greenfield areas, where land is cheap. When a metropolitan area matures, > this ideal no longer works, the greenfield areas are just too far and are > disconnected from the city. So, what can be done?

Not only is it expensive to buy a home, you can't even buy one cheap that somebody else got for cheap because they've (likely) made it more valuable by making it more liveable for themselves!

<comment><USER3> What was novel to me but seemingly obvious now that it's been pointed out is how the introduction of cars and highways created a vast oversupply of usable land that previously wasn't practical to build on because workers had no way to get to their city jobs, and that's a big part of why housing was so cheap after WWII.

Perhaps the lesson here is that if we want affordable housing, we need better forms of high-volume transportation that can move people rapidly between city centers and distant under-developed outskirts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In every American city I know, 80%-90% of the cost of an existing home is the lot, not the house. I don't know how to overcome this, but I understand it is caused by politics, suggesting it needs a political solution.

When Florida was abuilding like crazy after WWII for the next 25 years, the lot was usually about 10%.

<comment><USER5> If only there were some technology that would allow multiple homes to exist on a single lot...

<comment><USER6> That would just be priced into the lot.

People are going to spend 35-50% of their incomes on housing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One thing that I've seen quite a bit in Europe is people buying "unfinished" homes. They pay a builder to build a concrete structure with a tile roof, and get it plumbed and wired up to code. But then all the interior finishings (and sometimes even the doors/windows) are done by the owners, by trading a couple years of spare time for substantial cost savings.

<comment><USER8> I heard about something similar in Chile on a 99% Invisible podcast. [http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/half-a- house/](http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/half-a-house/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think the lack of entry level housing is a massive reason the tiny house movement has become so popular. I think people are willing to reevaluate the space they require to live in so as not to spend a life paying off debt.

<comment><USER10> Discussion of tiny houses and pod apartments has become popular (not so much the things themselves) because they offer this tantalizing hope that reducing living space size will decrease rent/mortgage proportionately.

It doesn't for all sort of reasons.

Basic functional blocks like bathrooms and kitchens can only be made so small. And once one graduates from college, shared spaces seem a lot less attractive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> One angle to make housing affordable is to outlaw mortgage products beyond 15 years (along with ARMs), require 20% down, and eliminate the tax deduction on interest - of course you can't do this overnight.

Housing is a basic necessity and we need to get the rampant speculation and financialization out - we're all stuck in this game of musical houses waiting for the music to stop.

<comment><USER12> I believe that would decrease upward financial mobility. It still might be a good idea, but that would be a dramatic drag on home buying, which means anyone who currently owns rental property would see a sustainable uptick in demand, keeping a lot of middle class from ever leaving the world of renting.

Mortgage interest deduction being eliminated for owner-occupied housing I would support a transition to. Loan interest for business expenses [to include a loan secured by property, aka a "mortgage"] should continue to be a valid business deduction, meaning that renters would live in buildings that had tax deductible mortgage interest while owner-occupants wouldn't. If you're trying to pull the tax support for house prices, this won't entirely do it. I strongly oppose taking away business loan interest deductions as that harms a LOT of businesses.

I don't see anything wrong with ARMs. Most of Europe has ARMs as the standard/normal mortgage product. Interest-only, NINJA/liar loans, ARMs with introductory discounted rates are more problematic, but there's nothing wrong with a mortgage being adjustable, IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Most people talk about land being the main cost barrier, but there are plenty of other costs that add up to the point where you're better off buying a standard resale home.

Having acquired land and being accustomed to living in ~600sqft all my adult life I thought I could build a reasonable living space for about $50,000. Once I started looking into it I ran into:

      - land clearing / prep ~$10,000
      - utility hookups and equipment ~$15,000
      - impact fees & permitting ~$5,000
      - foundation ~$5,000

Then comes the actual house construction. I was hoping for a company that would provide a livable shell that I could then improve upon while living in it. Long story short, it just didn't work out at the price I was hoping for.

<comment><USER14> I'm curious if you would share the additional costs you found beyond the land/clearing. And what area of the country are you looking at?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Of course the other option is rebuilding low scale areas around existing train stations as high density apartments.

The game has changed for most big cities since post wwii mass housing. Jobs are more focussed in fewer places and cities are much larger so getting into the city can be very hard from outer suburbs.

The UK is a good example for thr models discussed. It has been building small houses for a long time (like 150sqm lots) and have a minimum density requirement across the country to make this happen (which is also about retaining farmland in the longer term). Too many too far from jobs though its exacerbating englands divide between haves (in london and some other places - large and small) and have nots (in towns and accretions to towns with more people than jobs)

</comment><comment><USER3> Something I've been thinking about on and off since YC announced their "New Cities" research project [1] is whether you could create more affordable cities from scratch in undeveloped land as a sort of speculative public- interest investment.

Suppose you begin with a large lump of money sufficient to buy at least several square miles of rural land and to pay for some basic infrastructure (roads, power lines, sewer, etc..).

At first, you practically give plots of land away to anyone willing to build a house. (Since it's rural, there's little reason to be there unless there's some critical mass of people already there.) Then, as people start moving in, you can raise the price of the lots to recover some of your initial investment and pay for additional infrastructure. Eventually, you should be able to sell lots at far more than the original land cost and recover your investment. This might also spare residents from having to pay taxes until the city is fully grown and there are no more lots to sell.

Some thoughts:

The new city should ideally be near at least some neighboring town with schools, stores, a hospital, and so on to make bootstrapping easier.

This would be an easier sell both to county government and prospective citizens if it were managed by a non-profit institution that is contractually obligated to re-invest profits back into the city. This could be similar to a normal city government, except that in this case the city starts off by owning all the buildable lots.

Partnering with a University that wants to build a new campus on cheap land would be ideal.

Figuring out the right amount of land to buy up-front would be difficult. Too much and it's too expensive and you never sell it all, too little and you'll end up having to buy more adjacent land later at steeply inflated prices or let some other developer buy it and let them absorb all the profits without re-investing it back into the city.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11987032](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11987032)

</comment><comment><USER16> Tiny homes are 150 to 250 square feet homes that that can be built anywhere from ~$20,000 to ~$50,000. The person who figures out how to mass produce these houses (each one is only about maybe the size of two RVs) for ~$10,000 will change this world.

<comment><USER17> In places were housing is expensive, land will be the majority of the cost. In places where land is cheap, housing is already not expensive.

The way to affordable housing is high density, mid-to-high rise condos.

<comment><USER18> > The way to affordable housing is high density, mid-to-high rise condos.

How though? Density sounds good on paper, and has tons of side benefits, but (as the blog post explains) the cost of land + construction jumps significantly.

I know here in the US, there basically is no such thing as "affordable high density condos". High density urban housing is expensive, by definition. So much so that there isn't a single unsubsidized affordable high-density urban housing unit in my entire state.

The only place I'm aware of that has affordable urban housing is Japan. And that's mainly due to a combination of having no meaningful population growth, and having excellent public transit literally everywhere. Two things the US simply can't have in our lifetime

<comment><USER17> > the cost of land + construction jumps significantly

Per person? I don't see how. For a 16-floor building, you can easily fit 120 comfortable condos on a plot of land that would otherwise only fit 2-4 single family homes. Yes, the building cost would definitely be higher, but not per household. On top of that, it would be made of steel and concrete, and not plywood, which generally rots and needs to be torn down every 50 years or so.

> High density urban housing is expensive, by definition.

By definition? I'm not sure about that. There must be some middle ground between glitzy new condo projects and "the projects", which were also high- rise and affordable.

Much of Eastern Europe, lots of Western Europe, former USSR, etc., all have relatively affordable housing.

<comment><USER19> The construction cost of steel and concrete buildings is significantly higher per square foot of floor space than that of low-rise timber-framed buildings. In Canada, the cost of concrete and steel buildings is around 80% more per square foot than the cost of timber-framed walk-up low-rise buildings, and the cost of condos in skyscrapers is a whooping 150% higher than low-rise walk- ups.

Here is a source for construction costs for major metropolitan areas in Canada: [https://t.co/18FwgkSlWY](https://t.co/18FwgkSlWY)

And here are some figures.

For Toronto:

House (medium quality): 120-240$/sf

Walk-up low-rise apartment (medium quality): 100-150$/sf

Residential condos (medium quality): 180-240$/sf

Point towers, 40-80 stories (medium quality): 230-310$/sf

For Vancouver

House (medium quality): 165-225$/sf

Walk-up low-rise apartment (medium quality): 155-180$/sf

Residential condos (medium quality): 205-250$/sf

Point towers, 40-80 stories (medium quality): 270-355$/sf

For Montréal

House (medium quality): 125-180$/sf

Walk-up low-rise apartment (medium quality): 100-155$/sf

Residential condos (medium quality): 150-180$/sf

Point towers, 40-80 stories (medium quality): 250-355$/sf

So if you can afford a 400 000$ housing unit, and you assume half of it goes to pay for the land, you could get a house with about 1 500 square feet of space, a similar sized condo in a low-rise, a 1 000 square foot condo in a concrete mid-rise or a 650 square foot condo in an high-rise.

Yes, high-density housing options lower the amount of land per unit, but at the same time, zoning for higher density tends to rise the cost of land. A lot zoned for an high-rise building will be worth many times what a lot zoned for single-family houses is worth even if the two lots are adjacent, since the land value is proportional to the potential revenue of development, so the bigger the development, the higher the potential revenue, the higher the land value.

<comment><USER17> > So if you can afford a 400 000$ housing unit, and you assume half of it goes > to pay for the land

Why would half of your cost be for land in a high-rise condo? If understand your link correctly, these numbers are construction costs only. My argument always was that value of land is what makes SFHs expensive, not their construction cost.

> A lot zoned for an high-rise building will be worth many times what a lot > zoned for single-family houses is worth even if the two lots are adjacent

If a developer buys a plot of land and rezones it for high-rise, they maybe gaining some value from the mere fact of rezoning, sure.

But as a consumer, say in Toronto, if I'm looking for housing right now (and I actually took a brief look at Toronto RE market in the past), available SFHs are as a rule significantly more expensive than condos, especially in the same neighborhoods.

In addition, if you're looking for something not older than 20-30 years, many SFHs force additional extra space on you (an extra bedroom or two) even if you don't need it -- it's very difficult to find a newish SFH with only 2 bedrooms for example.

So yes, in many cases, I'm forced into an apples-to-oranges comparison of a 3-4 bedroom SFH and a 2 bedroom condo, but as a consumer these are the only choices at times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Here's one proposal for affordable housing in San Francisco: modular units that are extremely cheap to assemble and can be combined into a much larger building.

The developer can have them here instantly and wants to build on a plot near Cesar Chavez and rent to the city. The city's not interested because the buildings are not built here and they'd be a little more expensive than existing SRO's.

[http://sf.curbed.com/2016/10/31/13481254/micropad-tour- patri...](http://sf.curbed.com/2016/10/31/13481254/micropad-tour-patrick- kennedy-prefab-homeless)

<comment><USER21> The problem in SF is not the cost of physical building itself. The problem is zoning, permitting, legal, harassment lawsuits, etc.: [http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/11/a-tale-o...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/11/a-tale- of-two-town-houses/306334/). Or see [https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf- housing](https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing).

Fixing the problem is almost entirely about regulatory / legal issues.

<comment><USER20> I guess that's why I left that comment: solutions exist, the problems are more about political will.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> We need more industrial solutions to housing. Cheaper, more efficient and better quality. Something like [http://www.kodasema.com/en/](http://www.kodasema.com/en/)

<comment><USER23> That website is awful. Is it yours? A bunch of links are dead and the auto- playing video made me seasick. I was trying to figure out whether there's a model with a double bed or you're just supposed to stay single forever, but gave up.

<comment><USER22> No, it's not mine!

I agree it's quite broken. But I still love their house design and concept.</comment></comment></comment>


Merry Christmas, now go patch your Wordpress installation - <AUTHOR> http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.security.full-disclosure/88111

<comment><AUTHOR> Exploit: <http://git.zx2c4.com/w3-total-fail/tree/w3-total-fail.sh>

Screencast: <http://git.zx2c4.com/w3-total-fail/plain/screencast.ogv> or <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqZ_zYLFDSo>

</comment><comment><USER2> Note that this isn't a bug in WordPress itself, but in the W3 Total Cache plugin.

So, could someone un-editorialize the title, please?</comment>


How to take your startup international without breaking the bank - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-take-your-startup-international-without-breaking-the-bank-2011-12

<comment><USER2> You know you are going to get upvotes when you mention you based it on Paul Graham's writings. :) But thanks for the tips and pointers. I think you don't give yourself enough credit -- if the idea wasn't a good one, nobody would be asking you to launch it in their country. So job 1 is to have a compelling product and then things become easier all around the globe. GL Seth Cohen

</comment><comment><USER3> Well-written. But as you said, one will do it, only if something is culturally fitting so there is little friction. Else launching internationally also means managing internationally. How many of us have the bandwidth to do so (with our tiny startup budget)? I can see LetsLunch is a great fit for Italy.

</comment><comment><USER4> Great post Syed!</comment>


The Freak Revolution Manifesto - <AUTHOR> http://freakrevolution.com/manifesto/

<comment><AUTHOR> "If I could drum one thing, just one thing, into the head of every person on earth, it would be this: THERE IS NO ONE TRUE WAY. No one true religion, no one true philosophy, no one true relationship style, body size, sexual technique, computer operating system, educational method, pepper-to-garlic ratio. There might be one true way for you, personally and individually, but that's as subject to change as you are. To say and act otherwise is to cram yourself into a little box that doesn't fit, making yourself and everyone around you miserable." - Heather Freeman

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The first several pages give one the impression that this is just some kind of bleeding heart tripe. Once you progress to the meat of the document it is actually quite good.</comment>


Ask HN: What are fastest paths to financial success? - <AUTHOR> At Digg, one mentor gave me the savvy advice that the fastest path to financial success was working for four years at three different just-about-to-IPO companies. A surefire way to retire by forty. (This is, for the record, pretty good advice.)
https://lethain.com/forty-year-career/
What are other fastest paths to financial success? Currently am a software engineer, so looking for advice in this career choice. <comment><USER2> I'd start by reading "The Millionaire Next Door." It basically boils down to 1) get a decent paying job, 2) live below your means, 3) save/invest the rest of your money for 20 to 30+ years.

Hitting 3 "about-to-IPO" companies that actually do IPO and also give you a decent return is very, very low probability. One of the first startups I worked for, during the dot-bom boom, went IPO. Less than two year later it was near bankruptcy. Everyone's options were under water. Maybe a couple guys cashed out a bit, but nothing life changing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is there a faster way beyond the first three steps? Surely there is a more nuanced "meta" (for lack of a better term) in making money in software?

<comment><USER2> How fast are you looking for? You can think about it as a speed being inversely proportional to probability of success.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The fastest path to financial ruin is to look for the fastest path to financial success. Slow and steady may take longer, but it's much more reliable.

<comment><USER4> What about cryptos? Can I get rich with those?

<comment><USER3> Yes, if you bought them five to eight years ago. Now? Who knows? It's rolling the dice. Some will tell you the odds are good... but they said that just before Bitcoin lost half its value. They were wrong then. Are they right now? Personally, I wouldn't bet on it.

<comment><USER4> Nope, would not put money in. There's nothing valuable behind the hype.

I picked up some early 2017 and made almost an extra year's salary. Would not complain about hype take 2

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> <sarcasm>

Step 1: Don't be poor. Step 2: Repeat.

</sarcasm></comment>


The Conspiratorial Hate We See Online Is Increasingly Appearing in Real Life - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/charliewarzel/mailbomb-pittsburgh-shooting-online-hate-real-world <comment><USER2> The author tries to take a correlation ("crazy people say crazy things online") and argue it's causation ("crazy things online make people go crazy in real life").

We've seen this argument a million times before with the boogeyman du jour. For example: heavy metal and video games caused Columbine.

The problem is that violent crime has dropped as internet use has gone up. And violent crime has also dropped since social media first became a thing. So even if this is "a thing" \-- it's not a widespread trend.

Personally I don't think the medium matters. If Columbine or Ruby Ridge or Waco or Oklahoma City or 9/11 happened today, I'm sure all of these people would have some sort of social media trail for us to look at and say, "a ha, this is why this person was radicalized!" followed by, "Twitter and Facebook and Google need to do a better job censoring their platforms."

<comment><USER3> The mistake you make is correlating the rise of the internet with the reduction in crime. That correlation could be better explained with the lead- crime hypothesis rather than assuming that the internet is somehow causing less crime.

What we have seen is the number of hate crimes increase quite drastically over the past few years as well as the continued rise of school shootings in America.

<comment><USER2> > the continued rise of school shootings in America

Contrary to popular belief, school shootings have been flat since the early 90s:

[https://imgur.com/2uB0QdJ](https://imgur.com/2uB0QdJ)

Full report here:

[https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2018/2018036.pdf](https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2018/2018036.pdf)

<comment><USER4> That's more horrifying, not less. For 20 years children have been getting shot at school in your country and you've collectively done nothing meaningful to stop it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Charlie Warzel writing on Buzzfeed reacting to recent events he has read about online complete with a ridiculous click bait headline epitomizes everything that's wrong with the confusion between 'news', 'opinion' and even 'satire' in our blurred world of 'feeds' and information overload.

Free speech and investigative reporting and writing is essential in a functioning democracy. This is the former but just an inflammatory opinion piece. ('Why toxic online behavior is spilling into the streets').

</comment><comment><USER6> Online _is_ real life and there's not a significant difference between someone making death threats online or over the phone or through the mail and I wish law enforcement would take it more seriously and start jailing people and not just laughing it off.

It'll only take throwing a few obnoxious kids into big boy prison for making terroristic threats before the 'pranksters' stop doing it and we're left with the real crazies.

<comment><USER7> It's important to remind people that hateful speech is not protected by the First Amendment in America.

<comment><USER8> The first amendment absolutely protects hateful speech. It doesn't protect threats.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> BuzzFeed is part of the toxic behavior we see online.

<comment><USER10> Example? BuzzFeed News has in my experience been one of the better, if not the best, news portals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Given the definition of crazy = someone who lost connection to the reality. If you don't agree with somebody on the reality, how do you tell who is the crazy one? Is it possible that the majority is crazy?

</comment><comment><USER12> From buzzfeed "news". The pot calling the kettle black.

</comment><comment><USER3> A lot of this is because with the rise of the internet we've seen that it's become easier to push people into these conspiratorial narratives. Before it was largely limited to relatively local radio shows but now you have large media sources spreading not-so-subtle news about how the Jews are ruining America or the deep state controlling your lives.

We see these charlatans spreading vile bigotry and hatred, often directly resulting in the harm of innocent people. People spreading narratives that school shootings don't actually exist. The overall audience these people can reach has grown dramatically and the problem is that it's similar to cult behavior. You can't actually beat them with facts or through arguments. At a certain point we're going to need to face this problem head on and treat it as a proper cult.

<comment><USER13> Antisemitism has widespread roots in Europe going back 100s of years, unfortunately. It didn't need the Internet to spread :(</comment></comment>


Startups in Southern New Hampshire - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/31/tech-infrastructure-in-the-developing-world-2/ <comment><USER2> Southern NH has the benefit of having a 6.25% lower COL than MA but still being close enough to the Boston area that it can draw from those resources.

The income/property tax situation hits people living in NH but working in MA hardest. If you live in NH it's very much to your advantage to work there too.

Northern New England is tons more compatible with people who aren't from left leaning communities on the coasts than southern New England. Many people are willing to take the hit in terms of $$ in order to live in a place that's compatible with them. In NH can set of fireworks for your friend's birthday party and nobody will bat an eyelash. You can have a conversation with someone in the checkout line about where you go shooting on the weekends and your favorite cheap shotgun rounds. You can roll up to the gas station with two fresh deer in your truck bed and get compliments instead of dirty looks. You can part out a car in your driveway and it's more likely that whoever complains will be shunned by the neighborhood than you will. Few people do all of these things with regularity but many, many, competent, highly skilled individuals want to do one or two and can appreciate the freedom to do so.

The state colleges in "flyover states" might not be MIT and Harvard but they churn out a non-negligible amount of skilled white collar workers and many of those who wind up in the Boston area chasing careers find the cost additional cost of living in NH to be worth paying in exchange for living somewhere they're not culturally incompatible.

It was only a matter of time until employers started tapping into this.

</comment><comment><USER3> Surprised that no startups in Portsmouth, NH were mentioned!

<comment><USER4> There were a lot of startups not mentioned. This article lacks some details.</comment></comment>


Wardenclyffe Tower a.k.a. the Tesla Tower - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardenclyffe_Tower

<comment><USER2> Wow this is good stuff:

"It is not a dream, it is a simple feat of scientific electrical engineering, only expensive — blind, faint-hearted, doubting world! [...] Humanity is not yet sufficiently advanced to be willingly led by the discoverer's keen searching sense. But who knows? Perhaps it is better in this present world of ours that a revolutionary idea or invention instead of being helped and patted, be hampered and ill-treated in its adolescence — by want of means, by selfish interest, pedantry, stupidity and ignorance; that it be attacked and stifled; that it pass through bitter trials and tribulations, through the strife of commercial existence. So do we get our light. So all that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combatted, suppressed — only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle." – Nikola Tesla, "The Transmission of Electrical Energy Without Wires as a Means for Furthering Peace," Electrical World and Engineer, January 7, 1905.</comment>


The online encyclopaedia of integer sequences - <AUTHOR> https://oeis.org <comment><USER2> OEIS is, to me, mind-boggling. When you consider that there is literally an infinite number of possible sequences, it's amazing how often a completely arcane sequence you stumbled upon somewhere is listed in the OEIS.

Also, it's helped me solve a few project Euler problems (which often involve framing "well-known" problems into novel forms). Brute-force the first few values and more often than not you'll find the sequence in OEIS, sometimes with a generating function or pointers to the original problem.

</comment><comment><USER3> Lots of previous discussions: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=integer%20sequences%20points%3...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=integer%20sequences%20points%3E3&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0)

</comment><comment><USER4> Did anyone else immediately search 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42?</comment>


Is it ok to copy the TOS or PP from another site and modify it for my own uses? - <AUTHOR> Going to a lawyer seems pretty expensive, could I "re-purpose" the TOS and PP from another site? I'm a SaaS site. <comment><USER2> As rsto mentioned you can copy the agreements from Automattic as they released their Terms of Service and Privacy Policy under the Creative Commons Sharealike license [1]. However, it's important to consider that their legal agreements are suitable for their own business needs, their own website functionality, and so on [2].

A few things to look after in the Terms of Service for a SaaS app:

1\. Payment terms. A "Subscription" clause can let users know exactly how subscriptions work for your app, that billing occurs in advance on a recurring basis (monthly or yearly), that subscriptions can automatically renew unless canceled (for example).

2\. User-generated content. A "Your Content" clause can outline users' retained ownership of data as content created by users in an app would most likely be proprietary content.

For the Privacy Policy you can look at:

1\. Communications. A disclosure to inform users that you may contact them with promotional and transactional emails.

2\. A Business Transaction or Transfer clause.

[1] [https://en.wordpress.com/tos/](https://en.wordpress.com/tos/), [https://automattic.com/privacy/](https://automattic.com/privacy/)

[2] [https://termsfeed.com/blog/no-privacy-terms- wordpress/](https://termsfeed.com/blog/no-privacy-terms-wordpress/)

</comment><comment><USER3> IANAL, but if there isn't a license explicitly stated you must not reuse it (without permission).

Luckily, Automattic make their ToS available under a Creative Commons Sharealike license, which might be a good fit for your site.

[https://en.wordpress.com/tos/](https://en.wordpress.com/tos/)

</comment><comment><USER4> If you want something simple you can use the following: \- [https://ewolo.fitness/terms](https://ewolo.fitness/terms) \- [https://ewolo.fitness/privacy](https://ewolo.fitness/privacy)

</comment><comment><USER5> when I first signed up on Twitter, I came across a guy that was a business advisor. I asked him where I could get a TOS and PP and he pointed me at this site termsfeed.com

I made a mistake in what I checked off when I ordered the TOS, but they were nice enough to fix my choices and send me a new TOS free of charge. Hope this helps.

<comment><USER2> Thank you for recommending us!

<comment><USER5> anytime, I have had two other people in the last week ask me where to get a TOS, I sent them to your site.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Playable Ultimate Tic Tac Toe - <AUTHOR> http://ken-soft.com/tictactoe/

<comment><USER2> matchu posted an implementation earlier today (with an AI!) using the Khan Academy CS environment:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5901365](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5901365)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice. I guess I definitely have to build AI now haha

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Fwiw I found this one better and it has a rudimentary AI too.

(not mine)

[http://joeyrobert.org/projects/ultimatetictactoe/](http://joeyrobert.org/projects/ultimatetictactoe/)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the plug. I too hacked it out in a couple of hours after reading the article.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice. Good job!:)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Inspired by the recent Hacker News post ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5898506](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5898506)) and my desire to tinker with HTML5 a bit :) I was trying to make a nice "color pencil" effect, but still have some work to do.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's fun to see that whenever a game concept reaches the front page there are at least 10 different implementations done within hours. Good job.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I woke up around lunch and saw the post and was like, well, I guess I know what I'm doing today. Honestly I only originally planned on working on my "color pencil" line drawing. haha

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice... it'd be really cool to get an AI to play against as well.

<comment><USER7> Doing the AI would be fun... it seems like one of those cases where Haskell/Clojure could provide a very elegant solution.

<comment><AUTHOR> Love me some haskell. been playing with it for the past month as well. Have a mostly functioning BEP NN on my github. though for a problem like this AI would be simple :)

<comment><USER7> It'd be one of those things that's 40 lines of Java, 15 lines of Ruby, 2 lines of Haskell... :) if you do it, post it! I'll hack on it tomorrow with my Haskell guru/mentor (I am not strong in functional languages yet)

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha it would be a fun haskell algorithm to write:)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hah, that was the first thing I thought about when I read the article yesterday. Then I checked out ultimatetictactoe.com and found it was registered the same day and I got sad :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Very sad :/

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Fixed random mouse offset bug & whenever all tile become playable, they are all highlighted. With the exception of the start state (As I think it looks better white)

<comment><AUTHOR> Also added fork on github link

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Now to make a multiplayer version... I would use Firebase and Angular probably. Unfortunately I don't feel like staying up all night on a project tonight :-p

<comment><AUTHOR> V2.0 coming to a browser near you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd love to see an HN competition of AIs learning and playing UltimateTicTacToe.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm inclined to say there are already a few simple AIs that play perfectly, so it would likel not be that exciting :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> [http://i.imgur.com/QuPvQyF.png](http://i.imgur.com/QuPvQyF.png) this is the bug i found with this game, how x can win, when I(in blue) scored 4 before x reaches 3

<comment><USER12> The goal is not to win the most boards, but to complete 3 in a row on the large board by winning the small boards. If you're aware of that, I'm not sure what you're claiming the bug is. Could you clarify?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like it. The green highlighting of the active subboard is too subtle and sometimes I miss it. Another option is to flash the active subboard when the players try to use another subboard.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I uploaded originally without the highlighting, but I kept getting lost as well haha

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> thats pretty cool

edit: oops, stuck [http://i.imgur.com/nTOJq1F.png](http://i.imgur.com/nTOJq1F.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> All software is accepted as is.. Etc etc haha jk thanks! I'll check what happened!

<comment><USER15> I just played out this scenario, at this point player O must select any empty space.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I thought that was supposed to happen. Perhaps it was confusing because I didn't highlight all the squares:)

<comment><USER14> This can happen in various scenarios, basically giving the player a choice of any empty space on the scree. I consider that a fair rule.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was messing with this the last few hours... beat me to it :) well done! What'd you use?

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool:) just used JQuery and canvas. I built all the draw functions myself just to get more familiar with HTML5

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If I would be unemployed, I would create ultimate 3D tic tac toe for hardcore players.

<comment><AUTHOR> Step 1: quit job Step 2: create ultimate 3d tic tac toe

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nice job Kenny! We should play sometime.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure! let me get the multi-player and AI-Complete version done, or we could bust out the marker board/paper :)

<comment><USER18> Ahh damn, that was going to be what my fork of your project was going to do.

I'll just leave you to it, then :p

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, if you want, do the multi-player part, i'm more interested in the AI, doing a quck min-max AI solution

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Too bad the first player always wins.

</comment><comment><USER20> First turn should belong to X not O.

<comment><AUTHOR> fortunately that is very easy to fix, done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is cool.

</comment><comment><USER22> nice work man

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> don't have time to play, contributing to LLVM...</comment>


The Beauty of LaTex - <AUTHOR> http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex <comment><USER2> LaTeX gives you great defaults and can yield truly beautiful results if you put in some time: [http://www.duo.uio.no/sok/work.html?WORKID=81971&lang=en](http://www.duo.uio.no/sok/work.html?WORKID=81971&lang=en)

Edit: source code of this thesis in LaTeX can be found here: <http://bitbucket.org/uggedal/thesis/src/>

<comment><USER3> "Putting in some time" being the key words :)

<comment><USER4> Absolutely. There is no free lunch. Typesetting is a difficult job and unique typesetting is still considered a innovative profession. Latex is a wonderful tool for doing it, but you still need skill, creativity, and drive to use it masterfully.

That being said, Latex defaults have more typsetting heritage influencing their design than anything WYSIWYG tool. If you can handle the tradeoffs selected, it's a fantastic default route.

<comment><USER5> With LaTeX, I was able to compose and typeset a full IEEE-format paper, full of diagrams and equations, in a day. I've done the same in OpenOffice, doing part of the work in Word, and I spent half the time fiddling with the figures to get them placed decently, and in the end it still didn't look nearly as nice as the LaTeX version.

I don't know many LaTeX tricks, mostly how to make sections and subsections, insert a figure, add some citations, do monospace text for code, but I can get beautiful papers out of it.

<comment><USER6> A big drawback I find is that this sort of ease is only true if there is a LaTeX stylesheet already in exactly the format you want. Not all conferences provide LaTeX stylesheets, in which case you have a huge hassle, because the stylesheet language for making your own is terrible.

<comment><USER4> I agree and disagree. TeX isn't a terrible language, but it's not a modern language either. Additionally, there's a lot of environmental complexity knowing that typesetting is a complex business.

Writing a fluff template language that compiles to Sty files would be a great project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I used to do all my work in LaTeX, but recently gave up: life is too short. And before you do the "vehemently disagree" thing, think about the last time you had to typeset a text in LaTeX with lots of figures (as in, 2 or 3 per page), or tables. Enough said.

Pages on a Mac gives me all of the typography features outlined in that article. Actualy, it gives my pretty much everything I need, except for unbreakable spaces (argh) and good support for numbered figure captions.

Positioning LaTeX as a "competitor" to WYSIWYG is wrong, instead one should mock Word and OpenOffice for poor typography features.

<comment><USER8> I use LaTeX specifically _because_ I have lots of figures. Word's handling of figures is monstrous: moving them around at the drop of a hat is just awful.

Tables are definitely easier in WYSIWYG.

Some sort of typographic valhalla would be Markdown syntax with LaTeX equations and figures, BibTeX bibliographies and WYSIWYG tables.

EDIT: It looks like Pandoc does this! Awesome!

<comment><USER9> Interestingly, I like tables in LaTeX better. Not because I like the syntax of LaTeX, but because it is much easier to get a program to spit out LaTeX tables (and have LaTeX use them automatically) then dealing with WYSIWYG.

<comment><USER10> Failing that, you can take your data (originally suitable for gnuplot) and make it suitable for LaTeX to \include{} via

      cat data.tsv | sed -e 's/<tab>/ & /g;s/$/\\\\/'

And then you can put all this into a Makefile or whatever you prefer. :)

<comment><USER4> I do this using org-mode's tables pretty frequently. It's the way I generate 95% of my Latex tables.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Good article but the author concentrated just on great output quality. There is another huge advantage: it is easier and less time consuming to write using Latex. I have used Latex, OpenOffice.org, and Word to write books in the past. Using Latex has the smallest overhead because it is so easy to move chapters and sections around, etc. Another advantage, which I am using now, is that I am writing 2 editions of the same book (using different programming languages for the examples), and using Latex greatly facilitates using common material.

</comment><comment><USER12> Whilst we're all here... can anyone recommend a piece of software for writing a thesis?

I'm struggling with MS Word at the moment as I seem to be locked into a fight to the death with Styles.

I've tried Scientific Workplace but actually found it to be such a non- intuitive interface that I consider it a substantial obstacle to overcome.

Currently I'm: Using MS Word to: * Layout the document, keep track of references and figures. Using MS Excel to: * Produce charts Using MS Visio to: * Produce images of graphs * Produce images of database schemas

It works, but it's clunky and those damned Styles are driving me nuts.

I'd love: * A LaTeX engine for Windows that makes things very easy to get started and very intuitive. * A way of generating charts and having a lot of control over the precise layout of the charts * A way of producing tables (database schema), vector graphics (graphs, and also relations for those database schema) * Keep track of my references in a way that can automatically update the master document and produce the bibliography

In my mind this should be a LaTeX application and perhaps something else for the references. But I'll be damned if I've ever managed to find something that makes adopting and using it as easy as I want it to be, and so I stick with MS Office.

Please help! Before these styles ruin my day again.

<comment><USER13> I wrote my thesis in LaTeX under Windows. My tools were:

1\. <http://www.texniccenter.org/> Great UI to get you up and running. You still type in LaTeX markup, but you can compile to PS or PDF very quickly.

2\. OpenOffice to produce the images, which are exported as PDF. LaTeX has a way to include PDF files directly into the output.

3\. For anything else, get a PDF printer and generate PDFs that way. You might need a PDF editor to set the bounding boxes properly though, so it will take some hacking.

4\. For bibliography, I used a very hacked up system. EndNote allowed export in a format that LaTeX understood, except that it had a bug in the output markup. So I wrote a quick PHP script to fix that and add a unique, deterministic, ID for each reference so I can refer to it in the text. Worked a treat.

<comment><USER14> I make most of my with xfig and export to .eps. I also use the LaTeX package psfrag to include LaTeX math formulae in images.

<comment><USER15> I'm using Inkscape instead of xfig for drwaing graphics.

However, there's also _TikZ_ \-- a LaTeX package that takes the descriptive approach to graphics: You describe what you want and get almost always a very nice picture that fits perfectly with the rest of your LaTeX document:

<http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/>

TikZ comes with an amazingly good manual:

[http://tug.ctan.org/tex- archive/graphics/pgf/base/doc/generi...](http://tug.ctan.org/tex- archive/graphics/pgf/base/doc/generic/pgf/pgfmanual.pdf)

<comment><USER14> I knew about pgf, in fact I've made learning it my new year's resolution. It is indeed amazing. I didn't know the texample.net website though, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I never learned about ligatures in school, and have only recently been introduced to the idea of them. A couple weeks ago a buddy was putting together a logo in photoshop and the 'fi' ran together. I had never seen that before, and opted to keep them separate, because I felt it would be confusing (or distracting) for people. I had no idea it was the correct way of typesetting (though I still think it would be confusing).

As an aside, I learned Latex doing my thesis (though never noticed the ligatures), and fell in love. I recently wrote a patent application in it, but my attorney had never heard of it, so I (unfortunately) had to put it in Word for her to collaborate. Much less elegant.

<comment><USER17> Unfortunately, a significant number of font designers and typesetters have tried to be a bit too clever with "proper" typography in recent years, as OpenType fonts and tools like LaTeX or InDesign have made it realistic to add professional quality typographic touches in everyday DTP projects.

One common example is feeling that you "must" include certain ligatures in a font. There is absolutely no reason to mandate this if the glyph shapes do not require it, e.g., if setting the normal shape "f" then "i" with their natural spacing does not cause an awkward overlap. Equally, if glyph combinations other than the classic f-ligatures cause awkward clashes then corresponding ligatures should be provided. So, if you saw a font where the "fi" ligature ran together in a confusing way, it was almost certainly a poorly designed font (or a feature of a well designed font, used poorly).

Another common idiocy in OpenType fonts is creating dedicated petite caps (the same height as lowercase letters) and then calling them small caps. The point of small caps is just to reduce the "heavy" appearance of a string of capitals, to avoid disrupting the flow for the reader. Small caps are _not_ supposed to be so small that they are the same height as lowercase letters, because then small caps like O, S and C become near-enough indistinguishable from their lowercase counterparts, and if you have to do things like pluralise an acronym, things get messy.

See also: "hanging" punctuation that puts the entire mark in the margin (the point is to give a visually, rather than mathematically, even margin, and hanging a few mm of glyph out there hardly does so), hanging bullets/list markers right out in the margin (these are _supposed_ to cause a visual break in the flow, that's why they're there!), using oldstyle figures where they aren't necessary (OSF can be useful for avoiding chunkiness in the same way as small caps, but suffer similar problems to petite caps where an old-style 0 or 1 can easily be misread if the context doesn't make it clear which is intended), and so on.

Unfortunately, there's a whole new breed of typographical snob who once read a book of rules about how typography "should" be done, and now apply those rules unthinkingly, resulting in documents that are neither more beautiful nor more functional that they would have been without the "clever" typography.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "There are several reasons why one should prefer LaTeX to a WYSIWYG word processor like Microsoft Word: portability, lightness, security are just a few of them"

I agree with most points but seriously, lightness? Have you ever downloaded it? The program is about 750MB (Source: <http://www.tug.org/protext/>), and that's for software without an elegant UI. To compare, the ENTIRE office package is around the 500MB, that's Word+Excel+Outlook+OneNote+Groove.It does produce very nice results, but it isn't light (in terms of space).

<comment><USER15> This comparison is not fair.

You're free to download just the LaTeX core and the most important packages. Add a decent Editor/IDE such as Kyle or TeXnicCenter, and you're still in the range of 50-100 MB.

The 750 MB of the total LaTeX package should be compared to the size of Word along with all macros and plugins that are available for Word.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I use Pandoc to write most of my assignments in Markdown with a bit of LaTeX, and then convert them to a PDF via LaTeX. It makes doing small papers really quick and easy.

<http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/>

<comment><USER20> Looks really interesting (and +1 for Haskell). I've used for this purpose Deplate written in Ruby, which has a rich feature set, but is not quite mature, so sometimes you have to go to the source code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I would like to mention that the Memoir class (<http://www.ctan.org/tex- archive/macros/latex/contrib/memoir/>) pulls together many useful LaTeX packages and comes with a terrific manual.

When I discovered it, I had no knowledge of LaTeX beyond the Not So Short guide ([http://www.ctan.org/tex- archive/info/lshort/english/lshort.p...](http://www.ctan.org/tex- archive/info/lshort/english/lshort.pdf)) and a couple of semesters using article for homeworks. I found it very helpful for documents of more than a couple of pages, and even when I want to be fairly particular about a single page document such as my resume.

<comment><USER22> Agreed on the beauty of the Memoir class. I used it for my ebook and I enjoyed the result ([http://betterexplained.com/ebook/MathBetterExplained.Preview...](http://betterexplained.com/ebook/MathBetterExplained.Preview.pdf)). It's hard to find LaTeX examples/templates for non-technical papers, but Memoir was it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> _LaTeX is a free typesetting system that allows you to focus on content_

and on markup.

</comment><comment><USER24> Why does latex get so much love compared to context (<http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page> ), when latex only has a handful of academia-focused templates by default and the barrier to making your own is really, really high?

(No, I will not use the gimmicky caps, they annoy me.)

<comment><USER25> I looked at the beginner's manual and user manual on their wiki. The first document looks terrible (I expected Comic Sans any moment, after seeing the heading/special section frames), the second has broken layout on some pages. Not inviting unfortunately :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> TeX has a lot of shortcomings as a language. When I was writing my dissertation I would have been able to list plenty of them, but the most obvious was the gratuitous use of dynamic scoping instead of lexical scoping.

It can be very tricky to selectively expand parts of a subexpression to create a block and then return to the head and execute the block you've created. Without lexical scoping it's difficult to safely create CPS macros.

</comment><comment><USER27> Yes, but what about if I want to insert a few figures? I don't want to have them all bunched up one side of the page or to have a tiny bit of a paragraph show up before one or etc etc. I just want to say "put this figure here and this one here" but this is LaTeX so tough.

(I should add that I use and like LaTeX, it does let me produce beautiful documents from Emacs. But let's not pretend it's the answer to everyone's problems)

<comment><USER14> _I don't want to have them all bunched up one side of the page_

Try

      \begin{center}
      \begin{figure}[ht]
      ...
      \end{figure}
      \end{center}

Also, LaTeX usually does a good job in placing figures (which, in professionally typeset journals/books, appear at the top of a page), and overriding it with [h!] sometimes makes a document look less readable.

<comment><USER14> Oops, that's supposed to be inside out:

      \begin{figure}[ht]
      \begin{center}
      ...
      \end{center}
      \end{figure}

Not sure it works the way I first suggested. Apologies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Just a small correction to the article: LaTeX is not only free, it's also Free Software!

<comment><USER28> A small correction to your comment: your "correction" is actually an addition, since you point out an omission not a mistake.

<comment><USER15> I consider this a mistake because the author depicts the project under value.

Saying a project is free when it is in fact Free Software ... well, that's like saying "they have more than 1.000 users" when there are in fact 50.000 users.

It isn't really wrong, but it's a mistake that should be corrected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> LaTeX, please!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, but it's too late, I can't edit it now.

<comment><USER14> The first time I read this comment the title had a typo ("Beautfy" instead of "Beauty") that has been corrected. By YC, I suppose.

<comment><USER14> And now it's LaTex. Almost there...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's great for collaborating with other authors since you can use the same tools you use for software (svn, git, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER31> "The algorithm uses language-specific patterns in order to decide the preferred position for hyphenation. The engine then selects line breaks so as to make paragraphs look as good as possible."

Proper typsetting will check for lakes and rivers. I do not see mention of this so it probably is not "as good as possible".

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_(typography)>

<comment><USER17> There is no explicit check, but a natural consequence of the mathematical optimisation problem that this algorithm solves is that rivers are unlikely.

<comment><USER31> I tried to read the paper, but it's behind a paywall so I am unable to confirm whether it gives any possible mechanism for solving rivers. But it seems highly unlikely because the alignment of word gaps from one line to the next, the cause of rivers, is entirely unrelated to getting nice word spacing on the lines themselves. The abstract makes no mention of trying to solve the problem of rivers or lakes. How does the algorithm solve rivers?

<comment><USER17> As I mentioned before, there is nothing explicit about "solving" rivers in the algorithm. The rarity of rivers is just a welcome side-effect of the mathematical formulation.

The kind of river that is distracting is typically caused by an unfortunate combination of two things: having wide spaces between words, and having them aligned closely enough from one line to the next that the white space they cause joins up visually.

TeX's hyphenation and justification algorithm is, in simple terms, trying to optimise for even spacing throughout a paragraph, with a bias towards using the natural spacing or as close to it as possible. Notably, it can do this by increasing _or decreasing_ the space between words. In this environment, you are much less likely to get wide spaces in the first place than if you have a typical word processor algorithm that justifies line-by-line and only by increasing space. If the spaces aren't as wide, then they are less distracting in themselves, and there is less scope for them to overlap for several lines to form the long rivers that are so distracting to the reader.

This doesn't mean that rivers are impossible using a TeX-style algorithm. It is just less likely to happen, and probably less noticeable if it does, than with a line-based H&J algorithm.

<comment><USER31> I see, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> LaTex does many great things. It's sad that the overwhemling majority of the world chooses to use inferior tools like Word, Google Docs etc. I threw in the towel a long time ago, but still wish I didn't have to.

The worst part is that all the problems that people cite below in Word can be solved relatively easily, but Microsoft doesn't fix them because their customers are too undemanding.

</comment><comment><USER33> There are two-and-a-half shortcomings of the TeX ecology (but not the core TeX software itself) today that I've seen:

The first is the fact that TeX is still relatively unknown, at least in non- specialist circles, which makes it hard to share documents among people. Related to this, I haven't seen any straightforward software to track changes and generate readable diff's of shared documents (though I haven't tried TeXDiff lately <http://robmar.net/TexDiff/>). I've seen a friend switch a major paper from TeX to Word because his adviser (a Public Policy prof) couldn't deal with the TeX versions of drafts.

Second, and this is purely a software thing, is that footnotes have the potential to break up the flow of text too much. Ideally, there would be some toggle-able option where footnotes could be collapsed during editing. Given the nature of Emacs, I wouldn't be too surprised if there's a way to do this. Am I missing something? Any possibility of doing it in TeXShop?

</comment><comment><USER34> Hm, well, it is not really about [Xe][La]TeX, but various features of opentype fonts. But that is OK, and those links in the section 8 to some free (for commercial use, that is important) fonts are perhaps the best part of the article, I didn't know them yet. :-)

</comment><comment><USER35> Latex is better than its competitors (Word, OpenOffice), but it has its problems. Many of the environments are fragile and not composable. Last night, I was trying to embed a list inside a table.

I had this, and the problem was that the longer item does not wordwrap:

      \begin{tabular}{|l|l|}
      \hline
      \textbf{Title A} & thing 1 \\
        & thing 2, but it's much longer than the other items \\
        & thing 3  \\
      \hline
      \textbf{Title B} & thing 1 \\
        & thing 2, but it's much longer than the other items \\
        & thing 3 \\
      \hline
      \textbf{Title C} & thing 1 \\
        & thing 2, but it's much longer than the other items \\
        & thing 3 \\
      \hline
      \end{tabular}

The items on the right are not a list. However, you can not embed an _itemize_ environment in a tabular environment. Further, this table does no word wrapping. I wanted an itemized, bulleted list on the right, so 30 minutes of Googling and experimenting later, I have a solution using the tabularx package:

      \begin{tabularx}{0.9\linewidth}{|l|X|}
      \hline
      \textbf{Title A} & \begin{itemize}
        \item thing 1
        \item thing 2, but it's much longer than the other items
        \item thing 3
      \end{itemize} \\
      \hline
      \textbf{Title B} & \begin{itemize}
        \item thing 1
        \item thing 2, but it's much longer than the other items
        \item thing 3
      \end{itemize} \\
      \hline
      \textbf{Title C} & \begin{itemize}
        \item thing 1
        \item thing 2, but it's much longer than the other items
        \item thing 3
      \end{itemize} \\
      \hline
      \end{tabularx}

This does as advertised. I get a word wrapped, bulleted list on the right. It's also fugly. The spacing of the list is atrocious. It's not fit for a professional publication. Eventually, I end up rolling my own bulleted list:

      \begin{tabularx}{0.9\linewidth}{|l|X|}
      \hline
      \textbf{Title A} &
        $\bullet$ thing 1 \newline
        $\bullet$ thing 2, but it's much longer than the other items \newline
        $\bullet$ thing 3  \newline
      \hline
      \textbf{Title B} &
        $\bullet$ thing 1 \newline
        $\bullet$ thing 2, but it's much longer than the other items \newline
        $\bullet$ thing 3 \newline
      \hline
      \textbf{Title C} &
        $\bullet$ thing 1 \newline
        $\bullet$ thing 2, but it's much longer than the other itmes \newline
        $\bullet$ thing 3 \newline
      \hline
      \end{tabularx}

Finally, this looks okay. But the road it took to get here is ridiculous, and the solution I came up with is silly. (Also note that I had to use \newline, because the end paragraph maker, \\\, would screw up the table.)

In the end, I like Latex. It is, as I said, better than the alternatives. When what you want to do fits exactly into what's provided, it's fine. But when you hit edge cases, abstractions leak and you can sink hours into fixing things. I would love there to be a version of Latex that was not fragile like this.

<comment><USER36> This is a shot in the dark, but have you tried inserting a \parbox or minipage environment into the table?

I solved this problem in the past, much more simply. I think I embedded a \vbox in the table (back when I used TeX rather than LaTeX). Sorry I can't be more specific-- I poked around on the hard drive of my current machine, and didn't find it, so this must have been many years ago, on a project that didn't merit copying over.

<comment><USER35> Nope, but it very well could work. The solution I did come up, though, also works. But this is all part of my larger point: Latex can be fragile, and getting it to do what you want is often nonobvious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The real question is whether any of these features actually matters.

<comment><USER38> LaTeX also makes it easy to write big documents. MS Word becomes painful to work with when you get over fifty pages or so.

Also the final output is much, much prettier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I used to use LaTeX (with AUCTeX) for writing medium-sized documents. AUCTeX is great, and made typing the required markup very easy.

For a while I tried reading all my docs in pdf instead of html. After that I tried using the various latex-to-html tools, but wasn't really crazy about any of them.

Somewhere along the way I must've gotten lazy or something, and now just use Markdown which works nicely for me.

</comment><comment><USER40> Check out the WYSIWYG TeXmacs: <http://www.texmacs.org>

It has its own real-time high quality typesetter.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would, but it looks too 1999. And it also appears to not be maintained anymore.

<comment><USER5> It looks featureful and effective. Are you concerned about your "image" if people see you using software that looks old? Do you constantly switch editors because the one you like starts to look dated? I like the "1999" look, because everything is small and simple, there's no glowing shiny ribbon thing oozing across the top of my screen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There is a Wordpress plugin that accepts a LaTeX formula between "$latex" and "$" and places a PNG image. Handy when you have webpages for math-related teaching.

<http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-latex/>

</comment><comment><USER41> I loved LaTeX for a long time, but InDesign has now trumped it for me: equally good rendering and output, with usable GUI goodness. It even uses the same hyphenation engine!

</comment><comment><USER42> imho it's bit unfair to compare LaTeX to MS Word, as the other is typesetting system, and the other is word processor. How does LaTeX output compare to Adobe InDesigns or some other tool that actually cares about typograpy?

My main gripes about (La)TeX are that Unicode seems to be an afterthought, it has its own peculiar font system and creating custom layouts/styles with it seems to be harder than it should.

<comment><USER43> "Afterthought" is precisely true. Knuth made up his own character encoding stuff which ought to be replaced now, but in 1982 I doubt he had any better alternatives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> This title should be changed to: "The Beauty of LaTeX". feh -- of couse somebody suggested it already...

</comment><comment><USER45> I wish SVG would work seamlessly with LaTeX...</comment>


Where should product management report to? - <AUTHOR> http://productmanagementtips.com/2011/09/20/product-management-organization/

<comment><USER2> How about none of the above? Directly to the CEO is the only thing that makes sense. And the CEO had better be focused on Product (or Service) Management above all else, and all those other things should report INTO the PM organization.

Engineering? Implementation of PM strategy.

Marketing? Communicating the PM message.

Sales? Delivering the product spec'd and built by PM.

Etc....

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed that a VP of PM (or whatever title) should report directly to CEO, though having engineering report to CEO directly as well makes sense. As a PM, I've always felt that the tension between PM and engineering is a good thing. It leads to some healthy conflicts instead of hierarchical subservience.

Though marketing reporting into a PM organisation sounds like a fantastic idea... :-)</comment></comment>


Record labels sue SourceForge - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/18/sppf_sues_four_us_p2p_companies/ <comment><USER2> It's articles like this that make me unable to properly convey how much I love watching big labels collapse and die.

</comment><comment><USER3> 1\. It's suing over software used to share files, not software that breaks or circumvent DRM. So, as the article says why not internet browsers, email clients, etc.?

2\. I'm confused as to what a French law can do to Sourceforge and the others.

Being French, I feel kind of embarassed by that... I hope it ends up well.

<comment><USER4> Well it looks like the labels have given up on attacking their customers (probably a good idea... /sigh) in favor of attacking suppliers. I think SourceForge would probably be at the bottom of my list of businesses I'd sue. If you sue them the FSF and any number of lawyers associated with open source code will be there to their aid.

 _So, as the article says why not internet browsers, email clients, etc.?_

I am sure that is next... which court will allow it is the real question?

<comment><USER5> Sourceforge isn't some tiny non-profit that needs the help of EFF, etc. Sourceforge is a massive business with 50 million/year in revenue.

<comment><USER4> A few additional points.

EFF has a lot of experience, why not use it.

* Sourceforge is a massive business with 50 million/year in revenue.*

Massive by whose standards? 50 million a year revenue relative to the major record labels doing 20 billion a year revenue. The music industry is 400 times the size, that is substantial multiplier.

Any number of other large companies who have or use open source projects indirectly have a stake in this lawsuit. Companies like Google and IBM won't stand by idly while precedence is created on how open source projects will be held accountable for their user's behavior. This is similar to lawsuits that were attempting to hold the gun industry responsible for what the users of the gun did with them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The lesson is: host your P2P app on Google Code, the music industry probably don't have the balls to sue Google.

</comment><comment><USER7> They better ban all birds, too, then (see <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149>).

</comment><comment><USER8> And this is why I'm happy not to live anymore in my own country (france)...</comment>


So I've envisioned a phone app - how to find coder? - <AUTHOR>

I, like many others, have conceptualized a phone app that I think has strong appeal.  The next major problem is finding a competent code developer to partner with to make it real.  Are there reputable clearing houses for match-ups like this?  What resources are there in general for this?<p>Thanks <comment><USER2> If you have money, just hire them as a contractor via craigslist. If you need help vetting then I would ask a developer friend to help. If you don't have money, good luck. Most developers will not partner with someone who just has an idea because it usually means they will do the majority of the initial work for something that will most likely fail without any compensation. The exception is a developer friend who really sees the vision.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hey DonGateley,

I recommend you to check on founder2be : [http://www.founder2be.com](http://www.founder2be.com)

I'm probably going to Montreal founder2be if you're in Quebec, I can link you to the eventbrite page.

You can always look for freelancers too on these websites :

[https://ooomf.com](https://ooomf.com) [https://www.elance.com](https://www.elance.com) [http://www.freelancer.com](http://www.freelancer.com) [https://www.odesk.com](https://www.odesk.com)

Hope you'll find a co-founder or a freelancer ! A.

</comment><comment><USER4> There's a monthly thread for freelancers on Hacker News:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6310240](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6310240)

As for vetting the person, it's usually done by looking at what they've made.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here. No real money, just a few good ideas. I'm an engineer and programmer (started designing mainframes at IBM) but long retired from the day to day issues of design and coding, especially distant from modern device programming.

Like a barely countable set of such people, I'd like to lure a programmer in with a good idea and the belief that it could be financially worthwhile in the long run.

How to do that without being too vulnerable to a hit and run completely escapes me.

Y'all have given me some threads to follow, thanks. More specific individual replies coming up.

I sure wish ycombinator had a notification option for threads you start or comment in. That would facilitate longer and more productive threads. Am I just missing it?

<comment><USER5> [http://hnnotify.com/](http://hnnotify.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly! Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The thing is, if you're not a programmer, you'll have a hard time judging the quality of a programmer and may end up hiring incompetent one. Even a newbie freelancer like me have seen it happen quite frequently. I often hired to clean up the mess left by those bad hires (almost all of them was hired by non-programmer).

You should try posting the job on curated/specialised marketplace such as [http://getlambda.com/](http://getlambda.com/) and [http://gun.io/](http://gun.io/) . Your chance of hiring great programmer will be higher there.

<comment><USER7> I was just checking project estimates on gun.io, they don't seem to be any higher than freelancer or odesk (e.g $1000 for an iphone app) especially if they are looking for "expert hackers"

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you have money, the options outlined are pretty good. If you're strapped for cash, I'd encourage you to start building on www.appcubator.com which will get a project going for you for free. Disclaimer, I work at Appcubator.

</comment><comment><USER9> You could check out Mobile Brain Bank [http://mobilebrainbank.org/](http://mobilebrainbank.org/) .

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm an Android developer & can work part time, ping me @ firstname.lastname@example.com if you are interested!

</comment><comment><USER11> Learn to code.

</comment><comment><USER12> Do you have money?</comment>


HTTP Strict Transport Security Comes to Internet Explorer - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2015/02/16/http-strict-transport-security-comes-to-internet-explorer.aspx <comment><USER2> This is fantastic news! And they decided to include the Chromium HSTS Preload list too. I've submitted something like ~30 domains to the list, and having them covered in newer versions of IE automatically is a very nice thing.

<comment><USER3> How long until that list of yours is just *.gov?

<comment><USER4> A while. It takes a significant amount of effort to effect change in the IT infrastructure of every organization within the US government. (konklone does mention this in their Reddit post in /r/netsec)

Progress is progress.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. I was eager to learn more about their specific strategy to achieve it.

<comment><USER2> There's not a master plan, but there's several promising lines of work happening. Hopefully 2015 will be a fun year. Tomorrow, I'll be on Federal News Radio in the morning, preaching the gospel to DC commuters.

<comment><USER3> Link for those interested: [http://www.federalnewsradio.com/?nid=1269&sid=3801434](http://www.federalnewsradio.com/?nid=1269&sid=3801434)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> until it's not longer tied to windows versions, ie will always be a problem

<comment><USER6> Don't know why you are downvoted but that's true. Windows versions tend to be long-lasting. If Microsoft keeps tying browsers to them, then they will always have browsers that remain behind for 5+ years.

And of course the next IE12/"Spartan" will be tied to Windows 10...so this won't change anytime soon apparently.

<comment><USER5> I don't know either, but that's HN for you. meh

It's a shame though, because the new IE isn't so bad, but while I have to develop for IE8 it's as good as useless :(

<comment><USER7> Though the only people "stuck" on IE8 are XP users, which is indeed in rapid decline.

<comment><USER5> True, but after that I'll still be stuck on IE9, and the trend will continue.

<comment><USER7> I think that's called progress :)

<comment><USER5> It would be much better progress if they could use the latest IE on whatever version of windows, rather than being forced develop for the lowest common denominator.

Chrome has it right, it's always the latest version, and firefox is better than it used to be, but even then they didn't say "sorry, you need the latest windows to use this version, here, have this 4 year old version instead"

It's ridiculous, and I can't think of one valid technical reason for it

<comment><USER8> You really can't think of a technical reason?

Now I am not involved with IE at all, but i think it's safe to assume that they are most likely using new APIs which are specific to that platform.

Now that's not an excuse, as they could write in fallbacks for platforms that don't have this, but it's definitely a valid reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does that make Safari the last browser without a preload list for HSTS?

<comment><USER10> Have you looked at ~/Library/Cookies/HSTS.plist?

<comment><USER11> That list doesn't seem to be preloaded. I checked mine and it only has 187 items in it. So I guess they store the preloaded list somewhere else.

<comment><USER10> Probably that they have a different organization than the preloaded list you find elsewhere.

When you delete that HSTS.plist and restart your Safari, the same file will pop up again, containing the same entries (if you haven't modified it before). So it is reasonable to assume that the list is preloaded rather than gradually built up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Are they really sure this feature is "exciting"? It's a welcome change for sure, but I can't quite see them beaming with joy or writhing orgasmically, simply due to an implementation of HSTS. An odd fetish, indeed.

<comment><USER6> Apparently it's becoming a thing to cheer for Microsoft when it implements a feature in its browser that others have had for years. It's like cheering for the 10th guy who crossed the finishing line instead of the first.

<comment><USER13> Firefox has had HSTS support since version 4 and Chrome has had it since 220.127.116.11. Indeed, it is great to see Microsoft do this, but too little too late?</comment></comment></comment>