Show HN: Digest – Reddit newsletter based on the subreddits you want to follow - <AUTHOR> https://getdigest.io <comment><USER2> Looks great but needs a few extra things in order for it to be _really_ useful:

1\. One subscription for multiple subreddits. EG: I might want programming, julia, python, etc. 2\. I'm already subscribed to reddit. Perhaps ask for credentials so you can fetch my list? Would be quite useful 3\. Suggest related subreddits. You can just pick by tags from here: [http://redditlist.com/](http://redditlist.com/) 4\. A pause option for subscriptions.

Maybe list:

\- Autocomplete perhaps? (just get a list of the biggest subreddits)

<comment><USER3> I second "One subscription for multiple subreddits". I just realized there is a concept on Reddit called Multireddit where you can aggregate multiple subreddits. Being able to create a subscription to a Multireddit would do the trick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You should really put some sort of preview before you ask users to sign up.

<comment><USER5> Seconding this; I have no motivation to feed the box my email address because I have absolutely no idea what I'll get back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really really want less things in my email, not more. This is where hosted RSS readers have value.

<comment><USER7> I need fewer things in my RSS reader</comment></comment>


Greece's finance minister used to be Valve's games economist - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2015/01/28/greeces-new-finance-minister.html

<comment><USER2> Varoufakis has been featured heaps on NPR's Planet Money show. In one episode [1] he was quoted on Australian Radio Show "Late Nite Live" to say:

> "When you have an implosion of the economic sphere, then suddenly the > political sphere follows suit. And then all sorts of riffraff, like me, come > out to play."

Varoufakis is truly a fascinating man.

[1][http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...](http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=387239084)</comment>


The Raspberry Pi web server speed test - <AUTHOR> http://www.jeremymorgan.com/blog/programming/raspberry-pi-web-server-comparison/

<comment><USER2> FYI out of the box setting for apache are brain dead.

I literally have systems with tweaked setting doing 45k/second hits at less then 10ms latency on Apache. You can't do that with default settings because again the brain dead default settings.

I think in general tuning each of these carefully could eek out more performance on any platform especially one with such a small footprint.

<comment><USER3> What is ruining the performance and why is it default?

<comment><USER4> One example as one of the commenters noted was prefork being the default mpm. Something else valuable for static performance is allowoverride none (disable htaccess checking). As to why it is default, I suspect due to the popularity of php and other modules which often misbehave on the threaded worker mpm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> His testing is very flawed. Look at the availability chart: nginx has _higher_ availability at 200 concurrent connections than at 100? It's simply not possible if the test was the same w/ just a higher concurrent connection count, as he claims.

Edit: Yes, it's "possible" that this is something in the nginx code causing it work weird, but I'd say a benchmarker should use some common sense instead of blind reporting, notice that this is an anomaly, and re-test. Benchmarking should be a scientific statistical process, reporting mean and mode, standard deviation, etc. The background environment should be heavily studied and documented to ascertain no background/cron tasks are taking place, and every little detail should be carefully looked at before putting results up for the world to see.

<comment><USER6> The charts show nginx has _lower_ availability at 200 concurrent connections except for the large JPG test where availability is the same (97.55%). The labels are goofed up on the second chart (they're off by a column), so maybe that's what confused you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is something very appealing in the idea of running own web server on a small, cheap device like RaspberryPI and pushing it to the limits. It's of course far more reasonable to just buy a hosting and don't bother about it, but how great would it be to host applications on your own server infrastructure? :)

<comment><USER5> The bottleneck wouldn't be the device, it'd be your internet connection. Higher latency, no uptime guarantees, bandwidth limits, contract restrictions, etc.

Plus, unless you already have a 50 or 100mbps connection at home for other reasons, getting that internet connection speed will cost you more than a VPS somewhere (usually). (And, it'd be 100mbps downstream, but your upstream would likely not be more than 10-20mbps.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Could anybody explain why there is such a difference between text and image? Is this just because the file sizes are different or has that a different cause?

I really like to "out-of-the-box" comparison, but as others already have stated for apache that doesn't really make sense because apache just doesn't perform well without any configuration changes.

</comment><comment><USER9> I feel like the load is way too high for getting relevant results. Imho it doesn't really matter if response time is 15 or 35 seconds when most users except responses in <1s.

Also it would have been nice to see some low-power x86 system for comparison.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is nice to see. I've ran lighttpd extensively in an embedded environment and for our application it's always performed like a champ due to its really tiny memory footprint. In an embedded environment most of the time the web server is just running a UI, so it's best that it stay out of the way and leave the RAM available for the main application. However in the case where we're doing inter-device communication via HTTP, I might reconsider nginx.

</comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone here have any experience with Cherokee (<http://www.cherokee- project.com/>)? I've heard good things about it but the fact that it's not represented in this test makes me think that it's not as widely regarded as others.

</comment><comment><USER12> This article makes me curious to see how an FPGA based http server would perform.

</comment><comment><USER13> I would've liked to see a small node.js or Go-based server. When running on an embedded device, you want maximum efficiency, and a full web-server isn't your best bet.

<comment><USER14> I don't think either of those would perform as well as just a stripped down epoll shim, which is basically just stripped down nginx.</comment></comment>


Scheme vs. Python (2011) - <AUTHOR> https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/proglang.html <comment><USER2> > _How many people reading this are 50 years old? Lisp is 50 years old — and > for the most part, the lifespan of a programming language is closer to the > lifespan of a dog than to that of a person. Only one other language > (Fortran) is that old and still in use. Why has Lisp survived? Not because > it's useless. People still use it because you can write working code in Lisp > way faster than you can in most so-called "practical" languages._

Sorry to burst this bubble, but tons of languages created in the same period or 10-15 years later are still in use.

Fortran, which he already mentioned. COBOL is still in use (much much more than any Lisp, just not in shiny new startups). Forth is still used here and there. C of course which is about 12 years younger but still around 40ish. Pascal is still used (in far greater numbers than Lisp). Heck, even BASIC still has tons of fans, either in VB disuise or in the the various commercial BASIC's around.

With this in mind, Lisp being "50 years old and still in use" is much less impressive -- since one other 50 year old, and several 40 and 30 year old languages are still in widespread use. We use lots of 3+ decades old languages - so, it's not like we only use "new" languages and Lisp is the exception.

<comment><USER3> I'd love to know what Pascal's still used for.

<comment><USER2> Tons of people still use Borlands tools and there are lots of legacy enterprise apps maintained in them.

In Windows there are also several high profile apps written with Pascal. One such I remember reading about recently is Fruity Loops, one of the most popular (though entry level) DAWs.

In the TIOBE rankings (not definitive, but indicative), Pascal has 2 entries in the top 20, as Delphi/Object Pascal and plain Pascal -- far ahead languages from all CLs combined, to Clojure, Scheme, Lua, Groovy, Erlang, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This course is taught in python now; this post is about 4 years old.

Oh look, there's even a past thread about it [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3491142](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3491142)

</comment><comment><USER5> I think what makes Python unique and successful as a programming language is a strict pragmatism (rejection of any ideology) and rather conservative choices in features to add (that is, don't add everything that someone suggest, wait until we can see it's a good idea and it cannot be readily composed from existing parts).

Scheme, OTOH, has some ideological choices. The whole notion of programmable programming language that comes with Lisp tradition (which includes s-expressions). The emphasis on teaching and small libraries. Attempt to somewhat model mathematics in numerical tower. These design choices, while interesting, are going against practicality.

I am big fan of mathematics, Common Lisp, Haskell. There is so much beauty and elegance. And yet, when I need to get something done quickly, I will just use Python because it drops the mathematical purity without prejudice, just like a physicist working on an impossible problem.

<comment><USER6> Python is so ideological it is not even funny. It has a crippled lambda because Guido couldn't find a syntax he liked for it. It doesn't have tail call elimination because Guido is under the, mistaken, impression that they inhibit backtraces. The zen of python spouts explicit is better than implicit as a marketing slogan to cover up a design wart with Python's lolscope. It only had local and global scope. Python Scope is still broken[0] btw. But don't worry, it is not a bug because it is documented. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻. The only reason Python passes as a language with good design is because people compare it to PHP or Javascript.

How is the numerical tower impractical? Having to check for overflow/underflow after every addition is what is impractical in my book.

> I am big fan of ... Common Lisp ... There is so much beauty and elegance.

Idk where to people get the idea that Common lisp is 'beatiful and elegant' (in opposition to practical I may add). It is eminently practical. Have you seen loop and format (which btw Python has adopted with some glaring _practical_ omissions like list iteration ~{~}.)? The whole anything but nil is true to allow functions like digit-char-p to return a number instead of t is another practical design choice. Do you think there is anything elegant in modifying the readtable? I could go on and on. CL is a practical language that, apparently due to ESR's nirvana bullshit quote, people who haven't used it have a misconception about its design.

But back to the point, Scheme's design (ideology if you want) is to play to pick features that synergize as to allow discard others as they can be expressed with the previous features/concepts. You don't need iteration, as it is a special case of recursion. You need iterators, you have map, which is just a function the user can define, etc. And this is relevant to teaching computation as it allows the teacher to waste as little time teaching a language and allows him to focus on CONCEPTS. The amount of scheme knowledge needed to finish the SICP can be taught in 15 minutes (It doesn't use macros). All the difficulty lies in the concepts it deals with. Getting the language out of the way allows to cover a lot of ground, for example in the SICP one implements a Virtual Machines and a compilers targeting it.

Now if you want to argue that nowadays the student needs to learn how to pipe software together and has less need for concepts that is another thing altogether[2], but saying that Python is practical (as opposed to ideological) and Scheme's 'ideological' choices hampers the students learning is bullshit.

[0]: [https://bugs.python.org/issue24321#msg244357](https://bugs.python.org/issue24321#msg244357)

[1]: [https://twitter.com/whitequark/status/604088954816716800](https://twitter.com/whitequark/status/604088954816716800)

[2]: Of which I'd quote Dijkstra: "It is the university responsibility to give society not what it wants but what it needs."

<comment><USER5> > The only reason Python passes as a language with good design

..because ability to compromise _is_ a good design, in a sense.

I kinda agree about the scope though, but I don't think it's a big deal. Sometimes having a hierarchy is overrated, and two levels of names is good enough.

But you will find design mistakes in all languages. Every designer errs. Python doesn't actually have that much warts because the designer is quite conservative.

> Idk where to people get the idea that Common lisp is 'beatiful and elegant'

Maybe from the paper that introduced Lisp, of which CL is descendant? I am aware about CL's warts, but these are result of Lisp's success rather than its original design goals.

> Scheme's design (ideology if you want) is to play to pick features that > synergize as to allow discard others as they can be expressed with the > previous features/concepts

I understand. But the reason for that is that people consider it beautiful when you start from small subset of features. It doesn't however reduce the need to know the more practical concepts. Like in mathematics. The fact that we can build everything from set theory doesn't mean we don't need to know about integrals.

Some universities skip the basics (set theory) and teach only the practical concepts (integrals). Perfectly fine in my book.

> Now if you want to argue that nowadays the student needs to learn how to > pipe software together

I have said it on HN before, it depends on your goals. If you're teaching future programmers/computer scientists, sure, starting from Scheme or even Lambda calculus is better. Because you can assume people will do the real work in other languages. But if you teach a general non-programmer audience to program (like scientists), why not teach them just one language, which they can use in practice?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was actually enrolled in the first python version of this course. at that time it was taught by a google employee and not Brian Harvey (author of the OP, past professor of this course).

For me personally, the biggest benefit of python was the large amount of accessible resources online. There were multiple ways to learn something rather than banging my head against SICP.

Incidentally, writing a scheme interpreter was one of the last projects of the course.

\</comment><comment>----

EDIT:

More from the OP about this topic

[https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/61a.html](https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/61a.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> couple of quotes from the article:

It's SICP that I want to preserve, not Scheme.

For writing real-world code, what you want is aggressive optimization, and access to libraries for up-to-the-minute solutions to real-world problems.

and ofcourse, this mindset is _exactly_ right in the context of a course for teaching programming. as much as we might fantasize about it, computers are made of metal, not lambda calculus :)

<comment><USER9> I know more about Racket (that is very similar to Scheme). The compiler does a very aggressive optimizations and inlines many of the lambdas. You can write nice understandable code with lambdas, but under the hood many of them are removed and the actual running code is similar to the imperative version.

In Haskell there are a lot of abstractions, the compiler is also very aggressive, but I don't know the details.

Anyway, in the "Computer Language Benchmarks Game", most of the programs in Haskell and Racket are much faster (> 10x) than Python. [http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/compare.php?lang...](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/compare.php?lang=ghc&lang2=python3) [http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/compare.php?lang...](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/compare.php?lang=racket&lang2=python3)

(But I like the saying: There are lies, dammed lies, statistics and microbenchmarks.)

<comment><USER10> _" After all, facts are facts, and although we may quote one to another with a chuckle the words of the Wise Statesman, 'Lies--damned lies--and statistics,' still there are some easy figures the simplest must understand, and the astutest cannot wriggle out of."_ Leonard Henry Courtney, 1895

Also, those are "toy programs" not "microbenchmarks".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There appears to be a website [1] for the self-paced, Scheme version of the course referenced (61AS) although it doesn't appear to be run as a MOOC formally. There's also a well-organised site for the scheduled, Python version [2] .

[1]: [http://www.cs61as.org/](http://www.cs61as.org/)

[2]: [http://cs61a.org/](http://cs61a.org/)

<comment><USER12> I wish the lecture videos for 61AS were online, but sadly I can't find them. I think 61AS is done in Racket now, which would make it even more practical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Rossum, the inventor of Python, hates Lisp, but he was dragged kicking and > screaming to lambda

I'm not sure that's true, anyone have more details? Most people don't like the parens everywhere with lisp, but otherwise speak of it highly.

Edit: thanks for the links on lambda, read all of them. However, didn't see anything obvious written about lisp itself.

<comment><USER14> "Kicking and screaming", to be fair, is a bit of a literary exaggeration. But Rossum did not particularly _want_ to add functional features to the language and only did so at the behest of his users. Lambda as well as map/filter/reduce were "a significant, early chunk of contributed code", not something he intended the language to have from the outset[1]. More recently, he has been trying to deemphasize these features in favor of list comprehensions.

Moreover, Rossum is opposed to proper tail calls and even recursion in general[2]. He also doesn't like folds, and generally thinks you should just express that sort of logic as some sort of loop. (I forget exactly where I read that opinion, but it could easily have been [1].)

He's a staunchly imperative programmer, and the design of Python shows this off consistently except for an initial accident of first-class functions and closures (of a sort)—a design he likes because it enabled other, non- functional language features like new-style classes.

"Kicking and screaming" might have been an exaggeration, but it captures his overall attitude towards functional programming pretty well.

[1]: [http://python-history.blogspot.com/2009/04/origins-of- python...](http://python-history.blogspot.com/2009/04/origins-of-pythons- functional-features.html)

[2]: [http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2009/04/tail-recursion- elimi...](http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2009/04/tail-recursion- elimination.html)

<comment><USER15> I just can't understand anyone who is black and white. I like when I have both tools at my disposal: recursion and iteration.

<comment><USER16> when you have a project concerned with readability, adding new features is a huge community cost in the long run because it's one more thing you have to learn to deal with as you go across projects.

One of the wonderful things with python is that you can dig into the code of most python projects and not have to worry much about completely different idioms requiring a complete context switch to understand how they work.

He is not really being black and white, he is doing a service by preventing language bloat ala C++ as much as possible.

<comment><USER17> This is exactly what makes Python a bad language. Lack of expressive power results in an unnecessary complexity of the code. It's much easier to comprehend a short, compact code written in the familiar, domain-specific idioms rather than digging through convoluted pile of low-level leaky idioms like loops, list comprehensions, generators, classes, recursion and all that irrelevant crap.

<comment><USER18> Just wanted to add my voice: this matches exactly my perception. I used to really like Python, but I've come to the conclusion that there's a certain point in terms of the complexity of a Python program where everything just blows up and it's next to impossible to keep it from becoming a tangled mess. This point is reached incredibly soon, something like five classes with some inheritance, some interface/virtual/abstract class. Ugh. Now I avoid Python as much as possible, much preferring C++ or Java, which I think work incredibly better for larger programs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> At Oxford University in the UK, students are taught exclusively Haskell in their first year - a language designed by a committee of some of the worlds best computer scientists. An institution that teaches Python under the banner of computer science, certainly loses prestige in my opinion.

<comment><USER20> I don't know the Haskell ecosystem, but my guess is that Python will have many more libraries already developed for scientific tasks.

<comment><USER19> For computer science, I doubt it.

<comment><USER21> You can doubt as much as you want it's just a fact. But I'm not saying it's good either. As much as I like python as a scripting language I don't think that's it should be use as widely as it is now.

Concerning Haskel it still lacks some pragmatism to solve some pratical problems such as install and cabal hell.

<comment><USER19> There are countless parsing libraries, compilers and cutting edge research done in Haskell. My guess is that you are thinking of NumPy and similar wrappers over older C/Fortran code. A computer scientist would seek to design something better, perhaps by exploiting algebraic properties not considered by NumPy. Universities teaching Python is a relatively recent phenomenon, perhaps to appease industry.

EDIT: cabal came from industry and was based on ideas from the Java, Python, Ruby communities. The Nix packager better embodies the ideas of Haskell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What students cannot understand is that after passing the classic CS61A in Scheme, languages such as Python or Julia could be picked up in a few hours with occasional consulting of reference manual for particular details. Erlang in a couple of days.

Well, for Java (a dogmatic religion) one have to be thoroughly brainwashed, so there is CS61B for that.

</comment><comment><USER7> Here is a video playlist of the first

Here are video playlists of all the CS courses at berkeley

[http://webcast.berkeley.edu/series.html#c,d,Computer_Science](http://webcast.berkeley.edu/series.html#c,d,Computer_Science)

This is the most recent version of the CS61A course (Spring 2015)

2015 version:

[https://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=-XXv- cvA_iBM29DgZsG...](https://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=-XXv- cvA_iBM29DgZsGaQihJp8lLQn3J)

first python version available online (Fall 2012)

[https://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=EC87898FD0A141069E](https://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=EC87898FD0A141069E)

This is the last version of CS61 taught by Harvey (Fall 2010)

[https://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=EC6D76F0C99A731667](https://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=EC6D76F0C99A731667)

</comment><comment><USER23> It's interesting that the PG article is cited. I've always had mixed feelings about it.

On the one hand I agree that wanting to use Lisp for a startup is probably a good indicator of technical strength (yes I'm saying that people that pick Lisp as their first language are smarter than the average).

On the other hand startup financing is all about the hyper growth potential and it would seem to me that basing your technology stack on Lisp could be quite the hinderance. The job market is already tough and finding people with a deep understanding of Lisp to start working on an (assumed) nontrivial Codebase isn't easy.

I guess Clojure and "allowing" (or migrating to) Java could be an option? Then again some hypergrowth startups don't need many developers (WhatsApp)

<comment><USER24> When they were starting their company there was no Python/Ruby/PHP to choose over Lisp, and Java wasn't as mature. Lisp was actually quite the RAD choice at the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Can't believe you air heads are seriously comparing Scheme to Python. Scheme is a nightmare, it's only good for academics who have nothing better to do and the 1% of your projects where functional programming may actually be beneficial to what you're trying to do.

</comment><comment><USER26> As a developer, I tend to be now agnostic/indifferent towards programming languages. Essentially, you can use any programming language to do the job. The difference lies in developer's comfort zone and libraries. For example, I prefer C# over VB.Net for ASP.NET/MVC backend. However, for several practical in-house projects, I've found Excel+VBA far quicker over IIS/ASP.NET project. So, it all depends on the context, your audience and usability of the project. We should not let technologies drive our projects, but our business users and current trend patterns. For example, I'm seeing a lot of JavaScript frameworks being used to deliver responsive and device-independent web applications, such as SPA (Single Page Application). Granted, it takes a while to learn a language's API, but essentially all of them do similar things. The advantages lies not in them alone, but in the entire framework/suite that it comes with. We are living in times where knowing programming languages is not as important as knowing frameworks/libraries. There are heaps of them out there that require programmer to spend more time on writing integration code to "glue them" or configuring them. We no longer need to write the low-level mundane code, but focus on delivering high-quality, rich software applications.

<comment><USER17> > Essentially, you can use any programming language to do the job.

Of course you can code even in Brainfuck if you want. But the difference in time and quality would easily be in orders of magnitude.

> Granted, it takes a while to learn a language's API, but essentially all of > them do similar things.

Uhm, no, not nearly. Languages are far too different, and all of them are very specialised. There is no such thing as a general-purpose language.</comment></comment>


Truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2009/05/20/truth-the-whole-truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth/

<comment><USER2> Comment #20 is really worth reading. One of the best arguments against laissez-faire capitalism I have read.</comment>


The two faces of Airbnb - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/the-two-faces-of-airbnb-2015-10 <comment><USER5> > Here's what's wrong: an increasing amount of Airbnb's commercial activity in > cities like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles does not come from the > listings of "regular people" who are merely renting out a spare room.

This is my problem with AirBnB. I know investment firms buying as much property as they can to list on AirBnB. Every single rental I stayed in when traveling around Asia was done by 'power users' or real estate companies with scores of listing throughout the cities.

Unfortunately, that means in my experience the quality drops, no 'homey' feel, and it negatively impacts the locals.

AirBnB should implement the rule that you only get to list 1 rental. That would solve this problem, and allow them to stop lying to everyone about who is actually renting on their platform.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. Small sample size, but my wife used airbnb twice in london. First time was good (not great, but good). Second was _horrible_. (no curtain on windows directly facing office buildings, broken shower, no tv, 2 hangers for a 10 day booked stay, etc). Video evidence for everything, and multi-day delays in getting resolutions (everything documented via their platform). Requested a partial refund (no working shower for 4 days?) Response was a resounding _no_ , then threats from the person who was doing the renting that they would post negative reviews of my wife as a renter so no one would rent from us again. Guess what? The owner (and his girlfriend) had several airbnb properties they were renting out, growing a landlording business (without all the pesky regulation). (edit: there were multiple reviews stating how great it was - <USER2> was a veritable dump - which is partially ok, but broken shower, no tv, etc - when those are clearly listed amenities - is simply lying. Oh, and if you're going to rent out a room/place via airbnb, please remove moldy/stale food from your refrigerator first)

Contrasting that with a recent nashville visit via airbnb (I didn't book it, but stayed there) - the epitome of the "share my home" aspect that gets played up - notes around the house, everything fresh and tidy, etc).

Forcing just 1 would certainly get back to the roots. Or perhaps a sliding scale - fees go up as you want to list more rooms? The individuals wanting to rent out a spare room get the cheapest fees - the people trying to be the next hilton (sans service and regulation) pay correspondingly higher fees).

<comment><USER7> One question I haven't seen to be raised often is how the reviews are "regulated" by airbnb.

I rented an apartment in a metropolitan city via airbnb last year. Both the owner and the apartment got about ~15 excellent reviews. It turned out the owner was very indeed very nice and friendly, but the apartment was far from both the description and the reviews. Our friends living in the city was astound since the price we paid should get us a much better deal than that.

It made me wonder if 1) the reviews were "regulated" or "engineered" somehow, 2) due to the two-way review system, renters were reluctant to write a bad review since they were concerned they could get retaliated by the owners giving them bad reviews in response.

Edit: fix typos

<comment><USER8> _due to the two-way review system, renters were reluctant to write a bad review since they were concerned they could get retaliated by the owners giving them bad reviews in response_

This, I think, is important. Both the renter and the landlord have to write a review before both reviews appear on the website. And the review content of the other party is not known to you until you post your own. So, basically, we know when the renter is "problematic" \- has a lot of complaints, is constantly unhappy etc. We generally don't leave a review for such person. This is probably not the best approach from an ethical point of view, but yes - we do not want to know what this "problematic" guest may write about us.

<comment><USER9> So, if I don't write a review, the other party's review won't get posted either? This misuse can be prevented by implementing a deadline for submitting review and beyond that, whoever submitted theirs gets posted. So even if you forfeit your review, it still wont prevent the other party's bad review from getting posted

<comment><USER8> _So, if I don 't write a review, the other party's review won't get posted either?_

Yes, I'm quite sure that's how it works currently. There is a deadline, which is 14 days, and also you are notified when the other side posts a review. The message says something along the lines "X just posted a review, you need to post a review for both of your reviews to become public". And you also can't see what the other side wrote until you post yours.

There is also place for "private feedback" in the review, so of course it is possible to leave a good review, but send a bunch of complaints or suggestions that are only visible to the person you are reviewing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have stayed at 4 AirBnB properties over the past month or so. The first three were great. They were - almost literally bed and breakfasts, where I interacted with my hosts and they made me breakfast the next morning and were company in the evening.

Last week I stayed at one in NYC and it was honestly weird. The host wasn't there and just left the door unlocked and all the lights off - without saying as much in an AirBnB message. Some of the outlets did not have outlet covers, leaving wiring exposed etc...

Anyway, it's been clear for a very long time that the thing that you find from a hotel is completely lacking with AirBnB: Consistency.

On the flip side, should people be looking at AirBnB as a direct replacement for hotels? Obviously that is the operating thesis, but I think a better way to consider AirBnB is as a _marketplace for Bed and Breakfast accommodations._ All of the problems that are brought up go away if you think of it in that context.

<comment><USER11> Sounds like much of the problem would go away with better labeling and categorization. Some people want the get-to-know-your-host experience, some people want the impersonal experience, and some people might want either one depending on the nature of the trip. The problem arises when you expect one and get the other.

<comment><USER12> I guess I don't understand why people looking for an impersonal experience don't just book a hotel - or even a motel. At least then you are guaranteed certain things such as working showers and toilets.

<comment><USER13> Some people are cheap, and use airbnb just as a way to spend less money.

Prime example: my girlfriend. We can both easily afford a normal hotel room, especially when traveling together. But in an expensive city, spending $80/night on an airbnb instead of $200/night on a proper hotel, is to her an irresistible savings. We've had bad experiences, and we've had fights about this. There may also be cultural differences. I have a high salary, no debts, and lots of savings, and there are some things which I think are absolutely worth paying for (like a hotel room), and she just doesn't want me to.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, I understand. I suppose to old adage holds true then: you get what you pay for. The cost savings from booking an AirBnB over a hotel is increased risk that you may have a shitty experience with no recourse. Whereas with a hotel, the experience is a lot more consistent (since hotels are regulated), and if you _do_ have a shitty experience, you have official channels through which you can get compensated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't understand why they are allowed to look the other way when "professionals" are breaking local laws. Youtube can't allow copyrighted movies on their site. Megaupload was shut down. Below is a real customer service response to reporting a professional in our building.

thanks for reaching out about this, I do apologize for the delay in my teams reply and for contacting us regarding your concerns with the listings you've identified. Airbnb is an online platform and does not own, operate, manage or control accommodations, nor do we verify private contract terms or arbitrate complaints from third parties. We do, however, require hosts to represent that they have all rights to list their accommodations. To that end, we are committed to notifying hosts about complaints such as yours, provided we (i) receive a formal written letter (scanned electronically as an image or .pdf) addressed to the user that (ii) details your specific allegation, and (iii) fully identifies the Airbnb user to whom you believe it applies (please include links). Although we will not verify, evaluate or arbitrate the terms you identify, we will provide a complete copy of your complaint to the host and we will ask them whether they wish to remove their listing(s). Again, thank you for contacting us about this. Best,

<comment><USER15> Well, quite simply, YouTube are (and Megaupload was) serving the infringing content, making them a contributory party. If we started holding building managers responsible for the lawbreaking of their residents, that would at least set some cats among the pigeons I guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> People love _using_ Airbnb, but don't want an Airbnb rental next to their home. The negative externalities remind me of cars: super useful for me, super annoying to you.

<comment><USER17> Which bodes well for Airbnb, since the modern business environment is pretty much based on socializing negative externalities while providing value to direct customers. Besides cars, there's also oil, coal, mining, plastics, advertising, agriculture, water rights, and housing development.

<comment><USER18> This. I don't know why I get so many blank stares when I explain that a great deal of the technocratic New Economy is about reassignment of risk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> IMHO all the regulation to be done against multi-property landlords should be created at the state-level, I mean, decoupled from any Airbnb-like infrastructure ("don't shoot the messenger!").

That is, the state has ultimately all the information regarding real-estate ownership. Creating laws that tax adequately the companies/individuals that own more than 1 property should be easy, and irrespective to how/if they monetize them.

Doing a regulation against AirBNB is ultimately going to hurt the real regular people that is being helped by this "sharing-economy", such as the ones that just rent their unique property (either because they have an extra bedroom or because their job required them to move to a different city where they bought their house, and therefore use their AirBNB income to pay the rent of a different apartment).

<comment><USER20> They're not shooting the messenger.

Proposition F >Limits short-term rentals of a unit to 75 days per year, regardless of whether rental is hosted or unhosted. >Requires proof that the unit's owner authorizes using the unit as a short-term rental. >Requires short-term hosts to submit quarterly reports on the number of days they live in the unit and the number of days the unit is rented >Mandates that the city post notice on buildings with a unit approved for short-term rentals and notify by mail owners, neighbors of the unit and interested neighborhood organizations. Source: Ballot Simplification Committee

AirBnB created a market in an area where existing laws didn't apply. This is part of legislation catching up.

<comment><USER19> There you go, 75 days a year? That affects small-owners in the same way as multi-owners.

<comment><USER21> Except that if it's truly about renting out something you already own (and likely attached to your house) then it still makes it possible.

However, what it massively disincentivizes is buying property solely to use it for hosting on Air BnB (and thus preventing others from buying or renting the property for residential use).

<comment><USER19> Yes it disincentivizes that but it also penalizes people that need to rent their place to pay rent in a different place to where they bought the house originally (there are many reasons to not sell your house in this scenario).

<comment><USER21> Given the market, they could either rent that place to a full-time tenant or sell it – the odds are strongly against them being underwater, given the market. Given the stated aims of increasing the supply of residential rentals/property ownership, I don't think this case is counter to the aim of the proposition.

<comment><USER19> People generally think that landlords prefer renting via AirBNB instead of full-time renting because it provides more income. This is just one side of it. There are more advantages:

\- When the property is not rented, you can use it for yourself (imagine if you want to go back home from time to time to see your parents, then you block some spot in the calendar).

\- The property is not rented 100% of the time so then it deteriorates more slowly. Less maintenance costs.

\- There are less chances to get tenants that don't pay and still stay in the property.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The housing shortage in SF is a citywide problem that goes far beyond airbnb. Removing airbnb listings would barely make a dent in the extreme housing problem that we have in San Francisco.

The few times I've used airbnb they were always much better than comparatively priced hotels in the area.

<comment><USER23> AirBnB was just walking by the scene, looking unsavoury enough to make for a sufficently satisfying lynching.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This article captured exactly how I feel. Airbnb has become it's own worst enemy by getting greedy and not proactively removing bad actors who make them money. And I really hope SF passes prop F to force their hand.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra Article's author seems to defend problems rather than acknowledge their solutions.

"it comes from professional landlords who are removing badly needed housing from the local market and making it available exclusively for tourists"

Since when in modern society should commercial entities care about what is "badly needed" instead of where profit lies? Since when it's not only politicans need to pretend to care about "regular people", but commercial property owners?

"That's true of regular hotels as well, but usually they exist in areas that have been zoned for such activity"

This seems to be the root of problem. Zoning is a socialist measure. It will create all kinds of shortages.

The whole article reads to me like this:

We've implemented this zoning measure that we knew would cause problems. And by golly it did! Now we're trying to blame these problems on all kinds of commercial entities. Make them fix things for us that we knew would arise. And we also want more regulations to fix problems caused by having regulations in the first place.

<comment><USER25> You seem purposely to miss some of the points of Steven Hill's very even- handed analysis which is that some AirBnB operators are turning residential zones into commercial hotel zones by having multiple listings and this causes conflicts for 1) residents who find commercial activity in and around their homes , 2) municipalities deprived of tax revenue, 3) guests who find themselves in units that do no have adequate safety protections let alone commercial insurance.

This is especially problematic given that in LA, SF, and NYC AirBnB makes a large fraction (~44%) of its revenue from commercial operators with multiple listings. That is, in these markets nearly half of AirBnB "hosts" are entrepreneurs who are flouting municipal law and obligations for their personal gain and to others' detriments.

Hill offers a few common sense (and in my opinion equitable) actions AirBnB might take to make amends. In a passage worth quoting in context, Hill writes

> Perhaps the biggest tragedy in all this is that at the core of Airbnb is a > really good idea. It has cleverly used Web- and app-based technology to bust > open a global market that connects tourists with financially strapped > homeowners. After interviewing some of Airbnb's "regular-people" hosts, I'm > convinced that this service legitimately does help them make ends meet.

> But by taking such a hands-off, laissez-faire attitude toward the > professionalization of hosting by greedy commercial landlords and > multiproperty agents, Airbnb has become its own worst enemy. As the number > of victims piles up, it undermines its own "sharing and trust" ethos because > Airbnb could easily meet cities halfway:

> • With one stroke of the computer mouse, Airbnb could "evict the evictors" — > de-list from its website any professional landlords or property managers > operating multiple properties as tourist hotels. It has the data and knows > who they are.

> • Cooperate with cities like San Francisco, Santa Monica, and Portland, > which require hosts to register with local agencies, by de-listing any > unregistered hosts.

> • Pay the same hotel occupancy taxes that hotels pay in all 34,000 cities in > which Airbnb operates, or collect them from the hosts and turn them over to > the cities.

> • Stop refusing to supply the data that cities need to enforce regulations > and taxation, including the number of rental nights and rates charged by > each host.

EDIT: Remove markup. Readability. Grammar.

<comment> guard-of-terra I think that zones are the problem. There should not be residential zones. There should not be commercial zones. There should just be the city.

Or else you should be ready for consequences: shortages of one thing after another, people turning sour, inadequate pricing.

1) I don't see why one would at the same time expect to live in a heart of dynamic, rich and important city and be shielded from reality. Yes, if you live in a shared building you may find a brothel, drug pusher store, or AirBNB rental next door. Call the police if they behave. Cope otherwise, or move to suburbs.

This may sound unfair if you expect otherwise, but those expectations are unrealistic.

2) But they don't talk about tax, they talk about banning. Taxing is a thing they can do. Just write a law clear enough that it would explicitly cover AirBNB, with clear understanding how this tax should work. Then force it out of AirBNB, suing if needed. Of course, some of individual lenders will go grey (for example, exchanging money outside of AirBNB's sight), but so can do hotels.

3) I don't see why short term rented flat would need more safety protections than regular flat.

Pass adequate laws. Don't ever start talking about banning something. That is what you should do.

<comment><USER26> Zoning regulations deal with a classic "tragedy of the commons" problem. Nobody wants to live next to transients, but each person individually benefits from renting their property to them while they're away on business or vacation. If everyone agrees not to do this, and the rule is enforced, they are all better off.

If you believe this is just a "socialist" thing, what about commercial contract agreements between property owners in a co-op? Should they be allowed to all agree to not engage in short-term rentals? Many condo and co-op board contracts have provisions for this, not enforced by some maladaptive government, but by negotiations between equals. It's a common desire and short-term renters aren't a protected class.

<comment><USER27> > Nobody wants to live next to transients, but each person individually > benefits from renting their property to them while they're away on business > or vacation.

I've lived in actual full-time hotels in Asia for months at a time and never encountered any of these "transient" problems people keep whining about. Maybe once a month there was some noise at night. And these weren't high-end hotels either.

<comment><USER28> Fine, you don't want neighbors. This is probably true of many people who choose to live in "full-time hotels in Asia."

Many people move to residential zones because they _are_ interested in having neighbors, and they are understandably perturbed when an entity encourages law-breaking behavior that destroys their neighborhood.

<comment><USER27> The article is about SF and NYC. People live for years in residential neighborhoods in SF and NYC without befriending their neighbors.

Anyways, having transients for neighbors actually reduces your risk (variance) with respect to your neighbors. Any given day you're likely to have a normal respectful neighbor. If they're not, they'll soon be gone. Whereas with permanent neighbors you're stuck with them for a long time if they're inconsiderate assholes.

<comment><USER28> So your opinion is that people who want neighbors should consider seeing random strangers next door an improvement over people with whom they can develop long-term relationships?

> People live for years in residential neighborhoods in SF and NYC without > befriending their neighbors.

The data doesn't back this up. In fact, NYC and SF are two of the best places to befriend neighbors based on the shared walkable living areas that are rare in most US cities. Here's a recent article on the phenomenon:

\- [http://www.vox.com/2015/10/28/9622920/housing-adult- friendsh...](http://www.vox.com/2015/10/28/9622920/housing-adult-friendship)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This just reminds me of Uber - same clash of ideologies between those whon see empowerment of people through new technology and those who see unfair advantage through breaking the law. The problem is that both sides are right. Both Uber and AirBnB provide better/new service through new technology where the incumbents usually didn't bother to inovate and banning them would be backwards. But both also profit from not being subjected to the same regulations - and this is what we should be discussing. While some regulations add value - fire safety standards etc - other are just disguised taxes - <USER3> should taxi licences be auctioned for the price of a family house?

</comment><comment><USER30> Housing in New York City and San Francisco is a problem - MASSIVE. Airbnb has helped many people in those cities find places to stay, make extra income, etc. I'm certain, because of the reasons the problem exists in the first place, that people have and will continue to find ways to use it in ways that are harmful to vulnerable populations.

But if you focus really with any energy on Airbnb as a part of the problem rather than some of the applications of Airbnb as EVIDENCE of the problem, boy howdy are you missing the point. I fear that is what will happen - <USER4> wants a scape goat, tech is an easy one.

<comment><USER31> I'm a little late to this thread, but I think short term rentals could be a bigger core problem than you've recognized. This is all hard to determine without data, and some of what I am worried about is a risk rather than a current reality, though it appears to be growing.

Here's where I'm coming from - in my lifetime, the percentage of SF residents under the age of 18 has dropped from about 22% to below 14%. Much of this happened without airbnb or short term rentals, so obviously they can't be the core cause. However, it could exacerbate it.

Airbnb makes it far easier to rent out a "spare" bedroom - in doing so, they vastly increase the value of having a "spare" bedroom that you don't use. So if you are a family with just one kid, three bedroom houses suddenly become much more attractive than two bedroom houses, because what used to be an occasional guest room is now an income generator. What happens when a family with two kids goes up against them in a bidding war? One family can factor in the extra income, the other factors in no extra income and the additional expenses of an additional kid.

airBnB(noKids, hasKids) { unless(noKids.income(isWayHigherThan(hasKids.income)) { numKidsSF--; } }

At least in that scenario someone is still going to be "from" SF (when this is no longer the case, SF will be nothing more than a disneyland for young people and empty nesters).

It can get worse - what happens if investors now realize that they can just buy the whole 3br house and treat it as a hotel?

I could see airbnb being a factor in driving the already collapsing percentage of SF residents who are children to even lower lows.

By the way, in all of this, I see a good place for airbnb. If a San Francisco family wants to leave for a vacation in Paris, and they can rent out their place for a couple of weeks, and vice-versa, this seems like _a good thing_. But if converting a "spare" bedroom means that what were formerly kid's bedrooms are too profitable as tourist rentals to be wasted on children, then no, this would be extremely destructive to SF.

We need to regulate this, and airbnb needs to be a good citizen and cooperate. The suggestions in this business insider are good ones.

<comment><USER32> > "We need to regulate this, ..."

Do you know that adage that goes: "... then they say, I know, I'll use a regexp. And then they have two problems."

It's regulation that got SF into this problem.

<comment><USER31> "It's regulation that got SF into this problem."

Unfortunately, you don't give me much to go off here. I consider myself somewhat moderate where it comes to regulation, though that's probably because, as a programmer who hangs out on HN, I interact with a very tech-ish libertarian crowd. In short, I do see an important role for regulation of industry, housing, and so forth. I also do tend to agree that a lot of regulations are onerous and harmful, but I don't nod in agreement when someone simply says "government" or "regulation", as if the problem has now been adequately identified and analyzed. I do prefer that people actually explain what regulations caused this problem and how, and consider what problems might exist in the absence of regulation.

So… if you are pointing out that SF has caused a problem with anti-grown measures, I'd generally agree. If you are pointing out that that peninsula towns have contributed to this problem, I'd overwhelming agree, the behavior from places like Mountain View has been pretty shocking.

On the other hand, if you are telling me that zoning is obsolete and that the concept of residential neighborhoods in urban areas, where residents of _some_ neighborhoods trade their right to run a hotel out of their house in exchange for for a legally enforced expectation that they won't have to live next to a house suddenly converted into a hotel - if you're telling me _that_ regulation is the problem, then it's unlikely I'd agree with you, though I am all ears.

<comment><USER32> Obviously short-term rentals serve a need many have or AirBnB wouldn't have such uptake.

Adding regulation to fix that issue without changing regulation to increase supply, etc. seems like it misses the point.

People are already ignoring the regulations - how are more going to solve that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The interesting thing about AirBnB is by going down the unregulated hotel route is it opens up an opportunity for competitors to come in offering a real home sharing experience.

</comment><comment><USER34> > Unfortunately, that means in my experience the quality drops, no 'homey' > feel, and it negatively impacts the locals.

Isn't this the fundamental goal of reviews; get a real opinion from the users on wether this is a good or bad thing?

</comment><comment><USER35> I stayed in an AirBnb property and I had good experience. But when you realize the place you stayed wasn't really surveyed for security, it's scary.

</comment><comment> floodyberry- How does Airbnb have two faces? Their entire company is just an app that offloads all of the regulations, upkeep, and safety of running a Hotel on to the users, and charges them for the "privilege". The only face there is a greedy leech taking advantage of "not illegal yet" loopholes.

<comment><USER36> that describes Uber pretty well too

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> How is Airbnb responsible for rent control evictions? Landlords would get rid of these tenants at any opportunity regardless of whether Airbnb ever existed.

<comment><USER38> Not sure if I'm missing something about your question, because this seems obvious. It's increasing the demand (by allocating a whole new population of short-term tenants to the market, who would otherwise either not visit or would stay in hotels and hostels) and constricting the supply (by incentivizing landlords to take entire properties off the rental market to service those tenants).

<comment><USER39> If you're counting "short term tenants" in the demand, it seems really dishonest not to count the properties that serve them in the supply.

If we're talking about the supply and demand of all housing, supply has not changed because because using properties to service short-term tenants is still keeping it in the supply, and demand has not changed because you're conflating demand with transaction quantity.

In other words, when Airbnb allows the supply of short-term rental properties to increase, this decreases equilibrium price and increases transaction quantity of short-term rentals, but demand itself isn't affected. The number of people who _want_ to visit San Francisco at any given price point hasn't changed, it's just the number of people _able_ to visit that's changed.

Really, all that's going on here is that Airbnb has lowered the barrier of entry to short-term rentals, allowing landlords to more easily address market inefficiencies created by rent control.

Not that rent control is wrong, but it does work against market forces, and markets tend to route around regulations that work against market forces, in the form of black markets, or scalpers, or whatever. Your enemy really isn't individuals or companies so much as market forces themselves, and while sometimes it's necessary to fight them, honestly, it'd be easier just to legalize building denser housing. Unlike Airbnb, that's what's _really_ restricting the supply.

<comment><USER40> "and demand has not changed because you're conflating demand with transaction quantity"

What? Of course it increases demand in the market that is traditionally served by houses in residential neighborhoods. 'Real estate' is not one market, there are several, divided by zoning regulations. When the people that used to stay in hotels now are looking to occupy places in houses where they didn't used to be able to stay, the demand for stays in those places has gone up.

Furthermore, demand is _also_ increased (demand for the amount of nights) because visitors can stay cheaper (per night) so some stay longer. I.e. more demand.

<comment><USER39> I think you're still conflating demand with transaction volume. Let me put it this way:

> Furthermore, demand is also increased (demand for the amount of nights) > because visitors can stay cheaper (per night) so some stay longer. I.e. more > demand.

Demand is a curve. Visitors saying longer because they can stay cheaper just changes what part of the curve you're on, it doesn't change the curve itself.

In other words: the demand was always there, that visitor would always have stayed longer if they could stay cheaper. The only difference is whether or not they have that option, which is a difference in supply, not demand.

<comment><USER40> Demand _does_ go up, because people who earlier couldn't compete for the good we're talking about now can. There are x locations each night to sleep that are zoned for residential purposes, some more attractive than others. This is the supply. There are y people competing for those; y is roughly equal to the amount of people who have their primary residence there. Now y' people who are not primary residents start to compete for those places. Result: demand is y + y'. X remains constant (in the short term). Result: P goes up.

The 'cheaper' meant _compared to the prices of another market_ , i.e. the hotel market. This is a cumulative effect, on top of the first-order effect of those consumers being let into the market in the first place.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A detailed look at Vancouver's startup scene - <AUTHOR> http://montrealtechwatch.com/2007/08/07/vancouver-canadas-greatest-start-up-city/

<comment><USER2> One YC funded startup is based there, Snipshot.

<comment><USER3> Just curious, did they need H1B visa (or other paperworks) for the first few months in the states?

<comment><USER2> I don't think so. I think you can come for a short time to the US with no problem. It's staying for years that's hard.

<comment><USER4> We love YC here in Canada.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And hey, starting up in Vancity now may leave you with JUST enough time to exit in order to afford the hockey tickets for the 2010 Winter Olympics ;)...

<comment><USER4> Crosby is gonna be at his peak at that time, barring any significant injury. Gretzky be damned.</comment></comment>


Did VW #playtheroad shamelessly rip off music tech startup RjDj? - <AUTHOR>

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWCtMKGia6M vs. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mss2tv8PYBw <comment> josh-wrale Definitely appears as such. Both are cool. I like the original music better, I think.</comment>