Why Haven't Voters Been Buying the Case for Increasing Housing Supply? - <AUTHOR> https://shelterforce.org/2019/02/19/why-voters-havent-been-buying-the-case-for-building/ <comment><USER3> One reason this is less of a problem in Texas is the high property tax rates (about 3% per year vs. 1% here in California). Combine that with no prop 13 and you have homeowners with mixed incentives — yes, equity appreciation is nice, but ouch the tax bill! Thus you have a lot of home owners who support keeping costs down via supply growth.

In Texas, taxes are heavily leavied against _wealth_ and _lifestyle_: high property tax, high sales tax (but none on staple goods and tax holidays for back to school etc.), and no income tax.

Conversely in CA, the tax structure makes it easy to shelter wealth (low property taxes AND they never increase), with moderate sales tax and high, almost flat income taxes (the brackets ramp quickly to 9.5% at $45k then are flat to $1m/yr).

Not surprising so many people are moving to Texas in search of an easier ladder to climb.

Having made the opposite move for a big tech job, the headwinds here against upward mobility are really striking.

<comment><USER4> Texas is in some ways the egalitarian sort of place California pretends to be. I was talking to a cab driver in Austin who had immigrated from Morocco. He and his friends bought houses in the suburbs with pools in good school districts, which they were able to pay off in 15 years with a cab drivers' salary. What really strikes me visiting there compared to the coastal cities is relative prosperity among ordinary people, especially the kind of people (immigrants, etc.) that people in the coastal cities like to talk a lot about. Texas also does a better job educating students from disadvantaged groups than California, despite spending less money on education: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2015/06/30/which- of...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2015/06/30/which-of-the-five- most-populous-states-do-best-in-k-12-education/#44a5a4dd2021). For math and science, Texas has some of the highest NAEP scores in the country for black and Hispanic students, while California has some of the worst.

<comment><USER5> The Texas Public Policy Foundation is one of the worst organizations you could cite. They're infamous for being just a front for Rick Perry's ambitions and as such are one of the groups directly responsible for the decreasing quality of Texas's _higher_ education system. (Higher education in Texas is much worse than that of California.)

There's no denying that California has a problem with K-12 education due to Prop 13. But I grew up and was educated in Texas, and I can say the government of Texas has always been significantly more dysfunctional than the government of California. The "Texas Miracle" thing during GWB's campaign was obviously an attempt to take credit for the fact that the oil industry attracted the kind of people who care about education, not because of anything related to the government. In fact, attempting to recreate the "Texas Miracle" nationwide led to the disastrous No Child Left Behind law.

I more-likely-than-not won't end up having kids, but if I did, I would want them educated here, not in Texas. The government of Texas plays games with education to score political points in a way that the government of California does not. Besides, I question how sustainable Texas education is going to be without an income tax, and income tax is the third rail of Texas politics.

<comment><USER4> The data underlying the article is NAEP scores, which are widely respected as an objective measure of student performance. And California does awful on NAEP, and has for a long time.

As to where I'd want my kids educated—I'm thinking from the perspective of having come to this country as an immigrant. We were solidly middle class and moved to a pretty nice neighborhood in Virginia with decent schools, but there is no way we could have afforded it today. If I were in my dad's position, I'd definitely head to Houston or Dallas rather than San Francisco or LA. Heck, when I bought my house in the DC area, I was apalled at the school situation. I didn't want my kids to grow up in a place where a million dollar house is the buy-in for a going to a good school district. We ended up moving to a different city and just putting up with a long commute.

<comment><USER6> My dad lives in the Highland Park area of Dallas. He says people move there and pay their 20 or 30k a year in property taxes to go to a great school district as it's cheaper than a private school tuition. It sounds like the same thing. Of course that's just one example.

<comment><USER7> How much are the houses to pay $30K-$40K in property taxes? The wealthiest city in GA is Johns Creek with top rated schools and just looking at Zillow, a home valued at $460K has property taxes around $5000.

<comment><USER6> Seem to be a couple million and up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Oh they get it, they're just looking out for themselves. Property owners account for 72% of the voting block and have strong roots in the community where renters tend to be more transient [1]. In America, as a property owner, your home is probably your largest investment. The perception here for better or worse is that more housing means less demand for yours, so you lose money.

It's like wondering why the foxes don't vote for razor wire around the chicken coops. Not in a malicious way, it's just not in their interests.

For what it's worth I own, and am fine with new development because I think it's not nearly as detrimental as it's made out to be. I think the community benefits both directly with diversity of people and indirectly as it supports more jobs but I feel very much in the minority.

tl:dr; it's because renters don't vote and voters don't rent.

[1] [https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/renters-and- voting...](https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/renters-and-voting/)

<comment><USER9> Hmmm...while there is definitely a difference between owners and renters, the article is talking in large part about the attitudes of renters: "But, among renters, attitudes toward affordable housing were quite different. While renters were less likely to support market-rate housing the closer it was located to their house, for affordable housing the result was reversed."

The question is why renters did not support more upscale housing being built, and rejected the argument that any increase in housing would ultimately result in an increase in housing supply and thus (theoretically) a reduction in rent. The answer is, they don't believe that's the way it really happens, and they're correct not to believe it.

<comment><USER8> Luxury housing by mine is going to raise the value of mine and hence rents no? Sounds like what landlords would want.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great article that adds a lot to a nuanced and controversial topic.

I'm surprised they don't consider time as a dimension of market segmentation, i.e. what is "luxury" today might become "standard" or even "basic" as time progresses. Even things that you'd think would stay static over time don't -- houses are larger today than they used to be, and I could very much imagine people standing around 100 years ago talking about only "the rich with their luxury running water" can afford to live in a certain area.

I think long-term the solution really is just to build, and build, and build. Over time, if builders consistently add supply to the top of the market, it will gradually slide downmarket as it ages and its amenities become more standard. I think the biggest problem is that in California, the normal process of adding luxury units has been paused for 20 years due to anti- developer sentiment, and they're trying to make up for it now, at all once.

I'm reminded of a saying: the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, but the second-best time is today.

Another thing, and I wasn't even going to mention it, but any Bay Area real estate developer will tell you [0], it's very difficult adding supply to the middle of the market here because things are just so damn expensive. Affordability is not and never was the priority. It's 500K to build a middle- market affordable unit before the developer makes a cent of profit. For that, thank buy-local regulations, environmental legislation like CEQA, organized labor, huge "developer impact fees", extremely long wait times (years) for permits to get approval, and now "inclusionary housing" requirements that force developers to cross-subsidize below-market rate housing by jacking up the prices of the market-rate units. It's madness.

[0] I'm married to an architect working in the Bay Area.

</comment><comment><USER11> What is the incentive for a voter who currently owns a home in an expensive market to be in favor of more housing?

<comment><USER12> Do voters never think about their own family members or their own kids one day growing up and living next to them?

This is a problem when society is becoming less communal and more nimby like.

<comment><USER4> No—see, eg, all baby boomer policies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Because the US doesn't have a housing shortage nationally. The vacant houses and the jobs are in different places. If you want a cheap foreclosed house in San Bernardino, CA, here's a list.[1] That's in Southern California, not too far from LA. It's not Cleveland or Detroit. Developers overbuilt in the last boom.

[1] [https://www.zillow.com/san-bernardino- ca/foreclosures/](https://www.zillow.com/san-bernardino-ca/foreclosures/)

<comment><USER5> There's a reason why those houses are cheap. Commuting from the Inland Empire to Los Angeles is _miserable_. It's an hour if there's no traffic, which of course is never the case in Southern California.

<comment><USER14> We need some way to incentivize companies to spread out more instead of overstuffing these same places more and more.

<comment><USER15> No cities are far more efficient (engery, economically, culturally...). Suburbs are massively subsized miserable alienation farms that only appear cheaper.

<comment><USER14> There are more cities out there than what you find around SV, and there are middle grounds between super-dense and rural.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think supply + demand oversimplifies one major issue.

Wages are extremely inflated in certain hotkey areas with housing issues. There was a story somebody shared a couple of months back on here about somebody in the Bay Area working at a cafe unable to find affordable housing on the $75k he was taking home. The point of the article was supposed to be pointing out that even such high wages don't solve the problem, but I think the more salient point is that high wages _cause_ the problem.

Cafe work is relatively low skill. When you can take home 250% the median personal income for low skill work, you're never going to find affordable housing. Such high wages are _already_ driving seemingly endless economic migration with unaffordable housing. Add in reasonably affordable housing and you just exponentially increase the demand.

The point of this is that I think it's questionable about whether or not you can build your way out of this. There are two examples we can look at for lessons: Hong Kong and Tokyo. The current situation is that both are extremely densely populated areas. Hong Kong has 17,552 people per square mile, Tokyo's at 16,121. Hong Kong is _extremely_ expensive whereas Tokyo has become a somewhat reasonably affordable place to live. Many people have tried to attribute this to various programs the Japanese government has carried out.

In reality, one factor plays a dominant role. In the 90s many expected Japan to become the world's leading economy. They were actually far ahead of the US in terms of GDP/capita. Since then they've gone through decades of something between recession and stagnation. Their GDP was higher in 1995 than it is today. Hong Kong, by contrast, is much more like all the other areas facing housing pricing issues. Their GDP continues to exponentially accelerate - <USER2> more than doubling since 1995 with a continuing exponential growth. Japan, in general, became affordable because it became economically less desirable. And ultimately I think that is the only solution - but it's one few would ever lobby for!

On the other hand if your goal is not to actually create affordable housing, but instead to simply maximize your GDP then things become much more interesting - but that's an entirely different topic.

</comment><comment><USER17> Might not significant improvements in mass transit might help this problem quite a bit as well? If a commute from 20-30 miles away was trivial, more people on the lower end of the economic scale could live further from urban centers where housing prices are at their peak.

<comment><USER18> But in California, major transit extensions take a decade or more to complete and cost tens of billions of dollars. It would be hard to build enough housing to make a serious effect on prices: it's probably five times harder to build enough transit to have a serious effect on prices.

<comment><USER19> > in California, major transit extensions take a decade or more to complete > and cost tens of billions of dollars

Recent data from LA Metro:

* In 2012, Expo Line phase one (Downtown to Culver City) opened, six years after construction broke.

* In 2016, Expo Line phase two (Culver City to Santa Monica) opened five years after construction broke.

* In total, the 15.1 mile Expo Line cost $2.5 billion.

* Also in 2016, the Gold Line Foothill Extension, Phase 2A (Pasadena to Azusa) opened after five years of construction at a cost of $735 million.

* Gold Line Foothill Extension, Phase 2B (Azusa to Montclair) is expected to cost ~$1.5 billion, involves some major additional work (relocating existing commuter rail and freight rail tracks), and is expected to open in 2028, about nine years after it broke ground.

<comment><USER18> Fair enough, maybe I should've said "Bay Area" instead of California.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A couple of observations:

1) In the segmented model, the cross-segment elasticity limits the impact of high-end supply on lower-segment prices, but that applies just as much to the impact of _high-end demand_. Yet the same people who reject high-end supply as a solution are much more likely to believe in high-end demand as a cause (those damn techies pushing housing prices up!).

2) There is a significant number of singles with high-paying jobs in San Francisco who are living with roommates, in tiny studios, etc. These people who would live in much larger and better housing in any other city. Thus there is a good reason to believe that the cross-segment elasticity in San Francisco is actually quite high.

3) In general, nobody believes in Economics 101 when it comes to policy, unless it aligns with their other preferences.

</comment><comment><USER21> Because for the government to have an effect on the housing supply, they need to find a way to lower the price. At best homeowners risk losing their equity, at worse they become upside down and are subidizing the new construction with their own martgage losses.

</comment><comment><USER22> Chinese investment buyers can't be helping the situation. [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/08/chinese-middle-class- buying-...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/08/chinese-middle-class-buying-up- american-residential-real-estate.html)

Vancouver B.C. had it so bad that they had to tax foreign investment purchasing. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_28_(British_Columbia)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_28_\(British_Columbia\))

</comment><comment><USER17> Author says that increased luxury housing will trickle down to lower level housing. I'm not so sure. I wish I could find it, and maybe it's a bit anecdotal, but I came across something recently that said decent sized chunks of luxury housing in NYC is basically bought and left vacant by people using it essentially as an investment vehicle. If this is the case, additional high end housing will not trickle down to the same net effect on supply & demand as additional low-end/affordable housing.

<comment><USER23> This is obvious to anyone who lives in the real world.

Add 10k $1MM apartments to San Francisco and it won't do anything appreciable for people making $55,000/yr. it will just attract more millionaires and investors.

Trickle down anything is paper theory for your intro micro course. By the time you learn about externalities and non-linear equations you quickly realize it doesn't play out in reality the way you want it to.

Maybe the term isn't really that misleading though. The concept of trickle down is kind of like a clogged rain gutter. Sure, a few drops trickle down, but most of the water just piles up.

<comment><USER24> I think the solution is the heresy that the central bank should put strings on the money they lend out. So the central bank has to apportion a certain amount of funds for high density housing in particular geographic areas. Directly loan money to states to build mass transit.

And specifically not to purchase paper, stocks, bonds, etc. All that stuff should be hard money loans.

<comment><USER25> Why involve the central bank for those loans? I think the federal budget could handle it well enough and there is even some justification for it being a loan as a slight anti-graft measure to give encouragement to make it something productive instead of squandering it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Here's just a sampling of the rhetoric I see on Nextdoor in Silicon Valley:

> See where the Wheels and Deals is going to be torn down and have another > living complex built there? And the old nursery, a pre-school as well! It's > never going to end until all of El Camino is a mess of roaming cars and > people. Our whole area is going to be turned into an over populated dump.

And in case you weren't clear on who's doing the over population, the poster later makes clear their opinion on the subject:

> These living places aren't being built at the alarming rate they are because > there's a line of people waiting. NO sir.....there being built to ATTRACT > them here. WHY.. would we want that? Politicians can shove all their forced > urban developments. They're not living in them.

> And for the record, the state of California and it's past buffoon elected > officials are the ones to blame. If they weren't so busy preaching sanctuary > state they would have come up a population control plan. That's whats > needed. Not trashing cities with every element that has little to offer.

</comment><comment><USER27> Rents are super high in New York and Hong Kong and they are high density.

<comment><USER28> That's an interesting point. For example, whenever people talk about increasing road building to alleviate traffic these days on places like Reddit, they are immediately lectured to about how more roads just cause induced demand and they don't actually cause traffic to go down.

For highly desirable cities I have to wonder if the same thing is true for housing. I mean, it feels like even if you doubled the amount of housing in SF that you would just cause more people to want to congregate in SF while 3rd tier cities and rural areas would empty out even faster.

<comment><USER29> > For example, whenever people talk about increasing road building to > alleviate traffic these days on places like Reddit, they are immediately > lectured to about how more roads just cause induced demand and they don't > actually cause traffic to go down.

People misunderstand how that works.

If you have a road which is excessively congested, the congestion suppresses demand. Nobody wants to sit in traffic for two hours, so people stay home or make use of flexible hours to commute at what would otherwise be less convenient times etc.

If you add capacity to the road then the congestion gets better, but not by as much as you would have expected if you looked at the existing traffic, because the fact that it got better caused some of the congestion-suppressed demand to return, which made it less better. So the net result is that it got a little better when you expected it to get a lot better.

But that doesn't mean you can't fix it by adding supply, it just means you need enough supply to satisfy the whole demand, including the demand that was suppressed by the high congestion (or in the housing case by the high prices).

Of course, in the road case there are also alternative ways to satisfy demand, like building more housing so that people can live closer to where they work and don't have to drive as many miles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A land value tax should never brought up as it has wide support among economists for precisely the purpose of improving land use necessary to make building more housing most productive.

Maybe it takes a huge amount of luxery housing before another type gets "naturally" made, but with good land use at least the rest isn't stuck with crippling commutes.

If we had good land use, we could probably get away with saturating the luxery housing market and not sticking everyone else with terrible commutes.

</comment><comment><USER30> Remember that middle-aged guy that lived next to that lake house that Tony Soprano wanted to buy? All city councils are made up of that guy.

</comment><comment><USER31> Outside of urban areas or even just urban centers....I don't think it really is a big topic.

</comment><comment><USER32> Remember when Tokyo was expensive?

[https://www.ft.com/content/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3...](https://www.ft.com/content/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3c60)

</comment><comment><USER33> NIMBY voters. The issue is 100% local zoning to allow less parking spaces, efficiency units, inlaw apartments in suburban houses, allow multi-family housing, and allow zoning of nearby grocery stores.

</comment><comment><USER34> To summarize: voters aren't dumb, they do do economics, and the economics clearly spell out that building luxury housing isn't in the majority interest, but building anything else isn't in the developers interest. Is this really rocket science?

</comment><comment><USER35> This is great work. It does a great job bridging the gap between the true but l overly simple supply and demand arguments with the complex dynamics of housing markets.

Bravo to the author!!

</comment><comment><USER36> If only luxury housing gets built eventually the amount of middle class housing will become too scarce. This is quite apparent in Boulder, when I lived there the citizens were quite good at banding together to prevent any development that wasn't going to be upper middle class and above.

<comment><USER37> On the face of that, this seems like a nonsensical objection.

In my view, obviously "middle class housing" is just "average quality housing"; as more luxury homes are built, existing housing stock will start to be considered as middle class or working class.

Further, this is how things have worked historically; in most cities I have been in, the working class housing stock is invariably older, and was originally built for other purposes, eg, a mansion now turned into apartments, or a middle class house now turned into a duplex, or simply a bunch of originally middle class tract housing now that the middle class can afford better. We have not historically, nor are we now, building large amounts of purpose-built working class housing.

> If only luxury housing gets built eventually the amount of middle class > housing will become too scarce.

If housing of any type is built, then housing will not be scarce. If no housing of any type is built, then housing will be scarce. Worrying about the _type_ seems like misguided micromanaging.

<comment><USER36> You're missing the point, people from middle class housing wont be able to move into luxury housing, most people don't have the means to do so. I don't see how you can believe that building luxury housing will help middle class people. Building middle class housing will help middle class people. If you don't believe that there's too few options for middle class people in Boulder and that it hasn't become too scarce I would encourage you to do some basic research using a simple tool like Zillow to look at prices. Building expensive homes raises the prices of everything around them so now most homes in a place like Boulder are out of reach.

<comment><USER29> There are people who currently live in "middle class housing" even though they have more than middle class money because all housing is scarce. If you build more luxury housing then those people move out of the middle class housing into the new housing and then middle class people can move into the middle class housing.

Moreover, there is no structural difference between "luxury housing" and "middle class housing". A building is a building. You take 10 units of "luxury housing" and add some walls and appliances and now it's 20 units of "middle class housing". The problem isn't what they're building, it's the zoning that prevents it from being subdivided that way.

<comment><USER36> That doesn't make any sense at all. No middle class person will be able to move into Boulder where the average home price is over $1 million. If someone moves out of there a middle class person wont be able to move in at that price point.

<comment><USER29> It costs over $1 million because the existing owners aren't selling, because they don't have better properties to buy instead. Provide those and the existing properties go on the market, and once there are more of them on the market they can no longer command a million dollars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> As someone who recently moved out of Los Angeles in search of more affordable housing and a better traffic situation, I would vote against building more housing in Los Angeles due to overcrowdedness. There's just simply too many people living there and the traffic is insane. The city should work on fixing other issues first, like public transportation and mixed zoning rather than allowing more housing to be built.

<comment><USER3> Serious question, why should they ban more housing and not ban more jobs instead?

I've never heard anyone suggest restricting job growth when a place is "overcrowded," but why else do people move there?

<comment><USER39> The way California works, housing is an economical loss for local governments while jobs are a profit center.

This in itself fully explains the absurd California job/housing situation. If we changed those laws, it would solve itself just through the greed/invisible hand of local government.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Increased housing in high cost locations DOES NOT decrease prices. This is a complete fallacy. The problem is that the supply is limited and it solidifies comps and makes people more sure that high prices are legitimate.

Look at Bay Meadows in San Mateo. An entire community has been built in the last few years. There are a ton of condos, townhouses and single family homes built in quite frankly a well thought out community.

Townhouses are over $1.5M and SFH, which are yards away from the Caltrain are over $2M.

This is entirely new supply and their prices are higher than existing houses. The prices in the area didn't go down, they went up because this legitimizes the high prices and solidifies them.

The only way you get lower house prices is by killing demand like during the housing bust, not by increasing supply because supply doesn't happen at the scale that is required to decrease prices.

<comment><USER41> You're talking about a community of 2000 residents [1] out of over 7 million residents in the San Francisco Bay Area [2]. Do you really expect it to change the housing cost equation at all?

In a largely unregulated market land use is largely dictated by how expensive that land is. Developers don't otherwise just decide to build high rises, mid rises, townhouses or SFHs. It's why the 3-6 story condo complexes you get in, say, Santa Clara County you don't get in Manhattan.

Now obviously this is complicated by regulation, demand in different market segments, what the infrastructure can support, etc but the prices you give seem to suggest the land value is extremely high. Building low density housing on that is going to lead to really high prices.

[1] [https://baymeadows.com/2017/12/22/2017-lets-do-the- numbers/](https://baymeadows.com/2017/12/22/2017-lets-do-the-numbers/)

[2] [http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/](http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/)</comment></comment>


RubyMotion API Reference - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rubymotion.com/post/35843841267/rubymotion-api-reference-smart-file-dependencies New RubyMotion API Reference! <comment><USER2> As a seasoned ruby developer working on my first ios app in Objective C, I'm intrigued by RubyMotion and would be very interested to hear about the experiences others have had in using it, and whether it's a legitimate, production-ready replacement.

I've resolved to finish my current app in Objective C to be sure that I have a decent grasp of the standard stack before reaching for a higher level abstraction, but it does feel pretty painful at times to slog through some of the language's awkwardness and verbosity after using the likes of ruby, go, and clojure. This isn't to say that Objective C doesn't also have its bright spots, but I tend to feel that they mostly end up getting buried in unwieldy syntax and the bulkiness of xcode.

<comment><USER3> My position, I've done a fair number of iOS apps and am well versed in Ruby. The meta-programming aspect of RubyMotion is what appealed to me. There's a ton of boilerplate in iOS that could be eliminated. I attempted to migrate an iOS app to RubyMotion. I stopped because the debug tools weren't mature enough. It was a lot of fun to work with when everything worked! Like everything in life I suppose...

I will go back to RubyMotion once it has better debug facilities. And I won't do an app re-write; I'll do a new app. HTH. :D

<comment><USER4> Objective-C has quite a few metaprogramming capabilities itself, what do you find missing?

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I've used dynamic method calls in Objective-C and I just Ruby easier to use when doing those types of tasks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Descriptions could use formatting love, see UITableViewDelegate</comment>


React or Vue: Which JavaScript UI Library Should You Be Using? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/js-dojo/react-or-vue-which-javascript-ui-library-should-you-be-using-543a383608d#.69wgh4vgs <comment><USER2> TL;DR - good article, just a couple of thoughts/questions.

Interesting. So is this syntax:

      new Vue({
        el: '#app',
        ...
      });

required for every element or component in the same way that this is?

      class App extends React.Component { ... }

Or is more the equivalent of ReactDOM.render? i/e

      ReactDOM.render(App, document.getElementById('app'))

Additionally, going through some Vue examples, I see this usage:

      var app = new Vue({ ... });

      app.$mount('.my-app');

I'm going to guess that creating a new Vue app object is equivalent to something abstracted away by React once ReactDOM.render is called, and that ReactDOM.render is more like the Vue.prototype.$mount function. Is that correct?

The more I look at Vue code, the less of an issue I have with its syntax, something I initially didn't like as it reminded me too much of Backbone, but that was probably just the el: property. Without getting too far down the rabbit hole, I think the biggest concern I'd have with Vue (re: wouldn't enjoy) is going back to using v-* HTML properties like this:

      <section class="main" v-show="todos.length" v-cloak>

That's something I never enjoyed with Angular.</comment>


New Sony Google TV Set-Top Box Disappoints, Increases Desire for Apple TV - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/06/25/new-sony-google-tv-set-top-box-disappoints-increases-desire-for-apple-tv/ The Google TV announcement this morning was greeted by underwhelming hands-on reviews. The continued weakness of Google's platform is good for Apple, of course, but it also raises questions about how much is really needed to create a satisfying, web-enabled TV experience for most users. <comment><USER2> Why is anyone surprised by this? Apple's product shop is run by designers, backed up by supply chain managers and engineers. Google's is run by engineers, backed by engineers, dealing with a mob of third party engineers at their hardware partners. Google's approach is destined to crank out mediocrity.

Microsoft's taking of the reins of their own hardware future speaks to their frustration at the inevitability of that mediocrity.

Apple's approach cranks out excellence... at the expense of incurring risk. Risk that they'll bet the farm on something like the Cube or Siri and fall flat on their face. So far they've rolled the dice and won.</comment>


PwdLess: A platform-agnostic passwordless authentication server - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/PwdLess/PwdLess/ <comment><USER2> So, in this context, what is a "JWT"?

<comment><USER3> JSON Web Token:

\- [https://jwt.io/introduction/](https://jwt.io/introduction/)

\- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON_Web_Token](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON_Web_Token)</comment></comment>


A new survey explains one big reason there are so few women in technology - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2016/1/17/10781366/women-technology-sexual-harassment <comment><USER2> Survey homepage: [http://elephantinthevalley.com/](http://elephantinthevalley.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is great. I wonder how these statistics differ from other workplaces?

</comment><comment><USER4> An article telling men to be less aggressive considers telling someone they're too aggressive to be a form of sexism.

<comment><USER3> Neither the article nor the survey "tells men to be less aggressive". If you have substantive criticism of the survey, you should produce it, not make a straw-man.</comment></comment>


How China acquires 'the crown jewels' of U.S. technology - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.com/story/2018/05/22/china-us-tech-companies-cfius-572413 <comment><USER2> Wait.. you mean, even openly buying things, like respecting free market economics, is now _wrong_?

So that reductionism around open markets the Federal Government keeps ramming down our (I am not american, I live in another economy) throats, it was all hyped bullshit, and in the final analysis, actually yes we can intervene on 'national strategic outcome' reasons anyway.

<comment><USER3> America has never been short of this hypocrisy, most notably with Japan in the 90s. However one must reflect that the national corporatism in China is not free market as we understand it. The west's trade model is built around companies as individual actors separate from their countries but that is not true in China.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I mean the US has blocked 3 major semiconductor deals recently. The free market is pretty important but clearly some compamies and technologies should not be sold. Also, China has a pretty unfair set of rules for competing in their ecosystem whivh handicaps the US, leads to a lot of IP theft and forces profits and data through a Chinese pipeline.

So, i disagree we're totally asleep at the wheel and the scrutiny goes beyond that one agency mentioned. I don't know if a bankrupt company that likely hasnt fully developed an automated chip designer is a crown jewel

</comment><comment><USER5> China is eating our lunch and we're to fat, greedy, and stupid to realize what's going on.

<comment><USER6> With an appropriately fashionable president as well. Brawndo, the thirst mutilator!</comment></comment>


Why Apple Nixed My iPhone App - <AUTHOR> http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2009/09/why_apple_rejected_my_iphone_app.html?ana=from_rss

<comment><USER2> The real issue is that there is no discussion happening between Apple's AppStore approval staff and the developers. If there was 2-way communication between the two the developer would know fairly quickly whether or not this was Apple having an over-reachingly broad policy, or just an Apple employee misinterpreting the policy.

I think that Apple is running into the same problem that the patent office has. Everybody can't be an expert on everything, and it's increasingly expensive to hire experts to do mind-numbingly boring work like shuffling through applications (software or patent) to approve based on rather broad criteria. Not only that, but there is pressure to just push things through the pipeline (whether they are approved or rejected).

In this case, it's entirely possible that the employee that rejected the app knows there is a program called Bitwise, and thought that this app was trying to tag along on that popularity (I guess?) not realizing that bitwise is a generic term. It might be a different story if he was _naming_ his app Bitwise, vs just adding it as a search keyword.

But all of this could be solved through 2-way communication and making AppStore developers feel like valued business partners -- they are business partners with Apple afterall. Even the US Patent Office -- for all its ills -- has an amount of communication between the patent reviewer and the patent applicant.

If the AppStore reviewer fired off an email or phone call to the developer saying, "Your app seems great, but we don't like the keyword 'bitwise' in there because it's referring to another application," the developer could immediately respond with, "But 'bitwise' is a generic term that describes the functionality of my app. Wikipedia/Google it."

As it stands, the developer feels like Apple is talking down to him/her from 'on high,' decreeing that this app does not seem worthy of the AppStore. Without communication, the developer feels powerless to affect the outcome of the approval process, and gets frustrated at minor details like this which would probably be cleared up over a couple of emails instead of forcing the developer to resubmit his app in the 'Apple approved way' (even though his way might be perfectly fine, and the reviewer was only mistaken).

<comment><USER3> _The real issue is that there is no discussion happening between Apple's AppStore approval staff and the developers_

From outward appearances it doesn't look like the AppStore reviewers are even talking to each other! Each one is zealously applying their own capricious interpretation of the policies to deny apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a terrible, unilateral, knee-jerk methodology to determine application eligibility. It seems that apple is constantly creating lose/lose situations in which the developers have zero recourse for their strongly legitimate complaints.

<comment> b-man Yeah, this is fascism in miniature. Imagine a large scale experiment on that philosophy. Welcome to Italy, circa 1919.

<comment><USER5> Luckily it's just a cell phone and there are plenty of alternatives.

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately, as a market, the iPhone app store is fairly unique.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm so bored of the YAIDC syndrome (yet another iPhone developer complaining) here on HN...

<comment><USER8> Yeah, and I'm pretty sure after all that complaining he still went ahead, removed the keyword and submitted the app. I'd say if you're going to bow down to Apple then you have no right complaining.

<comment><USER9> People _only_ complain when they _want_ to keep using the product/service in question and are unwilling to take things to an extreme conclusion.

E.g. When people have a bad experience at the theatre, the only ones who complain at the service desk are those who will return regardless.

The people who've had enough just quietly walk out and never return.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure I buy into this piece of psychology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why didn't they just approve the app and remove the incriminated keyword?

<comment><USER11> Because business doesn't work like that. You can't go around changing someone application, or removing words from the description that you don't like. That is really bad. They have given the guy the option to resubmit, so all that happens is his app is a couple of weeks late.

<comment><USER10> Right.

On the other hand, in this case it was a search keyword, not a word in the description.

They could add a disclaimer to reserve the right to remove _inappropriate_ keywords.

Asking the developer to do so and resubmit the app is a waste of time for both parties.

<comment><USER12> Dude, welcome to the status quo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wouldn't expect the average application reviewer to know what "bitwise" means. If he responded explaining it and they still didn't allow it that would be worthy of a rant.

<comment><USER14> I would expect that the average application reviewer has access to a dictionary though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Perhaps this is really naive, but why haven't any lawsuits been brought up regarding the app store? Maybe they have but I haven't heard of them?

<comment><USER16> How would you build a legal basis for asserting that you have a right to force Apple to accept, approve and distribute your software against their desires?

<comment><USER17> Especially when you signed away all those rights in the developer agreement (or so I've been told).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does anybody else feel like there's just been a rash of this kind of stuff lately? Apple really seems to be dropping the ball on a number of issues. Whether it's the attempted trademarking of "glossy chat bubbles", lethargic update cycles, or app rejection decisions like the one in this article, I really feel like the Apple user and developer experience has soured. I think the iPhone store (and the iPhone phenomenon) is perilously close to jumping the shark.

Android, anyone?</comment>


Rumpkernel – NetBSD kernel drivers as user-space libraries - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rumpkernel/wiki/wiki <comment><USER2> So would this allow for example the building of something like unikernel python apps?</comment>


Show HN: Noms – A new decentralized database based on ideas from Git - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@aboodman/noms-init-98b7f0c3566#.ojb6eaz94 <comment><USER4> So, i realize this project is early, but it would be EXTREMELY helpful to walk through someone's use case - like, who is the target here? A business analyst who iterates on cleaning / analyzing small excel csvs? Or someone else?

After watching the screencast, all I saw was a bunch of commands explained (could have read the docs for that), instead, I'd like to walk through a use- case where this solves _someones_ problem.

<comment><USER5> He mentioned at least one. His friend went to a cabin where there were little to no internet connection, then he updated the database on a local device. And later on other database-nodes would just pull the updated data.

Seems like it is for personal use. Maybe something to build apps on top of.

<comment><USER6> That doesn't differentiate noms from postgres or any other multimaster database.

Does it do clever merging?

<comment><USER5> I just went by the use case he mentioned in the video. I don't really know about these technical details for databases etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> GC I can see a shape of solution for since you can use something like a per- object DVVset to determine the minimum set of unresolved histories required to avoid losing data during conflicts while not unnecessarily ballooning the size of the dataset.

However, the inner-object conflict-resolution problem seems a lot harder to solve given that there's no obvious join-semilattice for arbitrary fields/data. Can you discuss what conflict-resolution strategies you're working on for auto-resolution and/or what metadata you intend to provide to the end-user in the event that you're going to punt resolution to them to handle?

Given this is supposed to be for collaborative workloads, the conflict- resolution issue seems to be a cornerstone. Git handles this by inserting sibling sections into the documents and forcing the end-user to manually deal with fixing problems, which is often fraught with pain and peril, and doesn't seem like a strategy that would work for something that's a database (as opposed to something that's a workflow).

<comment><USER8> This is a question that we've gotten quite a bit. It's our view that there's no magic solution to conflicts. There are logical conflicts in the real world that must be arbitrated.

That said, it's a surprisingly basic thing, but just knowing _what changed_ from party (a) and party (b)'s perspective (relative to their most recently agreed-upon state) is somewhat rare or ad-hoc in existing systems. In noms, you can directly compute exactly how state diverged and apply whatever resolution strategy is suitable.

We have plans for applying default conflict resolution for changes to data- types that - in many cases - will be correct, but in the end, there's no avoiding that correctness can only be defined within a given specific domain.

<comment><USER9> To me, there are two separate concerns: intent preservation and coherence.

Operations cause a change of state. The sequence of operations that are performed given a user action need to ensure that they will cause a modification of the state of the database in the way intended by the user.

Coherence is about maintaining a design. A set of rules are conceived. For each state, it is possible to determine whether the state is valid according to them, and if so, the database is coherent.

To maintain coherence, it is possible to deny an operation, therefore breaking user intent. To maintain user intent, it is possible to accept an operation that leads to an invalid state. From what I understand, noms is heavily tilted towards coherence, like git, but unlike git, it doesn't have the social "pull request" aspect, nor a support for running tests.

You mention diffing as a plus, but realistically the only use of diffing is to guess intent. Real intent can only be provided by a maximally rich set of operations. Logs of SQL queries, for instance, are more likely to provide insight than a cold diff. For a database that is tilted so far towards maintaining coherence at the expense of user intent, it may be a good idea to compensate by staying close to the operations.

Finally, if you decide to tilt towards intent preservation, there are definitely approaches to automate merges, avoiding nagging the user to fix conflicts. The most successful trivial solution remains latest-write-wins, which gives surprisingly good results assuming a high data granularity and a rich set of operations. But unless there is a way to automate coherence validation (which the equivalent in git projects is, I suppose, running the tests), we can only rely on user attention… in which case, relying on the user to fix coherence after the fact on a database that heavily preserves user intent would be pretty much the same.

So… do you plan on supporting custom coherence rules? Alternatively, which conflict resolutions are you leaning towards?

<comment><USER7> What is "latest" in a situation where you're experiencing concurrent writes?

<comment><USER9> Google's Spanner, for instance, relies on their TrueTime design, which requires having a GPS clock and an atomic clock on each datacenter, I believe. Most designs simply rely on NTP or a similar time synchronization system.

Another approach is to maintain total order of writes. Assuming some form of consensus protocol to determine write order, the unicity of the order ensures synchronization. That design, however, tends to preserve user intent less. Bitcoin has a form of that.

<comment><USER7> Time isn't a reliable resource in this context.

<comment><USER9> They mention striving to support many contexts. In the demo, they showcase offline editing of a single CSV entry. If the granularity is the atomic types, then a conflict only occurs when the very same field in the very same row is concurrently edited.

Then, the system can show the conflict and offer a default that keeps the operation with the highest timestamp, or if the timestamps are identical, the one with the highest hash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Going through the SDK docs, why was a scheme like '[http://localhost:8000::people'](http://localhost:8000::people') chosen instead of the plain old '[http://localhost:8000/people'](http://localhost:8000/people')? Are there any benefits? If yes, curious to know what they are.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the help everyone with this most important aspect of the system ;).

To clarify, we don't think of these specs as URLs. The part before the final double-colon is a URL. To parse one, you get the final double colon, and take everything to the left as a URL.

There's some info on the syntax here:

[https://github.com/attic- labs/noms/blob/master/doc/spelling....](https://github.com/attic- labs/noms/blob/master/doc/spelling.md#spelling-databases)

Though it's not presented as a formal grammar in that doc, our most important criteria for the syntax was:

      - <USER2>
      - interacts well with the shell, since we frequently use these as part of command lines

<comment><USER12> > To clarify, we don't think of these specs as URLs.

But everyone else will because you are including the protocol, and at the end of the day, they are a uniform way of identifying a resource, so they are functionally URIs.

Otherwise, you should probably either conform to the HTTP(S) protocol spec or makeup your own, e.g. noms+[http://dbinstance.noms.foo::database/dataset](http://dbinstance.noms.foo::database/dataset)

SQLAlchemy and most DB URIs are good examples on how to do this. For example, you can connect to a MySQL database instance and give it a default namespace/schema/database.

Part of the issue here is the ambiguity between a database, a database instance/server/host, a dataset/table, a catalog/namespace/schema, and what all those words and concepts mean. There's little consensus across fields, because even if computer scientists say "Okay, this is what a dataset actually is", somebody, whether it's a biologist or a physicist, will throw up their arms in protest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My queston is on scalability. You say "large datasets" on the website. What is large? 1x/10x/100x Terabytes? 1x/10x/100x Petabytes?

What kind of access rates? Etc.

Very general answers are okay -- I'm trying to wrap my head around whether this is even in the right ballpark for my world.

Distinguishing current proof-of-concept vs. design-goal scale is okay too.

Thanks!

<comment><USER11> Honest answer is: we don't know yet -- we're working our way up from the bottom.

But we (cautiously) don't see any reason why the basic design shouldn't scale to very large (e.g. petabyte) datasets, and that is our eventual goal.

That said, we do think there are a lot (even maybe the majority) of use cases in the GB-TB range.

<comment><USER14> Isn't the append-only design unsuitable for scenarios where many updates/deletes are made? If you update/delete 1GB of your 2GB database each day, then after a year the database is 365GB in size, but the live data is only 2GB.

I think the git-like features (history, merging) are very helpful for internal work, but when the dataset must be published, I think in most cases only the newest snapshot should be made available. But then the question is what format should it have...?

<comment><USER11> It just depends on the details. If you have a dataset in which 50% of values changes every day, and it doesn't compress well, then yeah, your Noms archive of that entire dataset is going to grow quickly.

In such situations, you could either (eventually, when it is implemented) prune old data, or aggregate the changes into bigger blocks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Strawman marketing alert: "The most common way to share data today is to post CSV files on a website". Maybe there are a bunch of people that still do that somewhere, but if so, they ain't early adopters of decentralized database technology and so not your target customers. It's always better to talk about what your most likely customers are doing now.

<comment><USER16> This is actually extremely common.

For example, if you browse the UC Irvine ML datasets

[https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/index.html](https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/index.html)

You'll find that many are in csv format.

If you do a search on data.gov

[http://catalog.data.gov/dataset#sec- res_format](http://catalog.data.gov/dataset#sec-res_format)

You'll see that it's about as popular as JSON.

Also, the World Health Organization

[http://www.who.int/tb/country/data/download/en/](http://www.who.int/tb/country/data/download/en/)

Also, many of the datasets at kaggle are in csv format.

[https://www.kaggle.com/datasets](https://www.kaggle.com/datasets)

And this isn't that surprising, it's human readable, and gets the job done, and zipping will give decent compression.

I'm not sure who you think the target market for this would be, but I'm sure that if it's an efficient local format, you could probably get the ML crowd on board.

<comment><USER11> Right. A shocking amount of public data is distributed this way.

Also, we routinely talk to developers who complain about the difficulty of consuming data snapshots from partners, parsing it, trying to understand how it has changed since last time, etc.

With high value datasets, people frequently build an API to combat these problems. But it's hard to design a good API, and even if you succeed, it has to be secured, documented, scaled, and maintained indefinitely.

<comment><USER17> So if nom takes off would you see 'download a nom dataset by clicking here'

or would it be 'use this hostname to sync the nom to your own computer'

Or would it be a dsn sort of and you just instantiate a client and your on your way?

Or, some combo?

<comment><USER11> In some glorious future world you might see things like:

``` <a href="[http://www.who.int/tb/country/data/download/en/::case- data/b...](http://www.who.int/tb/country/data/download/en/::case-data/by- country">Download) the Data</a> ```

<comment><USER18> Hmm, if you want people to be able to link to Noms datasets on the web, maybe you should switch to using URLs to name the datasets, instead of a two-part identifier with an URL separated from a dataset name by a "::"? Darcs and Git seem to get by more or less with URLs and relative URLs; do you think that cold work for Noms too?

The super REST harmonious way to do this would be to define a new media-type for Noms databases with a smallish document that links to the component parts. Like torrent files, but using URLs (maybe relative URLs) instead of SHA1 hashes for the components, maybe?

<comment><USER11> This is a good point. We never thought of these strings as URLs, but there are places where it would be nice to use them that only want URLs (the href attribute, for example).

The way we have it now is nice in that any valid URL can be used to locate a database. I am loathe to restrict that.

Interesting point though - thank you!

<comment><USER18> Sure, I hope the ideas are useful! As some other commenters have said, if you just use # instead of ::, I think the problem goes away?

<comment><USER11> The hash portion of a URL is not transmitted to the server by browsers, so it wouldn't help in the case of putting the string into a URL bar or a hyperlink.

<comment><USER18> If the resource you're linking to is a database (or to speak more strictly, if its only representation is a resource of a noms-database media-type), rather than an HTML page or something, can't the browser can be configured to pass it off to a Noms implementation, complete with the dataset identifier within? I mean, that's what people do with page numbers in PDF files, right?

<comment><USER11> Hm. True.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Very cool. I would love to have something like this production ready. Some day...

Anyone who finds this interesting may also be intrigued by Irmin [0] - <USER3> library for applications to persist data in a git-compatible format.

[0] - [https://github.com/mirage/irmin](https://github.com/mirage/irmin)

<comment><USER20> Docker for Mac > About Docker > Acknowledgements, Cmd+F: Irmin

Not only has Irmin been around longer (with full JS support thanks to js_of_ocaml) it also has a pretty big deployment under its belt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> At first glance, this reminds me a little bit of datomic - all data history is preserved/deduplicated, fork/decentralization features. Can you comment on how it compares?

<comment><USER11> Thanks, we will take that as a compliment.

I feel weird speaking for them, but at a product level, I think it's fair to characterize Datomic as an application database -- competing with things like mongo, mysql, rethink, etc.

While Noms might be a good fit for certain kinds of application databases (cases where history, or sync, is really important) we're really more focused more on archival, version control, and moving data between systems than being an online transactional database.

Also, at a technical level, unless I'm wildly mistaken, I don't believe that Datomic is content-addressed, and I wouldn't call it "decentralized" (though that word is a bit squishy).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This looks really exciting, congrats to the team for launching!

Could you tell us a bit about how this compares to dat? [http://dat- data.com/](http://dat-data.com/)

<comment><USER11> Dat is (currently) focused on synchronizing files in a peer-to-peer network.

Noms can store files, but it is much more focused on structured data. You put individual values (numbers, strings, rows, structs, etc) into noms, using a type system that noms defines, and this allows you to query, diff, and efficiently update that data.

Also Noms isn't peer-to-peer (although we hypothesize that it could run reasonably on top of an existing network like IPFS).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hi all. I'm one of the creators of Noms. Happy to answer any questions!

<comment> bra-ket does noms understand sql and can it do joins?

<comment><USER23> It doesn't support queries. It's a datastore, not a database. This is from their FAQ. [https://github.com/attic- labs/noms/blob/master/doc/faq.md](https://github.com/attic- labs/noms/blob/master/doc/faq.md)

<comment><USER24> I mean, by their definition it is a database, but i can understand your usage. Then again, they both say it is a database, and in your link, they say it "isn't quite there yet", so /shrug heh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's an interesting idea.

The HN title suggested it's a database, which made me really curious as I can finally stop using history tables (or wal logging, or the other myriad ways of seeing a point in time). However, that doesn't seem to be the case here?

That said, the idea of "git as a datastore" does seem akin to "blockchain as data verification". Combine those two ideas together, get PWC involved and you have multimillion dollar deals coming in for audit protection.

<comment><USER26> I've been working on something pretty akin to what you describe, hosted verifiable data structures (logs and maps). Rather than Blockchain it uses the same data structures as Certificate Transparency to provide equivalent functionality. Would love to get some feedback if you had the time to look: [https://www.continusec.com/](https://www.continusec.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here's a relevant (albeit 4-year-old) StackExchange thread, "Is there a Git for data?":

[http://opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/748/is-there- a-g...](http://opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/748/is-there-a-git-for- data)

<comment><USER27> I once wrote super simple `git in js` for data objects. Was less than a couple of hundred of lines.

But there's also - [https://github.com/mirage/irmin](https://github.com/mirage/irmin)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've been wanting something like Noms for a while. Prolly trees sound really promising.

In intro.md, you suggest, "If you wanted to find all the people of a particular age AND having a particular hair color, you could construct a second map having type Map<String, Set<Person>>, and intersect the two sets." In that case, how should I keep the two maps in sync? Do I need to atomically update the logic of all the instances of the application to modify both maps instead of just one? Or do I keep the second map (the hair color index) in a separate index database and update the index whenever I pull changes from a remote database? (What does the API look like for getting notified of new changes that haven't been indexed yet?)

I see that "noms sync" does both push and pull. Does that mean I can't pull data from a database I can't write to? How does that work over HTTP — do I need to use a special HTTP server that knows how to accept and authenticate write requests, or can I just dump a Noms dataset in a directory and serve it up with Apache?

Forgive me if these questions are obvious — I've read the docs I could find, but I haven't read any of the code beyond the hr sample.

<comment><USER11> > Do I need to atomically update the logic of all the instances of the > application to modify both maps instead of just one? Or do I keep the second > map (the hair color index) in a separate index database and update the index > whenever I pull changes from a remote database? (What does the API look like > for getting notified of new changes that haven't been indexed yet?)

Currently, you have to manually keep an index up to date. But keep in mind that internally this is what all databases are doing -- manually reflecting changes into indexes -- they just hide it from you.

Eventually, we imagine that there will be tools to declare indexes you want to maintain and we'd do it for you. Note that because Noms is good at diffing, calculating the changes that need to be re-indexed comes for free!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm surprised you didn't use a functional language like Haskell or OCaml or Rust to do this, since the article talks about love for functional programming.

I'm not criticizing Go at all, it's just not really a functional language.

</comment><comment><USER29> Excellent! This has been on my "things to build someday" list for a while now. Excited to start playing with it.

<comment><USER30> Same here, though in my case it was on my list of things to continue building.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Pretty impressive work but seems like reinventing wheels. Why wasn't it built upon existing tech?

I think the docs should enumerate the most important differences and use cases for which it should be a better fit.

<comment><USER32> To play devil's advocate, Git "reinvented the wheel," but it was a much nicer wheel.

Not saying this is to databases what Git was to versioning, but there's a reason to strive for that.

<comment><USER31> Git's author felt the alternative (gratis) systems were lacking. Noms's author, on the contrary, praises Git but doesn't build on it. He chooses to implement the same technology himself, and from the docs it's not clear to me why that is.

<comment><USER33> Off the top of my head: git can only use sha1 which makes it unsuitable for any use case where you need to cryptographically verify the origin of data (so far nobody was able to tell me definitely how secure git signed commits and tags really are).

<comment><USER34> Assuming SHA1 has second pre-image resistance (which it currently still does), the security of git signed commits/tags is the same thing as the security of the private key used to sign the commits/tags.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is really interesting! What are some ideal use cases for the current implementation? I've seen Git is considered a competitor, but Noms also appears to be a generic database, so i would just like to hear some basic use cases, if possible.

Eg: If used as a database, what applications would benefit from Noms? Could/should this be used for personal storage? Could/should this be used for code versioning (ie, Git)?

<comment><USER35> The way I read it, git is not a competitor but rather an inspiration. They are taking ideas from git to apply them to a different domain.

<comment><USER24> Fwiw, i was referring to this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12212276](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12212276)

The author explicitly says Git is a competitor

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Wow, this could be quite interesting.

Firstly, it would be cool if this could be a single gateway to "all the data in the world". Right now its a pain to find, say, energy generation statistics for, say, Portugal, but it would be great if I could do something like:

      noms get statistics.industry.energy.portugal.all();

Secondly, the versioning idea could have some really cool applications. For example, I work in data analytics, and sometimes I want to transform some data in an SQL table.

Doing transformations nicely is a bit difficult. Either I'm doing the calculations in a column of a view, with the associated performance hit, or I'm tacking columns onto the table, which quickly leads to a mess, especially during the initial stages of analyses.

It would be so cool if I could treat the database as a constantly-evolving git tree.

</comment><comment><USER37> Your mascot looks like it giving an 'air' blowjob.

Otherwise looks like a cool project, keep up the good work!

<comment><USER38> I could not stop laughing after I read this...

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I really like the idea in theory, but seeing it in practice I feel the whole thing is too concerned with being a wrapper around git handling for their dataset files. I would much rather see diffs based around the records themselves, and not so much the structure of the data.

<comment><USER40> While Git is referenced as an inspiration, the implementation of Noms does not use Git. Noms performs diffs on the data - as records or whatever other structure you used in importing your data. CSV is but one example of a way to import data into Noms, but since so much data is available in that format it is an easy one to reference that most people know. Noms can also import JSON, XML and many other data types if you are willing to write JS or Go code (more to come). Thanks for taking a look at Noms!

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I don't want to downplay this idea, it really is nice to see people doing different/unique things with technology.

However, 1 question I have is:

Couldn't you just put a CSV/JSON file(s) behind VCS?

Eg. Drop my CSV/JSON file(s) onto github.com and then it will be version- controlled ?

<comment><USER11> You can, and people do that today. It has limitations though:

      * The data must be sorted in order for Git to provide good diffs
      * It does not scale very well. On my machine, Git refuses to diff files over 1GB (maybe there is a setting for that)
      * You must clone the entire repository onto your machine to work with it
      * There is no programmatic API -- you must work with the data and changes as text and line diffs

See [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zeg9CY3BMes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zeg9CY3BMes) for a little bit more on this topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> "...inspired by the elegance and power of Git for years.."

Definitely powerful, but elegance?

<comment><USER11> If you ever look into the internals of how Git works, it is beautiful. Yeah, the UI is kinda a mess, but the idea is inspired.

<comment><USER42> "UI is kinda a mess" \- amen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> We've been struggling managing a collection of periodically updated CSVs & binaries over a few GB's in size, we struggled with Git-LFS and gave up, and we were considering (dreading) SVN, this looks really promising. Cheers!

</comment><comment> ah- Can you elaborate a bit on how the hashing and chunking works? There's a rolling hash for determining chunk boundaries, and also SHA-512/256 somewhere.

Does the same data chunked differently have a different hash?

<comment><USER11> We never chunk the same data differently. An inviolable rule of Noms is that the same logical value is always chunked the same way and always has the same hash.

If I start with integers 1-1000000 and you start with integers 0-999999, and we both make mutations to converge at the same list, we will end up with the exact same tree, with the exact same hashes.

This is what makes efficient synchronization and diff of noms data possible.

<comment> ah- Thanks. So it's building a hash tree with deterministic chunking and that means you can cheaply update the hash after updating parts of the tree as you only have to rehash certain bits?

Does that mean that your chunk sizes are kind of fixed? Do you think there's a way to retain that advantage and be able to coalesce smaller chunks into larger ones?

Say your smallest nodes are 4KB but for more efficient storage you might want to go up to 4MB chunks. Could that be done while retaining the same hash for the same underlying data?

<comment><USER44> Keep in mind (if this wasn't clear) that the chunks are only probabilistically 4K: [https://github.com/attic- labs/noms/blob/master/go/types/roll...](https://github.com/attic- labs/noms/blob/master/go/types/rolling_value_hasher.go#L16). I.e. the thing that's "fixed" here is the chunk size we're aiming for. The chunks themselves could be of any size.

In any case, that's a good question - we might want to do something about that down the line. But, if we did change that constant, the structure of the trees will change, and all[1] the hashes will change.

[1] a small number will stay the same

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> No ones mentioned this yet, but with good (mongo-like) query interface, this can add an important database to the offline-first movement.

(Right now pouchdb or gundb are the only available options.)

</comment><comment><USER46> This looks really interesting. I've been thinking about the problem of distributed issue tracking lately... and the set of sub-problems it has (authorization and authentification, synchronization and so on) ... I'm not sure all these problems could be covered by this, but I guess at least the "distributed"-part could be covered by something like this.

</comment><comment><USER47> I had an idea for this with a buddy in college after doing case study research into Git. I've always considered this the next step into a decentralized world outside of code and non-typed "text". I know .csv's where mentioned a few times; are you looking to narrow into a few specific file types for proof of concept?

<comment><USER48> We have implemented a bunch of importers. One of them is CSV. Take a look at [https://github.com/attic- labs/noms/tree/master/samples/go/cs...](https://github.com/attic- labs/noms/tree/master/samples/go/csv)

We envision there to be tools that work on certain data types (Noms has a full type system), for example an app that displays all geo locations in a dataset.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I'm curious about merging.

When there is a conflict, like when a file gets changed by different people, how merging is performed?

<comment><USER11> Not implemented yet, but here is the plan: [https://github.com/attic- labs/noms/issues/148](https://github.com/attic-labs/noms/issues/148)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Those are exactly the kind of ideas the finance world needs to get out of its ethernal mess of spreadsheets.

</comment><comment><USER51> This is really interesting, thanks for sharing it!

I haven't had a chance to dig into the code yet, but I notice that you say two replicas of the same database can be disconnected, altered, and then merged. Could you explain how Noms takes care of that, particularly in the case of collisions?

</comment><comment><USER52> This really piqued my interest and "next big thing" sense

</comment><comment><USER53> Something like this could be used as a backing store for package managers like npm or apt or ruby gems or pypi.

</comment><comment><USER54> How do you handle hash collision?

<comment><USER11> We assume that within a given version of the database format, there will never be a collision. The chances of a sha2 collision are beyond astronomical, and if you can create one, there are better things to do with your time that bother us.

That said, hashes only get weaker over time. The chances of an md5 collision used to be astronomical, now they are not.

So it was important to us to have an escape hatch - a way to increase the strength of the hash we use over time.

That's why we built a format version into Noms from the beginning. Our design is predicated on the fact that within a given version of the format, there is a 1:1 correspondence between hashes and values. Every value has exactly one hash, and every hash encodes exactly one value.

In future versions of the format, we might change the hash function. In this situation, we'd need to import data from the old format to the new format, just like how you have to sometimes migrate traditional databases across versions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> First off... I'm excited to see this project. There's a lot of potential here and this looks like a good implementation of a nice concept. I have at least a bit of authority behind that statement, since a few years ago, I had the opportunity to build something similar (although smaller in ambition.) A couple things to think about:

 __* Type accretion - This doesn 't change the fact that database clients need to be able to accept historical data formats if they need to access historical data. The schema can't be changed for the older data objects without changing the hashes for that data, so there's no way to do something like a schema migration would work in SQL. For simple schema changes like adding fields, this might not be so hard to deal with, but some changes will be structural in nature and change the relative paths between objects. (This adds complexity to the code of database clients, as well as testing effort.)

 __* Security - Is there a way to secure objects stored within noms? Let 's say I store $SECRET into noms and get back a hash. Does it then become the case that every user with access to the database and the hash can now retrieve the $SECRET? What if permissions need to be granted or revoked to a particular object after it's been stored? A field within a particular object? What if an object shouldn't have been stored in the database at all and needs to be obliterated? (This last problem gets worse if the object to be obliterated contains the only path to data that needs to be retained.)

 __* Performance - The CAS model effectively takes the stored data, runs it through a blender, and returns you a grey goo of hashes...this is good for replication, but it means you can 't get much meaningful information out of a hash. This tends to mean a lot of operations like you might find in an old- school navigational database, and a huge dependency on the time to fetch an object given a hash. Indices can help by reducing the complexity of the traversals you need to do, but only if they're current and you have the index you need.

 __* Data roll off - How do you expire off data so that it doesn 't just monotonically increase in volume? Let's say there's an API to mark an object as purgeable, the problem of identifying other purgeable objects turns into effectively a garbage collection process. (git gc, etc.) There's also the issue of the sheer number of objects that can be involved. The system I was involved with had something like 500K objects/day that had to be purged after 120 days in the system. (Total of 60MM objects line and around 6TB or so) Identifying 500K objects to purge and then specifying those to the data layer for action is not necessarily an easy thing....

 __* Querying - Server side query logic (and an expression language) is basically essential to performance. Otherwise, you wind up with a network round trip for every edge of the graph you follow. Going back to my first point, whatever querying language is used has to be flexible enough to handle a schema that might be varying over time (through schema accretion).

All four of these bullet points are worthy of a great deal more discussion, and I haven't even broached issues around conflict resolution, differencing, UI concerns, etc. I think there are good approaches to managing lots of these issues, but there's a bunch of engineering involved, as well as some close attention to scope and goals...

<comment><USER11> \- Type accretion: I don't think in general that schema changes like what happens in sql databases works very well (I say this having worked on such systems). In big systems, it's hard to get everyone to agree on a moment to CHANGE THE SCHEMA. You can certainly do something like that in Noms -- just write a new dataset and replace the old one. But being able to read old data and leave old clients working I think is powerful. Couple this with the structural typing that falls naturally out of Noms and - I think - you have a more flexible way to change schemas over time.

\- Security: current thoughts: [https://github.com/attic- labs/noms/issues/1183](https://github.com/attic-labs/noms/issues/1183)

\- Perf: I'm not really following you here. CAS has some positives and some negatives for performance.

\- expiration: 1. there are a huge number of systems today that never delete data. Taking advantage of that to make other operations faster makes sense. 2. yeah, it's a gc problem. luckily gc is a well-studied problem. Also, as Noms is a merkle tree and merkle trees are good at diff, we have some additional leverage. We don't need to do a full scan everytime.

\- querying: disagree that it is essential to perf. Another option is to have a schema that matches your access model. You can do that server-side in addition (or instead) of having a query language.

===

It sounds like you have thought a lot about all of this! If you are interested, your brain would be very appreciated in the github or slack.

<comment><USER55> > It sounds like you have thought a lot about all of this!

Up until around 2014, I was heavily involved in the construction of a small CAS (100MM objects online, around 5-6TB in size) for a client that needed to replicate certain periodic calculations in a reliable way. It worked well, but something like noms would have eliminated the need for a bunch of custom work.

> If you are interested, your brain would be very appreciated in the github or > slack.

I'll take a look... thanks for the invite!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Interesting project, would just like to say that the Git workflow isn't that great and CVS isn't that bad.

The Git workflow is quite complicated and will probably not appeal to people who typically just use Excel for everything.

It is true that CVS is messy, but its strength is that it is really simple, and it can easily be fixed.

Also, CVS can be versioned with Git quite well in many cases.</comment>


Poles Take anti-ACTA Protests to the Streets - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/poles-take-anti-acta-protests-to-the-streets-120126/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter <comment><USER2> I thought I should surface this comment by "sado" from that page:

 _Also, the statement "We must sign ACTA and not give in to blackmail" was taken out of context (the context: Anonymous, who DDOSed Polish govt sites, threatened to release personal data of minister Boni and to DDOS moar, if Polish govt signs the ACTA... that could be called "blackmail")._

<comment><USER3> Does Anonymous's association net help or hurt the anti-ACTA position? And historically, did it help or hurt anti-SOPA/PIPA?

I generally took what they do as being emotionally gratifying but having zero real impact, but by giving the un-informed but not necessarily malicious (and potentially the intentionally malevolent spinsters) an easy way to justify onerous regulation, I think they may be hurting the causes they ostensibly back in the long-run.

<comment><USER4> It's hard to say what the net effect is. It's true that such attacks give the government an effective, if fallacious, argument: "we cannot give in to blackmail". On the other hand, large-scale media coverage started only after the Anonymous hacked the government websites. Before the attacks, the Polish media were not interested in ACTA. This in turn helped mobilize politicians from opposition parties and, I think, also the protesters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am lucky to be right now in Poland visiting my GF. I took a some videos of todays ACTA protest in Poznan. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLSSUV4P_d4> More videos will appear on my YouTube channel

</comment><comment><USER6> 3 cheers for the Polish people for standing up for yourselves! A diminishing quality in today's society.

</comment><comment><USER7> looks like ACTA's potential enforcement on ISPs to implement content filtering can't be applied in EU countries that adopted [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_Fundamental_Rights_o...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_Fundamental_Rights_of_the_European_Union)

Can't find an English source: <http://goo.gl/sVQUN> (translated from Polish)

</comment><comment><USER8> I read a summary that a redditor wrote maybe... a week back. It didn't seem that bad. What's the controversy?

<comment><USER4> It fossilizes a framework of copyright laws that was created before the Internet. Each country that signs ACTA commits itself to preserving the existing system of intellectual property protection, which many consider to be antiquated and out of touch with the digital world. It ensures that no alternative ideas for managing intellectual property will arise in those countries, which is of course the goal of the United States government and the rightsholders that lobbied for this treaty.

In addition to limiting the flexibility of individual countries without giving them anything in return (other than a pat on the back from Uncle Sam), ACTA contains a number of vague provisions that could lead to more stringent IP regulations. For example:

"ordering the alleged infringer (...) to provide information on any persons (...) involved in any aspect of the infringement" (notice the broad scope)

"endeavoring to promote cooperative efforts within the business community to effectively address trademark and copyright or related rights infringement" ("encouraging" ISPs to "voluntarily" cut off users?).

ACTA also contains provisions that go beyond what is currently law in many of the countries that are about to sign it. For example, it introduces broader anti-circumvention laws that are currently in effect in Poland. It also provides that prosecutors must be able to act out of their own initiative (ex officio) on copyright cases -- even if the rightsholder does not complain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Third night of protests in progress.

Some photos and vids from what's happening right now in the city of Poznan: [http://www.tvn24.pl/0,1732237,0,1,lublin-i-poznan-kolejny- dz...](http://www.tvn24.pl/0,1732237,0,1,lublin-i-poznan-kolejny-dzien- protestow-przeciw-acta,wiadomosc.html)

And a fun nugget: members of parliament displaying Guy Fawkes masks in the Parliament: [http://www.tvn24.pl/0,2497368,0,0,1,1,,poslowie-palikota- w-s...](http://www.tvn24.pl/0,2497368,0,0,1,1,,poslowie-palikota-w-sejmie- pap,galeriamax.html) Note: these are just the MPs from the populist party Ruch Palikota. Clearly trying to win some votes of the protesting youth,

</comment><comment><USER9> You can read more about the Polish eruption here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3502200>

And here's some more footage from the protests: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3511980>

</comment><comment><USER10> At the end of the day, Poland is highly dependent on support from the US, as they are positioned between Russia and Germany.

<comment><USER11> How is this an issue in this day and age?

<comment><USER9> Poland is in NATO so the threat from Russia is vastly overestimated.

Poland is also a great friend of Germany.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Protests are big in Poland because they are very poor and 90% of people downloads everything from the Internet. Deleting Pirate Bay, Rapidshare. Youtube and Megaupload would stop most people from accessing any cultural goods: music, films, software.

Unlike India etc, average Pole has enough money for good PC or notebook and good internet connection, but not yet enough to pay for software.

Nobody uses Steam or Itunes, paying for software is just laughable. Except for businesses - they must be legal.

<comment><USER13> I'm sorry, but this is just a load of bullshit. GDP per capita in Poland is 46th in the world (comparing to 127th position of India), it has one of the fastest growing economies in Europe, and one of few that were immune to the recent economic crisis. If you want more information, you can find it on the web[1].

It's true that in the early nineties, just after the fall of communist regime, intellectual property wasn't regulated and piracy was sprawling, but a lot has changed since then.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Poland>

<comment><USER12> Yes, I said enough money for good hardware but not for software.

Why nobody uses Iphone, Xbox, Playstation, Gamecube in Poland? Because it is hard to jailbreak and pirate.

I know someone who bought Mac from UK. Disk wasn't erased, there were hundreds of mp3s in Itunes and some apps. And we all thought it is a computer from an abosolutely crazy richman.

<comment><USER14> That's plain BS. When I was in Warsaw in December and iPhones were everywhere. During the holiday season I saw tons of people buying legitimate non-pirated music, movies, and games at stores like EMPIK. In fact after the new year when I went to buy some albums it was hard to sort through what was left on the shelves because so much of the stock had been cleared out and made a mess of in the holiday buying rush. It's true that a lot of people in Poland may be income limited due to low wages, but I think making it seem like everyone there pirates everything because that's the only way to get it is totally wrong.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you use IRC? - <AUTHOR>

I see a lot of people and projects advertising the fact that they can be found on an IRC channel. I've tried it before, but generally I find that it's too distracting.<p>How does the HN community use IRC? Any tips on how to successfully use IRC to promote a company, product or project? <comment><USER2> I wouldn't say you'll use IRC directly to promote. It's just another communication channel with people. Think of like twitter, everyone is almost always online thanks to bouncers or irssi+ssh setups and you can query whoever you want or need. They may respond if they see your message and think it deserves an answer.

I'd say most of its interest comes from the support channels like #rubyonrails or #python where you basically help people. After a while, you get to know regular users and thus making new connections or even friendships. As an example, I've got friends hanging out in a french sys-admin related channel who sent to me people looking for python training. I made an offer and we later called to them to finalize the order. I'd say such things are a consequence of your genuine participation in channels rather an objective in itself.

I use quassel as an IRC client, the core is installed on my personal server, being always connected. I connect from my home or my laptop and always get only what I haven't read thanks to quassel acting a bit like IMAP. I also have a bitlbee setuped in order to act as a gateway to gtalk and hipchat, meaning I got every single possible chat protocol I may use in quassel.

I desactivated notifications, which means If I minimize quassel, I won't see anything, letting me focused. After each focused work cycle ( like every 30-45 minutes ) I just check if anything happened there and answers depending its importance and my current priorities. I don't say I'm not available, which may lead in a debate on why I can't answer right know, I just don't answer back until I got prioritized stuff done first.

This way I can handle chat with wrecking daily productivity. As opposed to that, phone just trouble my productivity, I almost never answer on my phone except for a few people and use almost exclusively chat to avoid that.

</comment><comment><USER3> I use bersirc. It's an old client, but it checks out. It's very simple to use.

You're not going to be able to use it to market a product, unless you're specifically targeting hackers or bearded system administrators.</comment>


What Is the Last Question? - <AUTHOR> https://www.edge.org/the-last-question-1 <comment><USER2> > Will AI make the Luddites (mostly) right?

"Yes" will be our Last Answer.

> What might the last fully biological human's statement be at their last > supper?

"The Luddites were (mostly) right"

> Will we pass our audition as planetary managers?

> Will scientific advances about the causes of sexual conflict help to end the > "battle of the sexes"?

> Can natural selection's legacy of sex differences in values be reconciled > with the universal values of the Enlightenment?

> Will humans ever embrace their own diversity?

Will the virtue signaling ever stop?

> If science does in fact confirm that we lack free will, what are the > implications for our notions of blame, punishment, reward, and moral > responsibility?

A better question: Why is that so hard to understand that the answer is "none"?</comment>


Biogrid's GPU-accelerated world simulation - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@haversine02/simulated-worlds-are-like-onions-dfa18cab3d85 <comment><USER2> This is not a very descriptive title, and I almost skipped over what was a really cool article as a result.

<comment><USER3> Apparently "makes your eyes water when you cut them" wasn't part of the answer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is amazing stuff for what sounds like a side project. Would love to check out the public demo which seems to be coming soon

</comment><comment><USER5> Is there a more up-to-date demo available to the public? The link on his subreddit has not been updated in 3 years.

</comment><comment><USER6> Really interested to see where you go with this. Amazing achievement so far

</comment><comment><USER7> This is very impressive! Is the world just flat or is it a full 3D sphere?

<comment><AUTHOR> Flat. Which apparently raised some very important questions: [https://twitter.com/BioGridGame/status/1101496659102650369](https://twitter.com/BioGridGame/status/1101496659102650369)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks awesome! Like Tidal tribe on steroids. Do you have a newsletter so I can know when its ready? I wanna play it.</comment>


Show HN: Pocket Digest – an RRS reader without information overload - <AUTHOR> http://productchaseapp.herokuapp.com/pocket_digest <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, everyone, I'm a fan of Pocket, and I've been using Pocket's data to filter the my RSS feed for sometime. I end up with this idea, and I want to share it with you and the Pocket team.

The basic idea is that, by using Pocket data, we can subscribe as much as possible blogs as possible and end up with better content that we might interested. This was a critical problem for typical RSS readers and now I see it can be solved decently by Pocket.

The full thought is at [https://medium.com/@cqcn1991/pocket-digest-your- personalized...](https://medium.com/@cqcn1991/pocket-digest-your-personalized- feed-without-information-overload-d10ed5f64822)</comment>


Rough silicon nanowires potentially allow much more efficient waste-heat to electricity conversion - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v451/n7175/abs/nature06381.html

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://www.scribd.com/doc/1005581/nature06381></comment>


Have any HN members met here and collaborated on a project? - <AUTHOR> With the abundance of talent and ideas on HN one would think that readers/users would by now have formed viable teams of founders and gone on to conquer the world. So, has any of you done so? Tell us your story. Also if you would like to meet a collaborator / co-founder here, by all means reach out. <comment><USER2> I've met a _bunch_ of people on HN that I've gone on to do stuff with. Patrick McKenzie, one of my current business partners, is just the most obvious example.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm working on a platform for just that with another person I found on here. It's real early on so we'll see how it goes. To me a platform were people can contribute part time on team projects to make money seems like the perfect alternative to, well, everything else.

<comment><USER4> I would be interested in testing it out. I am close to New York City would be interesting in any meetups also.

<comment><USER5> What about meetings in remote locations? I'm in the USVI and it'd be great to meet some fellow HNers passing through.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am under the impression (mistaken? please correct me if I'm wrong) that patio11 and tptacek met here, and have since founded starfighters.io

</comment><comment><USER7> I recently met several people who may become potential collaborators due to comments about what I'm working on (privacy-focused ad-tech), and I've met a few generally interesting people in the Bay Area to have lunch/dinner with here as well. I always reply to handwritten emails, my email is in my profile.</comment>