Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/10/salesforce-is-buying-data-visualization-company-tableau-for-15-7b-in-all-stock-deal/ <comment><USER2> So I have to deal with both tools at my company. The reality is that it all feels so incomplete from a BI standpoint. Managers are throwing money at front end tools like Salesforce and Tableau, but the entire back end stack is still pretty much the same as 20-30 years ago (big expensive Oracle-ish databases).

I think the development of Python and Jupyter and other less known things like Vega are much more interesting. Python is today the only "glue code" that puts all of it together, from data to insights.

<comment> qwert-e > I think the development of Python and Jupyter and other less known things > like Vega are much more interesting.

In that case you may be interested in Dash (dash.plot.ly). It's a free and open source library that you can use to create dashboards online with Python only.

<comment><USER3> plotly aint exactly free, you get 25ish free plot and then you gotta pay.

<comment><USER4> That's not totally accurate... If you use our SaaS Chart Studio product then yes, but otherwise (i.e. in 'offline' mode) you can use our Python, R and Javascript libraries as much as you like: they're MIT licensed.

<comment><USER4> PS: and Dash, which is what the GP was talking about, is totally free and unrelated to Chart Studio :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow, Looker last week and now Tableau. I'm only 90 days in to running the open source equivalent inside GitLab, and these big revenue multiples are telling a fascinating story. I would've loved to be a fly on the wall for this negotiation, what a great outcome for Tableau shareholders!

With all that's happening we're definitely looking to pick up the pace, and would love to work with more contributors on the free open source alternative at Meltano (www.meltano.com)

Edit: just wrote a quick post with some open questions I'd like to explore around this deal [https://meltano.com/blog/2019/06/10/salesforce-is- acquiring-...](https://meltano.com/blog/2019/06/10/salesforce-is-acquiring- tableau-for-15-7b/)

<comment><USER6> Exactly what we've been looking for. An open source ETL tool.

This looks great. Will check it out for sure. Keep up the great work.

I wonder if there are any other open source tools in this space?

<comment><USER5> There are some great tools in this space, definitely worth exploring.

Our vision is to glue the steps from ETL to dashboard together in an end-to- end solution. We pick whatever we consider best in class and integrate it. So far, we've got Singer, DBT, Jupyter Notebooks and Apache Airflow and we're using VueJS for both the product UI and our website.

We're also working on a blog post exploration what other acquisition might happen in this space. We're adding suggestions to the spreadsheet as we hear them on Twitter, HN, etc [https://meltano.com/blog/2019/06/10/first-looker- and-tableau...](https://meltano.com/blog/2019/06/10/first-looker-and-tableau- which-data-visualization-companies-are-likely-to-be-acquired-next/)

<comment><USER7> thanks for the product. I checked Singer, DBT, both of which are great idea and product. I build one very similar (conceptually) to DBT in my last data project. (I would not if I knew dbt is there).

Airflow is too heavy weight for me, I use Scons to do the workflow management.

meltano must do a lot of work to integrate all this together. I wonder what is the general user experience is. To me, seems too heavy weight.

<comment><USER5> Ideally, to abstract away complexity (which is what causes that "heavy" feeling)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One thing I've had to remind myself of - coming from a CS/Engineering background similar to most folks on HN (I'm guessing) - is that there are 2 types of people: Those who program and those who don't.

To me, Salesforce looks like a big shared Excel file with a bunch of sheets. Tableau... well I can do the same thing with some scripts or spin up a web server.

To others, this tech is just magical. Pay the money, do the integration and it just works... And clearly people will pay a lot of money for things that "just work".

<comment><USER9> As an engineer, this has really fascinated me. Tableau, Salesforce, Excel, etc. were things that never made a significant amount of sense to me. I thought mostly of Salesforce as a CRUD app (which it is!), Tableau as d3 with nicer ergonomics, and Excel as... well... something I never understood.

If this is something you guys are interested in, I started a company called Retool ([https://tryretool.com](https://tryretool.com)) that is essentially Excel for developers. Imagine if every Excel cell — instead of being a cell — were instead a React component. So you drag and drop these components around, and you can connect them to any back-end datasource (postgres, APIs, etc.). So you could drag on a table and have it pull data from `select * from users` from postgres, and then drag on a button and have it `POST` the selected row back to your API, in order to ban a particular user. The goal is to let end users build CRUD apps (like Salesforce) around their existing datasources quickly.

If you guys have any feedback... I'd really appreciate it. We're just starting out, and really curious to get any feedback from developers. Thanks!

<comment><USER10> When I looked into this a few months ago, your pricing didn't make sense to me. You're saving developer time, but charging on user time. So I've got 800 people in this org and I could either pay a shit ton to use retool or just build it from scratch. The difference between both of these is my time so it makes sense I'd pay you for that.

That made it not viable for me. Building from scratch was way cheaper with Upwork. Anyway, Product was cool.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the feedback — that's really helpful. I agree that our pricing isn't good for a large org that is looking to build a tool or two (instead of say, a few hundred).

Do you mind if I email you? (I can't see your email in your profile, but my email is email@example.com if you're interested in reaching out.) I'm really curious — just to learn — what kind of pricing plan might work for you. Would a per-app model work for you, for example? Thanks!

<comment><USER10> I've since left the company but one of my friends working there is the one who suggested we try the product anyway. I'll tell him to contact you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This seems really high for a company without earnings and a weird growth curve. Their ticker is cool and maybe sales force wants to be DATA on nasdaq.

Otherwise, it will be hard to justify this high markup for a tool company.

It will be awesome if Salesforce can adjust their model and make Tableau spit out D3. Their desktop tool is nice for designing, but their server components seem frequently unnecessary for running the visualization. The catch is that creating serverless dynamic visualizations isn't all that money-making and the cool UI/UX design tool is outside of OSS' wheelhouse.

<comment><USER12> _> This seems really high_

Precisely what I thought. It looks like their annual revenue is ~ $1 billion, placing this price around 15x annual revenue.

However, Looker has about $131 million in revenue, so their purchase price was an even higher 20x annual revenue.

My conclusion is that these acquisitions are much less about sales revenue and much more about filling strategic holes in product offerings, and I can only assume it's a sellers market in that area.

<comment><USER13> Multiplers don't scale linearly. The lower your valuation, the more possible it is to get a higher multiple for various reasons (cash, # of bidders in the market, etc).

At $1B/year in revenue there aren't a lot of companies that can realistically acquire you. At $131MM/year, there are.

But still I agree. Both are quite high.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Salesforce currently has a P/E ratio of 104. The headline might as well read "Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B in Monopoly money."

This deal makes a lot of sense for Salesforce. They should be (and are) on an acquisition spree.

But if I had stock options (or any kind of locked-up equity) in Salesforce, I'd be worried right now. Someone is going to be left holding the bag.

<comment><USER15> Interestingly, I think an earlier version of the title had "in all-stock deal", but I think the mods removed it. I wish they hadn't, as that's an important detail for the reasons you mention. (Also, ask James Baker, who was convinced by Goldman Sachs to sell Dragon Naturally Speaking in an all-stock deal ... of a company that turned out to be the Belgian Enron.)

<comment><USER16> I was in speech recognition tech during that time. It all tanked, but Dragon got screwed the hardest. ScanSoft (now Nuance) made out like a bandit with all the tech fire sales post-bust.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, I can't imagine how Baker (and all the employee-shareholders) must have felt about being advised not to do the standard half-cash-half-stock purchase and then turn out to be a fraud so soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I love this. Mulesoft, Tableau -- there's a very clear strategy here for Salesforce. You're running all of your customer-facing operations on Salesforce, so why not also integrate the BI stack into everything?

I've worked with a lot of companies who spend months (if not years) integrating their data into a few disparate systems... The finance team has one system (and underlying data lake), the commerce team another, the marketing team another... If Salesforce thinks they can run the entire underlying data infrastructure in addition to the actual customer-facing functions, then this is a smart play.

<comment><USER18> It's a risky play. At my enterprise company, we're not allowed to use a single vendor for everything, we explicitly must use different companies if a favoured vendor hits a certain spend threshold.

This is to prevent cost overruns and solution capture, where every solution to your company's problems becomes "give it to X vendor" and then X vendor kills a product line and you're toast.

Salesforce needs to be careful or else they'll hit that threshold where companies don't want to use them because you as a client are too small. Google is facing this problem right now.

<comment><USER19> Although there is a good % of the market that works in a similar way to your business, it is worth noting that when a deal is exceptionally good, executives will create exceptions. MS Suite and some of its satellite offerings (PowerBI,Sharepoint,etc) is a good example of an exception.

There are also cases where a company will pick multiple vendors in an attempt to de-risk and/or for negotiating tactics. If you are fully dependent on a single vendor, the cost of migrating tends to skyrocket and the negotiating power moves towards the vendor.

<comment><USER20> > If you are fully dependent on a single vendor, the cost of migrating tends > to skyrocket and the negotiating power moves towards the vendor.

This is particularly important with SaaS, as you lack the leverage to walk away. If you're fighting with a vendor, you had best resolve it by your contract date, as they will happily shut you off and wait for you grovel (and pay).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I remember the wave of BI vendor acquisitions in 2007-2008 when IBM acquired Cognos and SAP acquired BusinessObjects. Now, 12 years later the wave repeats. Google is buying Looker. Salesforce is buying Tableau, and probably Qlik will be acquired within the next 1-2 years too.

<comment><USER22> Qlik was sold to Thoma Bravo, a private equity firm, about two years ago for $3B.

Not sure if that's a relative bargain compared to this deal or if it makes the $15.7B look totally unrealistic. As of a few years ago the total revenue of the two firms wasn't that different.

<comment><USER21> I've heard that Thoma Bravo specializes on re-selling assets. If that's true then the $15bln sticker on Tableau should only justify and boost their intention to re-sell Qlik.

<comment><USER23> Haven't heard much about Qlik lately. A few years ago we were evaluating Birst and Qlik, and have since settled on Looker and Tableau.

Birst end up getting acquired too. [https://www.infor.com/news/infor-to- acquire-birst-infor](https://www.infor.com/news/infor-to-acquire-birst-infor)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Can't wait to pay $1000 per gigabyte per month to host my analytics data there.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, Salesforce presentation of pricing really can feel like a bait-and- switch. Advertised as a pay per-user per-month, but then to actually make the system work you get all of these add-on fees, like for storage, or for API calls to perform data integration, etc.

<comment><USER25> The data storage limit increased quite a bit just a few months ago:

[https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en- us/spring19/rele...](https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en- us/spring19/release-notes/rn_storage.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm the CPO at a SaaS data catalog and analysis hub company called data.world - I was at the Snowflake Summit when the Looker acquisition by Google was announced - the guys at their booth seemed pretty happy ;)

With Google snapping up Looker ($2.6B) for Google Cloud, Salesforce's much bigger purchase of Tableau is a clear sign that the big guys see buying BI tools is a good way to expand the reach of their offerings into more of the business. We talk to companies every day that have made massive investments in data warehouses, viz tools, and high-paid data scientists, but they still aren't agile enough because they can't tie it all together so their people can find and use the right data when they need it. I read an article once about the failure of self serve BI and the reality is that you just end up creating more sprawl. People need tools to reduce the clutter and sprawl and stop the endless chain of emails trying to figure out what table to look at or query to use or if your source is still updating.

We built our data catalog and analysis hub for exactly this, and it's extremely validating to see the big guys like Salesforce and Google investing in expanding the user base of big data tools and I really hope we can be part of the solution of sorting it all out!

<comment><USER27> Looker is way better than tableau.

Lets break it down:

Both are over priced

Lookeer, however has LookerML

Tableau obfuscates all code.

Looker has easier bolt-ons to redshift/postgres

Tableau's BI tool-set is weaker than looker, albeit, wider spread (more mature)

So, I think google got a steal and SF is playing catch-up... at a high cost.

Plus SF's sunk costs in eveything is going to make a 15B buy take at least two decades to pay off....

<comment><USER28> I disagree with you! Looker is more advanced, and that does not mean it is better. Tableau's tools were MUCH easier for me to make ad hoc analyses with, as well as to create dashboard with. Yes, there were some transformations that I couldn't apply and had to go to custom SQL or ETL for, but the total time to finish my analyses and produce high-quality live dashboards was much less than with Looker.

(I don't know why you are being downvoted though, you're entitled to an opinion same as me)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Oh hey, maybe this will mean somebody at Tableau has to start to give a damn about enterprise features, such as a way to do product activation and registration that doesn't fail completely in non-persistent virtual desktop environments.

Or Tableau can continue to pretend that this isn't a real issue and stonewall customers and partners alike.

I think the actual visualisation part is neat, and better than many competitors, but many of the server-side parts are various levels of disastrous (as is their support), and their "data preparation" tool needs some serious improvements to be borderline useable.

15+ billion seems like a lot to me given how Tableau interacts with customers and partners alike, especially seeing how they are activelly alienating existing enterprise customers, all in favour of new sales, but perhaps something will change for the better here.

<comment><USER30> Yeah as the defacto Tableau Server administrator in my org, I am not happy with Tableau. Despite it's power and ability to let less-technical people generate insights from data, the administration experience as a whole is a total nightmare; purchasing/applying licensing to all installations is a disaster. Maintenance upgrades and backup procedures are also sort of wonky. For the data visualization piece, I personally feel like the software is difficult to use because it uses custom "branded" terminology for many things, so the knowledge you gain using Tableau can't often help you outside of Tableau... and then they place many features in locations that are not intuitive and thus difficult to find without documentation or prior experience.

We're a Microsoft-heavy shop, and I've been trying to get them to move to Power Bi simply because it's far more fully featured, easier to use if you're familiar with the "Windows way" of working, and has streamlined administration/installation/licensing/configuration in Windows environments.

<comment><USER29> I think Tableau Server works better on Linux, where upgrades etc. are also somewhat less painful and require less downtime.

That said, it baffles me why I have to restart Tableau Server 3 or 4 times during installation, and why I have to restart it for trivial changes more generally. For a piece of software that specifically ships with a cluster controller and full-blown zookeeper, somehow their engineers (or "engineers", as I sometimes get the impression) manage to make things that should be trivially solvable with reloads, partial restarts or spawning new workers (e.g. SSL certificates for the built-in Apache webserver) require a complete restart of the whole node.

edit: Regarding Power BI -- I feel that Tableau Server is (for better or worse) one of the killer features for many enterprise customers, because it means all of your data can remain within your own infrastructure and does not have to rely on external cloud providers. If that is not a requirement in your organisation, Power BI might make sense depending on your overall IT landscape, as well as your users' specific needs. On the other hand, if your organisation requires hosting things yourself, I guess it doesn't matter how miserable the experience is for you as an administrator. That's basically Tableau Server in a nutshell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> this is a vote of no confidence for the Salesforce Einstein Analytics ( formally Wave analytics ) product. I suspect over the next couple years you'll see Einstein Analytics phased out in favor of Tableau with a SF stylesheet applied and framed inside Salesforce.

On the other hand, the IOT team at SF probably loves this. I got to spend a few days with the main engineers discussing their "Thunder" architecture a couple years ago. Under the covers it's awesome (great integration of multiple open source technologies) and the "IOT Cloud" UI isn't bad either but they didn't have an answer for data visualization on the scale they built for.

on a tangent, while getting into SF's IOT product they were talking about how it was so easy business analyst could set it up (famous last words right?). It's pretty easy to make a mistake and create a billion SF cases ( case is like a trouble-ticket in SF's Service product) in the span of " _click_ -> "oops let me undo that" -> _click_ " hah

<comment><USER32> Hey! Glad you enjoyed what the IOT team was doing! I didn't think many people knew about us!

I was actually a part of that team and left Salesforce pretty recently. I think i can safely state that everyone involved in building the tech for that IOT product was pretty proud of what we built.

That being said, the team that built it 2-3 years back and the current team are fundamentally different. The department was thoroughly axed back around November 2017, and multiple teams, including my old one, were spun out into different other projects. It's a shame really, that project was what lured me into joining a behemoth like Salesforce in the first place.

<comment><USER31> Wow we probably crossed paths. At the time, a CTA buddy of mine was starting the North America IOT Cloud practice at Accenture and was bringing me along for the ride. He had a baby and eventually left to run a program at a client (9 to 5 no travel). Without him, I bailed soon after for a higher up role at a startup. I would still love to get back in that scene though, this acquisition makes it that much more interesting.

<comment><USER32> Ha! We most likely did in some fashion. It sure is a small world out there. All the best!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If we look at Gartner's Analytics & BI magic quadrant from Feb 2019 ([https://www.qlik.com/us/-/media/B0DCF50C816448EEAC8981B02387...](https://www.qlik.com/us/-/media/B0DCF50C816448EEAC8981B0238781B1.ashx)) it becomes clear that Tableau(Salesforce) & PowerBI(Microsoft) are the driving force in the area.

The move to buy Tableau likely comes from an interest in enhancing cross- compatibility between Salesforce+Tableau, the ability to provide a more robust service offering that can compete with Microsoft (e.g. If you buy our CRM solution, we will give you Tableau for a 25% discount) and a concern that another big player would have come in and taken Tableau.

<comment><USER33> I've used PowerBI but it feels extremely limiting if you have a coder background. Don't know a single person who likes the BI tools that exists today and I've worked with a lot of BI people. I'm convinced BI people becomes coders solely because of the bad tools that exists today. Intelligent autocompletion, git and strong types? No! But here, have some drag and drop!

<comment><USER34> PowerBI is not for developer. It's for Data Scientist/Business Analyst.

Someone will come and build the dataset (or known as model) and the BA/DS can start building visualization that make sense to tell story about the company (or to tell the story about something).

It's a whole different market/profession.

<comment><USER33> Reproducibility is the number one rule in (data) science...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Wow.

When we started Graphistry, our view was, "skate to where the puck is going", so while we saw Looker and Periscope burning sales/marketing/dev $$$, the result felt 95% similar to Tabluea Public. Instead, we've focused on figuring out how to harness next gen -- GPUs, how to expose ML and automation, etc. While I still think we are right long-term, and that the cloud co's will be paying top dollar here for the next 5 years.. Short-term, I didn't expect this much market hunger for old-school.

Bravo to all the product PMs!

<comment><USER35> To clarify -- not just us, but think ServiceNow, Thoughtspot, and our fellow GPU startups. The next 5 years will be fun!

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm responsible for external salesforce integrations at my company, this is a really critical acquisition. Salesforce feature categories are surprisingly easy to compete with (be it LeadSourcing, Pipeline Management, 3rd Party App distribution, Licensing, Performance, Design, etc.) because they do a relatively average job at each of them. There are dozens of competitors springing up, many of whom target one of these categories as a key selling point.

Now if you go into a fortune 500 sales meeting to pitch how much better the analytics stack of your CRM is, they will come back saying that Salesforce is clearly investing to be superior in that category for the long haul.

<comment> Arcanum-XIII Honestly, while doing some business analyst job for a company, the higher up keep on bringing Salesforce as something we should consider for a B2C project. Their marketing force is something to recon - and the lack of basic knowledge about what they wanted to put on the market was frightening. So, they're not the best? People don't seem to think clearly about this :(

<comment><USER37> Sometimes its easier to buy the second best at everything, (caught Microsoft) and benefit from everything supposedly working together, and a clear cohesive overall roadmap, than trying to stitch 200 individual products together, make them all pass data to each other naively, and hope that their feature changes and roadmaps stay aligned.

<comment><USER12> Oh yes ^^^ this. Where I work we recently upgraded from a single legacy product to another ERP, only for many secondary functions we went "best of breed" to additional SaaS products. It has had, literally, an exponential increase in the necessary resources to make them all work together. Keep in mind, the ERP we upgraded to also had modules for these secondary functions, but it was a case of Perfect-Is-The-Enemy-of-Good, and the sum of all parts is now much less than the mediocre Good we would have had with a single ecosystem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I stopped teaching Tableau because of the licensing costs to my students.

Tableau feels more polished than PowerBI although BI has pretty much reached feature parity with Tableau.

The problem is the licensing costs. PowerBI is very affordable ($10 a month) while Tableau is not($70 and UP).

Tableau is basically saying, unless you have a corporation paying for the license err SAAS subscription do not bother to use us.

[https://www.tableau.com/pricing/individual](https://www.tableau.com/pricing/individual)

There was a free option that was pitifuly unused and crippled to cloud only without any exports.

Then again by focusing only on companies for whom the licensing costs are a drop in a cloudy ocean Tableau brought in a 16B valuation.

<comment><USER39> Tableau is free for students and teachers. (1 year license) [https://www.tableau.com/academic/students](https://www.tableau.com/academic/students). It's not crippled.

<comment><USER40> I used to teach Tableau too and while you're right, the tool still becomes useless after graduation because of the ~$1000/yr price tag.

From there, tableau becomes a "learn it just to get hired at a company that might use it" tactic, which is a valid job hunting strategy but is not something useful to learn in a data viz class, especially since there are other data viz tools the students can learn _and_ keep using after graduation.

<comment><USER39> Are you teaching how to use Tableau (the product) or Data science/BI? Because I don't think you should be learning how to use a specific software product at school unless it's vocational.

That said, I don't see why any student couldn't continue using the free Public version.

<comment><USER38> You are aware how crippled the free Tableau version is? Just public dashboards no saving functionality at all.

Judging by the sparsity of the public dashboards seemingly no one is using the free version.

As bduerst said, learning Tableau is only useful if your employer will be paying for it.

So I briefly cover Power BI and concentrate on Python. I'd rather spend more time on various visualization methods in Python.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm still really interested to see if there's any long term blow back for Salesforce from the whole Camping World saga.

Even for people who agree on principle, as a business owner in general I'd be very wary of using software from any 3rd party who's willing to try to influence how I run my own business. It makes me wonder about all of the other companies under that SF umbrella too.

</comment><comment><USER42> I never really understood tableu, it just makes fancy graphs from your data doesn't it? What's new about it?

<comment><USER43> > I never really understood tableu, it just makes fancy graphs from your data > doesn't it? What's new about it?

It's really easy for business users to point it at a database and get started on their own, exploring the data. It feels like it has a much lower barrier to entry than many other reporting tools.

And once you win the hearts of executives, that's kind of the end of that discussion. It's a really sticky product.

<comment><USER44> Also, the business users can combine data sources and do joins. Instead of waiting for IT to produce the right views.

<comment><USER45> Business users don't usually have a clue what a join is.

<comment><USER46> No, but most of them know what a v-lookup is, and almost all of them know when they need the result that a join accomplishes.

<comment><USER47> Yeah, one of my old coworkers was ecstatic when he learned about joins. He'd been downloading two tables and then using vlookup to join them in Excel. Using actual joins sped up his workflow a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I think that many folks don't remember or know about how the word "BI" [business intelligence] was born.

Back in the day corporations paid programmers and consulting companies millions of dollars for the purpose of building out applications with databases upon which to digitize their business processes. This was a great for a couple decades, up until some time in the 90's.

It was at that point that expectations had caught up with digitization and having your battle-axes in accounting/order-entry/supply-chain do their keyboard magic on green-screens just wasn't cutting it. To actually understand what was going on, managers had to ask for specific reports from these people and they were just not in a position to do the reports as well has get their own ever-increasing-shit done. Let alone whatever the hell sales was doing.

For a control-freak in management this just isn't acceptable. They started to find ways to "serve themselves". Eventually someone had the idea to hook the enterprise databases into their own zany spreadsheets. It was amazing. There was such a fountain of knowledge and insight that it made the people who could do that seem like relative geniuses. Almost "intelligent" in their business jobs. Thus, "Business Intelligence" was born.

"Business Intelligence" is the practice of making badly-designed opaque shit from brutal, inscrutable business applications... visible.

Only now are makers of enterprise applications starting to get it (or pretend to get it).

</comment><comment><USER49> They paid for a bubble (Tableau stock) using another bubble (CRM stock). So all is good in the funny world that we live in.

</comment><comment><USER50> Bright years ahead for acquisitions in business & development tools segment: Slack, Gitlab, Figma

</comment><comment><USER51> I was recruited for one of the first engineering positions at Tableau a very long time ago, but I turned it down as it just wasn't interesting enough. I think I was targetted in part because I was a SIGGRAPH presenter/author as one of the co-founders, Pat Hanrahan, was big into SIGGRAPH. Oh well.

It is a great success for a brilliant computer graphics professor: [https://graphics.stanford.edu/~hanrahan/](https://graphics.stanford.edu/~hanrahan/) [http://www.graphics.stanford.edu/projects//polaris/](http://www.graphics.stanford.edu/projects//polaris/)

</comment><comment><USER52> Wow, this seems extremely overpriced! Should give Microsoft and PowerBI a big boost value wise.

</comment><comment><USER53> I'm shocked to see this not being a better day for Elastic. While still quite narrow with ELK stack, the elasticsearch backend is something that many more companies can make useful quickly given how non-finicky it is.

</comment><comment><USER54> Very happy for the Tableau folks, they are great to work with!

My firm uses Informatica's IICS to output all of the datasets for Tableau to visualize, its not as exciting as the hundreds of frameworks and languages that do the same but it works reliably and I don't have to hire expensive data scientists to get the job done or switch tech every few years to whatever is the flavor of the month.

We take the 80/20 approach that most questions the business asks can be answered with Informatica. The last 20% we save for our developers and the odd data scientist to help us with.

</comment><comment><USER55> I really really hope this makes Salesforce more like Tableau and not the other way around. Their UX and workflows are atrocious (not that their main competitors' aren't).

</comment><comment><USER56> At its core, Tableau is an implementation of a really elegant formalism to specify visualizations, and it's much more organized and declarative than something like Grammar of Graphics.

[http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/cstolte_thesis/](http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/cstolte_thesis/)

</comment><comment><USER57> Not very surprising, they have been looking at them for a while.

[https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/leaked- docu...](https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/leaked-document- listed-tableau-among-salesforces-potential-acquisition-targets/)

</comment><comment><USER58> Just for the comparison, salesforce's revenue is ~$13B. At current profit rate, ( including that of tableau ), they can generate $15B in about 30 year, may be 20 year given growth and inflation. I run a small business, I don't think I would be able to generate equivalent of deal, nor my banker/investor allowed such a investment, no matter what growth would look like.

Ultimately my take is, small business usually take growth from someone else most of the time ( i.e. new restaurant steal customer from another old customer ), instead of generating brand new growth, while bigger business are actually creating - or - consolidating whole industry for growth in a society- positive way in the long run. ( like uber ).

Still somewhere I would wish I can replicate such method of growth for small businesses.

<comment><USER59> Wow. I think that's a very insightful perspective, but come away with a very different perspective:

Big companies play by very different rules than small ones, especially big tech companies right now, and I don't see consolidation being (broadly) socially positive at all really.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Last week Looker, today Tableau, next week Qlik or Alteryx?

I wonder how this will integrate with Einstein and other AI products salesforce already has. Pardot is the first to come to mind. They already own Heroku, Mulesoft, and Quip.

Exciting times to be a data geek. Hopefully this adds more money to the AI race.

<comment><USER61> yeah I see Alteryx or something similar as their next purchase. All they are missing now is a ETL solution.

<comment><USER62> What do you call Mulesoft?

<comment><USER63> The #6 tool behind Informatica, Dell Boomi, Jitterbit, Workato and SnapLogic according to Gartner.

<comment><USER62> Yet it's still an ETL tool.

On a sidenote, at what point do we stop taking Gartner seriously? Recent report had MicroStrategy (complete dinosaur of an application) ranked top on almost every category. It's so blatant.

[https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-6P7GS86&ct=190517&...](https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-6P7GS86&ct=190517&st=sb)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Looker, Periscope, and Tableau have all been acquired or merged in the last six weeks. Periscope merged with another BI start up Sisense. Looker and Tableau were part of a multibillion dollar acquisitions. It's an interesting time for this space.

</comment><comment><USER57> Great news! Maybe the Salesforce connector will finally work properly and allow filtering.

</comment><comment><USER65> I think the value will be created from the data itself, less focus on data- processing skills. Of course, modeling skills will be still important at future, but data-processing would rather become much more easier. That's why self-bi tools like Tableau, Elastic search are becoming more and more popular.

I am personally focusing on Metatron Discovery, which is an Open-Sourced Big data analytics platform for citizen scientists. Link : [https://github.com/metatron-app/metatron- discovery](https://github.com/metatron-app/metatron-discovery)

</comment><comment><USER66> Salesforce appears increasingly worried about being pigeonholed as a CRM product and wants to ride the data wave and be seen as a data product.

I'm not sure this acquisition makes a lot of sense though. The Tableau fad seems to be fading as people realize that while it's a nice glorified Excel it doesn't really solve the data issues most companies have. It seems like a very high price for a product that may be past it's peak.

That said, we'll done to the Tableau team for having gone public and then selling the company again at a nice bump.

<comment><USER12> The bloom may be off the rose with Tableau, but I'm not sure I understand the "glorified Excel" comment. Sure, Excel has charts and pivot tables that might have something comparable in any single visualization in Tableau, but its inherently non-relational and single data source, where Tableau is made to mash up data from multiple sources for exploration and creation of interactive dashboards, something Excel doesn't really do very well, if at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Another reminder that Oracle got a screaming deal for Sun at a net $5.6 billion in 2009. Either that or Salesforce has more money than brains.

<comment><USER68> It's a stock deal, and Salesforce seems a bit stretched in valuation, so I'm sure the deal isn't going to end up being this high.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Did Google know Tableau could also be acquired? I wonder how powerful this acquisition would be for Google Cloud instead of Looker.

<comment><USER70> ~15B vs ~2B

I think they evaluated very well

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Salesforce Press release: [https://www.salesforce.com/company/news- press/press-releases...](https://www.salesforce.com/company/news-press/press- releases/2019/06/191006-f/)

</comment><comment><USER71> I can hope they leave them alone, but that's a fools wish. Not looking forward to them stripping away feature after feature, and charging exorbitant per-user prices to get them back.

</comment><comment><USER72> Anyone know how something like Tableau compares to something like Palantir? I don't have any experience with either but I've heard that Palantir is valued quite high as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> So what does this mean to Tableau using BI analysts out there? does it add values to my tableau certifications?

</comment><comment><USER73> Dear techcrunch: I will NOT disable my adblock

</comment><comment><USER74> Leave it to Salesforce to buy the clunky incumbent, not Periscope

<comment><USER75> They are arguably essentially buying revenue to help their bottom line. Salesforce hopes to add $350-400M to their FY20 revenue

<comment><USER12> That's a pretty steep price to pay for a single-digit % increase in revenue. I view this more as filling a strategic hole. BI & Analytics from Salesforce are awful.</comment></comment></comment>


Obama's Net Neutrality Bid Divides Civil Rights Groups - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/08/business/obamas-net-neutrality-bid-divides-civil-rights-groups.html <comment><USER2> "Some of the groups that oppose Title II designation, like the Urban League and the League of United Latin American Citizens, have received contributions from organizations affiliated with Internet service providers, like the Comcast Foundation, the charitable organization endowed by Comcast"

"But those organizations say that the donations or sponsorships do not influence their positions."

Yeah, OK.

</comment><comment><USER3> The key I see here is, while we need to restrict the ability of delivery companies from determining whom they provide service too we cannot regulate minimum terms of service to end consumers because its likely that is the most they will ever get.

One thing I remember well from regulation, before competition, was that if they had to guarantee a minimum service that was all you got until your area was rich enough to support upgraded investment

<comment><USER4> _we need to restrict the ability of delivery companies from determining whom they provide service_

 _we cannot regulate minimum terms of service to end consumers_

Sorry, those two conditions are completely mutually exclusive.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Have you vouched for dead HN submissions? - <AUTHOR> The feature was implemented a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10298512<p>...and I haven't vouched for a single submission, nor seen one I would have vouched for, which is a testament to HN's spam detector. Articles that have been flagkilled usually have valid justification. <comment><USER2> By 'submissions' do you mean stories as opposed to comments? If so, then yes, it's rare for dead stories to get rescued by vouching. We see maybe one or two a day. We see more rescued comments, though not as many as I expected. We've also seen very few cases of users rescuing posts—either stories or comments—that ought not to be rescued, which is a testament to HN's community.

Notes for anyone wondering where the 'vouch' links are: (1) they only show up on [dead] posts, so you have to have 'showdead' on in your profile, and (2) for comments, you have to go to the item page (linked from the timestamp) to see them, just as you do for 'flag'.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, completely forgot you could vouch for comments. Those numbers make sense.

<comment><USER2> We mostly created vouching for comments. The problem was that banned accounts sometimes post good comments, so autokilling every comment is too coarse- grained. The core idea of modnesty (comment vouching) is that being banned no longer means your comments are all [dead], but merely that they are subject to a jury of your peers. After a month, I think it's safe to say that this has worked; in fact it has exceeded our expectations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Yes. Both for user-flagged ones and for ones stuck in the spam filter ([dead]). (and a flag by me has been overridden by other users)

</comment><comment><USER4> I've vouched for a few comments (I try to vouch for as many good comments in a dead users' history as I can), but not submissions.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've vouched for comments, but not submissions.

I find it much easier to flag than vouch, which is weird because it should probably be the other way round.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've vouched for one story so far.</comment>


Dengue fever cases have surged in the Americas this year, says health agency - <AUTHOR> https://latinamericareports.com/dengue-fever-cases-have-surged-in-the-americas-this-year-says-international-health-agency/2935/ <comment><USER2> I lived in Thailand for the past year and was unlucky enough to get dengue after only a month there, despite liberal application of mosquito spray and keeping them out of the house. I wouldn't wish dengue on anyone.

It's a huge problem in Southeast Asia, and the tactics employed to eliminate the problem are often not helpful in the long-term (e.g. random spraying of insecticide in residential areas).

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm hoping to be in a position to fund a pirate gene drive extermination of mosquito subspecies in 2020/2021, if someone else hasn't done it before then. i.e. do all the development and then implement the solution without "permission" because fuck waiting around for 5-10 years of pointless debate.

</comment><comment><USER4> Very true in Nicaragua, and not only a surge in cases, this year strand seems to be a really bad one, it lowers the platelets to very low levels, causing internal bleeding, while the body is dumping all the iron trying to fight the infection.

</comment><comment><USER5> Maybe now there will some more money spent in dengue research, and we in the poor countries will get a cure for it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Afriend contracted a dengue like fever from Budapest. I thought he was going to die, and his joint pain was unbelievable...in every joint.

</comment><comment><USER7> probably due to all the insecticide used in agriculture killing off the natural predators of mosquitoes. but i am sure the wealthy are rubbing their hands in thinking of the number of their companies that can profit from this.</comment>


The Art of Computer Programming: Random Numbers - <AUTHOR> http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=2221790 <comment><USER2> When you step back to think about it, a _huge_ amount of CS theory papers rely on this hand-wavy definition of "randomness" to prove something. Oddly, though, if you actually press a CS theory person for a mathematical definition of this concept, they virtually always draw a blank.

As a student I remember thinking that this was _incredibly_ alarming. Without a good understanding of this concept, how can we be sure any of what we're saying is even remotely correct?

What Knuth has given us here is the ideal treatment of the subject, essentially putting the question of what randomness is, to rest for good. He starts by taking a comprehensive, entertaining history of the landscape (in short: researchers ping-ponged between having definitions of randomness so strict that nothing was random, and so loose that they were all pathologically predictable) before finally proving a theorem that completely solves the problem.

It is a monumental accomplishment in the field, and it is quite shocking to me that it's still so obscure. It's one of my favorite results in all of CS, anywhere.

If you haven't had the chance, I highly recommend the rest of this volume (Seminumerical Algorithms). It is just stuffed with other surprising, amazing results.

<comment><USER3> What? The modern definition of pseudorandomness ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandomness#Pseudorandomn...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandomness#Pseudorandomness_in_computational_complexity)) was figured out in the 80s through the works of Blum, Goldwasser, Micali, Goldreich, etc. and is not hand-wavy at all. It's pretty rigorous and reliable.

<comment><USER2> You are 100% mistaken that this implies we had a good definition of random sequences before Knuth. In the article you link, they discuss the uniform distribution, but any distribution (and the modern notion of probability in general) absolutely depends on a mathematically precise notion of random sequences.

If you don't believe me, read the chapter. Early probability theorists (e.g., von Mises, Kolmogorov) literally started thinking about randomness _in order to define probability_.

EDIT: And, I don't suppose it's worth pointing out that pseudorandomness is _not at all_ the same thing as randomness. The fact that you seem to use them interchangeably is not a good sign IMHO.

EDIT 2: Why the unexplained downvote, HN? :(

<comment><USER3> I skimmed through the extract presented (didn't have time to go into detail) but I don't see a formal definition of any kind presented in the extract. Could you point me to where it is? And if it's not in the extract, then could you quote it here?

Pseudorandomness is not the same thing as randomness but most algorithms today work on pseudorandom numbers so the concept is important. My impression was that that's what you were referring to.

PS :- FYI I didn't downvote your comment. Actually upvoted as your post made me discover some new math (various notions of randomness by kolmogorov, von mises, martin-lof) :)

<comment><USER2> So, the excerpt here is chapter 3, section 1. The actual definition happens in chapter 3 section 5 ("What Is a Random Sequence?"). I have the book at home, though, so I can't quote it here. Sorry. But the intuition is, if you have an infinite sequence of random numbers, then the numbers in all infinite subsequences should be equidistributed. So, like, if you a stream of random 0's and 1's, then if you pick only every other number, the 0's and 1's have to be equiprobable, and if you pick every third number, they still have to be equiprobable, etc. This is slightly wrong, but it's on the right track to the actual definition.

re: Pseudorandomness, the point of pseudorandomness is the following.

1\. A lot of algorithms use randomness to make pathologically bad cases extremely unlikely. For example, choosing a random pivot in quicksort makes the worst case _very_ unlikely.

2\. But in a lot of cases, this leads to huge amounts of space consumption. For example, most frequency moment estimations involve a matrix of random numbers. So if you're getting those numbers from a "truly random" source, then you have to store the entire matrix, which can be huge.

3\. So, a better solution is to use a pseudorandom number generator! That way you can store a seed of s bits, and do something clever, like deterministically re-generate the matrix as you need it, rather than storing it outright.

Notice though, that this is not independent of the notion of randomness! In fact they are quite intimately tied together.

<comment><USER3> Your definition relies on the notion of probability though. So I'm not sure why you seemingly view Knuth's work as more fundamental than Kolmogorov's, etc.

<comment><USER2> Because the trick Knuth pulls is to express this intuition without appealing to the definition of probability. It's quite clever.

<comment><USER4> What's the sketch of the trick? I can define randomness by appealing to some of the same basic theory used to develop probability, but it's not really independent despite looking that way from the outside. Does Knuth do this uniquely?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This reminds me of a (somewhat) funny situation that happened to me one time. My parents bought some Lotto tickets and wanted to play, so they filled most of the combinations themselves and left two of them for me. I was annoyed by having to do that, so I take the tickets, and ask my dad, "So, you know that every combination is equally likely to win?", and he casually replies something like, "Yeah, sure, I'm not dumb".

So just to get done with it, I pick 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 on one combo and 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14 on the other. I give it to him, when he throws his hands in the air and angrily says, "What the hell? You just wasted two combinations, these numbers are never going to get drawn!"

It handily illustrates how hard it is to grasp the concept of true randomness and probability, and even if you do get it, sometimes you'll be caught off guard and your psychological biases will kick in.

<comment><USER6> I ran through the same script with my dad once, except he answered "Yeah, but you'll have to split the pot with more smartasses like you."

<comment><USER7> "You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!" \-- Feynman

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Once you've got pseudorandom bits working, the next step is generating variates from different distributions. Luc Devroye has a nice book on this freely available online, "Non-Uniform Random Variate Generation". [http://luc.devroye.org/rnbookindex.html](http://luc.devroye.org/rnbookindex.html)

<comment><USER4> This book deserves lots of recommendations. Luc Devroye does generally, as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Do the Monte Carlo people all know about Barash and Shchur's work? They made an RNGSSELIB and PRAND (using NVIDIA cards), but the main contribution is that they incorporated a new way to generate multiple streams not by re-seeding the generator but by skipping ahead, even with Mersenne twisters. It is the only simple way to get parallel streams, and it didn't exist just a few years ago. You still need to be careful in various ways, but this helps a lot. A lot, a lot.

[1] [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.5866.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.5866.pdf)

<comment><USER10> Skipping ahead is not new; it is a well-known fact that any linearly recurrent generator, such as WELL, Xorshift, or Mersenne Twister can skip ahead via matrix exponentiation.

And it is not the only way to get good independent streams either; hooking a cipher with a counter is arguably a superior way to do it, cf [1].

[1] [http://www.thesalmons.org/john/random123/papers/random123sc1...](http://www.thesalmons.org/john/random123/papers/random123sc11.pdf)

<comment><USER9> I like that paper. Thank you. It has references which criticize the skipahead technique. I need to look into whether I believe that paper, though. There are lots of ideas about how to do this, and subtle flaws abound. While many generators are known to skipahead, there is a quite new technique for MT that makes it much faster, not by Barash and Shchur, but they used it. Again, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I feel compelled to share this quote from the author of _cfengine_ with whom I have had some emails of late, because it neatly summarizes a more holistic, physics-inspired approach to the computational world's obsession with invariance, which could be seen as present in the quest for 'randomness'.

 _The simplest idea of stability is constancy, or invariance. A thing that has no possibility to change is, by definition, immune to external pertubations. [...] Invariance is an important concept, but also one that has been shattered by modern ideas of physics._ What was once considered invariant, is usually only apparently invariant on a certain scale. _When one looks in more detail, we find that we may only have invariance of an average._ \- Mark Burgess, _In Search of Certainty: The Science of Our Information Infrastructure_ (2013)

This accords well with the opening quotation _Lest men suspect your tale untrue, Keep probability in view._ \- John Gay, English poet and dramatist and member of the Scriblerus Club (1727) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gay)

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm not sure why, but I struggled with the concept of randomness in my algorithms class. On the last day of class, the professor signed his book, "May you one day explain randomness to all of us"

</comment><comment><USER13> This is old material, right? Or is Knuth publishing a new fascicle?

<comment><USER14> This is old material, from Volume 2. What's new is the recently-published electronic editions, and, I guess, publishing some excerpts in online article form, like this one here.

<comment><USER15> ...and the reference to rap music.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What new technology / software are you waiting for? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I would say (profitable) fusion power (other than the Sun's...), but that may be 20 or 2,000 or 2,000,000 years from now so...

I'll go with mind-controlling machines. I know the US military is already quite advanced in that regard (trained pilots can control helicopters, jets too iirc), we've all seen the monkey using a third mechanical arm after a few minutes of training, there's this game with the ball in a magnetic field... mind-controlling stuff is going to be immensely powerful. And so swell.

The human-machine interface (how fast we can transfer information into the machine, how fast we can intake what it outputs) is the weakest link in the chain. Improve that, and you massively improve our capabilities, our power to do "everything else". Imho. And it would be so cool to feel like Jedis or Q's hehe. And robotics, a "smart"-world IoT-enabled at every corner, and you get an idea of a totally surreal world for us.

</comment><comment><USER3> This has me believing in nuclear energy again: .. www.moltexenergy.com .. Molten salt in tubes. Walk-away safe. Economics estimated cheaper than coal. Can burn existing wastes. Uses existing materials.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm waiting for feature-full postgres schema diff tool :) there are a few out there, some written in C (so difficult to contribute to) but none is feature- full.

<comment><USER5> Why is this hard? Can you just pg_dump the schema then diff?

Seems like this isn't something you have to wait for, you can start making one in a language other than C (like Rust jk).

<comment><USER4> It's very hard, merging schemas manually is painful and leads to errors. I'm writing this from experience..

Such tool is on my list since long ago, but unfortunately there is only 24 hours in the day :)

<comment><USER6> Some years ago, I wrote a tool to merge databases. There were a few differences in schema that it handled through configuration, but the tool was mostly about changing primary and foreign keys as it transferred the data so the merges wouldn't clash.

What's your use-case on "merging schemas"? Does it not merge data? Is it like you have a database with a table with columns "foo", and "bar", and then another database with a table with columns "bar", and "baz" and you want one of the database to end up with columns "foo", "bar", and "baz" without moving any of the actual data?

<comment><USER4> I'm using all sort of building blocks, I recall functions, views, custom types, triggers, publications on per-table basis. In most cases I don't allow for my schemas to divert, but there had been situations like developing next generation of the system where for reasons out of my memory I had to wait till job was done and then merge schemas. Probably this could have been avoided but in the same time I was not there when decisions was made :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> current generation "VR" is pretty underwhelming imo - it's literally a 3d movie attached to your face, providing parallax but not depth of field. There are things like magic leap that have 2 focal planes, but I don't know how well they work in practice.

I'm waiting for real light field displays to come to market, which should have a much more compelling experience. Maybe in 10 years...

</comment><comment><USER8> Would be nice to do more in VR -- waiting for high enough res for programming and photorealistic avatars for video chat.

</comment><comment><USER5> Actually good videoconferencing. This means low-latency and high-resolution so that you can see micro-expressions on the participants' faces in real-time not lag-time.

This is more valuable than remote AR/VR.

</comment><comment><USER9> a development tool chain to embed a Zig language application into an seL4 based unikernel image deployable interchangeably on AWS, Digital Ocean, etc.

an Intel-supported multi-platform open source ME disabler

an up-to-date untethered iOS jailbreak

peer to peer encrypted DNS

</comment><comment><USER10> I will take one Neural Lace, please.</comment>


PSA: Is your iPhone suddenly crashing? Here's why (and how to fix it) - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/01/psa-is-your-iphone-suddenly-crashing-heres-why-and-how-to-fix-it/ <comment><AUTHOR> For more details read the following reddit thread - [https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/7gzntq/psa_iphone_r...](https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/7gzntq/psa_iphone_rebootrespring_issues_megathread/?st=jaoz9p72&sh=dd0fb500)</comment>


New method to rapidly deploy newly discovered bacterial CRISPR (Merck/May 2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14958 <comment><AUTHOR> Any thoughts? Found it through an announcement at Sigma-Aldritch [1]. As a side comment, Merck went on quite a aquisiation rampage recently.

      [1] http://www.merckmillipore.com/DE/de/20170512_225124?ReferrerURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sigmaaldrich.com%2Funited-kingdom.html</comment>


Ask HN: Need feedback on landing page and idea - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
I've just launched the landing page for this idea that I've been thinking about lately. This is the first time I'm actually launching my little startup idea over HN and I'd really appreciate any comments on the idea itself or the copywriting/UI of the landing page.
I'm still new to this and I have much to learn from all of you guys.
http://kontactify.heroku.com
In brief, Kontactify is a tool for people to store namecards digitally via their mobile phone (with a camera). Instead of spending time typing in namecard information, you'd just need to snap a photo, email it to us and we'll do all the input. You can also retrieve the digital image of the namecard anytime. <comment><USER2> A few grammar issues:

\- Got too much should be "Got too many"

\- Store it online should be "Store them online"

\- Never lose your cards (plural) again

\- Attach instead of Attached

The page looks nice, gets to the point, easy to understand.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. This is really embarrassing. I shouldn't be making this kind of mistakes.

Thank you for spotting them.</comment></comment>


Don't use || to set default values in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://www.codereadability.com/javascript-default-parameters-with-or-operator/ <comment><USER2> "The OR adds mental overhead for whoever works on the function in the future"

What world is this guy living in? It's like it's the first time he's seen this and just decided "I don't like it, let me write an article about that".

Anyone working in JS for more than a month will have seen this as common practice. It much neater (and less mental headspace IMHO) than an extra if block. Particularly if you have more than one optional variable.

The only practical consideration raised is the falsy types can trip you up but that is easily negated. I have strong negative feelings for people who impose their own personal believes based on nothing but their feelings.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. His statement is based on opinion, nothing objective. I could argue that in languages like C# the coalesce operator '??' has a similar meaning, so it is intuitive for people who know C# concepts.

<comment><USER4> C#'s coalese only works on null. The problem is that JS will apparently see an empty string or 0, and consider that null. So if your function passes those values deliberately, the || trick breaks.

So long you're OK with that, it seems like a clean solution. It's JavaScript. There's tons of dumb stuff a JS coder must learn. If he's confused by || then he's likely to be unable to work on any real JS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Bullshit. Using _foo = bar || baz_ is perfectly valid when used judiciously.

 _foo = bar || baz_ is perfect when parsing inputs where unset is passed as "" or 0. To no great surprise, HTML forms are one such beast.

The Boolean operators are simply a shorthand for _if (!foo) foo = bar_ \-- when you mean _if (foo === undefined) foo = bar;_ then simply write that instead. At least omit the unnecessary braces and white space.

Verbose code is not necessarily more readable. You may be able to code your way around a reader not comprehending JS rules regarding Boolean coercion, but those rules are based on real world inputs which often do not have a special 'undefined' value.

<comment><USER6> I came in here to write pretty much the same thing... the only issue for me tends to be when 0 is allowed. As an interview problem, I will ask someone to write in JavaScript a method that takes a single parameter, that will always return a number or null.. if it's a string that represents a number, convert it, otherwise it should be null.

0 always trips people up in this, or other means of coercion. Other than that one case, I find the shortcut of || to be pretty much invaluable.

This is an example of something you should just learn how it works, rather then assume it's stupid or wrong because you don't know how the environment works. You should have seen how many people went up in arms at LINQ and even Lambda functions in C#. I've seen similar comments about lambda/fat-arrow functions coming into JS.

<comment><USER7> Is that a great interview question? It strikes me as the sort of thing where a positive doesn't tell you all that much additional about someone's engineering ability, nor does a negative.

<comment><USER6> It isn't the only thing I judge on, but when you see a stack of resumes where people put their JavaScript knowledge as "expert" ... I expect it to be a relatively easy question. It comes down to a level of honesty, and when someone says they are an expert with a language, they better know that language pretty well.

Like "what are the falsy values in JavaScript" (I usually let people get away with 3+ of them)

In the browser a very primary purpose for JavaScript is input validation... this includes strings... being able to reuse a method for internal validation is useful as well. Knowing how to do something useful in a language is a perfectly fine interview question.

It isn't like I'm asking people to write a bubble-sort, or how an IEEE 754 number is structured and how that relates to JS... Or how to determine the number of marbles in a given jar... or any other of other questions I've been asked in an interview. I'm asking someone to validate a simple input in one of the most widely used programming languages on the planet.

Sorry to go on a rant.. but hiring is hard, and when you are looking at someone why says they have a lot of experience with the skills that you are looking for (full-stack javascript/node)... expectations shouldn't be too low.

I'm more than happy to talk to people with other backgrounds and skills... I've hired plenty of newer/eager learners who don't have a lot of experience, but demonstrated the ability to work through a problem. In my mind effort/ambition/trying-stuff means more than specific experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Perl solved that issue by introducing the // and //= operators, which do the same thing as || and ||=, but restricted to consider only undef as false.

<comment><USER9> You mean those are not integer divide operators?

<comment><USER8> Numbers are float by default in Perl. If you want Integer operations you need to cast with int() or use [https://metacpan.org/pod/integer](https://metacpan.org/pod/integer)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10>
        var undefined = "raspberry";

        function eatFruit (fruit) {
            if (fruit === undefined) {
                fruit = "strawberry";
            }
            ...
        }

        eatFruit("raspberry");

<comment><USER11> I was intrigued and just tried this. It doesn't work (at least in the chrome console) -- "undefined" is a reserved keyword and while the interpreter doesn't complain about attempting to assign it the value of "raspberry," it appears to ignore the statement.

<comment><USER10> Apologies, you're right.

I'm sure this used to work, a few years ago... but I may be getting old.

<comment><USER10> But there's definitely still odd stuff here:

        $ node
        > var bar = undefined = "foo";
        undefined
        > bar
        'foo'
        > undefined
        undefined
        >

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Shouldn't the undefined check be like this?

        if (typeof fruit === "undefined") {
           fruit = "strawberry";
        }

Unless your doing something like:

        (function(undefined) {

        })();

<comment><USER13> In ES5+, the global `undefined` is immutable, so it should be pretty safe unless someone declared a local `undefined` var in an outer scope.

<comment><USER14> I use "var undef;" at the top of a function and never set it to a value. Comparison with === is the same as with undefined. And it's nice for minification.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> nevi-me Similar to what everyone else is saying, I don't get the author's point. I taught myself JavaScript a few years ago, and the first time I came across that || assignment, it made sense. I think many other people would say the same.

</comment><comment><USER13> I agree that default parameters will be a much nicer solution to this problem, but using the OR operator is a very common practice in JS, and any dev with more than about 5 weeks experience will recognize and understand that pattern pretty much automatically.

In the example with the undefined check... what if undefined is a valid argument? You should actually check the length of the arguments object.

See, you can always find examples of when you shouldn't do something. That doesn't mean you shouldn't EVER do it. At the end of the day, people who read and write code need to understand how it works. You can only protect people from themselves so much.

</comment><comment><USER15> It is similar as in C:

When C come out, it did not include a bool type, since it could be easily implemented as integer or char. The result was, that every bigger project had its own standard of the boolean type. This lead to the situation that bringing together different libraries or projects in the same company, you very soon had four or more different (and potential incompatible) boolean types with different constants for TRUE, FALSE, true, false and UNDEFINED. The programmers where happy to deal with those ...

It would be best (and fastest) to include something like default parameters into the language much sooner ...

But at least in this case, I see much less trouble as with the C type and I do not agree with the author that there is mental overhead involved with the OR operator, since you normally get used to it fast.

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't agree either.

The first part of the argumentation is indeed based on the author's feelings. The second part I don't think is an issue for most real world use-cases (Objects, Strings and, to a lesser extent, Numbers).

On the underscore (_.defaults) recommendation: let's set our goals straight [1]. Aim for a good level of JavaScript understanding. Instead of library knowledge to make up for the lack of the former.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4anAwXYqLG8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4anAwXYqLG8)

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't agree. Replacing all occurrences of default values that use || with a 3 rows long if case would hurt readability.

There are many valid cases where the incoming parameter could be either undefined or null.

</comment><comment><USER18> >>> First of all, it isn't obvious why the OR operator would be used to assign default values.

Really?! This is common knowledge for anyone writing JS for more than a week. It's used EVERYWHERE.

</comment><comment><USER19> Doesn't it also check for _null_ not just _undefined_? Isn't that the whole point?

<comment><USER6> Any truthy value will be returned and short out the boolean expression.. falsy values fall through...

falsy values are: "", 0, null, undefined, NaN and false

Everything else is truthy.

I kind of wish that Invalid Date (invalidDt.valueOf() === NaN), empty arrays, and objects without any properties were also falsy sometimes. Though I also wish that sometimes 0 was easier to separate from other falsy values.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I look for more such insightful articles from [http://www.codereadability.com/](http://www.codereadability.com/) in the future. /s

</comment><comment><USER21> var skill;

article = skill || 'troll'

</comment><comment><USER22> I was always instructed to use typeof when determining if a variable or property is undefined. Some attempts to access an undefined variable will result in an exception being thrown.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27509/detecting-an- undefi...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27509/detecting-an-undefined- object-property)

<comment><USER23> That's only a serious issue if the binding may not exist at all, which is an other way to say that it's only useful for global variables. A function parameter defines a binding by definition.

<comment><USER22> Good to know. I peeked into underscore's source to see how this type of check is handled.

Aparently the issue is more complicated than I thought, because the following comparison is used:

obj[key] === void 0

Are they really defending themselves against the function being rebound with undefined shadowed?

[http://adripofjavascript.com/blog/drips/javascripts-void- ope...](http://adripofjavascript.com/blog/drips/javascripts-void- operator.html)

<comment><USER23> Yeah. It might be an issue when you're a widely used library, you might routinely encounter completely insane stuff. In a codebase you own though, I wouldn't worry about it, you can just set whoever decides rebinding undefined is funny on fire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> tl;dr: use Babel to get default arguments that are both more readable and more robust, along with a bunch of other JS Harmony improvements, for free.

<comment><USER25> > tl;dr: use Babel to get default arguments that are both more readable and > more robust, along with a bunch of other JS Harmony improvements, for free.

You mean replace perfectly valid javascript with a complicated nodejs pipeline in order to make scripts run in the browser now? hell no.

<comment><USER6> I like babel for plenty of other reasons... the single biggest one is the culmination of Promise + coroutines with async/await keywords.

Not to mention being able to break code into discrete modules that can be utilized without having to jump through namespace hoops or global collisions (does $ mean jQuery, Prototype, document.querySelectorAll, ...).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Thanks, but no. I will use ||

</comment><comment><USER27> fruit = (fruit === undefined) ? "strawberry" : fruit</comment>


Show HN: I Build Interactive Meditation Technology - <AUTHOR> http://www.sparqlabyrinth.com

<comment><USER2> When you say "walk the projected pattern", do you mean following the path on the touchscreen with a finger, or actually walking around with a guide on the screen that tells you how to move?

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds interesting. Needs a demo.

Pretty sure I'm not alone in being unwilling to give up my email without seeing what's on offer.</comment>


Chicago startups to watch in 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://www.builtinchicago.org/2015/02/04/50-chicago-startups-watch-2015 <comment><USER2> I appreciate BuiltInChicago as an effective way to promote knowledge about the Chicago tech scene and I looked there the last couple times I was job- searching, but this list is really uninspiring. Uber for [moving, dry- cleaning, beauty needs], clones of better-known startups, clones of startups that have already failed.

There should be more focus on what Chicago's uniquely good at, and what makes us not just a worse-SF: [http://www.holovaty.com/writing/chicago- bootstrapping/](http://www.holovaty.com/writing/chicago-bootstrapping/)

<comment><USER3> _There should be more focus on what Chicago 's uniquely good at_

Do you mean whining about how we deserve to be a tech/manufacturing hub but we're not? Because we're pretty good at that.

<comment><USER4> Judging from this comment, I'd guess that you, Adrian, and Kevin probably _agree_ on Chicago's strengths and weaknesses.

(As a Chicago startup founder, I'll just add that I hope we _don 't_ become a "tech hub". A diverse business community is one of our biggest strengths.)

<comment><USER5> Chicago has been, and will continue to be, one of the largest tech hubs in the world. We just are not as dominant as we used to be.

(speaking as a former Chicago startup founder)

<comment><USER4> On what axis is Chicago competitive with SFBA or NYC as a "tech hub"? On the obvious ones, like dollars of VC funding or number of tech employers, it doesn't even look close.

<comment><USER3> IMO, Chicagoans like to lean on their prior history of being a technological and manufacturing center.

You had some serious engineering here: Western Electric, Teletype, Bell Labs/Lucent, Stewart-Warner, Illinois Tool Works, USRobotics, Admiral Radio, Shure, Abbott Labs, Baxter, Rockola, Seeburg, Williams Electronics, Bally, Zenith, and of course Motorola. Motorola alone seeded lots of other small companies in the area.

<comment><USER6> We still have a lot of those companies here, the R&D has moved to the coasts though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> From the list: Mac & Mia is an online, custom clothing boutique for kids with soul & style. The company has a team of personal stylists that create looks for newborns to kids up to six. To get started, you create a style profile for your child and then, wait for the magic to happen. Once you decide to make the purchase, Mac & Mia will send you a box full of clothing customized for your child -- if your baby isn't into the design, tread it right back for free. [http://www.macandmia.com/](http://www.macandmia.com/)

Wow. Some people really do have too much time on their hands.

<comment><USER8> Let's not be classist. There's probably a market for this. I live in a trendy part of the city and boutiqe baby stores are a thing and have been a thing for at least ten years now. This is just a personal shopper for those stores.

I don't see how this really is more ridiculous than owning a current gen 3D printer or other expensive geek friendly frivolous toy. In fact, if you're part of the wealthy crowd, what your kids look like affects your social capital as so much of that is image based. If its creating jobs and opportunity, I don't really care about these Gweneth Paltrow-like excesses. Its just business.

<comment><USER9> I don't understand how 'class' is involved here. It's "rich people who have too much money will spend it on junk" \- which equally applies to geek friendly frivolous toys.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's super weird to me how preoccupied the tech industry is about geography. Why does it matter where a company is? Why are VC firms so focused on a tiny patch of land? Other than internet connectivity, there's no real reason why it should be harder to start an internet company in Estonia than in Palo Alto, but it self-evidently is.

Is this a market failure? Has anyone figured out how to build a fully distributed company yet? How about "Built Online"?

<comment><USER11> The conventional wisdom is that, in general, VCs join the boards of the companies they invest heavily in. Which means they'll have to travel to attend a monthly board meeting. And it's easier to only invest in companies where they don't have to travel too far to get to the monthly meetings. Of course, I think it's a terrible excuse, but that partially explains things.

edit: Bryce Roberts at OATV is currently running an experiment that could challenge that default VC mindset with Indie.vc: [http://indie.vc/](http://indie.vc/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12>
      If you're a recent startup founder, chances are you've taken a
      huge paycut. Well guess what - America was built on innovators
      like yourself and there are government assistance programs
      designed to help you while you sacrifice to grow your
      business. mRelief helps a user determine whether they qualify
      for Illinois government assistance programs like Food Stamps.

Wow.

<comment><USER8> Chicagoan here. The amount of fraud in welfare here is astounding. I regularly go to the grocery store and see people with nicer cars than me using their link card to pay for "groceries." By groceries I mean high-end items like lobster and steak, which they are clearly cashing out the card on and not shopping for food like everyone else. I don't know how they qualify for this, but imagine via some creative accounting that mRelief, I'm sure, is also willing to share.

I don't think people outside of the city realize how bad things are here. The corruption, handout mentality, patronage, politics, public sector unions, etc are probably the worst in the nation and it only seems to be getting worse. The various attempts to build a SV-like environment in Chicago will continue to fail until this corruption is cleaned up. I don't see a lot of incentive to invest in startups here, especially if we factor in our very high tax load and the little public value we get from it.

<comment><USER12> Welfare fraud is one of those things that people seem to think is rampant, and politicians often encourage that idea, but when measured turns out to be pretty infrequent.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_fraud#In_the_United_St...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_fraud#In_the_United_States)

[http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/12/20/255819681/the...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/12/20/255819681/the- truth-behind-the-lies-of-the-original-welfare-queen)

[http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/01/08/3136631/lepage-w...](http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/01/08/3136631/lepage- welfare/)

<comment><USER8> None of your links are local to Chicago. Yes, diluted nationwide I'm sure its an acceptable loss, but locally things are different. Politics are local and dismissing my experience with nationwide links makes you look especially disingenuous here. This is like saying Detroit is very safe to live in if you look at nationwide crime stats.

The only thing local here is the Reagan welfare queen comment from almost 40 years ago, which is far from timely. Nor was I making that argument. I don't think there are welfare queens of any type, but I do see, almost daily, casual abuse of the system designed to help the poor. With little political motivation to fix this broken system, if we consider the patronage from the aldermen, there's actually disincentives to fix this system. Considering our high tax rates, its a shame our leadership can't make this a priority.

<comment><USER12> True, none of the links I posted were about the Chicago area. Do you have data?

<comment><USER13> I imagine if they had data, they wouldn't have trotted out tired gripes and stereotypes in the first place...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Besides WeDeliver, there's two other startups from Techstars Chicago 2014 that were really interesting: PackageZen ([http://packagezen.com/](http://packagezen.com/)) and Telnyx ([https://www.telnyx.com/](https://www.telnyx.com/))

</comment><comment><USER15> Not a big fan of the list, as they left out some great companies.

Some of my favorite Chicago startups:

1\. TempoDB - Database for IOT and sensor data

2\. 640 Labs - Precision agriculutre platform

3\. Opternative - Online Eye Exams

4\. ShipBob (YC S14) - Easy shipping for businesses and personal (Disclaimer: Currently work here)

5\. Basecamp - Project Managment Software

<comment><USER16> Basecamp may be cool, but it's hardly a startup--it's been around since like 2004.

<comment><USER11> To further prove your point, the company was actually started in 1999.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I like the concept of [https://www.optionsaway.com](https://www.optionsaway.com) but everytime I try to get a price quote it just says this flight is no longer available. Anybody get it to work? I was trying to find out how much it costs for each time period lock.

</comment><comment><USER18> Why isn't AvantCredit listed?</comment>


The New Reality of the 14-Year Venture Capital Fund - <AUTHOR> http://www.institutionalinvestor.com/blogarticle/3428857/blog/the-new-reality-of-the-14-year-venture-capital-fund.html#.VOyjoVPF83Q

<comment><USER2> This is a very important trend and one which I feel is putting pressure on 'traditional' VC and enabling accelerators. It gets tougher to raise a fund as the LPs don't like the terms. Probably not crisis levels yet.</comment>


Apple's Steve Jobs: 'no one's going to buy' a big phone - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/16/jobs-no-ones-going-to-buy-a-big-phone/

<comment><USER2> Steve was wrong about a lot of things. Guess what, he also realized it.

'In the interview, Jobs also says about himself, "I just care about success. So you'll find a lot of people that will tell you that I had a very strong opinion and they, you know, presented evidence to the contrary and five minutes later, I completely changed my mind, because I'm like that. I don't mind being wrong and I'll admit I'm wrong a lot. It doesn't really matter to me too much. What matters to me is that we do the right thing." '

[http://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-steve-jobs-revealed-in-a- lo...](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-steve-jobs-revealed-in-a-lost- interview/)</comment>


UK Government: will not support Net Neutrality - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-17/u-k-government-to-snub-bbc-google-over-web-access-ft-reports.html <comment><USER2> I suppose that will end up giving ISPs the right to charge the BBC for handling their video stream traffic. Which effectively means private companies siphoning off BBC license revenue for their own pockets.

I really hope that if they go ahead with this that they clear all barriers to allow the BBC to run it's own ISP, and compete on selection of netural traffic. At least that way, people get a choice how many times they pay for the same content.

What good is video content streaming from a public broadcaster if you have to pay private organisations again to see that content you've already paid the BBC for?

<comment><USER3> The TV license is currently only required for watching traditional TV, live, isn't it? I haven't paid it for years, and exclusively use the on-demand BBC iPlayer website every so often.

<comment><USER4> Don't you feel like you _should_ get a license? Regardless of wether you're legally supposed to.

The sheer quality of programming they put out. Buy a license.

<comment><USER3> I don't watch often enough. I'd consider microtransactions in the iPlayer, but not a flat £145 per year.

<comment><USER5> Which is from memory less than Sky charges for content that includes adverts and is (IMHO) of vastly lower quality. Certainly far less of Sky's content is original productions.

<comment><USER3> I'd never get Sky. In fact I convinced a family member to cancel theirs becuase they were getting little value from it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is not such a big deal as it would be in the US. We have a lot more competition, so "let the market sort it out" is more or less a reasonable position.

<comment><USER7> Are there really not that many isps over in the US?

(although thinking about it, whenever I hear about US isps it is always the same few companies (comcast comes to mind))

<comment><USER8> Here in San Francisco, we really have Comcast and Astound (a localish one). I don't know of any except those two.

<comment><USER9> Two is nice to have. I'm back to two cable providers plus DSL, but last year I had the choice of Comcast, or something slow, pricey and wireless. And that was in the Boston suburbs, not the mountains of Idaho or something.

Network infrastructure in the USA is startlingly primitive and monopolistic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This will disrupt the chances of any new media startups in the UK. It is also good news for companies like Sky that compete with the BBC and have an ISP service.

Sky got good value for money donating to Ed Vaizey last election: [http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmregmem/100927/...](http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmregmem/100927/vaizey_edward.htm)</comment>


Show HN: Chirp for Twitter, a Chrome extension for easy screenshot+tweeting - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chirp-for-twitter/mlocpcjojbacdcajmjmlfonfibnleede <comment><AUTHOR> Chirp for Twitter is a Chrome extension that lets you easily screenshot and tweet from articles. When you open a link from Twitter.com, Chirp also shows the relevant Twitter thread on the page, so you can easily join the conversation with more context. The project so far is on Github here: [https://github.com/philly-d/chirp-for- twitter](https://github.com/philly-d/chirp-for-twitter).</comment>


Estimating the Impact of Airbnb on the Hotel Industry [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://people.bu.edu/zg/publications/airbnb.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Abstract: "We analyze Airbnb's entry into the state of Texas, and quantify its impact on the Texas hotel industry over the subsequent decade. We estimate that in Austin, where Airbnb supply is highest, the causal impact on hotel revenue is in the 8-10% range; moreover, the impact is non-uniform, with lower-priced hotels and those hotels not catering to business travelers being the most affected. The impact manifests itself primarily through less aggressive hotel room pricing, an impact that benefits all consumers, not just participants in the sharing economy. The price response is especially pronounced during periods of peak demand, such as SXSW, and is due to a differentiating feature of peer-to-peer platforms  enabling instantaneous supply to scale to meet demand"</comment>


Rent Control Causes Homelessness - <AUTHOR> I own no rental properties and have long been a tenant myself.
The main driver of high rents is simple supply and demand. If you have lots of people who need to rent apartments, and only a few apartments then prices will rise.
The solution to high rents is to build lots more apartments... Then landlords have to compete on price and the average rents will come way down.
If you try to keep rents down artificially with rent control, then you discourage developers from building new apartments. The result of this is homelessness even for those who could afford it. <comment><USER2> Not surprisingly, this observation isn't new, and there is much published research. It does not support your conclusion that there is a simple relationship. Quoting from [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026427511...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264275115001122) which looks at that connection specifically within the NJ housing market (emphasis mine):

> This study replicates, using 2010 Census data, and extends past work on > moderately rent-controlled municipalities in New Jersey, which began > policies to stabilize rents while allowing landlords modest returns in the > 1970s. .... _We find that these 40-year-old policies do not exert any > statistically-significant effects on their communities' housing markets_ > once other factors are controlled—a finding which has implications for > affordable housing and advocacy in New Jersey and beyond. ...

> Rent control has been a hotly debated regulation in the U.S. for nearly 75 > years (Fogelson, 2013; Gilderbloom, 1981; Gilderbloom & Appelbaum, 1988; > Glaeser & Luttmer, 2003). This literature review concisely reviews the > evolution of rent control, findings from previous studies of rent control's > effects, and the nature of rent control ordinances in New Jersey. ...

> When one controls for other factors affecting rents and rental unit quality > and quantity, any significant correlations between rent control—both its > presence and its strength—and the rental housing characteristics disappear. > 13 _It seems that most differences between rent control and non-rent control > cities are due to disparities in income, racial proportions, and rental > property market shares._ Our models confirm most of the predicted > theoretical relationships, with the exception of the key test variable— > _rent control—which exerted no significant effects, positive or negative_. > ...

> _Rent control cannot be measured solely by its ability to keep rents low_ , > but also by its protections from extreme rent increases and arbitrary > evictions, and mechanisms for tenants to challenge unreasonable rent > increases and landlord practices. Additionally, moderate rent control does > give tenants greater stability, making tenancy closer to homeownership for > those tenants with stable employment and incomes—in an area like New Jersey > where homeownership is very expensive. Tenants under rent control have > greater rights and security of tenure which perhaps makes rent controlled > cities more desirable when choosing a city of residence</comment>


Fin - <AUTHOR> http://dtrace.org/blogs/wesolows/

<comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8816055](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8816055)

</comment><comment><USER3> The Sun is strong with this one.

"GNU/Linux has been written by people with no sense of smell, no concept of architecture, and no ability to advance any large-scale piece of work."

The cathedral vs. the bazaar. Which do you think has won?

"And even if systemd were properly scoped and executed well, it would be only a modest improvement on SMF… which has been running in production on illumos for 10 years."

That's impressive. illumos has only existed for 5 years.

Perhaps the fact that the licensing and the ownership of the OS, the viability and attitude of the company that developed it and of the company that took it over has been a complete clusterfuck since 2005 might go some way towards explaining why people aren't using it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Geez this wesolows guy seems bitter as hell. I guess it's helpful to have a reference of what not to become as we grow older.</comment>


Redis for Windows updated to 4.0.2 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tporadowski/redis <comment><USER2> Genuinely curious: with WSL, what is the point of running Redis on Windows?

<comment><AUTHOR> One reason is that not everyone has upgraded yet and there are still many Windows servers running as VM without nested virtualization support (which makes Docker+Redis unavailable there as well). Sure one can run Redis in other ways, but it's not always that easy given clients' requirements and restrictions, not to mention introduction of those other technology stacks to dev teams and support teams.</comment></comment>


How A Journalist Turned Developer Built A Startup From Scratch For $6,000 - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcolabs.com/3013699/open-company/how-a-journalist-turned-developer-built-a-startup-from-scratch-for-6000

<comment><USER2> That's impressive. Not the learning to code bit, or the paying a solicitor bit, or the stumping up for a designer to do the branding bit ... for me the impressive bit is Benji using his "unfair advantage" of being a former Guardian journalist to get good coverage for his start-up on a popular blog in a guest post he wrote himself.

Well played Benji. If anything is going to make PicFair a success, it's the fact you can get people to see it. You've already got further than a lot of startups.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well done. Neat way to look at cost, etc. He definitely didn't have to spend a lot on marketing (other than time).</comment>


JQuery-1.4.js Full release - <AUTHOR> http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.4.js <comment><USER2> Note: This is the final source but the release won't be happening until tomorrow morning (with the full release notes, changelog, backwards-compat info, etc.).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for all you've done. You've made many lives easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Three cheers to the team!</comment>