Nearly 1 in 5 Millennial Renters Expect to Rent Forever in Some Metros - <AUTHOR> https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/2019-millennial-homeownership-report/ <comment><USER2> That's probably way too low given todays prices. The NYTimes has a good calculator for understanding if renting or buying is a better deal:

[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent- cal...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent- calculator.html)

What you will notice if you play around with it is that the decision is most sensitive to "What Does the Future Hold", in particular to the home price growth rate. If you expect that to even stabilize (let alone decline) then renting is almost always a better deal.

Now, that being said, I expected home prices to stabilize back in the early 2000's and didn't buy in SF, so I have been fooled before.

<comment><USER3> That's true, but future prices and rents are very difficult to know. If you buy, your costs, ex-property taxes are known for the rest of your life.

This means you can customize the house for your needs, make friends, have you kids make friends, join community organizations, etc, without having to worry that one day when you go to renew your lease, your landlord will have an unaffordable surprise for you, and you have to give up everything you've built up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Property taxes + HOA fees + homeowner's insurance aren't cheap. On top of that, a average run of the mill 3/2 home worth living in is about $350k-$400k in my area (South Florida)

If you can rent one out for $2.4k/mo - $2.75k/mo and not worry about the headache + not put 20% down... I'm sure that's a way to "stay poor" in some circles but... it works for me _shrug_

Also, last time I checked, if you file taxes as "single", I don't think the benefits of owning a home are even tax deductible. Meaning, the deductions for mortgage interest + property taxes combined aren't more than the $12k standard. I could be wrong.

<comment><USER5> You can apply the same math in SF. Why own a house for $8k/mo (mortgage + insurance + hoa + taxes + upkeep + real estate agent fee, etc) when you can rent it for $6k/mo?

Home owners are expecting to get their ROI on appreciation, so the rental deals are just too good.

<comment><USER6> 30year fixed mortgage rate of say 3.5% is only ~1-2% higher than the rate of inflation.

The cost of owning the house is really just interest + hoa + taxes + upkeep. You'll get your principal back out when you sell.

Over a long enough time period, the yearly home ownership costs will be less than renting.

Owning even in SF can still be a better financial decision than renting. There's a lot of tax advantages that you get by owning a home as well.

E.g take this place: [https://www.redfin.com/CA/San-Francisco/201-Sansome- St-94104...](https://www.redfin.com/CA/San-Francisco/201-Sansome- St-94104/unit-404/home/12402258). Costs about 5.4k/month. Removing principal & tax rebate its likely costing you ~4-4.5K/month.

Somewhat equivalent rental is 3.3k/month. [https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/d/san- francisco-916-pac...](https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/d/san- francisco-916-pacific-move-in/7022195137.html)

Cost of owning is ~1k/month more expensive. However you've locked in your mortgage for 30 years. Likely after 7-10 years the place you were owning will end up cheaper than renting on a monthly cost basis.

<comment><USER4> > There's a lot of tax advantages that you get by owning a home as well.

If adding together mortgage interest paid for 12 months + property taxes paid for the year together is less than the $12k single filer standard deduction, are there any tax benefits to owning a home?

<comment><USER6> If the interest + itemized deductions are > 12k, then yes. E.g. do you give to charity...etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Gen Z'ers, please learn from my generation. Think about return before going into debt for student loans. Nobody cares about your school after your first job and many state schools are more than adequate

<comment><USER8> > _Nobody cares about your school after your first job and many state schools > are more than adequate_

Few people say it out loud, but they do care. Both in social contexts and in professional contexts. I've been to a top-25 public state school for undergrad, and a top-3 private school for Master's. I've seen both sides of the spectrum and I've seen the privilege that I've gotten out of attending an elite university.

I would advise people to be smart about the student debt they are taking on. If your goal is to pursue a lucrative career path like Software Engineering, Law, Business, Consulting etc, go ahead and attend the university that has the best brand name. It will pay for itself over the course of your career. If your goal is to be a school teacher, then go to the best public university in your home state.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is it me or is that stat not that bad at all? Considering the price of ownership, having 80% of people being able to (eventually) afford to buy real estate seems alright, no?

<comment><USER10> Is eventually 3-5 years? 5-10? 10-20? I'm looking to have my current debts paid in 3-5 and down payment on a house or similar in 8-10, looking to buy (if reasonable) at that time. I'm also doing about 25% better salary wise than I'd expect at this point so that has accelerated my debt payments by a few years.

But if the economy tanks again, as it usually does after a conservative party owns the US government for a few years, then I won't have cash on hand to buy anything and could lose my job and more before paying off my debt and building serious savings for a house. I'd likely push this whole thought process out 12-15 years at best given rent costs don't increase dramatically.

In my case, I'd say it's bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is what happens when boomer NIMBYs oppose new housing. They got theirs and are making sure nobody else can join the party.

<comment><USER7> As a millennial homeowner, I don't want my historic neighborhood destroyed in favor of high rise apartments. I also have been warmly welcomed by my neighbors and enjoy the community a neighborhood brings. Why do boomers get so much hate from protecting their communities and neighbors?

<comment><USER12> As a millennial homeowner, living in a historic neighborhood, I am all in favor of taking the empty lots that do still exist in my area, and turning them into high density housing. I watched a 4-5 story building appear on a empty lot just down the street from me. This kind of housing is perfect to help alleviate housing constraints, and offers people the opportunity to live in a walk-able, historic neighborhood and contribute to the community. Why is that a bad thing?

<comment><USER7> There are no empty lots because it is a desirable place to live. If I lived in a place with abandoned building/lots I agree they could be put to better use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For those asking what's wrong with renting, some problems from a UK perspective are:

1\. Security of tenure. You can be a model tenant who never misses a payment, but if a landlord wants to do something else with your home for any reason, you've got two months and you're out. Wife, kids, stuff and all. Maybe with a change of school thrown in for good measure too.

2\. Exclusion from the biggest one way bet in town. Forget the best index tracking ISA, nothing beats using massive leverage to invest several hundred thousand pounds of borrowed into existence money in an asset class that the elite will happily throw the rest of the economy under the bus to pump up. Much to the benefit of our politicians, flipping their tax payer funded second homes.

3\. Welfare unfairness. Got a bit saved up? Maybe even for a house deposit ironically? Well if you fall on hard times, you'll need to burn through your years of savings until you're poor enough to receive benefits again. If you have a fortune of equity in your house though, you won't have to touch a penny of it.

</comment><comment><USER14> What's so bad about renting forever ?

I am a millennial, I am not planning on buying a house pretty much for ever, I don't see it be a problem

<comment><USER15> One problem is (for better or worse) home ownership stands in for a forced savings account, especially for retirement. If you rent forever but also max out your 401k or Roth then cool, if you're renting and also not saving for the long term then...

<comment><USER14> Gotcha, I am not a heavy spender, save most of my salary, this must be the reason why I don't see renting forever as a problem

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The study also says that if student debt was forgiven and payments were instead put towards savings, the percentage of millennial renters ready to buy a home is estimated to rise from 25% to 39%.

</comment><comment><USER16> But your house. If you want to freedom to move around then find a good management company and rent it out.

</comment><comment><USER17> Even if you have cash, investing can make more sense financially than owning. Plus you don't have to worry about repair/renovation, school taxes, fees, and the stress coming from mortagage payments.

You also get freedom when renting, for example being able to relocate anywhere in the country or the world when the opportunity comes.

So I don't understand why people are making a big deal about owning your property</comment>


Harry Styles fans are gaming music charts with VPNs - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/976941/sign-of-the-times-harry-styles-fans-are-gaming-music-charts-with-vpns-and-other-digital-tricks-showing-how-broken-rankings-are/ <comment><USER2> > some fans banded together to start a blog called the Harry Styles Promo Team

"some fans" would be the bit I flatly don't believe</comment>


Windows Phone 7 development from the perspective of an iOS developer - <AUTHOR> http://carpeaqua.com/2011/01/02/from-iphone-to-windows-phone-7/ <comment><USER2> >Microsoft might have done themselves some favors by giving it a whole new naming scheme away from the Windows brand.

Why on Earth do people consider the Windows brand to be tainted? I've really only heard this from Mac fanboys who seem to forget that Windows has a 90% market share. Tying Windows Phone 7 to Windows 7, a great OS by any definition as well as a very popular one is a stroke of genius. People will look at their smartphone and think, "this is a small computer", rather than, "this is a fancy phone". That gives Microsoft huge leeway to push their Windows integration line. It doesn't have to look or feel anything like Windows for the average consumer to realize that they can sync their emails, access their office documents, get on Internet Explorer, etc.

<comment><USER3>
         Windows 7, a great OS by any definition

Really? All the reviews I've read / all the people I asked said _"it's not that bad"_ which IMHO is the second most terrible thing customers can say about your product, unless you're a monopoly.

And it still features that idiotic UAC interface, among other things: like a totally remade Control Panel that looks nothing like the one in Windows XP (and just when I managed to teach my wife how to configure a network connection). And what bothers me the most about Windows 7 are the artificial restrictions. Did you know that in Win7 Starter you cannot change the desktop background? (or distribute an app that does that?) ... I actually had to explain to my wife that she has the cheap / sucky edition installed on her netbook, and that she needs to pay another $100 for the home basic upgrade.

It's shit like that which makes me cry every time I have to deal with Windows, but I still am dealing with it because that's what most people use: i.e. its popularity has nothing to do with technical achievements (unless you count not-sucking-so-badly).

And I'm only mentioning this because WinMo 7 was scheduled to be released in 2 editions, i.e. with a cheap version without Zune (at least). Competition with Android/iPhone probably prevented that (for now).

         People will look at their smartphone and think,
         "this is a small computer"

Except this marketing tactic has been done before with Pocket PC. Not working, because it's not like a computer.

What people will actually think: "this just like the iPhone/BlackBerry, only from Microsoft".

<comment><USER2> Every issue you just mentioned affects <5% of users. If you're a power user, Windows sucks, period. If you're an average user, it's great. I love being able to run linux apps in OSX, without having to deal with linux UI and driver issues. I hate trying to play games in it. Guess which group is bigger: those who play games, or those who like native linux app support?

Windows succeeds, despite the wailing of mac and linux fanboys, because it does what it needs to do and does so well. Mac will never have Windows market share when their cheapest laptop is $1000. Linux will never have Windows, or let alone Mac, market share. Period. Almost every business out there runs Windows. Almost every school library computer lab runs Windows. People who use computers for only the most basic things use Windows, and that's 90% of the computer-using population.

I have both a macbook pro and an older dell xps running Windows 7. I far prefer OSX, but that's because I like having a real shell. XCode is pretty good, too. OSX is a "nicer" OS, and it's certainly prettier, but is it worth paying twice as much for a computer? For the vast majority of people, the answer is no.

You seem to be arguing that Toyota is retarded because they make corollas, when BMW makes the clearly superior 5 series. I think the flaw in such reasoning is obvious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Two weeks ago, I got the samsung focus to replace my iphone4. The phone is really really good. The author is right about the tiles approach. It is a nice change from the app model of the other phones. I can see all my contacts, feeds from facebook and linked in in one view. It's even better than desktop experiences.

People have complained that the hardware is plasticy and cheap, but after using the iphone4 over a 2 month period and seeing the glass screen smash. I prefer the light feel; plus most people covert their phones with a case and they all feel the same after that.

Complaints on the phone:

The browser isn't as good as the iphone; change between pages isn't as nice and the back & forward is a pain. Rendering is also not as good.

The zune navigation system was better than the windows mobile. In zune you could navigate up and down the system by clicking the title of the current screen to go back in Playlists click "Playlist" to go back to music, click "Music" to return to the main screen. This was super convient because navigation could be done with one hand. In the Mobile OS it would more on a backwards only system that requires using the phones "back" button which is at the bottom of the phone. I find it not as easy operate as the zune, but the same as the iphone.

<comment><USER5> I don't get the whole thing with a light phone being "cheap" feeling. I want my phone to feel like air, because in my hand it really doesn't make that much of a difference. But in my pocket (especially with sweats or PJs), even a moderately heavy smartphone begins to make things sag (especially when running).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Disclaimer - I work for MSFT but my day job isn't related to WP7 in any way.

I had a bit of a minor hit with an app I wrote (see [http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/11/windows-phone- micro...](http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/11/windows-phone-microsoftie- builds.html)). For a couple of weeks, that app was #1 in the paid tools category and #35 across all paid apps.

As someone familiar with the Microsoft stack (C#, .NET, VS, etc), I found the going pretty straight forward. If you're familiar with the Microsoft development stack, you should probably have a fairly easy time getting used to the platform. If you're familiar with Silverlight (which I wasn't), you should find it very easy indeed.

<comment><USER7> How much $$$ did you make?

<comment><USER8> From the article: "Browser Plus has gotten a few thousand downloads so far, he said." Price was 99c. Not sure how much whichever marketplace it was in charges.

Assume 2000 x 70c = $1,400

Not bad for a week/weekends work (honeymoon apparently, go figure?!? :D )

But a bit ... lacking ... when considered as a #1 hit. On the other hand, maybe it hasn't been out there too long. You could say okay the time he and his beta tester put in was worth maybe $20/hour, but that ignores how an app can be a revenue stream that keeps on generating income.

If he 'only' made $1000 per year from that app (as is) every year for the rest of his life that'd be a pretty good ROI for a weeks work.

So don't get too hung up on my estimate, the advantage of an entrepreneur compared to a work for hire salaryman is to keep getting paid long after the work is done.

<comment><USER6> This analysis is pretty accurate. That Techflash article was after the first week or so - it gives you a sense of how many app downloads I got per day back then. Another thing to factor in was that this was in the first 2 weeks of WP7 launching.

Unfortunately, the popularity took a dive after the first few weeks so my run rate is much lower now. Also, a big part of my app sales was driven by press which you only get when you do new versions, etc. My wife and I working together on a soon-to-be-launched app also meant that I haven't really gotten back to shipping new updates, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Good writeup overall, I cant put a lot of stock into things because he admittedly did not spend lots of time in the development environment. Probably more aptly titled 'Windows Phone 7 usage and development from an iOS developer' as most of the article was about usage not coding.

</comment><comment><USER10> > First things first. If you want to build Windows Phone 7 apps on your Mac, > prepare to jump into Boot Camp. The emulator does not work in VMWare Fusion.

It works just fine on Windows 7 running on the latest version of VMware Fusion under Snow Leopard. It's just not very performant.

</comment><comment><USER5> Very balanced writeup. The only thing I disagree with is the quality of some of the apps... although I do agree they're not as good as some of the iOS 1-3 person shop apps, I think the big difference is that most of the small shop iOS apps are small companies, whereas WP7 is still in the early Android-phase where it is hobbyst working in the evening.

But the quality of paid apps, which are almost all games, is on par with the iOS top paid apps already.

<comment><USER11> I think games will be where WP7 will shine, Microsoft has the best game and media development APIs out there for any platform, and there are many many developers who've been building high quality games for Xbox and PC who could move to the platform a lot more comfortably than to iOS which requres OpenGL or to Android which sounds like a mess to have to deal with divergent hardware.

<comment> tomh- You are overestimating XNA. Most (almost all) high quality games for Xbox and PC are written in C++. It is even more likely that they could be ported to iOS or Android more easily due the simple fact that they allow native code. XNA would be a competitor to the popular Unity game engine which at the moment has a more competitive platform to build for (webplayer, iOS, android) and also offers a superior IDE while offering the same language support as XNA. In addition to that, UDK and the ID engine are also being ported to support iOS and Android. Feel free to point me to a list of high quality in XNA produced titles.

Good game developers are able to create games regardless of the quality of the tools. Its part of the fun to create impressive games with limited resources and tools.

Other than marketing the fact that Microsoft also created a successful game console and xbox live, I don't think Microsoft has any advantage here. Xbox live could be a key differentiator but only after a significant market share has been gained. I don't think people will buy a WP7 phone for Xbox live. Currently iOS offers the best games.

<comment><USER12> "Feel free to point me to a list of high quality in XNA produced titles."

If you want to develop a game on WP7, you HAVE to use XNA. All games in the WP7 app store had to be built with it.

Also, WP7 has no C++ support. John Carmack griped about this on Twitter.

<comment> tomh- That is exactly my point, why develop for WP7 if you can work with the technologies you want for other platforms which also have a higher userbase?

However I suspect that some of the titles from companies such as EA or Gameloft are still written in C++ even though it is not supported officially by Microsoft. It is highly likely that they have some kind of early access to native code compilation for the platform.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > rather than an iPhone 4 as I have for the past three years.

Hmm.

</comment><comment><USER2> >So long as the phone is available on the AT&T GSM band. No Nexus S for me.

Are there actually people for whom being on AT&T is a _necessity_ , let alone desirable?

<comment><USER14> > _"Are there actually people for whom being on AT &T is a necessity"_

iPhone users.

<comment><USER2> I forget that in the States the iPhone is only available on AT&T. Must suck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Executive Summary: if Microsoft supported standards (e.g. CalDav) it would be better...</comment>


Coronavirus: the second-weirdest solution? - <AUTHOR> https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4664 <comment><USER2> There's actually a Scrubs episode which did precisely what the author suggests: [https://youtu.be/PdrrgVVi-9U](https://youtu.be/PdrrgVVi-9U)

The spread of a disease throughout the hospital is visualized as a green slime passed on between people.

<comment><USER3> I think that's one of my 'favorite' saddest episodes/storylines in Scrubs. That and the ones with Brandon Fraser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The only practical takeaway from these suggestions IMO is that "you might still derive great personal benefit from _imagining_ them so covered".

In the real world, there are a few things that could help prevent these outbreaks from bringing the whole of society to a grinding standstill, namely the invention of something that kills targeted viruses directly (thought I read something along those lines a while back). And/or the insight that the way we have constructed modern society is simply conducive to pandemic outbreaks.

The tendency for people to work from home, be schooled from home and getting goods delivered home should not be viewed as a desperate measure, instead it is the way we probably will organize our lives moving forwards, and get a lot of life standard improvements while at it. Not to mention the time and energy we would save by bringing commutes down to a bare minimum.

</comment><comment><USER5> Some people suggested using copper handles in hospitals, since it has antimicrobial properties. I think the practical problem was that you need to clear the oxidized parts or it doesn't work. There were some other suggested materials too.

On a lighter note, people seem to adapt their behavior just fine: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgYL4rZC0v8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgYL4rZC0v8)

<comment><USER6> I feel like brass may be better, as it contains zinc and copper and does not oxidize as easily. How about an alloy of zinc, silver and copper?

<comment><USER7> Apparently brass does work [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_copper- alloy_tou...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_copper- alloy_touch_surfaces)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm confused. If you don't want people to touch a railing, why have a railing?

<comment><USER9> For safety reasons. For disabled people.

Last year I twisted my ankle and for a few days the only way I could use flight of stairs was to held onto the rails.

<comment><USER8> Well, yes, but the context is that a railing covered with a layer of sticky crap isn't much better than no railing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This substance already exists: biter nail polish.

Apply it on your fingers, and you'll want to avoid touching your mouth at any cost.

On a side note, so many buildings still put doors at the entrance of toilets forcing you to touch the door right after cleaning your hands (or to use a napkin to touch the handle).

<comment><USER11> I learned from my dad to always use the paper towel to open the door, if the garbage is close enough, otherwise the bottom of your shirt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I got sick 12 times my first year living in a city again. I got pretty paranoid after that and now I mentally have a "my hands are infected" notion as soon as I touch something outside the house. The very first thing I do upon entering my apartment or a restaurant is to wash them. Unfortunately I still touch my face sometimes while my hands are potentially dirty, I need to be more careful about that.

I've got sick a lot less often since implementing that, maybe once a year now on average.

<comment><USER12> It could also be because your immune system got used to the change in environment.

I honestly don't understand the particular level of fear around COVID-19 when compared to other flu outbreaks. Can anyone point me to a concise explanation? I mean, I get that it's a new virus we've never seen before, but what distinctly sets it apart? Everything I've read says that it affects older people and those with a compromised immune system the worst, which is just like any flu. Is it mostly that we're worried about what we don't know that we don't know? Not trying to be dismissive, I just feel like I'm missing something. I don't remember the panic around swine flu or bird flu being like this.

Also does anyone know why people are panic-buying toilet paper in my country?

<comment><USER13> Case fatality rate for swine flu was around 0.02%[1]. There's still a lot of uncertainty around 2019-nCoV, but most estimates appear to be closer to 1-2%.

You're not wrong in that old and sick people are the affected the most, but it's significantly worse compared to e.g. Influenza[2].

[1]: [https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus- death-...](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death- rate/#comparison)

[2]: [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jbloom/CoV_vs_flu_CFR/mast...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jbloom/CoV_vs_flu_CFR/master/CFR- stats.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So now we're supposed to have a fear of touching things as well as all the other neuroses programmed into us in modern life? I need to invest in some mental health startups.

</comment><comment><USER15> What boggles me is why modern buildings still have so many manual doors with handles. At least in the building I work in, you could easily eliminate a ton of doors and not reduce access control flexibility. The rest could be made automatic with some keycard authentication.

<comment><USER16> Not sure of your specific building, but they may be designed as fire doors, in the event of a fire, to isolate areas of the building.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The info from China shows that it spreads primarily through inhaling droplets, not through touching surfaces.

Which is why I expect the epidemic to be way way worse outside of Asia, since in the West people don't wear masks and are actively discouraged by the health authorities.

<comment><USER16> From what I have observed, it seems both South Korea's and China's outbreaks are largest among cities near rivers.

I have also read of the virus being detected in feces.

Is it possible the virus is being spread via the water supply?

The waste treatment plants dump into the river, as well as septic runoff, and humans just deciding to defecate in or near the rivers.

Additionally, if it is possible for dogs to carry the virus, I assume it could be excreted via canine feces, as well.

If the water treatment plants are also using the river as the source of water, what prevents the virus from spreading this way?

<comment><USER17> I'm an environmental engineer with some experience in drinking water treatment.

I doubt it's in the drinking water. One of the oldest drinking water treatment methods would remove the virus: slow-sand filtration. Most places in China would at least use this, and South Korea is likely using more advanced technology.

<comment><USER16> Is the reason sand filtration effective, because the virus is too big to fit between the sand particles as the water flows around it?

I have no clue on how it works, so any insight is appreciated.

<comment><USER17> The virus particles would be filtered out at the top layer of the sand filter, where a layer of microbes grow. This layer is referred to as the schmutzdecke. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmutzdecke](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmutzdecke)

Most of the filtering action happens in that layer. Viruses have no problem getting past sand particles.

<comment><USER16> Thank you for that info.

I also found this report, which may be of interest, from the University of Arizona in 2008 for Coronavirus survival in water and wastewater:

[https://west.arizona.edu/sites/default/files/data/Gundy2008_...](https://west.arizona.edu/sites/default/files/data/Gundy2008_Article_SurvivalOfCoronavirusesInWater.pdf)

10 days or more in water, and 2 to 4 days in wastewater.

My local municipality only uses chlorine, so I am a bit concerned.

We had our own sand filtration system, but 'decided' to instead use the town next-door's system, instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Rather than covering everything with dirt, you just have to make everyone believe it. In HK, this has been quite successful. Pretty much everyone refuses to touch the buttons on an elevator, handrails on escalators or the MTR etc.

<comment><USER19> How do people get from floor to floor in the elevator?

<comment><USER18> Use a tissue or, increasingly, gloves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The crud would rub off and have to be constantly replaced.

The effort to do that could instead be put toward continually disinfecting the surface which would provide actual benefit.

<comment><USER21> Snot tape. Stays put, feels icky, peels off clean.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Yeah put disgusting grease on railings let's see what happens to your lawyers phone in a day

</comment><comment><USER23> Here's another solution to something else...

How To Encourage Safer Driving

Instead of an airbag on the steering wheel, put a large 10 inch spike on it. Pointed right at your head.</comment>


Show HN: Improve web search with custom search engines - <AUTHOR> https://searchcommons.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> Maker here. I've put together several custom search engines that helped me fight poor Google search performance on certain queries. The search engines use Google Custom Search Engine configured for selected websites and return succinct results on general queries, especially the queries attracting SEO spammers.

The engines are listed on [https://searchcommons.org/engines.html](https://searchcommons.org/engines.html) and here are some of them:

— The web minus Alexa top 1000 most visited websites [https://searchcommons.org/?e=most-visited-websites- excluded](https://searchcommons.org/?e=most-visited-websites-excluded)

— Official docs for Python and its libraries [https://searchcommons.org/?e=python- docs](https://searchcommons.org/?e=python-docs) (feel free to request an engine for your programming language)

— Universities with Nobel Prize, Fields Medal, and Turing Award laureates [https://searchcommons.org/?e=universities-with- laureates](https://searchcommons.org/?e=universities-with-laureates)

The lists of selected websites are public and open to contributions: [https://github.com/antontarasenko/searchcommons](https://github.com/antontarasenko/searchcommons)

<comment><USER2> I have a similar private thing. The thing is ended up with duck duck duck go.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Too many costumers, no time - <AUTHOR>

I would like to ask you what would you do if you have too many costumers. Now my business have a great attention from target group. In our inbox there are 5000 emails asking for our premium service and ready to pay. But I have only three workers, and I can't answer all of my costumers. I need more workers, but I can't do it because I have no time to be a CEO of my company. I am a medicine student, everyday I must study, read. Would you think about a University drop-out?<p>P.S. sorry for my bad english, I am from Germany. <comment><USER2> Can you maybe re-write your 'Would you think about a University drop-out?' sentence?

If you are asking 'should' you drop-out? The answer is that it depends on what you want in life, and what your goals are.

If you've always wanted to run a company, and love the field that your company is currently involved in, then I'd say drop-out and go for it.

I assume you can always go back to school if you want to. You won't always have more customers than you can service. Consider yourself extremely lucky to be in the situation you are in.

I guess the question comes down to.

a) if you leave school, and work on the business,what are the positives and negatives.

As a positive, you'll learn a ton as a business owner, and be more rounded outside of the medical field. This could be VERY valuable in the long term even if you go back to medicine.

The negatives?? You may never go back to school (your choice though) or your degree may be delayed. You are taking a risk and hoping that financially you'll come out on top, but if customers are so keen on your product, that risk is probably small.

b) you stay in school. Will the business fail absolutely? do you care? Will you be wondering what would have happened had you taken a shot?

From an outsiders point of view and considering that you've posted this on HN, I think most people would suggest you go for the business.

Another way of looking at it might be to ask what you would do if the business didn't have so many customers right now? Would you still be operating the business because you enjoy it and it is't too much drain?

If the problem really is that their are too many customers to service, that is an absolutely amazing problem to have. Maybe try adjusting the parameters of the situation and see what you feel most comfortable with.

Example, can you take less classes to lower your school workload? Can you limit the number of customers you service, and raise your price. Can you create a wait list type situation for your service? Can you hire somebody to answer the emails for you?

If I misunderstood your question, I'm sorry.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks you for your comment, I appreciate it.

Actually, I would drop-out with no doubt if I were in second or third year of my study. It's already 7 years that I study medicine and there are only 4 more years to be a maxillo-facial surgeon. These surgeons earn in Germany per month 100.000-500.000 USD. I dont hate medicine but, I think I like entrepreneurship more than medicine. I discovered that I have great entrepreneurial skills and I started my business, so I made in my first month 40,000 USD. It's already 6 month, and it's growing. I calculated, next year I'll earn some hundred thousands per month.

But, we know that business is not safe and you can always go down, bankrupt. But to be a physician means you have always a standard routine work, and you'll earn good. But earnings are limited, and you can't earn more than half million per month as a surgeon. My goals are to earn too much money to be able to realize my other projects.

Now, actually already 2 years or so, I consider whether to drop out or not. I have 2 more projects, on which I am sure I can earn money with them. But those 7 years on medicine makes me thinking, because, after drop-out you can't go back and continue, you can only start from 3rd year.

<comment><USER3> I'd say only few lucky surgeons in private practice make that kind of money. I have no reason to doubt your good faith, but my BS-detector is getting some signals.

So, what's the business about? Can you disclose?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hire someone to answer the emails, create a waiting list and increase your prices.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comment. Actually I doubled the prices, but the number of costumers are not decreasing. I know it sounds scary but its true. I think I found a niche business, a hole on the market, and my business grows like balloon. Hiring someone on my business is not so easy, because it a special service work, they must have my skills, that I've learned in many years. I mean I must teach minimum 10 days my new workers, what they must do, otherwise they can't do it. And for that I have no time, this is the problem.

<comment><USER4> Hmmm... I wouldn't leave medicine for "service work" because it doesn't scale and it leaves you open when other people with similar skills enter the market.

That said, it sounds like a great time. If it were me, I would get family or a friend involved. You say it takes 10 days to train someone. So have them literally work with you for 10 days and train on the job.

As far as the time goes, I find it hard to believe your program can't let you take two weeks off. Any sizable institution has to have students with family emergencies and other issues. Also... if you are willing to drop out and abandon your degree, you must also be willing to let your grades drag a bit.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the ideas. I appreciate your comment</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Making MySQL 5,888.6x faster. Yep, you read that right! - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/bigobject-digest/making-mysql-5-888-6x-faster-yep-you-read-that-right-5ddbf4ce192b

<comment><USER2> Why are you using a locking read on a million+ row table?

Why are you doing a naive join between million+ row tables?

Is the point here that your product is better than a badly-implemented database on its own?

<comment><AUTHOR> Q: Why are you using a locking read on a million+ row table?

A: BigObject is row based storage as of current implementation. There is a RW lock on the table to coordinate access. Going forward as BigObject adopts advanced storage schemes i.e. column based storage, indexed row group, etc concurrency will naturally improve. For this iteration, we felt that most query are READ/SCAN access, and a simple RW lock is sufficient for the performance gain we observed.

The bottom line is, BigObject is a collection of data structures that could operate on structured data sets in an efficient manner. It is the foundation that we build on to provide new ways to address data analytic problems.

Q: Why are you doing a naive join between million+ row tables?

A: Here we are demonstrating a heavy operation that will scan the entire data set. You could improve the performance if you know first hand what subset of data you will touch, and leave the rest behind, but so would BigObject's performance.

Q: Is the point here that your product is better than a badly-implemented database on its own?

A: MySQL, PostgreSQL and other database systems are robust and well-maintained solutions.

Developers today develop applications with the premise that a database server must be present in their service, but could be using it for the wrong purpose. BigObject is a middle layer for extending the capabilities and performance of databases whose role today are skewed towards general storage and retrieval while the original idea was handling transactions.

Arguably, you could tell people to use the right tools for the type of data and inbound frequency they are dealing with, but as a service provider and partner in Big Data Analytics, we have a responsibility beyond RTFM and snide.

We hope this helps address your questions.

Note: Questions answered via Jeff our product architect here at BigObject.

Additional Material if you are interested:

[https://bitbucket.org/macrodata/benchmark- rdbms](https://bitbucket.org/macrodata/benchmark-rdbms)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Do you have plans to support replication from sources? Having to manually load data via a query takes away real time use and takes away the gains of the query in bigobject.

</comment><comment><USER4> No explanation what so ever on how you did this.....

<comment><AUTHOR> Let me know what explanation you are looking for and I would be happy to go into more detail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seriously? 5,888x or 5,888%?

<comment><AUTHOR> 5,888x...here is the math I used:

MySQL Time: 588.86 seconds BigObject Time: 0.1 second

588.86/0.1 = 5888.6 which is 5888.6x :)

Hope this helps!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What´s your favorite JVM Language? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Groovy, because it seems to have so much flexibility in what you can do with it. Its' the true "scala" to me in the sense that I can write single line bash scripts with it, but I can also write full fledged complex applications and high performance code that gets close enough to performance with Java and even C++ for most of my use cases. I can switch seamlessly between any level of static / dynamic typing to achieve whatever I want from among these different applications, and I can even do it after the fact.

</comment><comment><USER3> Kotlin. Learning curve is gentle, reduced boilerplate, aggressive null handling, first class language support in IDEA and interoperability with Java codebase.

<comment><USER4> Kotlin for me too. It's like the pinched the cool bits from other languages to boost java. Plus the power of java ecosystem. The tooling is amazing because obviously it's Jetbrains' baby. Gradle are on board as are the android team. Spring boot lot are going for it. It stands a good chance of getting a lot more mindshare than it has currently

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Groovy.

Because it's "java like" enough that all of my years of experience using Java still pay dividends, but yet it knocks off most of the warts Java has (writing getters and setters, for example), while adding cool stuff like dynamic typing, closures, currying, map literals, string interpolation, tons of handy convenience methods, etc.

<comment><USER6> > adding cool stuff like dynamic typing, closures [to Java]

Both dynamic-style inferred typing and closure-like lambdas have been added to Java since Apache Groovy was first released. Groovy's business case has become less compelling as a result.

<comment><USER5> _Groovy 's business case has become less compelling as a result._

By a small margin, yes. Personally, I still find Groovy far more compelling than plain Java, especially when I'm using Grails for "web stuff". For pure backend REST services, I do sometimes go with plain Java and Spring Boot. As the old saying goes "use the right tool for the job". Hell, I'd use COBOL if there was a compelling reason. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Java

</comment><comment><USER8> Kotlin!</comment>


Twitter is Not Facebook (Thank God) - <AUTHOR> http://brooksreview.net/2011/05/follow/ <comment><USER2> I did that just the other day, and will probably do it again soon. I just get fed up with all the garbage tweets that I see. It is nice to see something personal every once in a while from someone you follow, but more often than not, I am looking for value that will either 1) help me do my job better or 2) teach me something I didn't know about something I care about.</comment>


"Adobe Flash is no longer supported in Safari" - <AUTHOR> https://developer.apple.com/safari/technology-preview/release-notes/ <comment><USER2> We are working to solve the Flash problem "the right way" with a WebAssembly based virtualization solution, for more info:

[https://medium.com/leaningtech/running-flash-in- webassembly-...](https://medium.com/leaningtech/running-flash-in-webassembly- using-cheerpx-an-update-d500b6fbc44e)

[https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content- with...](https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-with- webassembly-done-right-eb6838b7e36f)

Feel free to drop me questions: [https://twitter.com/alexpignotti](https://twitter.com/alexpignotti)

<comment><USER3> Just to be clear, who are "we" in this case? :-)

<comment><USER2> Leaning Technologies (www.leaningtech.com), we make compilers that target WebAssembly and JavaScript.

I am CTO of the company.

<comment><USER4> Ah, it had appeared maybe you represented Apple or the Safari team in some way with your top-level announcement.

<comment><USER5> If Apple was going to bother with backwards compatibility, they would have it done before shutting down the old version.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://www.newgrounds.com/](https://www.newgrounds.com/) has been around for a long long time and has a wealth of old content built in flash.

Luckily they are creating [https://ruffle.rs](https://ruffle.rs) which is a flash emulator written in rust. All of this fantastic media should be preserved!

<comment><USER7> Is there any place you can play Desktop Tower Defense without flash?

[https://www.kongregate.com/games/preecep/desktop-tower- defen...](https://www.kongregate.com/games/preecep/desktop-tower-defense)

<comment><USER8> Seconded, I missed that time-sink game so much, haven't been able to find a replacement.

For some reason all the newer tower defense games use a fixed playing field whereas the original DTD allowed you to build your own defensive walls.

Edit: We _really_ need a Flash Archive

<comment><USER9> Building your own walls was very exploitable, so I can understand removing the ability.

<comment><USER10> There are some fantastic TDs that allow you to build your own walls in an open field, they just need to be explicitly balanced around that.

Besides Desktop TD, the other main classic of that subgenre is Bubble Tanks TD: [https://armorgames.com/play/4962/bubble-tanks-tower- defense](https://armorgames.com/play/4962/bubble-tanks-tower-defense)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm sure there are probably copyright or patent reasons that Adobe can't easily release Flash's source code, but I really wish they would.

It's great that there are community projects to help recreate Flash, but it would make those projects a lot simpler and less error-prone if Adobe would simply provide the reference implementations.

<comment><USER12> >I'm sure there are probably copyright or patent reasons that Adobe can't easily release flash's source code, but I really wish they would.

Time to reread what Steve Jobs wrote about it a decade ago! [https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on- flash/](https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/)

<comment><USER13> Is he really whining about something being closed and proprietary? Can't fucking believe it.

<comment><USER12> >Is he really whining about something being closed and proprietary? Can't fucking believe it.

"whining?" _Steve Jobs didn 't whine_...He built the greatest products in our digital era.

He answered Mossberg and Swisher here at 2:00 on why he wrote Thoughts on Flash. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5f8bqYYwps&t=4177s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5f8bqYYwps&t=4177s)

">Mossberg: you published thoughts on flash, is it fair to be abrupt?

Steve: Apple is a company that doesn't have the most resources of everybody in the world and the way we've succeeded is by choosing what horses to ride carefully technically. We try to look for these technical vectors that have a future and that are headed up and you technology..different pieces of technology go in cycles. They have their Springs and summers and autumns and then they you know go to the graveyard of technology. So we try to pick things that are in there Springs and if you choose wisely you can save yourself an enormous amount of work versus trying to do everything and you can really put energy into making those new emerging technologies be great on your platform rather than just okay because you're spreading yourself too thin. So we have a history of doing that that. As an example, we went from the 5 inch floppy disk the 3.5 inch floppy disk with the Mac.

>Mossberg: before other people right?

Steve: We were the first to do that we made the 3.5 floppy disk this popular, Sony invented it and we put it in the first products, and there some good reasons we did that, we got rid of the floppy disk altogether in 1998, with the first iMac. We also got rid of these things called serial and parallel ports and we were the first to adopt USB, even though Intel had invented it. You first saw it en mass on iMac. And so we have gotten rid of things, we were one of the first to get rid of optical drives with a MacBook Air, I think things are moving in that direction as well. And sometimes when we get rid of things like the floppy disk drive on the original iMac people call us crazy.

>Mossberg interrupts: or at least premature maybe.

Steve: No! they call us crazy. But sometimes you just have to pick the things that look like they're gonna be the right horses to ride going forward and flash looks like a technology that had its day but is really on is waning and HTML5 looks like the technology that's really on the ascendancy right now and to incorporate flash into systems is a lot of work there's not smartphone shipping with flash on it now as you know.

>Mossberg: but you know that there will be right?

Steve: Well, you know there's going to have been for the last two or three years and every six months it gets updated, so I'm sure that eventually they will and there is a lot of issues with that in terms of battery life and you know security and other things, but more importantly, HTML5 is starting to emerge. You know there's been an avalanche of people that have said we're doing HTML5 video and the video looks better and it works better and you don't need a plug-in to run it, and so while 75% of the video in the web may be in flash, you know 25% going to 50% very shortly is also available in HTML5.

>Kara: so do you say that to consumers, I mean besides the technologies?

Steve: I think consumers outside of the valley and our industry aren't having this issue…

>Mossberg interrupts: Except when they hold up their iPad and they go to a web page and there's like a hole there, where a video would be.

Steve: there are holes in some websites but those holes are getting plugged real fast. The holes that exist now are our ads, and that's the problem for some people.

>Mossberg: Not entirely.

Steve: but that's the number one holes that are there

>Mossberg: and what about the other community that I think is impacted by this and that's developers, because what I think a lot of the coverage of this flash issue has overlooked is that yes, flash is a video container and there are other video containers actually have a very rising share each to h.264 and the native HTML5 but it's also a development environment and there are entire some of them quite beautiful written on a flash?

Steve: an even more popular development environment was hypercard and we were okay to axe that!

>Mossberg: it wasn't more popular than flash, was?!

Steve: in its day, sure it was.

>Mossberg: on your platform right?

Steve: no no no no. Hypercard was huge in its day because it was accessible to anybody. You could be a hypercard developer. We have over 200,000 apps on the App Store. So something must be going right in terms of attracting developers to our platform!!

>Kara: so your goal your your ultimate goal is to get rid of flash or just to how..

Steve: well, see our goal is really easy we didn't start off to have a war with flash or anything else we just made a technical decision that we weren't gonna put the energy into getting flash on our platform, we told Adobe if you ever have this thing running fast come back and show us, which they never did and/but we think we're not gonna use it, and that was it. And we shipped the iPhone and it doesn't use flash and it wasn't until we shipped the iPad and it didn't use flash that Adobe started to raise a stink about it. We didn't raise a stink about it, we never mentioned the word Adobe or flash or anything else. We like Adobe we have a lot of common customers with CS you know their Creative Suite software and things like that, so we weren't trying to have a fight. We just decided not to use one of their products in our platform and so you know they started to say a lot of bad things about us in the press and this and that and it went on for months and that's why I wrote Thoughts on Flash, because we were trying to be real professional about this and weren't talking to the press about it, we didn't think it was a matter for the press and we finally just said enough is enough! We're tired of these guys trashing us in the press over this and so we wrote down the reasons why technically we didn't use flash, and they are just as true today as they were when we wrote it as they were six months or a year before that.

>Mossberg: What if people say you know the iPad is crippled in this respect.

Steve: This is America. Things are packages of emphasis, some things are emphasize in a products , some things are not done as well in a product, somethings are chosen not to be done at all in a product and so different people make different choices and if the market tells us we're making the wrong choices we listen to the market! We're just people running this company we're trying to make great products for people and so we have at least the courage of our conventions to say we don't think this is part of what makes a great product, we are gonna leave it out, some people are gonna not like that, they're gonna call us names it's not going to be in certain companies vested interests that we do that but we're gonna take the heat because we want to make the best product in the world for customers. We're gonna instead focus our energy on these technologies, which we think are in their ascendency and we think are gonna be the right technologies for customers and you know what?! they are paying us to make those choices . That's what a lot of customers pay us to do, is to try to make the best products we can and if we succeed they'll buy them, and if we don't they won't! And it'll all work itself out. So far I'd have to say that people seem to be liking iPads. We've sold one every three seconds since we launched it."

He wrote that post, and spoke for 10 minutes explaining all the reasons, and you called him whining.. I will end with a quote from Steve Jobs email to a journalist

"By the way, what have you done that's so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?"

what have you done that's so great to say that Steve Jobs was whining when he put valid reasons for not going with flash?

<comment><USER13> Well that's a nice try but I don't have to create anything to see through the BS. I just have to use some products this guy of yours created.

HTML5 was nowhere near the capability for interactive apps for a long time. And flash was, just look at those flash game websites, 1000s of them there. His attempt to make the whole argument about videos and not about preserving his walled garden that is app store is as dishonest as the rest of their typical marketing bullshit.

> He built the greatest products in our digital era.

Well maybe that's the problem right there. They were great from a business standpoint (aka getting fat asses fatter), never from user standpoint. Those products enslaved their users because they are closed down annoying i-know- what-you-need-and-dont-need-better-than-you pieces of trash.

It's also ironic that you use this quote:

> Do you create anything

Did he? Or someone else did for him to sell with his holier-than-thou marketing?

<comment><USER14> "Holier than thou":

Original iPhone supported offline HTML5 apps, with home screen icons and full app saved to home screen ... and iOS still supports that. Yes, you can still distribute purely open apps that work offline to iOS devices outside the app store with zero approvals from Apple or anyone.

Developers preferred the app store even for "apps" that are nothing but a web window, not just about APIs etc.

So Jobs is onto something with the "a product is a package of emphasis" and the market decides.

Sounds like you don't like the market, which as Jobs noted in that quote, is everything outside the valley bubble.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I haven't had the Adobe Flash plugin installed for several years now. I can't even remember the last time I needed to use Chrome for Flash support.

My kids are in college and I don't think they've needed Flash even for the variety of archaic sites they have to deal with.

<comment><USER16> _I can 't even remember the last time I needed touse Chrome for Flash support._

My company's spam filter service requires Flash if you're on desktop. There's a mobile version that's non-Flash, but it's feature limited.

The web site of one of the larger pre-FAANG online advertising companies is all Flash. You can't even change your password without it.

<comment><USER17> What's a "spam filter service" and why does it need flash to function?

<comment><USER18> A thing that holds incoming emails it thinks are spam and provides a web UI (usually) allowing you to review and release messages to your actual inbox.

<comment><USER17> Isn't that typically handled in the same interface as your regular inbox? Or is this some enterprisey service that forces you to go to their website to review it?

<comment><USER18> Its an enterprisey service that forces you to go to their website to review it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Adobe "will stop distributing and updating Flash Player after December 31, 2020" [https://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/end-of- life.html](https://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/end-of-life.html)

So for a browser version that will be released this fall as a non-preview, it makes sense.

<comment><USER20> Not only will Adobe stop distributing it, it will stop working.

> _Flash-based content will be blocked from running in Adobe Flash Player > after the EOL Date._

<comment><USER21> Wow. Good catch. So if this wasn't anticipated or disclosed to their authoring tool customers, would it be considered breach of service and qualify for a refund?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This makes me a little sad. I started my professional career as an AS3 dev building apps in Adobe AIR with occasional work in Flash. I realize AIR is still kinda supported, but the writing is on the wall. I've obviously moved on, but it does feel like losing an old friend.

<comment><USER23> Same here, although I started my career with Perl 20 years ago and then switched to AS3 and Air building a complete interactive museum with it, still open and functioning. Probably some people want to kill me now for this combo. :D My life was fun with those languages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I had no idea Flash was still supported.

<comment><USER25> I honestly didn't realize there was a way you could use Flash in Safari for the past few years. I just opened Chrome the last time (~2 years ago) I encountered some Flash content.

<comment><USER26> You could install it as it was specifically whitelisted. But now you can't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> More excited about improved WebAuthn support. Time to finally add this as login option.

</comment><comment><USER28> Steve Jobs killed it just as I had learned all about AS3, so that was a bit of a bummer. But in the end it was the right thing to do.

The company I worked for at the time excelled in creating awful 20mb non- indexable monstrosities, complete with auto playing music and all kinds of other sins. We mutilated the most basic design patterns when the client or bosses thought it would look interesting and even cut a shady deal with a popular meme site to "make it go viral" at one point in time, which it obviously didn't.

Shame about all the brilliant Newgrounds stuff though. I'm not talking about the actual content, I just mean I've never seen such a concentrated outpoor of interactive creativity since then. It felt like there was something amazingly smart, creative or funny to discover every day back then.

<comment><USER29> Nah, Adobe killed it.

<comment><USER28> Nonsense. Adobe may have been the one to pull the plug, but the Flash era would have been stretched by at least a couple of years if Steve Jobs hadn't pitted the weight of the entire iPhone community against it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Serious question - are they're any popular (define that how you like) sites that prominently use / require Flash?

<comment><USER31> Ikea has a closet planner[0] that is actually quite good. It lets you visualize closet frames in 3D by placing them within a virtual bedroom, then add shelves, drawers and other accessories inside of them. Then once you're done, it can put all of your items into your cart or generate a shopping list.

It's probably ~10 years old at this point, so it would seem they've had long enough to see the writing on the wall and port it to a newer technology. OTOH I'm not sure that, even today, the stability or penetration of WebGL is comparable to where Flash was at its height (to say nothing of the available talent pool.)

I've taken a screenshot[1] so anyone who doesn't have Flash can take a look.

[0] [https://www.ikea.com/us/en/planner/pax- planner/](https://www.ikea.com/us/en/planner/pax-planner/)

[1] [https://imgur.com/a/WW1lDCB](https://imgur.com/a/WW1lDCB)

<comment><USER32> 13 years ago I was working on a project for IKEA, a room planner. We used Flash and it was a seriously ambitious project. The level of interactivity that was possible when using Flash was unrivalled for a long time. It appears that most of these type of "sites" has been replaced by native apps, even though the web platform has most of the required capabilities now. Flash was fun to develop with, as everything was well integrated and just worked, and pioneered many of the technologies we now see as part of the web platform APIs. A lot of the criticisms of Flash is due to shitty timeline-based banners which used up the CPU. You could definitively make efficient, fast performing apps/sites using Flash/AS3 if you knew what you were doing. Of course I moved on to JS/TS development, but it isn't as fun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I can imagine Steve Jobs is looking down smiling today.

<comment><USER34> What makes you think he's looking down?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This concerns me a little. I won't miss flash, but I still need it to access vSphere on an old vmware installation the customer refuse to update.

<comment><USER36> Would you be interested in a solution that allows your access to the old VMware stack to continue?

If yes, how much would you pay for such a product?

<comment><USER35> Hmm, interesting. Ideally I would like to just have vSphere upgraded, but that's also not my money.

Let's assume that it's in the middle of the night in January 2021 and I really need the access and I can't be sure my employeer will pay and the solution is available via Apple AppStore and works using SSH jump hosts. In that case I would likely pay €100 - €150 without thinking twice about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> How can one access a flash site after this? I pretty much only use Safari now when I have to use flash and chrome won't let me. The French patent INPI website uses it for zoomifying their old Scanned in patents.

<comment><USER38> Perhaps a VM of an OS with an old copy of Flash, virtualbox.org might help. I wonder if any of the Microsoft legacy VMs for web testing come with Flash preinstalled: [https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft- edge/tools/v...](https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft- edge/tools/vms/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> See also the big demise-of-Flash thread from 11 days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23528182](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23528182).

</comment><comment><USER40> WebAuthn support is the real worthy upgrade

</comment><comment><USER41> Totally naive question: Would Unity + WASM cover the game space Flash used to well?

<comment><USER42> There's certainly already Unity projects on the web in the space Flash used to occupy.

Also, HTML5's CANVAS tag, and modern web platform tools like WebGL, mean that you can do most of what Flash games did directly in HTML5 and JS. There's a growing number of 2D and 3D game libraries written entirely in JS or TS.

The biggest missing piece that made Flash so ubiquitous for early web games is the authoring experience. Unity is a lot more complicated than the Flash designer was. I've seen several game editors for HTML+JS libraries, but also nothing quite similar to how easy Flash was for early web designers. The codebase that inherits and succeeds the original Flash IDE lives on in a new name (Adobe Animate) and can directly target HTML+JS instead of Flash, but is a part of Adobe Creative Cloud and so too expensive for many of the hobbyist designers that made early web games what they were back when the DRM for the Flash IDE was a lot easier to crack than a cloud subscription.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Steve Jobs is (or at least would have been) jumping up and down with happiness. Or more likely bitching about how long this took!

<comment><USER44> Yeah, I'm actually surprised that this is only just now happening. Guess I'd assumed he'd managed to bump it off on all Apple platforms before he died.

<comment><USER45> Because it was not about going after Adobe or Flash. It was about the performance of the iPhone. He detailed this in his public letter to Adobe after he gave them 2 years to get it working and they failed. The letter was public because Adobe was crying about being shutout and making shit up. The fact is that Adobe never got Flash "working right" even on the Android platform which they had full access to every part of the hardware. "Working Right" means not draining the battery after a 30 minute video.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Probably not a good call to do this now while kids are still schooling from home.

<comment><USER45> Why? Flash is dead. Any "school" using Flash does not have anything worth teaching since Adobe has been announcing it's death for years and this year is it [[https://www.wired.com/story/adobe-finally-kills-flash- dead/](https://www.wired.com/story/adobe-finally-kills-flash-dead/)]

<comment><USER47> "Dead" only meaning new apps generally don't use Flash. Old content is still not accessible without a Flash player.

<comment><USER45> It's only been 10 years since its downfall was obvious to everyone. If any one offers it as part of their service to you then just realize how little of a crap they care about you.

<comment><USER47> You never read a book published more than 10 years before? Just because something is old doesn't mean I never want to access it again. And 10 years isn't even that old.

<comment><USER48> Set up a VM with flash installed.

<comment><USER49> Done that, with a Linux VM. Works surprisingly badly. Flash becomes very slow.

Perhaps a Windows VM works better? Although Windows VMs tend to be pretty big, hard to manage with less than 5 GB. Oh, and the licensing...

<comment><USER48> > Flash becomes very slow.

No surprise there. Flash was never good on Linux (IME).

If the cost of the windows license is a barrier, then maybe the content isn't worth that much to you? I truly don't mean that in a condescending way. I just find that a lot of people like to data hoard without a real need for what they are hoarding.

<comment><USER45> "Flash was never good on Linux (IME)." It was never good on anything! You can half a laptop's battery by watching videos during a 30 minute break.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> it still was?

</comment><comment><USER51> Got a question for any front end devs who were experts in Flash and AS but now experts in React.

Qualitatively speaking what was the development experience like for Flash websites or animations vs. HTML 5 + react OR JS?

Can you say definitively one experience was better than the other or is it a more complicated story?

I know there's a lot of hate for flash but I'm specifically asking about the developer experience here.

<comment><USER52> It's a mixed bag. The ideal usecase for Flash vs React is very different. 10 years ago with AS3 I could put together a graphically rich game with decent sound or an intercative graphic very quickly, it would be performant and available as a small download -- much easier than doing similar today though libraries like phaser have certainly helped the situation a great deal. It just wouldn't make sense to try to make a sprite based platform game in React. On the other hand, complex forms, modular UIs and dynamically loading content -- areas where React (etc) excel were possible in Flash (espescially with adobe's Flex UI framework) but never looked any good or behaved in a satisfying way (my feeling is that pursuing this kind of thing as a kind of 'look at us we can do serious software' move caused adobe to take their eye off the ball wrt where they could provide real advantages over web-standards based solutions). Further, colaborating across teams of any size on AS3 based products was hard -- you'd have to pretty much roll your own CI/ deployment stuff (which I guess was the case with JS at the time too).

In summary: Horses for courses.

As a language I really enjoyed AS3; solid class system, strongly typed, good refactoring tools and crucially a decent and standard library.

<comment><USER53> Thanks for sharing.

I may be old or disconnected, but it seems like the like of the flash animator community won't be seen again. Where will we find another Homestar Runner or Weebl?

It was the right tool at just the right time. It was well able to deliver animations and interactive multimedia with the one tool and ecosystem. While the JS/HTML5 tools can manage animations and multimedia, it seems like the environment, libraries and tools are much more spread out... which perhaps discourages animators, while developers are used to working in such a way.

<comment><USER54> No matter the disadvantages of a medium or technology, there will be somebody making something amazing with it. Homestar is a work of creative genius. It's good in a way to be rid of Flash, but something is always lost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> It's still around?!? I thought Steve Jobs killed Flash years ago.

</comment><comment><USER56> The way Apple treated Adobe might have been their very first platform abuse on the iPhone. Flash was huge at the time, but more importantly it was software being actively developed which means it was software that would have improved even as the hardware also improved. At one point Apple even prohibited cross- compilation just to fuck with Adobe, who had adapted Flash at great expense to produce native iOS apps. They had to recant that when they realized they'd also banned Unity3d and many more technologies.

If Apple hadn't contrived their little vendetta, killing someone else's multi- billion dollar piece of software, today Flash would be a flagship IDE on the iPad Pro continuing its then-two-decade legacy as a creativity powerhouse that helped fuel innovation online and in games, media and software.

The worst thing about this sad period of Apple history is today they aspire to kill Electron in the same way.

[https://www.macstories.net/news/new-iphone-dev-agreement- ban...](https://www.macstories.net/news/new-iphone-dev-agreement-bans-the-use- of-3rd-party-services-and-analytics/)

[https://onezero.medium.com/apple-is-trying-to-kill-web- techn...](https://onezero.medium.com/apple-is-trying-to-kill-web- technology-a274237c174d)

<comment><USER57> > today Flash would be a flagship IDE on the iPad Pro continuing its then-two- > decade legacy as a

...resource-hogging security nightmare. You described my nightmare scenario.

<comment><USER58> > ...resource-hogging security nightmare.

Oh, you mean like a web browser?

<comment><USER59> > resource hogging

Completely true.

> security nightmare

Really? All serious browsers are open source and the major ones seem decently well audited, considering the relatively low amount of exploits being published. IIRC Flash was a bit different in that regard.

<comment><USER60> FISHING SITES AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Teju Cole Reminds Us of Life Beyond Politics, and the Beauty of Art - <AUTHOR> http://lithub.com/teju-cole-reminds-us-of-life-beyond-politics-and-the-beauty-of-art/ <comment><USER2> I attended an event called "We The City" in Vancouver last year where Teju Cole gave a talk. He was, in my opinion, a far more interesting speaker than the others. He's what I suppose I would refer to as a pragmatic artist, he's extremely knowledgeable, yet humble and composed, which somewhat contrasted with the other artists present who, while sorta nice, felt pretty shallow. I've read some of his essays from "Known and Strange Things" and I would highly recommend them, they're genuinely insightful.

<comment><USER3> If you haven't read them I really reccomend his small fates or fait divers that he has written: [http://www.tejucole.com/other-words/small- fates](http://www.tejucole.com/other-words/small-fates) or here: [http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/dtake/i-dont-normally-do- this...](http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/dtake/i-dont-normally-do-this-kind-of- thing-45-small-fates/)

<comment><USER2> Thank you so much for sharing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This guy is excellent. I recommend his first novel, "We the City," and you might also want to check out a literary form he renamed and whose revival he spearheaded, "small fates."

[http://www.tejucole.com/other-words/small- fates/](http://www.tejucole.com/other-words/small-fates/)

</comment><comment><USER5> This is great stuff.

</comment><comment><USER6> His "Unmournable Bodies" essay in New Yorker shook me to my core.</comment>


How To Meet Anyone - <AUTHOR> http://www.virool.com/blog/how-to-meet-anyone-from-steve-wozniak-to-president/

<comment><USER2> I have to hand it to this guy, he has gotten his marketing company exposure on HN twice now in as many weeks, and his other accomplishments are quite notable. The thing that rubs me the wrong way about his articles is they always seem to be predicated on the notion that being really incredibly outgoing to the point of recklessness is the road to success. For example, this post should probably have been titled 'How to bum-rush the Russian Prime Minister and live to tell the tale'. The last one could have been 'How to screw over your competitors and an innocent event organizer to further your startup'.

He is very accomplished, but one wonders if there isn't a way to accomplish the same things without bending the rules so hard.

<comment><USER3> Also, given the quality of the article in proportion to the speed at which this article was upvoted, I'm not totally sure it wasn't manipulated in some fashion. Decent advice but not worthy of being #1.

<comment><USER4> I also suspect a voting ring and was surprised as well that this was the #2 article on HN. I skimmed over the sub-heads and it is full of meaningless platitudes. "Be proactive" "Be outgoing" "Dream big" ?

<comment><AUTHOR> i am the author of this post. seriously voting ring? guys, the title of the article was "How To Meet Steve Wozniak and President" - that alone drove a ton of clicks, when people found it useful, they upvoted it! I can tell you that in a matter of 2 hours, we got around 50 votes, I suspect no more than 6 of them came from people that I know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I interviewed Kate Bush a long time ago. This may or may not impress you, but since she's a notorious recluse, it's quite impressive to anyone who is a Kate Bush fan.

Q. How did I do this? A. I made it my life's goal for a couple of years.

So, I'd agree with the OP that you can accomplish all sorts of crazy things if you are obsessive enough about it. In retrospect, however, I might have put those years to better use, and I'm not sure that all that obsession was particularly healthy. I.e., it didn't make me happy.

On the other hand, it's pretty cool to have interviewed Kate Bush, so no regrets.

<comment><USER6> Link to the interview?

<comment><USER7> I second this request. That is impressive!

<comment><USER5> Oh, at this point in my life the silly questions that I asked are just terribly embarrassing to me! I'm sure that you can locate it though, if you really care. The truth is out there!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've had the pleasure to meet a couple President's and a VP of the United States, Governors, hit golf balls with a Hall of Fame running back, drink with Mark Cuban and more just because I saw an opportunity and took advantage of it. As an example, I found out the President was going to a bar near me for a surprise visit so I got there quickly and placed myself where I knew he'd have to pass. Managed to get a hand shake and exchange a few words. You'd be amazed at how easy it is to meet people if you have a can-do attitude and use a little bit of creativity.

<comment><USER9> You seem to have high standards for "meet"

<comment><USER10> I think you mean low standards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> meta: This is the second time in several weeks that we've seen a virool post at the top of HN with loads of votes within just an hour of its posting. It sure isn't suspicious that a company based around viral marketing just happens to have excellent luck getting their HN posts in the top spot on the front page.

If all of their marketing tactics are this transparent, I don't think I would be very inclined to do business with them.

</comment><comment><USER3> Want to find anyone's e-mail? There's an app for that: <http://linksy.me/find- email>. Pretty useful.

<comment><USER12> As long as "anyone" has a Gravatar account with an easy to guess email address. I don't think you'll get Medvev's or Clinton's email in this way...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> TL;DR Stalk them.

</comment><comment><USER14> When I was living in North Carolina, I was reading 'The Mythical Man-Month' and decided to check the wiki page for Fred P. Brooks Jr. (the author). I was surprised to find that he actually worked for UNC Chapel Hill. I found a faculty email address and I was sitting in his living room the following week!

</comment><comment><USER15> "- If you do come in close contact with someone you would like to meet, don't be intimidated, approach them!"

This line pretty much sums up the entire article for me. It takes a "all about my wants" kind of approach. It never takes into account how the target of the meeting would feel. I for one, would be pissed if I was at a charity event and people came up to me asking about their own thing. Just doing what you want with blatant disregard to people's feelings is definitely a way to meet any person you want, but I just don't think the outcome would be the same as in this article.

<comment><USER16> So? What would you do about it?

It's a risk the "target" won't talk to you, but there is little downside. They might think you are a pushy jerk, but they aren't going to do anything. They will just immediately forget you.

If you don't talk them, then nothing will ever happen, guaranteed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Haha, why does Steve Wozniak have the "Bad Boys Bail Bonds" lanyard my girlfriend does?

</comment><comment> x-sam Reminds me a book "Never Eat Alone" by Keith Ferrazzi.

</comment><comment><USER18> $$$$$

</comment><comment><USER19> Very nice article, reminds me this from Tim Ferris:

[http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/12/10/how-to- get-g...](http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/12/10/how-to-get-george- bush-or-the-ceo-of-google-on-the-phone/)</comment>


TDD in CSS – fad or reality? - <AUTHOR> Do you test-drive your CSS code? What has been your long experience in this? Was this concept  of test-driving CSS, an experiment of the past? <comment><AUTHOR> My primary reason against Tests for CSS, is that CSS is not about business logic. And the other being that the way CSS works is the last run CSS styling over-rides the previous one. Unit-testing eh? The order of CSS styling that is applied depends on the order of inclusion, correct? Now write anaother test for this? All these thoughts, made me laugh at the idea of Testing the CSS back then. All said, I was still curious to know what was the positive/negative experience of those who tried it.

</comment><comment><USER2> How would you even "test" CSS?

Look for particular expectations being met in the browser?

As a lot of the general TDD stuff I'd say it's a bad idea.

It gives you nothing extra of value.

Instead you end up multiplying the number of times you declare/define/write something.

I consider this kind of stuff feel good busy work. You want to brag about your CSS test coverage (?!) but you are just wasting time and picking up complexity.

Tests at this level of granularity are just not worth it.

What's next TDD your TDD?

<comment><USER3> Here are some kinds of claims I would like to be able to verify on my stylesheets, whether through testing, fuzzing, proving, or magically intuiting via some proprietary black box APIs for $99/month:

\- The number of columns in the article is 1 on mobile.

\- On desktop, the sidebar is to the left of the article.

\- There is no horizontal scrolling.

\- All paragraphs have a line height equal to the baseline.

\- All elements are vertically aligned on the baseline grid (the "vertical rhythm" property).

\- All sidebar icons are 1rem squares.

I want to take high level desired properties, specify them as assertions, and then use that to continuously check that the assumptions still hold, especially as I change the code, or switch devices, etc.

We seem to _need_ this for CSS styling, because as soon as your website or app reaches a threshold of complexity -- a very low threshold, in my experience -- it starts to happen very easily that a seemingly innocent new stylesheet rule has some detrimental "action at a distance"... it's right there in the name, "cascading".

You might be thinking that you can get around this problem through proper abstraction, and I'm interested to hear about that too -- anything that can structurally improve stylesheet quality is urgently necessary. I note that CSS variables are still experimental technology, and that from what I've seen, various CSS preprocessing technologies mostly increase the need for verification (maybe because they tend to encourage even more complex forms of cascading).

In practice, for most projects, I would end up conceding that we can't test our CSS beyond things like screenshot diffing (which is a pretty nice technique), just because it would probably require some "original research" into specifying stylesheets.

Maybe Google or Facebook could sponsor it. They're both producing frontend development resources because they want web developers to succeed in making cool stuff that they can link to (and surveil).

Is there an academic clique somewhere with an interest in formal methods for stylesheets? Or a startup?

It seems interdisciplinary enough to be cool, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> IMO CSS doesn't really need unit tests because you are QA-ing it as you develop it. You can't really write CSS without looking at the page and making sure it looks good. If you're already looking at the page to make sure it looks good, what's the point of writing tests to do the same thing?

</comment><comment><USER5> I've found testing tools that take screenshots very useful. Once you're happy with the site, you take screenshots at various screen widths and after you make changes you can view visual diffs of the new screenshots to see if you broke anything.

<comment><USER6> We've had good luck with Percy. It was a few lines of code to have it drop HTML+static assets to them, they take care of screen shots. It takes screen shots (HTML) via our normal test suite, so we didn't have to write any new tests.

It shows up as a check on every merge request we have from develop->master, and any visual differences get a manual check. It works great, even on large refactors!

<comment><USER5> Do you have to pay to use that? If so do you find it restricts you? Sounds like something you want to self-host. I've used Wraith before which works OK but their version of PhantomJS is pretty old.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, we pay. And no. The benefit is they take care of rendering, our test suite only has to send DOM (html) snapshots with static assets. We, in turn, get a consistent rendering environment that can rapidly render+diff 100s++ screen shots in a minute or two. The key benefit is that it doesn't take our test suite much additional time to do it since our side is lightweight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Never even heard of anyone using TDD for CSS. How does that work?

<comment> another-dave See frameworks like:

* Galen: [http://slides.com/netzartist-de/galen-tdd-css](http://slides.com/netzartist-de/galen-tdd-css) * Quixote: [https://github.com/jamesshore/quixote](https://github.com/jamesshore/quixote)

It does sound interesting to me (well testing with good coverage on appropriate elements, rather than 'TDD' per se), but I've never had a chance to get it running on a project. It feels like the type of thing you'd need to do from the beginning if at all.

Could be useful especially around 'baseline' things on the site, that you're not expecting to change, e.g. do font-sizes, block-level padding, grid alignment, brand colours, etc.

EDIT:

Just to add, so I think the basic premise of this type of visual testing is that you're testing imperatively (i.e. "when I'm on the homepage, the navigation should be flush to the top of the screen and should have a 100px gap between it and the primary header") vs using something like Wraith where you're testing declaratively (here is a screenshot of the homepage; the actual homepage should look exactly like this ±5% variance).

It's roughly equivalent to integration tests (how does my nav 'integrate with' the Window, the header, etc.) vs functional end-to-end tests (does the homepage as a whole work). Given your point of view, that can either give great savings in debugging things (as you've more specificity about what has changed that caused your funky layout) or could be a complete waste of effort. The answer is probably somewhere in between :)

I would be interested to hear if there's anyone using a CSS test framework like Cucumber/BDD style tests — as the Galen slides above mention, your designer is probably subconsciously checking things on the page, but they're being exact about it — if we could distill that precision into BDD tests and allow our test framework building blocks to grow over time, would you be able to create a suite of reusable test statements that can be written up by design by themselves?</comment></comment>


Deathblow Dealt to Dark Matter Disks - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/deathblow-dealt-to-dark-matter-disks-20171117/ <comment><USER2> > Eighty years after the discovery of dark matter...

This is me being pedantic, but when was dark matter 'discovered'?

<comment><USER3> They're probably referring to Fritz Zwicky's observation in 1933 that the luminous matter in the Coma Cluster couldn't support the observed velocity dispersion. Zwicky hypothesized that there was a large amount of non-luminous matter that allows the velocity dispersion to be as large as it is. Zwicky's hypothesis wasn't taken seriously until the 1970s when Vera Rubin and others found a similar effect in galactic rotation curves.</comment></comment>


A New Thermodynamics Theory of the Origin of Life (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/ <comment><USER2> I think the organization process itself is what most people will find questionable about this. Making statements like:

"You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant"

Is obviously counter-intuitive for most people and certainly surprising. However, if this is the manner in which the universe actually operates, then this is brilliant. I think most of us would just want to see experiments and explanations that go further than this.

</comment><comment><USER3> Direct link to publications from Jeremy England's group at MIT:

[http://www.englandlab.com/publications.html](http://www.englandlab.com/publications.html)</comment>


So you've learned you've got a "pitifully" low IQ. How worried should you be? - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/10/23/16516516/iq-tests-high-low-achievement-sat-anxiety-determinism <comment><USER2> From the author's (funnier, better) blog post on the subject:

>Second, the people who get low IQ scores, are shocked, find their whole world tumbling in on themselves, and desperately try to hold on to their dream of being an intellectual – are not a representative sample of the people who get low IQ scores. The average person who gets a low IQ score says "Yup, guess that would explain why I'm failing all my classes", and then goes back to beating up nerds. When you see someone saying "Help, I got a low IQ score, I've double-checked the standard deviation of all of my subscores and found some slight discrepancy but I'm not sure if that counts as Bayesian evidence that the global value is erroneous", then, well – look, I wouldn't be making fun of these people if I didn't constantly come across them. You know who you are

<comment><USER3> That doesn't look funny or better to me, that looks bitter and hateful for no reason. This person thinks half the world spends their time beating up nerds?

<comment><USER2> I'll just give you the context and you can decide for yourself: [http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/27/against-individual- iq-w...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/27/against-individual-iq-worries/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> IQ tests are a bit biased aren't they? I mean, I score around 140 because I'm really good at spatial stuff, but I sucked socially. It took me into my thirties to really catch up with other people, to the point where I could truly fit the management role I wanted, and I'm still learning how to diplomacy in upper management.

<comment><USER5> My friends joke that I'm a sociopath or autistic, and my decisions have been called 'crazy' many times, and the only way I overcome social awkwardness is to treat everything as a joke. I have close friends whom I rarely talk to, and I'm not sure whether or not to blame a higher score for that. In a way, it's nice to be able to retain information and to be good at words and numbers, to be able to entertain myself (saves a lot of $$), but man, the first 25 years of my life (I'm 31 now) were such a struggle socially. There's deep-rooted feelings of anger at rejection, and I cling to a higher score as one of my main source of pride. (Yes, I'm jealous of people who have even higher IQs.)

Then again, my mentor who is at least one standard deviation higher seemed to have had few troubles socially.

<comment><USER3> That's a dumb joke. You might have one of those conditions, and proper diagnosis and understanding of how your mind works can be a gateway to therapy that helps you achieve your life goals with less frustration.

High IQ doesn't make you have low EQ. Some people have both high or both low or one of each.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It feels a bit off to say that "IQ is real". It gives a false sense that something fundamental is being measured. The tests are real, and the correlations are real.

</comment><comment><USER7> One might argue that a more practically consequential question is what happens when this same argument gets extended to achievement tests, or admission tests, such as the SAT, GRE, MCAT, or LSAT?

<comment><USER5> Some high-IQ societies accept achievement test scores as IQ tests. For example the Triple 9 Society accepts a pre-2005 SAT score of 1520 or higher as equivalent to an IQ of 146 or something (if I remember correctly). And I think some societies accept LSAT scores, though some have 'insufficient ceilings.'

I'm a bit ashamed to have wanted to join one of these societies. To be fair, I just wanted to meet intelligent women. I looked at some of their pictures and there were like 95% men over the age of 40.

At work my mind automatically tries to guess people's IQs. I'm probably really bad at it, but I think I know when someone's REALLY below average. They ask questions that don't make sense, sometimes it seems like it's their first day on the job, etc. As frustrated as coworkers are in dealing with them, and as much as people claim IQ doesn't matter, if they are at one standard deviation below the mean, I can't help but feel society has to find a way to make sure they are taken care of.

<comment><USER8> Civilized society does indeed have to find a way to make sure everyone is taken care of, including the "more intelligent" and less physically capable people, even if they go around calling people stupid - which is something that would certainly get them killed prior to the advent of civilization.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> IQ topic is popular on hackernews. I wonder if people with well-above intelligence have preoccupation with IQ more than others.

<comment><USER10> I think the causality may be the other way around.

Having a preoccupation with IQ tests will get you a high IQ test score. Because being very familiar with IQ tests violates the assumptions of IQ tests.

I've always assumed that this is why people who talk about their high IQ scores are insufferably dull.

<comment><USER9> How do you even get tested these days? I got tested when I was 13 in a classroom setting many moons ago (not in the U.S.), and no one in the class knew it was IQ test.

I moved to the U.S. shortly afterward and I don't recall being tested.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> IQ discussion has always seemed to me a little like talking about how much money you make with other people. The solid numbers as a mark of "who is better or worse than you" can be uncomfortable. Taken to a statistical level things become even more awkward, not something easy to discuss with most people.</comment>