Wage Slavery - Applicable to [Nearly] Everybody? - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery

<comment><USER2> This term should be offensive to actual slaves. What do you think a _real_ slave would say if he saw a free worker (who could at any moment quit, go to another employer, start a business, move to another country, go on holiday, join the army, become a priest, or just sit there slacking off safe in the knowledge that the worst thing that can happen is getting fired) complaining that he was a slave too?

<comment><USER3> I think you make a useful point. At a high level of abstraction "real slavery" and "wage slavery" seem very similar but for the people who were / are really affected it's a world of difference. It puts things in perspective.

<comment><USER2> There should be a word for this kind of thing: where you argue something moderately is bad by labelling it as a form of something universally acknowledged to be _really_ bad. Terms like "wage slavery", "cultural genocide" or "raping the natural environment" fall into this category, and they all annoy me.

Perhaps this abuse of the language should be called "verbal bestiality".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We're nowhere near Wage Slavery. As the Wikipedia article correctly points out, "Wave slavery" refers to a situation where people are paid so little that they cannot escape from their situation.

Certainly most of us on HN have the ability to work jobs where we earn enough to save money - whether we have the discipline to do so is, of course a different matter. Wage slaves were commonly paid wages such that there was absolutely no way for them to leave their job even for a few hours to try and do something else.

Today's economic systems, in the west, make wage slavery practically impossible.

<comment><USER5> _Today's economic systems, in the west, make wage slavery practically impossible._

That's a little misguided. For the uneducated, the mentally or physically disabled, or the financially burdened "wage slavery" can easily become the reality.

It takes being at a certain level in society to realize that you can create value in a way that is both competitive and creates a stronger bargaining position. It takes a level of understanding and confidence to do this that many people lack.

<comment><USER4> Ok, fair enough, that might have been an overly strong statement - but I maintain that it is true for the vast majority of the people on HN.

<comment><USER5> I'd agree with that, certainly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the important point isn't to compare our situations currently to 'Wage Slavery' but to acknowledge the history.

As a people, we have descended from serfs, slaves, and wage slaves. Wage slavery was a competing strategy for emerging industrialists, and a much more efficient one since they did not have to feed and house their wage slaves the way Chattel slave owners had to. ( Indeed, this was the argument the Southern slave owners used in favor of Slavery in the south. At least they took care of their property. The northern industrialists did not.)

So, we have descended from wage slaves. And the only reason we are much better off is because of the sacrifices made by other wage slaves who organized to fight for better working conditions.

Things like, you know.. the weekend, the 8 hour day, holidays.

</comment><comment><USER7> What a disaster, that people should have to produce to consume.

<comment><USER8> It's questioning the idea of work for wages, not the idea of producing in order to consume. An alternative system could be co-operatives or contract working, for example.

<comment><USER9> In which either "work" is being done for "wages", or "no work" is being done for "wages".

There really isn't a way out of it. The first is isomorphic to what we have, the second utterly fails as an economic system.

The third alternative is to break wages, but as money is already essentially as powerful as it can be, all you can do is break its power down, and _that's_ just "company scrip" again, which most people consider not so much a good thing.

TANSTAAFL.

Contract working isn't an out, either. Either we have the opportunity to do contracts already and some of us choose to work for wages, in which case we are not wage slaves because we have chosen it and you lose the right to complain about how we are wage slaves, or contract workers are themselves just disguised wage slaves. Either way, contracts can not be a solution to a problem we currently have; either we do not have the problem, or contracts are not the solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Woah a lot of strong reaction to this, which is perhaps not unsurprising.

I certainly think it is extreme language and I certainly didn't mean to imply that, as well-paid professionals, the majority of people on HN would be in a situation comparable to those truly in terrible situations: both overt slavery and what really amounts to actual slavery. I see it as purposely strong language used for emphasis.

I'm thinking more of the relationship between the employer and employee; ultimately you rent your time in exchange for money, which arguably for the majority of people is just enough to live their lives with some greater or lesser luxury, but ultimately doing unpleasant work which, though of course to some degree is necessary and serves society, is largely in place to make rich owners richer. A large mass of population simply acts within a confined system as 'slave wages' servicing the needs of the rich while only subsiding at a certain living standard.

I am contrasting this with those of us (and ultimately this probably applies to far fewer HN'ers than the general public) who find a way out, i.e. find value in our work beyond that of its means to provide us with an income, or in fact become one of the rich ourselves.

This is not a criticism of capitalism either, especially since I personally believe capitalism is the best means of distributing wealth, assuming controls are in place to prevent abuses.

</comment><comment><USER10> Wage Slavery is a state of mind. You don't work for money. You work to get things you need, and possibly, if you create more value than you consume in getting those needs, you also consume some wants. Wages/money are just a lubricant that makes consuming easier. The real focus shouldn't be the wage, but the work being done. Is it creating value? If so, the world will pay you what you're worth, especially in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER11> _a wage laborer can choose an employer, but he cannot choose not to have one_

This here is the underlying problem. The free, competitive market does not have barriers to exit.

<comment><USER2> Anyone can start a business at any time. I'm not talking about an internet startup, I'm talking about a lawn-mowing business.

<comment><USER6> Not everyone can start a business though. A business has to have employees.

<comment><USER2> Huh? A one-man business is a business in my book. In any case if you start one you're no longer working for "wages".

<comment><USER12> And the one man goes right back to needing someone to pay for his lawnmowing.

<comment><USER2> Huh? I quit my job. I buy a lawnmower (let us assume I planned that far ahead to save up enough money to buy a lawnmower). I knock on doors and say "Hey, I'll mow your lawn for ten dollars". I mow the damn lawns myself. I have a business. What's the problem here?

<comment><USER12> The "problem" is that you still need an employer. Calling yourself a business rather than an individual has not changed your situation. All you've done is exercise your capability to seek out other employers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We're not there yet, but our economy has been headed in that direction for the past 30 years. Michael Lind has termed it "Brazilianization", in reference to the inequality and corruption one sees in much of Latin America due to the lack of a concern for social justice in the governing class.

Capitalist economies with no welfare state (laissez faire) converge to an economy where people have to work to survive, which depresses wages, which can very easily (and reliably) bring about a vicious cycle. The end state of this is one where the lucky among the proletariat become servants (paid a pittance, but in a nice house and well-fed, enabling a very nice life in comparison to the alternative) while the unlucky and poorly-connected (who cannot even find employment as domestic servants) starve. This would be very damaging to minorities and Latinos, because the upper classes would demand (and be able to get, due to the collapsed economy) white, formerly middle-class, maids and nannies.

Minimum wage and welfare programs aren't good just for their direct beneficiaries, but for a lot of people, because they raise the bar across the board. If minimum wage is $8/hour, then skilled workers will expect $15 and entry-level white-collar will expect $20. Increase that to $10, and skilled workers are now asking for $18, and white collar is asking for $25. Although this causes "inflation", it's the good kind because it represents a wealth transfer away from legacy and in favor of labor.

On the other hand, if there is no minimum wage (which is similar to a basic income but contingent on working) then the reference point collapses and everyone gets poorer.

<comment><USER14> _Capitalist economies with no welfare state (laissez faire) converge to an economy where people have to work to survive_

How horrible. If only we could get rid of that pesky market, everyone could lie about eating lotus flowers. Wait -- who is going to grow the lotus flowers for us?

 _it's the good kind because it represents a wealth transfer away from legacy and in favor of labor_

First, why is taking away the fruits of one's labors to give it to another, less productive person, good?

Second, you're wrong. minimum wages _cause_ unemployment in the very lowest ranks. Thus, minimum wage laws are a transfer of money from the very poorest people to the next rank above them.

<comment><USER15> >>How horrible. If only we could get rid of that pesky market, everyone could lie about eating lotus flowers. Wait -- who is going to grow the lotus flowers for us?

Umm.. the exact same people that grew them under communism, mercantilism, feudalism and non laissez faire capitalism. "The market" is a way to allocate 'capital': money, labor, and general stuff. It's not the only possible way. Further, an attack on laissez faire capitalism is not the same thing as an calling for the abolition of capitalism as a whole.

<comment><USER14> _the exact same people that grew them under_

My point was that _somebody_ MUST work if we all want to eat. There is no solution to the problem that does not force people to work for their survival.

<comment><USER13> Surprising fact: most people like working. Many people hate being told what to do and when to do it, but people have a fundamental desire to work.

Here's how to do basic income. Starting with 2010 GDP as a base, 50% of all GDP after that goes into a basic income fund that's distributed to everyone. It starts out small and eventually grows to a point where no one has less than a 1/2*N share. For example, let's say GDP/capita is $40000 in 2010. If it rises 2% to $40800, then $400 goes into the basic income fund.

If the result of the basic income is that people become lazy and don't work, the basic income falls or is phased out and we call the experiment a failure.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL Compatibility - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-amazon-aurora-with-postgresql-compatibility/ <comment><USER2> I ran the preview for ~2 months on a few instances. No compatibility issues, but we had queries that were significantly slower than on a vanilla Postgres instance and a problem with temp table bloat that never got reclaimed (480G as per \l+, being shown as 1050G billable in the AWS console). The preview product team never got back to us so I'm going to switch back to the regular RDS this week and hope my bill doesn't get hosed by the unreclaimed bloat. Gotta go with the devil I know... ʅ(ツ)ʃ

<comment><USER3> I'm sorry the product team never got back to you. We'll get back to the email you just sent us on the preview thread.

If you have any issues with your bill, let us know and we'll happily look into it. But I'd rather work with you to figure out what went on and get it fixed for you!

<comment><USER2> Sure thing, feel free to reply to my email. \l+ shows 485 GB, and hitting temp_bytes from pg_stat_database is 0, but billable space is 1050G. I'd like to promote Aurora to production, but some of my system's 'legacy' queries which live behind an ORM are grinding against the Aurora instances. I haven't had need to really investigate/optimize the queries (or even try to pick apart what the ORM is doing) as the performance on the vanilla Postgres RDS instance wasn't was great, but wasn't problematic either, even on the db.t2.large's I'd use in lower environments vs db.r4.large's I'm using with Aurora. It may be that I am just missing something obvious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is this going to support IAM authentication like Aurora for MySQL does?

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/UsingW...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/UsingWithRDS.IAMDBAuth.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> The article says, "The [new instance class] db.r4.16xlarge will give you additional write performance." Does anyone know why this is the case? I thought one of the distinguishing characteristics of Aurora was that the read and write performance of its proprietary storage layer was independent of both the instance class of your database server and the size of your database.

<comment><USER3> It is true that Amazon Aurora is not limited by the bandwidth of the storage system, as it is huge and distributed across hundreds/thousands of nodes across an entire AWS region. And storage for each database instance is indeed only limited to 64TB, far above what most people need. But each single instance can still have limitations, such as CPU horsepower, memory, etc. The r4.16xl has 25Gbit networking, as opposed to the r4.8xl, which has 10Gbit network. So if your workload is write-intensive, such as streaming or IOT data, you will find the r4.16xl can have significantly better write performance. [https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance- types/](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/) I hope this helps!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wanted to use this, but doesn't support small enough instance types.

<comment><USER3> What instance types would you like to see? T2s? If so, which ones?

<comment><USER7> We are also looking to test the small and medium t2s versus PostgresRDS on small and medium.

<comment><USER8> Where I work we currently run 2 RDS PostgreSQL Instances in production, one on T2.small and the other T2.medium.

We never run out of CPU credits. We are dying to move to Aurora but the current instance sizes prevent us :( until we fully move away from SQL Server where our load on PostgreSQL will increase, its a huge cost for 0 gain right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does Amazon contribute cash to the open source projects that it turns into services?

<comment><USER3> Amazon has made contributions to open source in many ways, including bug fixes, spending hundreds of thousands/year to sponsor conferences, and even giving the PostgreSQL community a free testing account to run regression, soak, or functionality test suites on AWS for free. So yes, Amazon contributes cash to open source projects, at least to PostgreSQL, which we find to be a wonderful community that we are proud to be part of.

<comment><USER9> How much cash did AWS give to Postgres?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Glad to see this is GA now. The cost benefits and monitoring benefits are huge for the consumer. So far, I haven't hit any compatibility issues either.

</comment><comment> oh-kumudo Is this a big deal? What are the noticeable offering here.

<comment><USER11> Aurora is very interesting especially in terms of removing storage management from the equation. I just wish they (and the regular postgres RDS offering) had support for TimescaleDB ([http://www.timescale.com](http://www.timescale.com)).

<comment><USER12> Mind givin some use case scenarios for timescale that you really like? (aside from what one may think obvious)

<comment><USER11> I want to replace InfluxDB with it. Here's what we gain:

\- Postgres' reliability. Influx is awful and I absolutely do not trust it; I've had far too much data loss and consistency issues with it.

\- Postgres' internal tooling. Simple things such as "What is my largest measurement on disk" are not possible in Influx

\- Simplified stack. Timescale makes good on that promise: We no longer would have to ship influxdb libraries for internal apps. Permissions are simplified as well.

\- Hosted, managed metrics. Our InfluxDB instance is managed by ourselves and is a source of issues. Our RDS instance, comparatively, has always purred.

\- More advanced operations, including the full power of Postgres user-defined functions. Influx doesn't even support dividing one value by another.

\- Grafana support! It's finally here!!! :)

<comment><USER13> I was thinking about the same use-case, but there are features in InfluxDB (downscaling, retention policies) that are cool when dealing with large amount of data. If Timescale bridges the gap, I would be happy to give a try...

<comment><USER14> (CEO TimescaleDB) We already allow for efficient manual deletion of old data[1] (2000x faster than PostgreSQL)[2] and rollups via standard PG aggregates. Automatic retention policies and downsampling are coming soon.

But as one of the commentors above points out, we benefit from the reliability (and broad ecosystem) of PostgreSQL, which has allowed various companies to easily deploy us in production with minimal integration efforts.

[1] [http://docs.timescale.com/latest/api/data- retention](http://docs.timescale.com/latest/api/data-retention)

[2] [https://blog.timescale.com/timescaledb- vs-6a696248104e](https://blog.timescale.com/timescaledb-vs-6a696248104e)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> one cool feature is of this release is the Performance Insights dashboard which makes understanding and analyzing performance much easier [https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=4462hcfkApM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=4462hcfkApM)

</comment><comment><USER16> Nice. Does anyone know their policy about following major new versions of Postgres?

I want to launch an app using the new partitioning features of Postgres 10. I hope Aurora Postgres won't be indefinitely tied to a specific major version, as is the case with Redshift.

<comment><USER17> Judging by MySQL Aurora (which is still on MySQL 5.6, when 5.7 released 2 years ago) it will be a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Any ETA on making PostreSQL Aurora a HIPAA eligible service? We are currently using MySQL Aurora and would like to switch to PostreSQL, but we are storing ePHI, so we can't switch.

<comment><USER17> According to [https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/compliance/AWS_HIPAA_Co...](https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/compliance/AWS_HIPAA_Compliance_Whitepaper.pdf) page 12 the PostreSQL flavor is HIPAA eligible now:

> Customers may use either the MySQL-compatible edition of Amazon Aurora or > the PostgreSQL-compatible version as part of our BAA.

But according to [https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-eligible-services- re...](https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-eligible-services-reference/) only the MySQL flavor is:

> Amazon Aurora [MySQL]

I assume the latter simply hasn't been updated yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Really exciting news! Hope to see it added to the BAA quickly.

<comment><USER19> Good news! Aurora PostgreSQL was added to the BAA today (10/26/17). You can see it on the list of HIPAA-eligible services here: [https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-eligible-services- re...](https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-eligible-services-reference/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Now the wait for our region to gain compatibility.

<comment><AUTHOR> Which one?

<comment><USER20> ap-southeast-2 for us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Anyone know if this supports PostGIS extensions?

<comment><USER22> They state that Aurora "supports the same set of PostgreSQL extensions that are supported with RDS for PostgreSQL 9.6." Which is a yes. PostGIS version 2.3.2, I believe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> @omarforgotpwd, @purphase, @tengbretson: We're working on everything you just asked for - thanks for letting us know they are important! @jsmeaton: Which region?

<comment><USER23> Little old Australia (ap-southeast-2) would be insanely welcome.</comment></comment>


Pakistan Bans Make-Believe Curse Worlds from Texting - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/in_quest_to_become_worlds_most_ridiculous_ridiculo.php#.TsoDPABK6zc.hackernews <comment><USER2> Love this quote from the piece "Many of the words are in fact obscene". How can a word be obscene?

A word might be offensive in a given context but obscene? This piece is a daft as the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority.</comment>


A Penny Saved Is a Waste of Time - <AUTHOR> http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/11/04/a-penny-saved-is-a-waste-of-time/

<comment><USER2> This is a weird article. Started off with arguments why a penny is worth less than it cost to make, quoted Andy Warhol(where it started going off the rails for me), and then how a penny is a coin and not a value??

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know any details, but for me this highlights the lameness of the federal government. Inability to do something that smaller countries did years ago. For example NZ removed 5c coins in 2006.</comment>


Remove parallel collections from scala-library - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/scala/scala/pull/5603 <comment><USER2> They are moving it to a library. Is there a post with more info about the modifications they had done to be able to move it?</comment>


State of ICO ratings in 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://pyatakov.com/blog/state-of-ico-ratings-in-2018-part-1/ <comment><AUTHOR> OP here.

There are more than 30 services, which all aim to provide various ratings on ICOs. So I decided to conduct some research, what is out there that ICO ratings services have to offer us.

If you have any questions or ideas please feel free to comment this post or contact me directly.</comment>


Show HN: A website speed test tool to compare uBlock Origin with plain Chrome - <AUTHOR> https://webtest.app/?url=https://www.theguardian.com <comment><USER4> YouTube sends more requests with uBlock Origin enabled? [1][2]

My theory is, without the ads, there is more space in the webview to load video thumbnails, each item representing a video in the HTML document probably requires a handful of HTTP requests to load and pre-fetch their corresponding metadata. I would not be surprised if other websites react in the same way. I hope this is the case, but I am suspicious enough that I will investigate further how the ad-blocker affects these websites.

[1] [https://webtest.app/?url=https://www.youtube.com](https://webtest.app/?url=https://www.youtube.com)

[2] [https://i.imgur.com/HBB4TkK.png](https://i.imgur.com/HBB4TkK.png)

<comment><USER5> This is the case. With an addon that deletes most but not all homepage items or sidebar recommendations, YouTube does some noticeable spinning trying to fill the space which keeps getting emptied.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You need to filter the URLs that are accepted to avoid security problems - <USER2> you a contact address on your profile here, or on the site I'd have disclosed this more privately.

But consider this case:

[https://webtest.app/?url=file:///etc/passwd](https://webtest.app/?url=file:///etc/passwd)

In short you should restrict URLs to protocols of `http`, `https`, and even then you should filter based on IP. You don't want people to view [http://localhost/server-status](http://localhost/server-status), etc.

Finally you need to make sure you avoid recursion:

[https://webtest.app/?url=https://webtest.app/?url=https://st...](https://webtest.app/?url=https://webtest.app/?url=https://steve.fi/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, good find, I fixed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great idea. Kudos for launch. Bookmarked.

What striked me is JSHeapTotalSize, never really think the ADs are eating so much RAM / resources (make sense). In Guardian case this accounts for 50% more allocation.

</comment><comment><USER8> Minor typo on the website: "or to proof to others they should use an ad blocker" (should be "as proof" or "to prove").

Also, suggestion: don't require typing [http://](http://) or [https://](https://)

</comment><comment><USER9> TheGuardian is such a shit site without adblock. During the Australian election, I turned off my adblocker because "they're an independent news source" and I wanted to support their advertisers. I got bombarded with a full width banner at the top, and full height banner down both sides for the national Greens party.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't hate the greens party, but god damn, my eyes.

<comment><USER10> It's much better to donate, at least the correct people get the bulk of the money.

<comment><USER11> My wife and I decided to donate one year. Guess what happened next? They sold our data to their partners and we ended receiving so much spam mail in the following few years, we couldn't believe it. These organizations generate so much paper waste, it made us so angry we simply stopped our subscriptions. But we had to wait until we moved out for the spam to stop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm not sure why the code isn't open source on this one. If the OP is hoping that news websites (etc.,) will pay for this service, I wouldn't hold my breath.

This site only highlights all the bad things happening on those sites - <USER3> the marketing teams there have most likely already been told by their developers what including 1 million cookies & 50 million tracker APIs will do to the performance. They _want_ this gunk in there so that revenue targets can be met.

So the best bet is to put this up on GitHub where folks like me could learn from the code :-D

<comment><AUTHOR> In what way do you think news sites would pay for this service? They want full throttle ads everywhere right, not sure why this service is of any use. They just think: the more header bidding partners putting cookies everywhere the more money

<comment><USER12> Just to be super clear, I was not trivialising the project itself! I think it's a very cool idea, and very useful for users like me =)

I do not think it is 'not useful'. I was - not very clearly - posing a question on what your idea was to put it into 'practice'. I.e., whether you were hoping to turn this into a business or an open source project by posting here =D

Merely curious! Thank you for sharing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nice way to see if EU sites are GDPR compliant, because you didn't give consent when hitting a website those websites should not use any external tags yet. You can see for example nos.nl or lemonde.fr are fairly clean, but bbc.com or bild.de are not, even though there is no consent.

</comment><comment><USER14> Question for the developer: any particular reason you're using Chrome with xvfb rather than just headless. Its been stable for a while.

<comment><AUTHOR> You cannot load extensions in headless chrome, so I had to jump some hoops here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice, I like this.

Would be nice if there was a way to display/download all cached results. Would be a nice dataset for visualisation or a dashboard.

</comment><comment><USER16> I found a bug: when I enter a URL into the form it seems to URLencode the characters, but this doesn't work on the site. That is, [1] works, [2] spins on "status: queued" forever. As far as I know I don't have any particular settings or extensions that would cause the URL to be unexpectedly encoded. Edit: it's _not_ doing it right now, which is weird. It was just a moment ago, but maybe it was fixed? I had assumed the backend was down.

[1] [https://webtest.app/?url=https://bbc.co.uk](https://webtest.app/?url=https://bbc.co.uk)

[2] [https://webtest.app/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbbc.co.uk](https://webtest.app/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbbc.co.uk)

</comment><comment><USER17> Why does the Reddit page get bigger with uBlock Origin? From 2.73 MB on Chrome to 8.48 with uBlock Origin.

[https://webtest.app/?url=https://reddit.com](https://webtest.app/?url=https://reddit.com)

<comment><USER18> I'm noticing that DomContentLoaded, Processing Time, and Load Time are all blank for Reddit withoutout uBO as well.

I'm going to make a mild suggestion that the author double-check their implementation logic. Is it possible that the ad-encumbered page isn't loading before it times out? Or is it possible that without ads the page is loading more content?

Even showing something like a comparison screenshot at the end might help in odd cases like this.

<comment><AUTHOR> The screenshots didn't even load because the my tiny server ran out of memory when testing Reddit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Quite often I'm getting 2-3x the load times for ublock.

[https://webtest.app/?url=https://news.ycombinator.com](https://webtest.app/?url=https://news.ycombinator.com)

<comment><USER20> It's the same 7 requests, probably a transient effect. E.g. [https://webtest.app/?url=https://news.ycombinator.com/item?i...](https://webtest.app/?url=https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21052969) is 0.48 vs 0.5.

I don't think it lets you retest either, the first run is cached for a long time.

<comment><USER21> It would be very hard to retest, not just because of traffic, but also because some websites like amazon.com will throttle you to a halt or start showing captchas if they think you are scraping.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Great work.

Without uBO, Forbes loads 151 cookies.

</comment><comment><USER23> [https://news.ycombinator.com](https://news.ycombinator.com) takes a second longer with uBlock

<comment><USER24> That means HN is doing things the right way :)

<comment><USER25> How is it so?

<comment><USER26> Page A loads content for X seconds and Z seconds loads ads. uBlock overhead is Y second but saves Z seconds by blocking ads. Total time with uBlock is X+Y-Z. If page has zero ads the time will be X+Y-0 which is greater than X+0.

<comment><USER27> Just to clarify, this is desirable because "fewer/no ads" is preferred over "faster page load times"?

<comment><USER28> Yes. Pages with ads are unreadable. I'm horrified every time I see friends navigate with no adblockers. I always recommend one. I'm going to start recommending Firefox again, as I did at the times of IE6.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Thanks for sharing this gem.

Did you consider computing the Speed Index? [1]

It would help assessing the performance impact these ads have.

[1] [https://sites.google.com/a/webpagetest.org/docs/using- webpag...](https://sites.google.com/a/webpagetest.org/docs/using- webpagetest/metrics/speed-index)

</comment><comment><USER30> Fun, I tried it with a regional newspapper and it doesn't shows the processing and load time in the versiones without adblock.

Also I never realized it was SO BAD without adblock

[https://www.lavozdegalicia.es/](https://www.lavozdegalicia.es/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Regarding: "Also I never realized it was SO BAD without adblock". That's part of the problem. We techies have no idea what's happening without an ad blocker because we all use one. This service wants to show the unseen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Excellent way to show the weight of ads and trackers, very clean side by side comparison.

</comment><comment><USER32> Interesting to see many sites load faster without uBlock because DOM content loaded is faster... it would be nice if we could run more scientific measurement to get a better understanding of the load time differences.

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm stuck in a queue. more workers please, this is awesome.

<comment><USER16> No sites are loading for me, including the one in the Show HN URL, which ought to be cached. I think we broke the site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes sorry, it's tough!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> When I test your own site (webtest.app), it doesn't work. I was hoping for some introspection!

<comment><USER35> According to other replies this was a recent change to prevent recursive calls and attempts to access local files on the server.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Not using something like ublock is simply bad hygiene.

</comment><comment><USER37> Adblockers in chrome are slow. Fast pages goes from having no noticeable delay to having one. Many times the latency is not uncommon. Sure, this is only a problem for really fast pages, but it's still really annoying.

<comment><AUTHOR> Check this service, it proofs you wrong</comment></comment>


Show HN: Abbrase – password generation by abbreviated phrases - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rmmh/abbrase

<comment><USER2> > "122079103" and "toldulbal" (tolerably dull ball) are equally hard to > attack.

I believe this is only holds if the attacker has no further information on the password generation procedure. In the generated passwords, vocals are almost guaranteed to occur at least once in every triple. Also certain consonants have a higher probability to occur together, due to contraints of the english language. This should decrease entropy.

<comment><AUTHOR> It generates passwords by repeatedly picking a random 3-letter prefix from a pool of 1024 ("tol dul bal"), then generating a phrase that would abbreviate to that password ("tolerably dull ball"). This makes analyzing the effective entropy easy.

1024 possibilities for each group of 3 characters is approximately equal to 1000 possibilities for each group of 3 numbers.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> WordPass doesn't really solve the 'easy to memorize' problem, since it injects random numerals. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7793469](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7793469)

Abbrases require very little effort to remember, since phrases are very easily imprinted.

</comment><comment><USER3> This seems like an overly complex Diceware. Not only do I have to remember the phrase (Diceware), but I have to remember the first three letters of each word in the phrase. Interesting, but cumbersome.

<comment><AUTHOR> Diceware passwords are jumbles of words. They are unlikely to resemble sentence fragments, since they don't try to preserve grammatical links.

The hypothesis is that grammatically sensical groupings of words are easier to memorize than jumbles of words.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I usually look around me and pick 4-7 random objects, then take the first 3 letters of each. Is this secure?

<comment><AUTHOR> How many distinct objects are around you? It's a small pool, so there aren't many prefixes available (maybe 100), so the entropy if an attacker guesses the items around you wouldn't be very great.</comment></comment>


How fast is the Internet at Google? Mind blowing. - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2011/03/29/how-fast-is-the-internet-at-google-mind-blowing/

<comment><USER2> Dupe: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2384567>

</comment><comment><USER3> I would rather them show downloading at capacity of the benchmark (520Mb/8 = 65MBs) than 32MB/s.

Still impressive numbers (although not surprising) but still... "This car can drive 300MPH. Here's a picture of it driving 150MPH".</comment>


Lucy: Intelligent Mirror, Reflects Sunlight, Solar Powered - <AUTHOR> http://preorderlucy.com/ <comment><USER2> This is actually pretty cool.

\- I wonder if movie studios could use this for lighting scenes more naturally.

\- Would be cool if you could use more than one for larger rooms and they worked with each other to distribute light evenly

\- Also would be neat to have it paired to a phone/camera so where the camera focuses, the light is adjusted to get a better shot

\- $199 is too much, even for early adopters.

<comment><AUTHOR> I assume one would save on electricity with this mirror. Saving money. Plus having natural light instead of lamps is a big plus to me.

But I agree $199 is not cheap. Then its already discounted from the $300 before.

And I wonder how weather proof this is (one example is to setup the lamp outside the house).</comment></comment>


Hosting in mainland China? - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone know of a good VPS host in mainland China? We'd need a small VPS only (for hosting static files), preferably Ubuntu.
Thus far we've been hosted in AWS in Japan, but apparently websites hosted outside of mainland China are really slow for Chinese visitors.
We'd prefer a host that has English support, but it's not an absolute requirement. We do have staff in China, but they're not tech guys, so it'd be hard for them to fix problems.
Also: Would we need an ICP license? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICP_license) <comment><USER2> Hi,

There is, but not with English support. It's not true, but China is huge and latency can be an issue, depending on the service you want to host.

If you host in China you DO need an ICP license. One of your Chinese staff will have to register one for you. Choose someone you trust.

<comment><AUTHOR> What if I choose a Hong Kong host - then I don't need an ICP license, right?

Is the speed acceptable for mainland Chinese visitors if the website is hosted in Hong Kong?

<comment><USER3> Hong Kong or Singapore are much better choices, especially if you only need to host static files, as you avoid the legal requirements of having an ICP license. If you decided on a chinese provider anyway, be aware that almost all providers either block port 80 or filter unlicensed HTTP traffic (by deep packet inspection and automatic lookups against the sent "Host:" header.)

Keep in mind, latency in China is often high to begin with, so don't expect the same results as you'd get in most countries. For example, here is a trace from Beijing (Telecom+Unicom Route Optimized) to 36Cloud:

      traceroute to 18.104.22.168 (22.214.171.124), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
       1  188.8.131.52 (18.104.22.168)  1.110 ms  1.139 ms  1.207 ms
       2   (18.104.22.168)  1.882 ms  2.632 ms  2.586 ms
       3   (18.104.22.168)  2.617 ms  2.747 ms  3.011 ms
       4  220.127.116.11 (126.96.36.199)  2.603 ms  2.937 ms  3.007 ms
       5  58.19.arpa.hb.cnc.cn (18.104.22.168)  26.950 ms  26.911 ms  26.947 ms
       6  58.19.arpa.hb.cnc.cn (126.96.36.199)  25.141 ms  28.073 ms  19.810 ms
       7  188.8.131.52 (184.108.40.206)  41.906 ms  41.745 ms  41.723 ms
       8  188.8.131.52 (22.214.171.124)  66.004 ms  65.917 ms  65.833 ms
       9  18.104.22.168 (18.104.22.168)  65.744 ms  67.349 ms  67.274 ms
       10  220.127.116.11 (18.104.22.168)  62.020 ms  61.966 ms  61.983 ms
       11  220.127.116.11 (188.8.131.52)  71.800 ms  71.743 ms  71.687 ms
       12  18.104.22.168 (22.214.171.124)  69.861 ms  70.179 ms  81.530 ms
       13  126.96.36.199 (184.108.40.206)  81.380 ms  81.305 ms  81.237 ms
       14  22.214.171.124 (18.104.22.168)  81.165 ms  81.095 ms  81.022 ms
       15  gi7-0-9.core1.hk01.sunnyvision.com (126.96.36.199)  84.300 ms  84.146 ms  84.033 ms
       16  123-242-224-27.sunnyvision.com (220.127.116.11)  80.617 ms  80.544 ms  80.470 ms

Another option to consider if you need an SLA or have concerns regarding availability would be Internap's Public Cloud in Singapore (Very good peering and availability, uses Internap's FCP dynamic routing technique. You can expect less than 100ms from almost anywhere in mainland China, while not compromising routing to everywhere else.)

Ping from Beijing (same network as above) to Internap Singapore:

       PING 22.214.171.124 (22.214.171.124) 56(84) bytes of data.
       64 bytes from 220.127.116.11: icmp_seq=1 ttl=239 time=80.9 ms
       64 bytes from 126.96.36.199: icmp_seq=2 ttl=239 time=82.6 ms
       64 bytes from 22.214.171.124: icmp_seq=3 ttl=239 time=86.1 ms
       64 bytes from 188.8.131.52: icmp_seq=4 ttl=239 time=82.7 ms
       64 bytes from 188.8.131.52: icmp_seq=5 ttl=239 time=85.2 ms</comment></comment></comment>


The "shut up and get back to work" coding style guide - <AUTHOR> https://drewdevault.com/2019/04/29/Shut-up-and-get-back-to-work-style.html <comment><USER2> I prefer the first example that he says is crap. It has all the arguments grouped together to make it slightly easier to read.

I don't buy the argument about wasted whitespace. If you cramp too much of your code into dense one-liners, it makes the code unreadable.

Secondly, I'd say that code width is unnecessarily narrow. 120 characters is fine to fit two files side-by-side on a 1920x1080 monitor with space to spare. 80 characters is just too close.

Thirdly, I'd typedef "struct wlr_surface" to "wlr_surface_t" (assuming I were writing this in C. I don't know if this is actually CSS)

<comment><USER3> Yes these things are subjective though. I don't love having to scroll right to see params.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Matching the style that's already used in a file is certainly timeless advice.

Still, if a particular project or group has stringent opinions about code formatting, but at the same time can't be bothered to work out how to get a tool to apply most or all of that formatting, it's a bit of a bozo situation. Automation is what computers are for, after all.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hopefully, he's only talking about basic style guidelines, and not coding standards. Especially in C, there's practices that should be banned. Good naming conventions are arguably useful as well. I agree that endless arguments about the best way to indent and use brackets are harmful.

</comment><comment><USER5> Maybe

        struct wlr_surface*
        wlr_surface_surface_at(struct wlr_surface *surface, double sx,
                               double sy, double *sub_x, double *sub_y)
        {
            // Do stuff
        }

</comment><comment><USER6> I would argue that the first piece of code provided as an example is much more readable than the other.

</comment><comment><USER7> When I worked for Gumby and Ian, messing around with indentation instead of working was a firing offense.</comment>


Drinking Young blood could be the secret to long-lasting health: study - <AUTHOR> https://nypost.com/2018/09/10/young-blood-could-be-the-secret-to-long-lasting-health-study/ <comment><USER2> TLDR;

The article is bit of a link bait. It's not about drinking blood but obtaining some of the blood factors via medical process.

 _After being given plasma — the main component of blood — from volunteers ages 16 to 25, researchers noted improvements in biomarkers for various diseases._

The study was done in mice funded by Peter Thiel. However people doing study have commercial interest. They are in business of selling teenage blood plasma to customers at a cost of $8,000 for 2½ liters.

Original Nature article link here: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0457-8](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0457-8)

Silicon Valley episode was very much inspired from this :).

</comment><comment><USER3> I find it extremely unsettling to see this type of headline over and over again in tech/science journalism and HN. Someone has come up with a new way to make a buck and are on the process of making it widely know. The silicon valley hype cycles has started. The problem is that there is no strong independent evidence.

When you're dealing with people's health Money making needs to take a backseat to strong well-defined science. Move fast and break things is not the mantra we need to follow here.

</comment><comment><USER4> If it made my mother's Parkinson conditions better I would gladly give her some of my blood. Although I'm not a spring chicken anymore.</comment>


How I sold 2000$ of self-designed electronics in ONE day - <AUTHOR> http://hwstartup.wordpress.com/2012/09/07/how-i-sold-2000-of-my-electronics-in-one-day/

<comment><USER2> I'm trying to understand the sensor boards...

a) what kind of battery does it need? b) what's the range? c) what's the battery life like? d) what frequency range does it operate in and will stuff in my house interfere with it? e) can I buy extra sensors?

I think you should consider answering these questions on the growguard site in order to facilitate even more sales. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Harwoodr, It uses a 9V battery that lasts for about 6 months. It uses 868MHz ISM band and does not interfere with anything in your house. Outside range is about 50 yard/meters, inside a couple of rooms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice job. How did you find your price tag ?

<comment><AUTHOR> I started with my cost price and added a markup that would reduce my risk. In addition, I noticed that botanicalls was 99$, so 119$ would be ok.</comment></comment>


DynamoDB model wrapper to enhance DynamoDB access - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/conapps/dynamodb-cri <comment><USER2> It seems pretty excited when I started reading the "README", then I saw the "defining a schema" which I don't feel comfortable with (no idea why) , maybe I am looking for again easy and lightweight methods of querying without heavy scans, and kinda of universal way to retrieve on the fly defined objects for more than one app (creating new table for every app and schematize it is not cheap with such generous free tier) Good and clean job implementing async tho, maybe dynamodb is not for me , I found the elegance of couchdb , and since then I am looking for something similar .</comment>


Silicon Valley hiring is not a meritocracy (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.alinelerner.com/silicon-valley-hiring-is-not-a-meritocracy/ <comment><USER2> I think it's time that we consider that the problem might not be that we're hiring people based on the _wrong_ things, but that the simple indicators of future success just might not exist.

How long does this have to be an unsolved problem before people start to think, hey, maybe future success just isn't predictable, and certainly not if all you have is a resume and a couple hour interview.

Maybe hire people with at least some demonstrated aptitude and invest in them instead.

<comment><USER3> As an engineer on the other side of the table - I would much rather this be the case too.

I would much rather join a company, devote myself to a problem, a team, and a product, and have the company reward me as such.

Instead, engineers who are willing to jump are generally able to attain much higher compensation than those who stay put - so we're incentivized to do so, rather than investing ourselves in a company and having the company invest in us.

As a result, engineers are forced to maintain two skillsets: one for interviewing, and one for actually building & shipping products.

<comment><USER4> > Instead, engineers who are willing to jump are generally able to attain much > higher compensation than those who stay put - so we're incentivized to do > so, rather than investing ourselves in a company and having the company > invest in us.

Notwithstanding the fact there are companies that under-invest in their employees, you make it sound like engineers are being _forced_ to try to maximize compensation.

The reality is that compensation varies, and the differences can be quite pronounced in the technology industry. A startup with minimal revenue and $1 million in funding probably isn't going to be able to compete with Facebook or Google on salary and benefits. Expecting it to is like trying to get blood from a stone.

There is nothing wrong with trying to maximize your compensation at the cost of everything else, but if that's your approach, you need to live with the fact that you will almost _always_ have better opportunities somewhere else. Constantly lamenting the fact that your current employer can't pay you as much as another employer can is no way to live life.

Incidentally, in my experience, a lot of people who allow their job satisfaction to be based entirely on a perception of relative compensation are never happy no matter how much they make. They constantly find ways to convince themselves that they could and should be making more.

<comment><USER5> At what point does people griping about poor compensation at startups stop being the fault of "greedy engineers" and start being the fault of investors/founders not being willing to allocate the right amount of money to labor? Software startups would still be super cheap, relative to most other things.

Based on the recruiting contacts I get, there are some startups with massive amounts of cash in the bank that are still stingy on the salaries but will go on and on about equity even when they've raised several rounds at ever-higher valuations. But, fortunately, there are also others that are starting to be willing to pay more cash at earlier stages. I'm far from convinced that this is a bad thing.

<comment><USER6> What's the point of griping about compensation at startups? If you don't like the job offer, don't take it. Work at a big company instead.

If you have a more remunerative job offer from a big grey company and you still take the startup job _they 're pricing their offer correctly_. Hell, they might be offering too much.

<comment><USER5> I think you misunderstood. I _haven 't_ taken the offers. Were I to feel underpaid at a startup, I'd talk to my boss and/or some recruiters, not to HN.

(Nor do you have to got to a huge corporation to find the larger offers.)

It's just something to keep in mind when you see "why can't I hire enough good engineers?" posts... not the only reason, by any means, but certainly _a_ reason.

<comment><USER6> Nah, I meant the second person plural.

We should have stayed with thou/ye instead of you/you. It was more clear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't understand the author's problem with "look good on paper" This is paper that the applicant has full control over. The applicant can put whatever they want on their resume and cover letter. Sure this is a writing challenge that doesn't correlate directly with engineering ability but being able to communicate the value of your ideas and explain technical ideas and methods to people with different backgrounds and skill levels seems like something that's just as necessary as engineering ability.

It's always been my mantra that if you can't explain something to someone with no background in it then you don't truly understand what you're trying to explain.

<comment><USER8> > I don't understand the author's problem with "look good on paper" This is > paper that the applicant has full control over. The applicant can put > whatever they want on their resume and cover letter.

Yes, up to and including blatant lies. If your company establishes a reputation of screening resumes based on certain features like university you encourage less moral applicants to fluff up their resumes. While these people may not make it through the interview stages, they force the competent but humble or disadvantaged applicants out at the resume screening stage.

> It's always been my mantra that if you can't explain something to someone > with no background in it then you don't truly understand what you're trying > to explain.

True, but in some cases people aren't _allowed_ to talk about what they have done at that level. That puts anyone from a defense contractor, HFT firm, R&D group, and similar at a significant disadvantage because they can only advertise what they are doing in the broadest terms, if at all.

<comment><USER7> > Yes, up to and including blatant lies

I wasn't suggesting that people lie on their resume or cover letter.

> That puts anyone from a defense contractor, HFT firm, R&D group, and similar > at a significant disadvantage.

I was a defense contractor and experienced this first hand. I found that good communication skills both verbal and written were able to overcome this. Since the hypothetical non-technical recruiter in the OP isn't going to understand the technical things that you can't talk about anyways, being able to communicate how you added value is even more important.

<comment><USER8> > I wasn't suggesting that people lie on their resume or cover letter.

I know, and I did not intend to suggest that. I'm just pointing out that people do, and it distorts resume pre-screening.

> I was a defense contractor and experienced this first hand. I found that > good communication skills both verbal and written were able to overcome > this. Since the hypothetical non-technical recruiter in the OP isn't going > to understand the technical things that you can't talk about anyways, being > able to communicate how you added value is even more important.

That depends on what you are working on. My first program, I could give you a pretty good description of what I did and how I contributed to the program in meaningful ways. My second program, I couldn't even say what it _was_ when I first started. Even now I'm severely limited as the program has a very low public profile. What is actually in my resume now is pretty much the extent of what I can say.

<comment><USER7> I definitely have some things like that in my work history and I totally understand where you are coming from. In my experience, in this very specific instance of having done things you can't talk about, the aurora around having done classified work usually balances out the fact that you can't talk about it.

<comment><USER9> I have a similar situation in my work history. In my particular case I was consulting for a commercial firm with a duty of very strict confidentiality. Disclosing what I did for them would reveal their future consumer product plans. We discussed that I could freely disclose what I did as long as I didn't disclose who they were. So my resume has a line item marked "Client Confidential" and then I provide the technical details of what I did for them.

That's a bit harder to do in the case of classified material, but maybe there is a similar balance you can strike?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here's what I've learned from 20+ years of hiring people:

1\. Make all the resumes that come in responding to technical jobs go straight to your inbox. If your company has a candidate tracking system then set up an alias that sends it to you and to the tracking system.

2\. Review every resume yourself. Jump in and ask follow up questions for candidates that are interesting.

3\. Interview them yourself. Every one you bring in you should spend some time with.

4\. Have authority with the head of HR to make offers and move fast when you decide to hire people. If you leave this up to HR you will lose the best candidates.

The simple fact of the matter is you can't outsource this to recruiters. Let HR people do their paper work and all that but do NOT allow them in the decision making loop.

This article is right you can't train them to do your job, and my experience is that they are trained, basically, to be paper pushers and gate keepers.

Not only do these people not know how to tell a good candidate from a bad one, they (with very few exceptions) don't even KNOW they don't know, and they think they are an important part of the process in screening people out! Look at their blog posts and linked in profiles. They're proud of this role because they think it makes them important and they think they know what they are doing. This is the worst kind of ignorance, those who think they know but don't.

If I seem bitter it's because I've spent a lot of time dealing with HR people who are incompetent and who, basically, don't give a damn about the quality of hiring.

So, I'd say the number one most important hire in the early years (but not the earliest years) is the head of HR.

<comment><USER11> That all rings of truth. HR overstate their abilities and interfere far too much. Over the years I've been told "if you hire, it's your risk", which turns into "I'm glad we picked Sam". Also, if you're a woman, don't make a big deal about it. Saying "I'm a woman ..." Anything will almost certainly get you shown the door - this is a red light for "attitude". There are many indicators I see, people who talk about being manages during a technical interview, etc. all bad signs. One: you'd be surprised how many women have been programmed with ad attitudes/entitlement. Makes me sad.

<comment><USER12> "Attitude" is acknowledging that you are a woman? Wow. I sincerely hope I never work at your company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This post is a bit self serving and this statement:

 _" The sad truth is that if you don't look great on paper and you're applying to a startup that has a strong brand, unless you know someone in the company, the odds of you even getting an interview are very slim."_

Is, in my experience as someone doing the hiring at a number of 'name brand' companies, completely false.

That said, I've heard it used by recruiter after recruiter trying to play on the fears of an insecure engineer in order to get them to commit to approaching companies only through the recruiter. The motive here is that the recruiter wants to get up to 30% of your first year's salary for introducing you to a company, if you approach the company directly, well then the recruiter gets zip.

I strongly believe that it is this self interest which drives this silly (and bogus) narrative that if you don't come from the "best schools" or have the "best pedigree" you won't even get looked at by the "hot" start ups or companies.

That said, just mailing your resume to the 'jobs@...' address and hoping for the best is not a good strategy either. The key to getting an interview is that the hiring manager has to think you have a shot at being hired into the job, and for that to be true they have to believe that you have the skills to do the job, and would be able to work well with the existing team.

The easiest way for that communication to happen is to have someone that knows you and knows the manager make that connection. The next easiest way is to participate in activities that people who do that kind of job participate in. I know people who have been located in World of Warcraft guild chat, at maker spaces, and at conferences. Here is a clue, hiring managers go to subject matter conferences to meet people who might have the skills to to fill the positions they are looking for. It is efficient, you meet a lot of people quickly, and it is "safe" (you don't have to set expectations you just start talking). Another great source of recommendations? Professors. People who have seen you working on problems, ideally in small teams, and coming up with solutions.

</comment><comment><USER14> The article is true -- large companies often hire through non-technical recruiters, who aren't qualified to judge applicants.

But I find it disingenuous to single out tech, which is one of the most meritocratic industries. What does the screening process look like in finance? Academia? Journalism? Real estate?

<comment><USER15> Nobody has an image of finance, academia, journalism, or real estate that is bound up in the concept of 'meritocracy', though, so publishing this sort of takedown on any of those industries (and for the less illusioned, in ours as well) would induce a lot of 'no shit, Sherlock' moments.

<comment><USER16> Academia certainly likes to consider itself a meritocracy. (Like software, it's not.)

<comment><USER15> Good point, that's pretty true. Much like software, there's a projected image which involves the ideal of 'meritocracy', and much like software that's not how it works on the inside.

Unlike software, nobody who's been in or involved with academia for more than a year or two (read: grad students) holds on to that illusion or parrots that brand of nonsense.

My suspicion about software's need to maintain a veneer of meritocratic legitimacy is that there's a lot of money being tossed around, and a lot of founders/entrepreneur types making and losing money. Those who succeed have the loudest voices, and they don't want their successes to have been be influenced by the whims of fate or chance. So we end up with this Horatio Alger mythos born of the dissonance between success and merit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've got a crazy idea: we should start evaluating recruiters. I once had a very experienced recruiter get upset and pushy when I told her I was a bad fit for a job and I didn't want to apply. After some back and forth I realized that the source of confusion was that she didn't understand the difference between Java and JavaScript. Weeding out incompetent recruiters would help the whole process.

<comment><USER18> I had one recruiter call me up and try to sell me on a job in a certain technology. Then as the call ended the recruiter asked me what the technology was and what it did. If you had little credibility before it's definitely gone now.

This sounds like a great business opportunity BTW. I would love to get the real deal on some of these recruiters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> For reference, this post and discussion started in the thread about getting a thorough CS background online and its employability aspects:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9551239](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9551239)

In particular:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9551911](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9551911)

</comment><comment><USER20> Recently I was interviewed by a well-known dating company. After the onsite interview they rejected me by saying "Our team liked you very much but they have decided to go with the candidate that they worked with in the past".

Is this right ?

<comment><USER21> Yes. They chose a known quantity over an unknown one.

I'd be disappointed though.

<comment><USER20> I am not a quantity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> People are hired by merits defined by the hiring manager, not a globally consistent set of merits. It's a very well written article.

<comment><USER8> Yes, and those merits may or may not correlate with ability to do the job the candidate is being hired for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Lesson: Be on the hiring side of the table. That is, be an entrepreneur.

As someone with some high value, tough to get paid that value as an employee; that's a very old lesson.

E.g., I've been programming for decades and am doing so now in my startup, but my programming background doesn't meet the criteria in the job ads. So, I have little or no experience with Python, Java, JavaScript, C++, Linux, Unix, Haskell, Scheme, Lisp, C#, functional programming, etc.

Instead for my _platform_ I selected Windows instead of Linux. On Windows I selected Visual Basic .NET (VB) instead of C#. Why? Because for my work both VB and C# are essentially equivalent ways to build on the _common language runtime_ (CLR) and .NET Framework, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, SQL Server, etc. And for my work, C# and VB differ mostly just in the flavor of _syntactic sugar_.

I prefer the flavor of VB because: C# borrows much of the deliberately "idiosyncratic" syntax of C. Sure, way back in the DEC PDP-8 with 8 KB of main memory, some of the sparse C syntax may have seemed good to have. While there are still some good uses for C, now for my work C is like digging a Panama Canal with a teaspoon and VB and C# are far ahead. No C for me, thank you. Much the same for C++ (e.g., tough to avoid memory leaks -- tough to be really clear on just what the heck Stroustrup wrote).

So, I like the more verbose, traditional (Algol, Fortran, PL/I, Pascal, etc.) syntax of VB instead of the more sparse, idiosyncratic syntax of C#.

So, to me, VB is easier to write and read and, when I start to hire, teach and learn. So, it's VB.

The .NET Framework? It's a major hunk of software, one of the most important in computing. Microsoft is solidly behind it, and they have several tens of billions of dollars in cash to back what they want. Microsoft has long seen their business as that of supplying a _platform_ for others to build on, and their .NET Framework is one of their most important _planks_ in their _platform_.

For my work, .NET has a _class_ for nearly everything of any general purpose utility. So, often my code becomes mostly just _mortar_ to join .NET _bricks_.

For more, ASP.NET has a _way_ to write Web pages, and so far it seems mostly from okay up to fine with me.

ADO.NET has a way to get to relational data base and, again, seems mostly from okay up to fine with me.

For Python, maybe I will use it for some of its good packages, if doing so becomes worthwhile for my work.

For Java, don't need it. If I had already used it, then I wouldn't use it now and would forget it.

For JavaScript, so far for my Web pages ASP.NET has written a little JavaScript for me, but I have yet to write a single line. If I need it, then I will use it -- so far I don't need it.

For Lisp, too many parentheses, and I'd have no idea how to get to the .NET Framework.

For _algorithms and data structures_ , been there, done that, learned it, used it, taught it in college and graduate school, done original work in it.

For the _engineering_ , I've got a Ph.D. in engineering from a world famous research university. Some of that background is crucial for my startup. It appears that the jobs with the job ads would make no use of that background -- a big advantage for my startup. Besides, nearly no one hiring would be able to evaluate my Ph.D. work. And nearly anyone hiring would be afraid to have a Ph.D. subordinate.

So, the job ads and I agree to disagree: They don't want me, and I don't want them.

If my startup works and I need to hire for software development, then I will. Main qualifications: (A) Some okay basic computer usage and familiarity and interest. (B) Good at reading and writing technical material. (C) A good record in a college STEM major. (D) Otherwise looks like potentially a good employee. Having programmed a little would be a plus. That's what I'll hire for. It's not so strange: It's how I got hired in a Watson lab AI group, and they hired for the right stuff.

The job ads for software developers are sick-o. That others are making such mistakes is good for my startup.

<comment><USER24> What if you needed something specific like a mobile or web app? Would you have someone with a good degree from a nice university fumble with it for a few months, or would you hire someone with the experience to be up and running in hours?

<comment><USER23> If I wanted a good, long term employee, then I'd hire one. If I just wanted a specific app, then I'd contact a freelance consultant or a software house for just that job and, maybe, a few revisions.

For the poor employee, why the heck do they want to get hired just to write a first mobile app? So, is that _job_ worth their uprooting their family, moving across country, buying a house, getting good schools for the kids, having their spouse happy, maybe also with a job, etc.?

Same for bookkeeping, accounting, taxes, payroll, business insurance, business law, setting up system monitoring and management for a server farm, network configuration, travel planning, employee benefits, etc.

For details of how to make use of high end products of Microsoft, Cisco, etc., I'd expect some good technical _sales support_ and, later, some more technical support even if paid for by the hour. E.g., to set up some parallel, highly reliable, high performance, high end SQL Server database, I'd expect a lot of help from Microsoft. Same for much of their system monitoring and management software. If HP wants my startup to use some of their system monitoring and management software, then they'd better have their technical support people _ready to play_. I don't intend to hire full time employees with such expertise in place before I hire them; if they happen to have such expertise and look good as employees otherwise, then fine.

Same for running 500 A of 120 V electric power lines, fixing the HVAC or the plumbing, installing an employee kitchenette, installing phones, mowing the grass, plowing the snow, etc.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple announces 9/9 event with tagline "Wish we could say more" - <AUTHOR> http://www.loopinsight.com/2014/08/28/apple-announces-special-event-for-sept-9/

<comment> o0-0o Just a bit of speculation here, but could this actually be a watch that you talk to?</comment>


Most-recommended programming books - <AUTHOR> https://www.daolf.com/posts/best-programming-books/ <comment><USER2> >Best programming books of all-time

>Methodology:

>I've simply asked Google for a few queries like "Best Programming Books" and its variations of.

And then every one of those links is an Amazon referral URL.

This seems at best a low effort attempt to turn over a couple dollars.

<comment><USER3> I agree, this should be spam.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think this is a good example of confusing "popular" with "best".

Having read over half of those books, the only one I would ever come back to and read again and again with a smile on my face and a feeling of childlike wonder and intellectual curiosity is SICP (number 18).

<comment><USER5> Surely number 19 is among the best class, although the idea of reading it more than once may be limited by how long you have to live.

<comment><USER6> 19 was "The Art of Computer Programming", by Knuth.

I owned a copy of this, but I only used it as a reference once or twice. Sadly it didn't survive my emigration.

I don't think I've ever met anybody who has read the whole thing, and if somebody told me they had I'd assume they were lying.

<comment><USER7> TAOCP is a very good reference book, and I think very few people would have ever read it cover to cover, but it is good if you want to look up an algorithm. For example, I went through the hash table chapter while doing assignments for a course while trying to optimize my implementation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think Clean Code is a bit overrated. I got the book, and while some of the advice is sound, especially from OOP perspective design, a big part of the book is solving JavaEE specific issues, which don't translate well to other languages.

<comment><USER9> Uncle Bob is overrated. He's the personal embodiment of the "for dummies" series of the industry. Quick to say what everything should look like, he's given many people a false sense of direction by making no mention of all the reasons why something shouldn't look like that. If you're reading Uncle Bob material and not scratching your head a bit thinking "are you sure that's right?", do yourself a favor and go find some Fowler material instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Those popular vote ratings are mostly useless. What I really would like to see for instance is the books most favored by those who enjoyed SICP and who thinks the `Uncle Bob` books are garbage.

<comment><USER11> In this category, I _strongly_ recommend Art of the Meta-Object Protocol. I've been through it 5 times now, and each time it bends my brain in a completely new way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Mandatory comment: Omg no K&R?

</comment><comment><USER13> Nisan and Schocken's "The elements of computing systems" should be on this list. I'd have it at number 1

</comment><comment><USER14> Most-recommended programming books is very misleading. This is a list of software development lifecycle management books.

</comment><comment><USER15> Should be titled; "Most recommended programming books for non-programmers"

</comment><comment><USER16> Dreaming in Code is good too.

Clean Code is overrated imo.

I would never advice anyone to read about pattern and pratices before they can actually program in a fairly decent abstract domain.

</comment><comment><USER17> Overtime I've built my own list of lists.

Books lists for Hacker News:

[https://toptalkedbooks.com/hackernews](https://toptalkedbooks.com/hackernews)

[http://hackernewsbooks.com/top-books-on-hacker- news](http://hackernewsbooks.com/top-books-on-hacker-news)

[http://ramiro.org/vis/hn-most-linked-books/](http://ramiro.org/vis/hn-most- linked-books/)

[https://mapfilterfold.com/?genre=programming](https://mapfilterfold.com/?genre=programming)

Most mentioned in Stackoverflow:

[https://toptalkedbooks.com/stackoverflow/all](https://toptalkedbooks.com/stackoverflow/all)

Other aggregated lists:

[http://developeronfire.com/book- recommendations](http://developeronfire.com/book-recommendations)

[https://medium.com/@YogevSitton/the-ultimate-reading-list- fo...](https://medium.com/@YogevSitton/the-ultimate-reading-list-for- developers-e96c832d9687)

Curated lists:

Jeff Atwood [https://blog.codinghorror.com/programmers-dont-read-books- bu...](https://blog.codinghorror.com/programmers-dont-read-books-but-you- should/)

Joel Spolsky [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/11/22/reading-list- fog-c...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/11/22/reading-list-fog-creek- software-management-training-program/)

DHH David Heinemeier Hansson [https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3375-the-five- programming-boo...](https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3375-the-five-programming- books-that-meant-most-to-me)

Jason Roell [https://jasonroell.com/2015/03/16/12-most-infuential- books-e...](https://jasonroell.com/2015/03/16/12-most-infuential-books-every- software-engineer-needs-to-read/)

John Sonmez [https://simpleprogrammer.com/the-ultimate-list-of- programmin...](https://simpleprogrammer.com/the-ultimate-list-of-programming- books/)

Khalil Stemmler [https://medium.freecodecamp.org/9-books-for-junior- developer...](https://medium.freecodecamp.org/9-books-for-junior-developers- in-2019-e41fc7ecc586)

<comment><USER18> Nice list, thanks for sharing

\+ [https://books.goalkicker.com](https://books.goalkicker.com)

<comment><USER19> That is an amazing resource!</comment></comment></comment>


University pays $20,000 to ransomware hackers - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-36478650 <comment><USER2> Why openly announce that you're paying the ransom?

Here's some major disadvantages that I can think of:

1\. Announces to world that you have poor security/backup practices which encourages more attacks against you

2\. Announces to world that making and distributing ransomware is good business which encourages more attacks against everyone

I understand that public institutions needs financial transparency in order to be accountable to the public. But the nature of this isn't any different from, for example, a basement flooded due to poor design and required $20,000 to fix. Someone screwed up, and it cost the university $20,000. Let's just pay the money, fix the problem, and take steps to make sure it doesn't happen again. No need to call up the local paper about it and make it a story.

<comment><USER3> > Why openly announce that you're paying the ransom?

An effective thing they could have done is to announce that they paid the ransom, but that the decryption did _not_ work (even though it did).

That has the advantage of discouraging other people from paying up, and therefore reduces the incentive to create more ransomware attacks.

Hell, the government could step in and recruit people and companies to _falsely_ claim that they were ransomware victims who paid up, but never got decryption keys and were screwed over. That could put a damper on ransomware psychology.

Thinking about it further however, this will probably lead to better "customer service" by the ransomware makers. They'll adapt their software to selectively decrypt part of your data for free, so they can offer you proof that that they can and will give your working keys once you pay up.

<comment><USER4> > _Hell, the government could step in and recruit people and companies to > falsely claim that they were ransomware victims who paid up, but never got > decryption keys and were screwed over. That could put a damper on ransomware > psychology._

This actually did happen to me. Paid the money, got the key, couldn't unlock my files. Damn shame.

<comment><USER3> I'm sorry to hear that. Being Hacker News I think we'd all be very interested if you are able to share some details such as:

\- how your system got compromised?

\- did you have backups? (and did the backups get encrypted?)

\- how much did you pay and by what method?

\- why do you think the key didn't work?

EDIT: It now occurs to me that you're following my suggestion about falsely claiming to be a ransomware victim to discourage ransom payments. Whoosh!

<comment><USER5> > you're following my suggestion about falsely claiming to be a ransomware > victim

effective, isn't it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Microsoft really needs to build ransomware behavior detection directly into Windows. The behavior of these programs is quite distinctive. The advent of cryptocurrency was the missing link to enable all manner of anonymous extortion schemes, and this one in particular seems to now be a mainstream threat. Microsoft should be all over this.

<comment><USER7> Ransomware detection is just a (perhaps necessary) band-aid.

By default all applications should be sandboxed. Why should a random application be able to read/write to every user directory? We enforce process separation in memory, we should do the same on disk.

<comment><USER8> > all applications should be sandboxed.

not a bad plan, but also, all data should be _backed up_. In this 'cloud age' of computing, there's no reason, and no excuse. I certainly don't want to blame the victims of ransomware, but if that data was so important that they paid ransom to get it back, why didn't they back it up ?

<comment><USER9> The Mac makes this so easy with Time Machine. Is there something that's equally easy and effective in Windows?

<comment><USER10> Why couldn't the ransomware encrypt your Time Machine drive as well?

<comment><USER9> It certainly could do this. I don't think Time Machine protects its data in any way.

Backups have to be coupled with some kind of way of noticing that something is wrong. If the ransomware encrypted your data slowly over the course of months and you didn't notice you might be out of luck regardless of your backup system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ranked 151-200 in the QS rankings for CS. I bet if they handed this problem over to the CS people in the university they would have willingly helped them out to fix it.

Information security is even listed as one of their main research areas.

[http://www.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/cpsc_research](http://www.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/cpsc_research)

they even have some labs that does infosec

[http://icis.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/](http://icis.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/) [http://ispia.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/](http://ispia.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/)

I bet the people at the CS dept must be pissed.

<comment><USER12> You missed this quote under the picture: "University IT workers tried to crack the ransomware for more than a week before the payment".

BTW, are you implying that a strong CS university can break asymmetric encryption? Why is everybody assuming that hackers are stupid all the time, and only they are smart...

<comment><USER11> Actually I am implying it is possible for some types of ransomware. Here's an example.

[https://github.com/leo-stone/hack-petya](https://github.com/leo-stone/hack- petya)

(the hn thread [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11474613](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11474613) )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The most interesting part of the article was that some ransomware sites have threatened to publish their files if they don't pay - no backup strategy will save you there.

<comment><USER14> But consider the University of Calgary's actions in response... they publicly announced the outcome of these events in the interest of transparency.

Wouldn't it be more transparent to just allow their files to be published?

Surely there are damages that could be caused, but as a public institution, I feel like this is the way they should operate by default.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Since this exploits user level privileges, perhaps a good idea would be to have a privileged version control system for user data. In that, you need admin/root access to actually DELETE anything, and any file system changes by users are simply versioned away. This means if you had ransomware that fucked up your files (since this software typically runs at user level), you could just instruct said versioning system to roll everything back as an admin?

<comment><USER16> I _think_ that's what many enterprise deployments do with shadow copies, mostly for file shares. It would probably make sense for Microsoft to push this feature for personal usage/smaller networks as well (not sure if you can currently use it in that scenario).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I guess no backup strategy means no other option but to pay. Likely goes hand in hand with weak or missing security strategy.

<comment><USER18> people who backup their stuff laugh at ransomware

<comment><USER19> ...until they find the ransomware is in the backups too?

<comment><USER20> Only if they made their "backups" writable as well

<comment><USER19> It's difficult to create backups if you can't write into the backups storage.

<comment><USER21> The way I do it is I create backups locally and then copy them to my NAS over ftp(with a password), instead of samba. Hopefully, that way any ransomeware would not be able to encrypt my nas as well, as it does not have any publicly accessible folders on the network.

<comment><USER19> The problem is that ransomware doesn't have to activate immediately, so you can end up with multiple copies throughout your backups before it takes effect. Hence, restoring from backups may not solve an infection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Easy solution - the government writes into law it's illegal to pay ransomware hackers. Sure hackers might get the occasional payee after this but the likelihood goes down dramatically removing much incentive, especially for larger organisations to be targeted.

<comment><USER23> The ransomware would still be about. Even if the US banned paying, there are other countries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> They reference another article that contains a quote from an Intel employee...

"Ransomware and crypto malware are rising at an alarming rate and show no signs of stopping," said Raj Samani, European technology head for Intel Security.

That statement instills a confidence in me that makes me so glad Intel bought McAfee six years ago.

</comment><comment><USER25> Could one mimic the human imune system when it comes to security? All shared data is blockchained and if one producer shows lacking response all his contact partners get quarantined. Infections.. Yes on a large scale (even local) no

</comment><comment><USER23> Someone should make a usb hard disk that doesn't allow existing files to be modified on it unless you flip a physical switch. Then you could back your data to that and not worry about it being wiped / encrypted.

</comment><comment><USER26> Sorry but it was probably cheaper than implementing backups all along, eh?

</comment><comment><USER27> People asking for ransoms are shady to begin with, but to target a university? That's past gangster, that's just wrong.

<comment><USER8> universities charge fees that are tantamount to "ransom" in order to get your degree. They aren't much better (at least US ones ) than the thieves.

<comment><USER28> > US universities charge fees...

FTFY.

The University that this story is about is Canadian.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Security audits..im sorry Sir we don t have that kind of money..

</comment><comment><USER29> With $20,000 one could get a really nice backup system.

<comment><USER30> I see you backed up your comment

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> With 20,000$ could get a nice backup system.

</comment><comment><USER31> If you're a Windows programmer, might be a good idea to write a Windows Service that watches for drive encryption. Then you could stop it before it does anything. For now, I think most of the methods are known, so they are easy to watch for.

<comment><USER32> IMO, Micro$oft can gain a huge amount of positive press/PR as well as user- love by integrating a defense/protection mechanism right into the OS.

<comment><USER33> The moment Microsoft try to be proactive and integrate a defence mechanism I would suspect people would then try to hold them liable if another ransomware attack succeeded.

Microsoft could do without the overhead, or the headache, and so despite the PR upside it's probably not worth their effort.

Might be an opportunity for an ISV to make a utility though?

<comment><USER16> The same logic could be applied to their built-in anti-malware software (Windows Defender), so I don't think that's what's stopping them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The headline could also be "University willingly supports criminals with $20.000" \- and it would be more honest.

That's really something that bothers me with the whole ransomware thing: People seem to be completely ignorant to the fact that by paying they're not only getting back their data - they're paying the bills for the people who will launch more attacks against other people. And thus they're themselve guilty of supporting the same crime that just hit them.

<comment><USER35> ... under duress.

That's why it's termed 'ransom'. Because people who don't pay, have things taken from them. You don't really get to condemn ransom payers on ethical grounds without being an asshole.

<comment><USER36> Of course one does!

Paying a ransom encourages the criminal behaviour; it therefore negatively affects all potential victims by making them more likely to become actual victims.

Also, in some jurisdictions paying a ransom is actually a criminal offence so one could end up causing further negative consequences for your family, friend, colleagues, or the institution you work for.</comment></comment></comment>


Decentralized trust graph for online value exchange without a blockchain - <AUTHOR> https://settle.network/posts/intro/ <comment><USER2> The source code is available here: [https://github.com/spolu/settle](https://github.com/spolu/settle)</comment>


Ask HN: Is it okay that email change doesn't require my password? - <AUTHOR> On HN, changing my password requires me to type in my existing password. This makes sense: it prevents someone with my session from stealing my account.<p>However, there doesn't seem to be anything preventing someone from changing my email and submitting a password change request. It seems like a lot of websites allow this. <comment><USER2> Examples?

You'd be suprised how adhoc site security can be, even for popular websites. Since changing the email effectively does allow you to change the password, it is not a bad observation.</comment>


Are you a comparison geek - <AUTHOR> http://comparingstuff.posterous.com/are-you-a-comparison-geekhow-do-you-compare

<comment><AUTHOR> As a side note, what sort of articles would you like to see what would really add value for you (and are reasonably on topic)?</comment>


How Apple took nine weeks to arbitrarily reject our app - <AUTHOR> http://blog.forumwarz.com/2011/02/01/irejected-how-apple-took-nine-weeks-to-arbitrarily-reject-our-app/

<comment><USER2> This was a made-to-be-rejected-and-whined-about app:

"We built an iPhone game in just under two days and submitted it to Apple for approval. The concept was a little iffy, but we figured it was worth the gamble. If nothing else, it could attract some attention to our web RPG, Forumwarz."

Mission...accomplished.

For what it's worth, anyone reading the introduction to the 9/2010 app store guidelines would expect the rejection:

[http://stadium.weblogsinc.com/engadget/files/app-store- guide...](http://stadium.weblogsinc.com/engadget/files/app-store- guidelines.pdf)

* We have over 250,000 apps in the App Store. We don't need any more Fart apps. If your app doesn't do something useful or provide some form of lasting entertainment, it may not be accepted

* If your App looks like it was cobbled together in a few days, or you're trying to get your first practice App into the store to impress your friends, please brace yourself for rejection. We have lots of serious developers who don't want their quality Apps to be surrounded by amateur hour.

* If your app is rejected, we have a Review Board that you can appeal to. If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps.

kb

<comment><USER3> While I can buy that, it's still a little ludicrous that it took nine weeks for them to say "Remove this and it's okay, no, wait, nevermind, banleeted." You'd think that if it was as cut and dried as "We don't need any more fart apps" that you could reject it with about 45 seconds of review.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Their own pre-emptive attempt at exculpation "So you're upset that Apple wouldn't approve your money-grubbing stupid idea?" is pretty much my sentiment.

Come back when you have a legit gripe. Just because others get away with something is no reason you should get away with same. "Hey, officer, I saw other people speeding too and you didn't cite them, not fair!"

<comment><AUTHOR> We weren't upset because other people got away with something. In fact, I don't think anyone has created a remotely similar app.

We were upset because it demonstrates that Apple can effectively make up reasons to block your app when none previously exist.

Moreover, it shows they clearly have no sense of humor.

<comment><USER5> Isn't this basically covered in every legal agreement since time began?

"Apple reserves the right to refuse..."

I'll bet there's a line in the developer agreement to that effect. A catch-all defense used at times like this. Shouldn't come as any surprise.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't disagree.

But I offer this thought: do you feel like you might tell your kids or grandkids that you remember a time when any of your friends could try out the software your created on their own devices? When anyone had the ability to do whatever they wanted with their devices, without having to agree to a license agreement first?

<comment><USER6> >when any of your friends could try out the software your created on their own devices?

You can do this with the iPhone right now so long as "your friends" doesn't include all iOS owners.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The idea was worth the try, but I'm not surprised it was rejected.

As an iOS developer myself, I respect Apple's power to police the app store as they see fit. It's their platform and they have every right to set the precedent on what content is allowable. Approving your app would spawn numerous clones and obviously Apple doesn't agree with your utilization of in- app purchases.

<comment><USER8> Yes, how dare you draw attention to how people spend realmonies for digital goods with basically no replication costs.

 _Cough_. Time to go listen to some MP3's, maybe buy a copy of a free-to-air show I've already seen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > _Even if your App is built in accordance to every policy, Apple can still > reject it._

I think we reached this conclusion a while back. While many developers may consider it unfair, I should point out that I have never seen a non-gimmicky, high-quality, and polished app face this same predicament of arbitrarily getting rejected. These types of things just don't happen to those stellar apps that have been through a long development process (unlike the one mentioned in this article).

The truth is that arbitrary rejections aren't so arbitrary. You won't see an app like Doodle Jump be rejected, but you may see it happen to a fart app. While Apple doesn't necessarily point out the particular reasons of a rejection every time, most of us can agree that there is a clear distinction between those that are arbitrarily rejected and those that aren't. This goes to show that there is some reasoning behind Apple's decisions.

People need to realize this and understand that there is probably a pretty good reason why their app got rejected - even if Apple doesn't point it out for them.

<comment><USER10> > _I should point out that I have never seen a non-gimmicky, high-quality, and > polished app face this same predicament of arbitrarily getting rejected._

Walk over here with me, and I can introduce you to the fine folks at a small company called "Sony"

<comment><USER11> "arbitrarily" - Anybody like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, WSJ realizes that selling content on the iPad platform (now that the platform is popular) is going to require them to play ball with Apple.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Didn't Apple say something along the line of "No more fart apps anymore" when they updated their App store approval guidelines last time around?

</comment><comment><USER13> So you're upset that Apple wouldn't approve your money-grubbing stupid idea? Give me a break.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't know about you, but I am _glad_ that POS "app" got rejected. There is enough crap out there already.

</comment><comment><USER15> I LOVE the idea behind this app!

If released, there's a small chance it could become a running joke, especially if you'd promise to donate 50% of profits to charity or something. (Maybe iDonate would be accepted?)

<comment><USER10> Although I see the cheese of sarcasm in your statement, but AFAIK, official Apple App Store policy (this time, written down), is that you can't have a "donation" application. Which is why you don't see a "Give to the American Red Cross" or what have you application.

<comment><USER15> I didn't know about the no-donations policy, thanks.

I also really meant what I said about a donations game, it would work in a society where everybody wants the world to know about the good things they do in private.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Luckily, there is a great alternative out there selling just as well as iOS.

<comment><USER17> That users spend a fraction of the money on. Which would render this game irrelevant - if it had any relevance to begin with.

<comment><USER18> A fraction of the money is still more than zero. Android may not pay out well, but iOS is a gamble as to whether you'll even get to sell your app.</comment></comment></comment>