Self-driving cars will exacerbate organ shortages - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/12/self_driving_cars_will_exacerbate_organ_shortages.html <comment><USER2> >1 in 5 organ donations comes from the victim of a vehicular accident

So preventing 35,000 deaths a year, may lead to 6,000 less organ donations? I'd take that deal.

The article goes on to talk about changing from opt-in donations, to opt-out donations. Which seems completely orthogonal to self-driving cars, as (regardless of projected stats on future donor numbers) we should do whatever we can to decrease the number of people waiting on organ transplants.

<comment><USER3> I don't know why, but the idea of moving something that is currently opt-in to opt-out really bothers me even if it is a good cause. As the world becomes a more free place more and more things should be opt-in.

<comment><USER4> I recently had this discussion on reddit, and I don't get this position. As long as it's as easy to opt out as it was to opt in, I see the two as equivalent.

I suppose it could be more problematic in situations where the 'in' isn't such an obvious good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Re: increasing donations -- I've always wondered why it doesn't work roughly as follows: if you're an adult who finds yourself in need of a donated organ and are not yourself a donor, you're at the bottom of the list (below any donors) as a potential recipient from strangers who are donors. Puts the incentive in the right place and seems fair to me. What are the issues with that idea?

Maybe the donor system would need to be made an opt-out rather than opt-in system first (as the article suggests), otherwise ignorance could be an issue.

<comment><USER6> People are rather bad at handling low-probability events. We underestimate the likelihood of bad events, and overestimate the likelihood of good events. If people were purely rational, your solution would work. However, people would underestimate the chance that they themselves will need an organ transplant, and so the lower chance of getting a transplant if needed would not be a good motivator.

I am strongly in favor of organ donation being opt-out, rather than opt-in.

<comment><USER7> >I am strongly in favor of organ donation being opt-out, rather than opt-in. //

Whilst the state assumes control of a person's body around the time of their death, a little pre- or post- mortem, do you also consider that they should assume control of the persons other material assets?

If you're in favour of the assumption of state possession of [portions of] a persons body it seems logical you should also think the public should be able to assume the good from that persons other cherry-picked assets.

To emphasise the point, suppose a landed millionaire dies, their kidneys prove useful to someone - the state has written in to law that the persons bodily organs will be assumed to be possessions of the state. Would not also that persons properties, liquid assets, and other such non-bodily possessions be beneficial. Indeed they may give far greater benefit than their organs in some cases.

Why the organs but not the non-bodily assets?

Despite bodies being ruled as "not property" in UK law I'm of the opinion that a person's own body should be as much as feasible theirs to control as the other assets of that person are post-mortem. If people get to say what happens to their house, why should they not get to say what happens to their retinas, say?

Personally I find a greater moral good in assuming the possession of the non- bodily assets to the state and allowing people to choose to donate their bodies.

<comment><USER6> What you describe is exactly what is already implemented as an estate tax. It makes perfect sense to do so. Furthermore, an estate tax has the benefit of preventing a class of aristocrats from forming, by limiting the amount of wealth that can be passed down through many generations.

Default organ donation is different in two ways. One, you can opt out at no cost. Two, the organs would otherwise benefit nobody. In the case of an estate tax, the assets are split between the descendents and society, and nothing is lost. In the case of organ donation, the organs go either to recipients, or to the worms. Clearly, the default behavior should be the one that allows some benefit to be had.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We are on the verge of being able to replicate organs at scale. I think that that harvesting them from donors who have destroyed their brains in vehicular accidents is just an unfortunate but necessary stepping stone.

<comment><USER9> I went to the past show put on by Eureka Comedy in SF [1][2]. The speaker said that a type of artificial pancreas now in testing is more efficient than a healthy pancreas. If that is correct, it might become the norm at some point to just swap out natural organs for synthetic ones, at least for those who can afford it. Maybe organ collection and distribution will become a function of Goodwill Industries as people donate their original natural organs.

[1] [http://www.eurekacomedy.com](http://www.eurekacomedy.com)

[2] [https://www.eventbrite.com/e/eureka- tickets-26689373635](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/eureka-tickets-26689373635)

<comment><USER10> Does the artificial pancreas only produce insulin when blood sugar rises, or does it also secrete digestive juices and sodium bicarbonate? If the former, then it's surely not desirable yet to exchange a healthy pancreas for it. Similar to taking out the gallbladder if you don't have any stones. Digestion just works better with the real deal.

<comment><USER9> If I understand it correctly, the pancreas releases insulin to lower blood sugar, but it can also release insulin when you don't have a need. Like you might experience an insulin spike when thinking about eating a tasty dessert, but are not actually consuming the dessert. An artificial pancreas relies on monitoring actual blood sugar levels. It can also proactively address low blood sugar. The speaker mentioned getting a text when her diabetic son's blood sugar was low, and so she called the son's babysitter with instructions to give the son some crackers. I've never received a text message from my pancreas, or any other organ in my body.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As long as we don't have self driving motorbikes, there will be an ample supply of young, healthy donors.

I have been told Motorbikes is what a surgeon, specialist in transplantation, has in mind when he rubs his hands when it is raining outside. "It's going to be a busy day".

Probably more relevant in Europe than in the US.

<comment><USER12> indeed, I have heard paramedics refer to the vehicles as "donor-cycles"

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Much has been said about the ways we expect our oncoming fleet of driverless > cars to change the way we live—remaking us all into passengers, rewiring our > economy, retooling our views of ownership, and reshaping our cities and > roads.

"retooling our views of ownership" ?

What have self-driving cars to do with car ownership? If the global economy works there will be always ownership, there will always be companies from somewhere that will sell cars. It's like the WWW, you can put up paywalls, but there will always be another site powered by another business model (eg ads) that cater the users. Or you can still buy traditional light bulbs, and ironically the two companies that lobbied to ban light bulbs closed down their respective business units and focus on something else. Recently John Deer and Tesla vehicles have some kind dongle/software-as-a-service thing, where you have to register your vehicle with an account - that can limit the after-sale value/business. For every company that follows that plan, there will be x other vehicle manufacturers elsewhere that stay with the normal business model.

</comment><comment><USER14> Yes, but it will also lower the demand for organs due to less crashes with injuries. I'm not sure what the net would be.

<comment><USER15> I don't have statistic handy, but I imagine most organ donation need comes from illness.

<comment><USER14> I found some information. The largest organ by far that is transplanted is the kidney. I also suspect most of them are from disease rather than an impact injury.

[https://www.organdonor.gov/statistics- stories/statistics.htm...](https://www.organdonor.gov/statistics- stories/statistics.html)

<comment><USER10> But, are kidneys not most often donated from relatives?

<comment><USER14> Could be. I'm not sure if they are the most donated because almost everyone has a spare one, or because they are in the most demand, or a mix.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It seems likely that the artificial creation of organs could produce enough by the time self driving cars are actually ubiquitous enough to cause a shortage

> 1 in 5 organ donations comes from the victim of a vehicular accident.

And I'm quite surprised that's true!

<comment><USER11> I would have thought it would be more than 1 in 5. Keep in mind the organ must be healthy for it to be suitable. That rules out a lot of diseases, people dying of old age, etc.

<comment><USER10> I think most donations come from relatives. AFAIK some donations are also recoverable, e.g. when only a part of the liver is transplanted and it will regrow to its full size?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _To alleviate concerns associated with commercialization, compensation could be limited to fixed payments or to benefit packages that include insurance, tax deductions for travel, lodging and lost wages, or paid donor leave._

Is there a coherent argument for creating a "market" where sellers are banned from realizing the full market value of the thing they are selling? I guess people will say gouging, but that doesn't really work for an organ market (2 kidneys are actually better than 1, there's nothing short term or unusual about the shortage).

<comment><USER18> Personally I wouldn't want to live in a society where poor people are exploited for their organs so wealthier people may live.

<comment><USER19> So you would rather limit the oppertunities of the poor, rather than allowing them to make a choice about their own bodies that you personally disagree with?

<comment><USER18> Yes...it's exploitation. Should people be allowed to sell their heart or their eyes?

<comment><USER19> Have you thought it through? People will sell organs if they think that is the best possible opportunity for them. You want to come in and deny them that resource, which means you want to force poor people to make a choice that they believe is worse of.

Either you hate the poor and want them to be worse of (I don't believe this) or you think you know that persons situation better than they do. We tried a system of tell people what to buy and sell and what to make. It was called the Soviet Union and it was demonstrately worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Previously posted.. not sure why the dupe detector didn't pick it up, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13284588](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13284588)

</comment><comment><USER18> There's still Chinese prisoner organ harvesting.

[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china- carrying-...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-carrying-out- millions-of-illegal-organ-transplants-annually-report-finds-a7107091.html)

<comment><USER21> Great opportunities ahead for America's private prison investors.

<comment><USER22> A recurring theme in Larry Niven's writing

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> maybe Big Organ can pay google to randomly crash their AI cars. The free market at work!</comment>


Linux players complain of illegitimate Diablo III bans - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/07/linux-players-complain-of-illegitimate-diablo-iii-bans/ <comment><USER2> 35 pages of forum reading later, it is observed by a forum poster (and quoted by an employee) that a total of 2 users have complained so far. Many more users report that it works fine under WINE, and a Blizzard employee reports that they did "extensive" testing as well.

So this seems to be "we were caught cheating, so we started a bunch of sensational forum threads about Linux and then submitted it to ArsTechnica".

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't help but suspect that this is turning into a bit of a scapegoat for cheaters (especially in Blizzard titles which, due to the studio being one of the few to continue to develop using OpenGL, generally work really well in Wine).

"I wasn't cheating, I was running in Wine!"

I'm not saying that false positives can't or don't happen; I'm simply saying that I wouldn't put it past a lot of clever gamers to try a little social engineering and manipulation of the circumstances to get away with things.

<comment><USER4> It makes sense that they would have detailed logs of why people were banned, hence should be able to confirm the truth, if they wanted to.

<comment><USER3> Quite right; just saying that the type of "gamer-kid" who runs Linux is very likely the right mix of arrogant and clever to think (s)he can outsmart the Blizzard guys.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't know if this is true or false, but I've not yet had trouble with that while playing under wine. It will be interesting to see what comes out of this in the end.

</comment><comment><USER6> This has been confirmed as false already.

<comment><USER7> Source?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Blizzard claims that the specific users complaining were in fact cheating. [http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5978861022?page=21#40...](http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5978861022?page=21#402)

via the /. thread: [http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/07/03/141208/linux- users-...](http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/07/03/141208/linux-users-banned- from-diablo-iii-servers)</comment>


Thank HN: From Google form to $1k in revenue in one month - <AUTHOR> https://blog.oldgeekjobs.com/from-google-form-to-1000-in-revenue-in-one-month-3f5cd75b6089 <comment><USER2> Can you do another good deed and require your posters to include salary range in their job ads?

It's the norm in the UK and we successfully forced this in Poland (though posters almost NEVER post salaries here). How? The companies need IT staff so much that almost all IT job boards (at least the most popular ones - like FB groups or [https://nofluffjobs.com](https://nofluffjobs.com)) started requiring the salary range.

I think your idea is praiseworthy, but I'd never ever create a website like this with hidden salaries. Especially in your case - it's so cool people post jobs on your board, but what if they do so, because they're offering 10, 20, 40% less because it's a place for "old geeks that noone wants"?

I'm really super proud that if a IT ad in Poland has no salary range most of us just ignore it. And it took us maybe 2 years to get to this place. I think every other country should follow the lead and end the "competitive salary" trend. I don't want to spend 3 days on interviews just to discover that the salary offered is way too low for me. Salary missing from an ad is a big lack of respect, the sooner people realize that the better.

<comment><USER3> Just my 2c -- I'm in the US and I disagree. For example, many of the jobs allow for a very broad experience.

For example, in my current job, we are often looking for a smart, energetic people to work on X. Someone with a BS just out of college? An engineer with 10 years of matching experience? Tech lead wo just built X elsewhere? We will take either (if we like them) and adjust responsibilities instead.

This approach requires either creating multiple postings (a pain; we do not need so many people; it confuses the heck out of HR on why a single hire needs 3 postings), posting ridiculously wide salary range or saying "salary commensurate with experience" (which nowadays says nothing at all). My 2c.

<comment><USER4> What the hell is wrong with posting a wide salary range and stating you are looking at all sorts of people then? We're trying to prevent people wasting their time chatting to people when the remuneration will never be sufficient.

<comment><USER5> Honest question: Is a salary range of $50 - $100k really valuable to you as a job seeker?

<comment><USER6> Yeah, because then I know to ignore the listing.

If I came from a place that paid $50k, I'd expect them to be able to give me a small bump but likely land me in the low-to-mid part of the range and I'd apply. If I came from 75k I'd expect higher end of the range, and I'd apply. That could be unreasonable depending on how they place different tiers of engineer on that range, but if it is then it's better to split out the jobs by title (Software Eng Jr./Sr/Staff/Principal). If I came from over 100k I'll pass because I don't think they can afford me regardless of title.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Congrats! Small note, none of the listings appear when using uBlock Origin [ [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock- origin/cjpa...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock- origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm?hl=en) ], a popular ad blocker.

It seems related to your /js/ads-controller.js file (it gets blocked because of the "/js/ads-" portion in the path).

I would suggest fixing that (and preferably minimizing your JS into one bundle).

<comment><USER8> This is a good reason to never prefix generated Javascript with hex hashes, at least without swapping out vowels. We rolled the dice one and had this happen on Wikispaces once; it was utterly infuriating to debug.

<comment><USER9> Nice catch, never thought about it. Is it more problematic with preffixes (vs. suffixes etc.) or should we generally avoid any random string? Appending a hash to the script is very convenient to force the download of the new version of an asset (but maybe we have better solutions now, haven't considered this issue in a while).

<comment><USER10> In your site's code, reference the asset in a path that includes the timestamp the asset file last changed.

e.g.

/js/1476929634/myscript.js instead of /js/myscript.js

Then use your webserver to rewrite /js/<any number>/myscript.js to /js/myscript.js

<comment><USER11> You can also do /js/myscript.js?v=1476929634 -- this generally works without any server-side changes. A CRC32 might work better, since controlling mtimes can be annoying.

<comment><USER10> You can, but that can cause issues with browser caching ([http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2008/08/23/revving- filename...](http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2008/08/23/revving-filenames- dont-use-querystring/)) and in any case I prefer the cleaner urls :-)

Plus, once it's configured you never have to worry about it again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> hash-set Here's the deal: Employers will exploit your age no matter how old you are. There is no "perfect age" for a developer. When you're young, they exploit you because you are inexperienced (especially at negotiation). When you are "old" they exploit by trying to play the age card. "Not a cultural fit"\--LOL--fix your stupid culture and stop exploiting people, you smug fools!

So what is there? A ten year "ripe" age range where you're good enough to code but don't have a wife and kids? Blatant exploitation of human capital.

As far as "moving up to management" that's a load of crap. There aren't enough management positions to soak up all the age 35+ developers out there. It's an extremely narrow funnel. For the winners of that race, the prize is a lifetime of quiet suffering: You'll be lucky if you retire without major depression, anxiety, heart problems, or all three. I wonder what the mortality statistics are for people who work as IT managers?

There is also this role called "architect." Do not be enticed. It is, at best, a torturous role, and at worst, it's a redundant role that people who were only so-so at coding get promoted to so they can no longer annoy the rest of the team. The effectiveness of any given architect has an exponential decay from the instant they stop coding and start attending meetings all day.

Basically, you either keep coding and stay relevant or you go do something else completely. The rest is bs. But don't for a second imagine that companies aren't exploiting you by making you uneasy about your age or whatever else can be thrown in front of you to try and confuse, diminish, and lowball you.

<comment><USER12> > "Not a cultural fit"\--LOL--fix your stupid culture and stop exploiting > people, you smug fools!

If you're hiring someone 15+ years older than the rest of your team, there are going to be some cultural differences.

<comment><USER13> So? You're getting together to build things for money, not pounding back beers on the front porch and ranting about politics.

<comment><USER14> I think what the poster meant is that the twenty-somethings will just want to hack things up on the quick in Python or Rust while the old guy says _whoa, let 's sit down and write a specification first, and think about how we could architect this thing, and let's make OS packages out of all the components._

<comment><USER15> That isn't the problem. The problem is that the young guys THINK that the old guy will do this.

<comment><USER14> Sorry, I'm not clear on what you mean: they think that the old guy will write the specification and architect everything, or they think he will hack stuff together with them?

<comment><USER16> I think the implication is they think he'll be a slow-moving dinosaur before they even talk to him.

<comment><USER14> I guess that's probably correct. The old guy will appear to be slow because he'll want to think things through before digging his fingers into the keyboard, where the young guys are just fury of a tornado, but absolutely no plan.

And planning is 50% of the work.

However, I'm not being completely fair: my experience working in Silicon Valley with 20-somethings was extremely positive. At first, they were suspicious that it was taking me an entire day what they normally do in two hours, but they did it by manually hacking. What I was doing is writing a program which, based on data, generated another program to actually perform the work. I could just tell that they thought I was full of crap, because programs which program sounds completely esoteric.

What they didn't know was that the subject of programs which program, and data driven programming, is ancient history for old guys like me: open any European computer enthusiast magazine (64'er, Dator, anyone?) from the '80's and you're almost guaranteed to find at least one treatise on the subject in almost every issue, in one form or another.

But I digress; after that one day, their jaw dropped when I would perform the same amount of work that would take them two hours to an entire day... in three minutes. Every time.

Next they wanted to know how I did it. AWK and shell. Say what?!? What is AWK?

And this is where our story really begins: I always purposely kept enough free space at my desk, and an extra chair, so that anyone from all over the company could just pick up their laptop, walk over to me and plop themselves down next to me with whatever problem they were trying to solve. I also gave them homework. Pretty soon everyone was walking around with Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan's little Grey AWK book and used it as a reference. Then it was ANSI C 2nd edition's turn. Throughout it all, I kept teaching. There were whiteboard 1:1 classes on data structures. Then on algorithms. I loved it. And because this is regular work, I thought the exact theory that they needed to implement in order to solve the problem they were working on.

When it came time for some of the guys to switch jobs, go back to school, or go home, there were tears on both sides. I had had really devoted, bright young students, eager to learn, and I loved to teach; enthusiasm can be contagious given one is surrounded by right people. It was such a wonderful experience, and I think it was so for both sides.

<comment><USER16> I've had some pretty positive experiences working with older colleagues, so I'm totally in favor. I think the relationship can be better than either side alone because one tends to fill in the other's gaps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wish folks like Bray had championed this cause 20 years ago. It may not have done much, but... it feels a bit weird to hear old people complain about discriminatory impact. I can't say he was a contributing factor to the ongoing 'youth culture', but... it wasn't hard to see this coming.

My situation may be somewhat unique, in that I've had grey hair since I was 18. Not a HUGE amount at 18, but... people noticed. By the time I was in my mid 20s, it was definitely noticeable - more pepper than salt still, but noticeable. By 30... there's a fair amount of grey showing. Early 30s I've got people thinking I look good for being in my late 40s (had that more than a couple times).

But when it came to interviewing and opportunities, I was already feeling the age stigma in my late 20s. "Not a cultural fit" \- not even in silicon valley mind you.

Had someone interviewing me - early 30s - said "well your resume only goes back about 12 years or so, what were you doing before that?" "High school". "Whoah..." \- later found out he's assumed I was mid 40s.

Could I dye my hair? Yeah, but.. it's a pain, and... other parts of me will get old too. Not worth it - want to get hired based on ability, etc.

What's sad is to hear about the mid 30s folks wanting to get plastic surgery to look younger, which just validates and perpetuates the continuous youth culture. May not be possible to fight it at the Facebooks and Googles of the world, but it shouldn't be this bad...

<comment><USER18> I can't comment on Facebook but at Google I see plenty of people in their mid 30s and beyond. I joined in my early 40s. Yeah, we hire a lot of new grads / younger folks (I interview a lot of new grads) but I haven't noticed any overt ageism in the groups I've been in. Plus, the people making the hire decision don't see the candidate anyways. You should/would most likely get called out by the hiring groups if you added in color/vague "cultural fit" references.

This is just my experience, though.

<comment><USER19> Well, that's a huge company with many different types of engineers, and in business a long time (relatively). I would say the ageism is more likely at small startups that happen to have mostly young (in their 20s) engineers.

<comment><USER20> Maybe they're more easy to exploit providing a low wage dead marches.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I thought I was on medium.com.. You need to add a call to action to the end of your post! Add a short line - "if you've experienced ageism checkout these job listsing at /link" or "to see what I built visit /link" or something similar. Lots of lazy people want to click a link at the end of your post to see your site rather than trying to find a link in your profile or scrolling all the way to the top. Plus when someone inevitably copies your content, you get a free link.

I should make a site with marketing tips for devs...

<comment><USER22> [http://devmarketing.xyz/](http://devmarketing.xyz/) by [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mijustin](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mijustin)

<comment><USER21> thanks for linking this. That makes me want to do it more actually.. Sites like that guys make me feel uncomfortable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> @johnwheeler: Their loss for not hiring you.

I thought I was hot shit when I had 5 years under my belt, too, just like those whipper snappers. Took another 10 to recognize how full of shit that idea was.

I think there's a certain niche that wants to hire experienced, disciplined and reliable "old" geeks like you (or actual old guys like me...still grinding code at 50). Looks like you're going to own it. Well played.

<comment><USER24> Can I ask what the difference is? What didn't you know?

<comment><USER25> Less is more, focus on results, not code. Two things off the top of my head.

I just hired onto a subsidiary of a big corp, a cadre of 5 of started on the same day: 39, 41, 42, 45, and 55. Companies are paying top dollar for experience now, from what I'm seeing.

<comment><AUTHOR> >> Less is more, focus on results, not code. Two things off the top of my head.

bingo. same here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> FWIW, I just turned 70 and I'm still being offered more coding work than I want. It is VBA, though :)

<comment><USER27> This I like to hear. Hopefully LAMP will be the VBA of my seventies (:

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It sounds like everything worked out perfectly for the author on that fateful day. What are the odds that a stranger saw the author's initial (unsuccessful) post in the HN 'new' section and decided to write a whole article about it, post it to HN (with a link to the original form) and that this new post made it to the front page... Then it crashed... But thankfully there was an HN moderator on that day who cared enough to edit the link to send users directly to this form.

It sounds like the author made the most of it though, so I guess it's well deserved.

</comment><comment><USER29> Woah - did I miss the announcement that old is now 35 and above? Given the working range of professional engineers in the SF field, it sad that its not easier to invert the problem and build a Young-Fun-and-Full-of-Recent- Academic-Course-Material-Jobs.com.

<comment><USER30> "The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA) protects certain applicants and employees 40 years of age and older from discrimination on the basis of age in hiring, promotion, discharge, compensation, or terms, conditions or privileges of employment." [0]

OldGeekJobs.com works since it's the reverse of this... essentially discriminating against younger candidates. It's not legal to discriminate against 40+ in the US.

[0]: [https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/discrimination/agedisc](https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/discrimination/agedisc)

<comment><USER31> It reverses it by discriminating against the young, fighting ageism with ageism. I didn't realise age discrimination against those younger that 40 was legal in the US. There are other countries where a "jobs for the old" site would most likely be illegal.

<comment><USER32> Except it's not jobs _just_ for people who are older, it's companies explicitly saying they _do not_ discriminate based on age. No one is saying they'll only hire someone 40+, unless they're looking for 20+ years experience which implies your age.

<comment><USER33> CV's with Lisp projects at age 4, notwithstanding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> _One of the reasons I want to work on OldGeekJobs is because I've experienced ageism first-hand. I'm only 37 years old, but I was rejected by a startup of twenty somethings a few months back._

Ahh - that first painful moment of, "Wait a second, I'm too young to be the victim of age discrimination!"

</comment><comment><USER35> I hadn't seen this site before, and I think it's a great idea. Though I'm young, I am certainly terrified about the trend of age discrimination in the valley - after all, we all age! I'm glad to folks trying to make a meaningful difference in the trend. Perhaps through good samaritans such as OP, those same twenty-somethings that reject so many qualified applicants on account of age will receive better treatment when they themselves reach 35 or 40.

<comment><USER36> In 5 years there will be some new hot nodejs and then those current 20 year old will find the same thing and they will complain about the same thing. Oracle and Sap job pay pretty well and they are filled with old people (30+).

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> _spent an hour putting up a Google form and static site on a cheap Digital Ocean instance._

Now I feel like the Old Geek (I'm 32):

What's the deal with Digital Ocean? If the website is static and receives content by manual copy-pasting from a Google sheet (as outlined in the article), why bother with Droplets and Storage and all the other configuration? Why is good old web hosting (the kind where you just upload your html/php/js via FTP and it all just works) not good enough for this? Really curious.

<comment><USER38> Digital Ocean is just a simple VPS provider - I wouldn't even call it cloud.

The usual cPanel PHP 5.4 shared hosting is consistently unreliable, insecure and a generally overall bad idea. Who would you actually even trust to run it?

<comment><USER39> Eh, DO is cloud. The instances are virtual and can be resized dynamically.

<comment><USER40> Not sure I follow that ontology as that doesn't necessarily make something a cloud. API's to interact with the ecosystem make it more like a cloud. Whilst I understand DO have API's, just saying the machine can be dynamically resized doesn't justify the cloud tag. Cloud doesn't need to be virtual, either.

<comment><USER39> To me, I think of cloud as a business term that describes infrastructure that can be easily manipulated with software (or dashboards). That's what DO provides albeit with WAY less functionality than AWS (but at a much lower price point).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm not even the target market (too young), and this is my favorite job board already. Very fast to navigate around - speed IS a feature! Also love how granular the locations are.

</comment><comment><USER42> Simultaneously a great story and proof of the value of an 'experienced' coder. Looking forward to seeing how far this goes!

</comment><comment><USER43> I really like how the author posted the fake pricetag before spending time implementing payment processing - easy way to verify people will pay for it, low cost of experimentation. I've heard of other companies using similar strategies like a/b testing features that don't exist yet to figure out what they should build next.

Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER44> I started a new career as a front-end developer at the age of 33(last year), so I have my age and lack of experience counting against me. I must say, I do worry about my future prospects a lot.

Hopefully sites like this can throw a bone to us old dogs out there.

<comment><USER45> yikes old dog at 33.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Shrewd, this story is just going to bring more visitors. :-)

</comment><comment><USER47> Thanks for sharing this. If not finest then quickest example of idea -> MVP -> Product I have seen so far. I applaud you for the brave decision of putting it out there.

On the contrary, I always end up planning endlessly. Evaluating the best framework, best UI, best architecture and actually end of doing nothing.

</comment><comment><USER48> Great, I love that this worked out!

What's the purpose of backfilling jobs from StackOverflow -- is it just to make the site look less like a ghost town? Aren't those not necessarily old- geek friendly jobs?

<comment><USER49> I would like to know this too - how do you ensure you only pull old-geek- appropriate jobs from SO?

</comment></comment><comment> K-Wall Awesome story! Just as a heads up with uBlock Origin in Chrome on macOS one is greeted with a header followed by a white page. Everything loaded with once I shut it off.

[http://i.imgur.com/Ovbi0ic.png](http://i.imgur.com/Ovbi0ic.png)

<comment><USER50> I noticed the same thing and the problem is the js file contains the word 'ads', which seems to be blacklisted in uBlock.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I don't get something - 37 is now considered "old"? Is this some kind of millenia neolang?

<comment><USER52> Old _begins_ at 20, now, maybe 25. Anything after 35 is old without even the benefit of plausible deniability.

40 and above, you might as well be dead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Congrats for doing this and writing so honestly about it! But why only $1000? There are 134 "green" jobs * $50 which would be $6700. Or the Stripe integration was added that much later on?

<comment><AUTHOR> Correct - When the direct link made the front page of HN and the jobs were free to post

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Fantastic job and a great service!

One thing: The linked article states that you started on October 15th, but the screenshots indicate you started September 15th.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yikes! Honest mistake. Fixed

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Just a idea which I am sure would be easy given what you currently have, femalegeekjobs.com

<comment><USER56> I don't think this should exist

<comment><USER55> I have to ask why?

I have a team of male devs, and for my last hire really wanted a female for a different perspective and help balance the team, however only received 1 not ideal female application.

At the end of the day, oldgeeks mean you are discriminating (filtering out the young), why should it not work on gender also? Its all just different levels of discrimination.

<comment><USER57> > Its all just different levels of discrimination.

Aren't some of those levels enforced legally?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> It's a lovely story. I bet there are tons of similar ideas that can succeed with a quick MVP and a bit of ingenuity.

<comment><USER59> I tried to launch my e-commerce MVP with a Show HN but didn't get far. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12708181](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12708181)

Going to try resubmitting.

<comment><USER60> Yeah, but have you noticed a ton of articles on HN complaining about the problem that you fix? That's the difference here.

<comment><USER59> Now that I think about it, I've seen a bunch of complaints on HN about Amazon having fake goods for sale (most recently [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12743316](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12743316), but it comes up pretty much every time there's an article remotely related to Amazon). Maybe I should mention something about how we're only sourcing from legitimate suppliers like retailers or direct from manufacturers, which might alleviate that issue. It's definitely not the main problem I'm trying to solve, which is the amount of time good deal-hunting takes. (Price comparison, coupons, taxes, plus around a dozen other considerations).

<comment><USER61> I think it would be useful to give examples on how or where you your site finds an item at a price that I, presumably, was not able to find?

It sounds sketchy. :)

Also not sure if the whole workflow of your clients providing prices for items and then hoping your site delivers will work. How do I know the price I provided is realistic at all?

If you already have the capability to find items cheaply, just list those items on your website and let people purchase them :)

<comment><USER59> Thanks for the feedback.

>I think it would be useful to give examples on how or where you your site finds an item at a price that I, presumably, was not able to find?

Right now I'd be checking other retailers, other price comparison sites, some tools, plus using a handful of tricks to save off the posted price. It's deal- finding-as-a-service.

I want the flexibility to be able to source differently later; e.g. if there's a lot of demand for one brand I might get direct from the manufacturer, or wholesale, etc. You as the customer should be agnostic as to where I get the product from, as long as it's the right price.

>Also not sure if the whole workflow of your clients providing prices for items and then hoping your site delivers will work. How do I know the price I provided is realistic at all?

I don't know either. I believe I'll be able to fulfill a significant portion of orders, but I won't know that until a bunch of orders come in.

If you a put in a price within a few percent of retail, there's a good chance we'll be able to meet it.

Also, I'm not charging tax out of NY, and most states have a dropship sales tax loophole. That means you could save 3-4% off the Amazon+tax price on most items even if I don't find a deal.

>If you already have the capability to find items cheaply, just list those items on your website and let people purchase them :)

Well, I've sold through Amazon and other channels and have had over 100k in sales, all from being able to find items cheap enough to resell. But to launch a website to sell you either need a narrow niche (which prevents mass appeal), or a huge investment to list many products (or big partnerships with sellers with lots of products). Allowing the customer to name the product lets me not worry about product pages, and I do think the Name Your Own Price mechanism is beneficial to all parties (priceline is valued at $73 billion because they brought a ton of value to users).

Eventually I'm going to want to open up to sellers/retailers, but even without that I think I can add value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> If you really want us old geeks to use it, you need a command line interface.

</comment><comment><USER63> I like the simplicity of the site! But how about some more contrast on the body text. For us old geeks, you know.

</comment><comment><USER64> I just joined a new company and I feel a little reverse-ageism from my part. My team and most of the company employees are at a younger point in their life. After leaving a company where I could talk to people about kids the same age as mine and such, I find it all a little unnerving and uncomfortable. They've been fine and I imagine once I've been there awhile it will be ok, as I still have people outside of work to talk to, but it will take a little getting used to.

Also - When I search for 'c#' it seems to filter out the '#'.

<comment> hash-set You're clearly not a cultural fit, then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Awesome.. I remember reading your first post and finding the idea neat but also saying in my head, with amusement: "right, everything is easy when your name is John Wheeler _".

_ Archibald.

<comment><USER66> Everything is easy if you expect it to be, and act as if it's going to be.

Lyndsy. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> I love how simple and clean your site is, I would use it just because of that. Nice work!

</comment><comment><USER68> Awesome work! As a 34 year-old I can't believe I am faced with impending discrimination, but I guess its true. Thanks from my future self!

<comment><USER69> cheers mate, me too. Now get off my lawn

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> I wonder if the problem is specific to ageism in individual contributor roles. I've worked at a few startups where maybe 1/3 of the product team was over 40, but I can only think of two coworkers over 40 who didn't have any direct reports. Do we find ourselves wondering why an individual hasn't "advanced" to a management position after 10+ years?

<comment><USER71> I don't ever wonder this when hiring. It's very common to see someone who tried management for a while and didn't like it or wasn't good at it, and have concluded that they love coding for a living.

Technical management isn't for everyone, and isn't a natural progression from being a software engineer. The transition is very difficult for most people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Glad to see things taking off via HN community. Keep up the good work.

</comment><comment><USER73> I found a bug.

Job postings aren't sorted by date correctly. For example [https://oldgeekjobs.com/jobs/California?page=2](https://oldgeekjobs.com/jobs/California?page=2) shows jobs posted '2 days ago' while the front page shows jobs posted '30 days ago'.

<comment><USER74> It looks like it may be listing 'Old Geek Jobs' posts first and then the backfilled job posts from StackOverflow second.

<comment><USER73> Yeah, probably.

Now I wonder which of the job posts are 'Old Geek Jobs', for old geeks, and which are not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> This is great. Great idea, and an extremely good example of building just an MVP and going from there.

</comment><comment><USER76> I was going to make a snarky comment regarding if this site is for old geeks, then the blog should have an RSS feed, but if you go from the article to the blog's home page the RSS feed is there. :-)

Are you planning to open this up for areas outside the USA? (Australia here.)

</comment><comment><USER77> What I really like about this is how the interface is so dead simple. It could be the Craigslist of job postings with the $50 barrier to entry to filter out shitty posts. My advice is to not overdo it with features and KISS.

</comment><comment><USER78> Congratulations on seeing the opportunity and quickly moving to do something about it. It is unique enough at first sight that you got early coverage in the press, which is very helpful.

Quick question: I did not see anything unique to "old geek" in the website, other than the URL of course. I guess it is an implicit assumption by both job seekers as well as job posters.

On that note, where would this concept be headed if other job sites added a simple attribute called age (or something similar but more palatable) where job posters could specify their preferred age range, and job seekers could search on it?

</comment><comment><USER79> Great site! And thanks for taking my feedback in stride about the "tell people you heard it on oldgeekjobs.com" not being appropriate for the scraped jobs! The change (along with prioritizing paid ones) looks great!

</comment><comment><USER80> Sir, a fine website, one that I cannot take advantage of because I am in Australia. However a minor point - I do have some difficulty seeing the pale green highlight around the positions, I believe it may be to do with my red/green colourblindness, common amongst men, it is almost impossible to see against the bold blue. If you are feeling creative maybe you can change the colour of the highlight to a different less pale green or another colour. Thanks again for your site and congrats on your success. Cheers.

<comment><USER80> I have since posted this directly under the medium article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> What are your marketing/PR plans now that you've gotten a few major press hits?

All too often people aren't ready for the buzz when it comes, and see a sharp spike that then falls off a cliff once the buzz dies down.

</comment><comment> happy-go-lucky On one hand, I'm getting older. On the other, my skills are getting better. The younger people I work with can't keep pace with me. And, my employers aren't unaware of the fact that it indeed is a zero-sum game, so my age (early 40ies) has never been an issue so far. I believe there're and will be many employers who look at nothing but what you bring to the table. As a businessman, you wouldn't be foolish enough to hire only noobs.

</comment><comment><USER82> Idea to make even more money (if you get billionaire on it, please make me a millionaire also :) ): there are services that post jobs to multiple job boards. Create an API they could hook your site in easily and offer them a 20$ discount, so they can offer your service to their customers for 40$ and can also win a 10$/job posted to you.

Examples of such sites that come to mind are ziprecruiter.com and broadbean.com

</comment><comment><USER83> Awesome and congrats!

how'd you make those sweet gif screen caps?

</comment><comment><USER84> Any chance of opening this up to other countries?

</comment><comment><USER85> All new job listing sites should follow the lead of AngelList and StackOverflow, and include a salary field.

</comment><comment><USER86> Congrats John! this is perfect example of how ideas should be tested and developed. Loved the story!

</comment><comment><USER87> Excellent job.

It is great to see the birth of an idea and watch it grow.

Thank you for sharing with us. It is greatly appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER88> Well done and nicely executed!

That early "Hacker News Effect" really got you off to a roll, and you made the most of it. Have you ever thought what would have happened if that Wordpress write-up was not created, or didn't get such a good response on HN?

</comment><comment><USER89> Love the concept and the site. Minor gripe though, that I also find in most job boards: searching for Scala also gets me all the entries with the word "scalable" in them :-(

</comment><comment><USER90> Wow thats cool! How are you actually getting end user views? Is it through the PR articles or do you have a plan in mind?

What is a "faux price tag"? :-) .. how does it work?

<comment><USER91> Don't quote me: seems from the context he just threw it on there to see if they would still use it. Which they did. So he actually setup stripe to accept money. That's what I inferred anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> Great! Congrats! I'm 33 and I start to feel old too when applying to some jobs and when I see what you did this boost my motivation too! don't stop!

</comment><comment><USER91> Once you grew/adapted to the growth is that $1000/mo still profit or overall earnings?

Awesme btw posts like these inspire me, damn what is the next problem to solve.

</comment><comment><USER93> I think this a great idea but why would anyone pay for posting an ad? There're many free-to-post sites already.

</comment><comment><USER50> The jobs don't load with uBlock active.

<comment><USER94> Why should this site owner cater to someone using adblock software? If you want to see the jobs properly, add the domain to your white list.

<comment><USER95> _Why should this site owner cater to someone using adblock software?_

Because he's trying to make money and ignoring this problem may lose him users? It's not like he's actually showing regular web ads, so an ad-blocking user is as potentially profitable as any other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER96> Don't get it, how do you know that age discrimination is not at play with the jobs listed on your site?

<comment><USER95> Self-selection. Why bother paying to post a job on a site called OldGeekJobs if you won't accept old geeks as applicants?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What about reverse job postings, where old people could post what they can do, and where they want to work?

</comment><comment><USER97> I think your definitely on to something. I can't wait to see how far you take it.

</comment><comment><USER98> Have you planned to share app source code? Or can you share it?

</comment><comment><USER99> If there's an insistance on a fixed-width font for the site, I really wish it was something more like Consolas/Inconsolata etc... The job descriptions are nearly unreadable on my display, lighter gray, with a relatively thin font weight.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll try it out with different fonts. Never even thought of that!

<comment><USER99> Thanks, I know it came across fairly snarky, and that wasn't my intent, it's just I had a lot of trouble actually reading the site. For reference, here's the fixed width family bootstrap is using...

        font-family:Menlo,Monaco,Consolas,"Liberation Mono","Courier New",monospace

I'd add Inconsolata after Consolas...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> made my day.

</comment><comment><USER101> Awesome!

</comment><comment><USER102> congratz and great work!</comment>


Being the editor of a newspaper in Eve Online - <AUTHOR> https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/08/20/whats-it-like-being-the-editor-of-a-newspaper-in-eve-online/ <comment><USER2> 15 years after its birth, Eve is still making headlines and conducting large scale pvp on a mind boggling level. I tried it and it wasn't for me (too slow) but a part of me wishes it was. Nearly every other MMO loses its essence over time (and wanes/dies trying to cater to the lowest common), but Eve seems to, after 15 years, still be the same ruthless political madness that it was on day 1. I admire that immensely after being orphaned by numerous MMOs that couldn't hold on to their essence.

<comment><USER3> > Nearly every other MMO loses its essence over time (and wanes/dies trying to > cater to the lowest common), but Eve seems to, after 15 years, still be the > same ruthless political madness that it was on day 1.

Speaking as someone that's been there from day 1 (before actually. I've been playing since closed beta back in 2002), EVE is absolutely not the same ruthless universe anymore that it once was. It's increasingly become a fancy pile of garbage, where complexity is removed and the game streamlined to "make it more accessible".

In other words: It's on the best way of becoming yet another World of Warcraft clone and that's mightily showing in the community these days. EVE lives and dies by its community and frankly the community has pretty much degraded to a bunch of screaming children crying for instant gratification and the removal of the last essence of what made EVE be EVE.

So yeah, the only reason EVE is still around is because it's a niche game and it's literally the only available choice in that niche. If CCP had even the slightest sliver of competition, EVE would have already gone the same way as so many other MMOs that lost their aim, spirit and essence before it.

But well, people have given me the title "Epitome of Bittervetism", so maybe take this with a grain of salt. But in all honesty, you're not missing out on much anymore.

Edit: No, you can't have my stuff.

<comment><USER4> I played briefly, for about a year back in the 2009-2010 era. Played quite a bit, joined a corp, even had multiple accounts/characters. Left for 2 reasons:

1\. The massive time/money suck and complexity. Playing Eve started feeling like its own career. Having to log in constantly to skill, having to be available at all hours for missions (getting texts at work that we were jumping into WH space where are you???), having to maintain vast excel spreadsheets to optimize ISK income. It was too much, stopped being fun.

2\. At its heart Eve was(is?) a PvP game. Sure, you can stay safely in hisec, mining and trading, and getting called a carebear, but if you did, you were experiencing at most 25% of the game. I always found PvP unpleasant and wasteful, and wished the devs made hisec-only play better. But if you wanted to get your money's worth that meant living in nullsec or WH space, and having to deal with the griefers. Also, if you wanted to make enough ISK needed to fund your accounts through PLEX you had to be in WH space and live with the slugfest. So much was geared towards PvP, and if you didn't like PvP, the game was ultimately not for you.

<comment> cbm-vic-20 The game has evolved somewhat from that era.

1) In the past, you couldn't enqueue skills beyond 24h, basically forcing you to log in frequently. Now, paid accounts ("Omega") can load up their skill queue indefinitely. There are a lot more casual corps in the game these days, and the player base has finally figured out that newbies are really valuable, rather than seeing them as easy marks for scamming. I only have time to play a few hours per week, and being in one of the big corps makes it okay for me to not show up at 3am for a stratop. Optimizing ISK income is something you can do if you enjoy that sort of thing- and a lot of people do. For the rest of us, we convert cash into PLEX, and sell those in the market for ISK. My time is worth too much to spent it trying to figure out how to set up an optimal production system or to mine rocks all day.

2) This is pretty much true. The "heart and soul" of Eve is in its player-run corporations, particularly ones that engage in PVP. Funding accounts by making enough ISK to buy game time (PLEX) is a bad decision for anyone who has a real-life job. A month of game time is roughly $15. It takes lots and lots of hours of grinding or market trading to generate enough ISK to buy a PLEX in game. Unless you enjoy the grind, and if you make more than minimum wage, it's cheaper to buy PLEX with cash and sell them for ISK than it is to buy PLEX with ISK.

<comment><USER5> > and the player base has finally figured out that newbies are really > valuable, rather than seeing them as easy marks for scamming

What are they valuable for? (Honest question)

Is it even worth it to join Eve now as a newbie? Or is this one of those games like CS where it's impossible to play because everyone's been at it for a decade and has 100x more experience at that game than you.

<comment><USER6> In the context of PVP, they are good as eager bodies. It takes only a couple trains of training to begin flying the simplest ships in an alliance's doctrine, and only a month or so to fly a slightly better ship. Get a couple hundred low-sp but highly-motived players, and success can be yours...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> cbm-vic-20 For those intrigued: Eve Online has "free to play" Alpha tier, if you want a taste. There are certain limitations (ie, a skill point limit (think "levels" in other games)), but even an Alpha character can join player-run corporations and take part in the economy, join these thousand player battles, etc.

There are also newbie-friendly corporations (Brave Newbies, Brand Newbros, Karmafleet, Pandemic Horde) that are part of the major power-blocs, if you want to get into the politics.

[https://www.eveonline.com/](https://www.eveonline.com/)

These corporations have IT infrastructures that put most real-world businesses to shame; web sites with custom applications that tie into the game's API (swagger: [https://esi.tech.ccp.is/latest/](https://esi.tech.ccp.is/latest/) ), authorization services, voice chat services, Slack integrations, custom ERP systems for in-game industrial management, HR systems etc.

<comment><USER7> Thanks, this is interesting stuff.

I've been interested in Eve for years but only last week realized that it has a free tier.

However progression in the game seems a bit slow to me and tutorial a bit boring. After how many hours in can I expect some more interesting action?

<comment><USER8> You can step into the "fun" aspects of the game pretty quickly if you don't mind being cannon fodder for one of the larger corporations that will even pay for your ships.

Eve's progression is entirely based on feed-the-meter, where you skill up by scheduling your skills to be learned over time. My knowledge is out of date, but it took me hundreds of hours of paid time to get into higher tiered ships to reach what I would consider the "fun" aspects of the game. YMMV.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's amazing sometimes how much EVE mimics real life. I used to know a guy that ran a bank there.

My little brother used to be really into it, eventually leading fleets during fights, and he credits that experience with giving him the skills he needed to manage teams at an IT company.

<comment><USER10> I had the same leadership training with minecraft, leading factions in RP servers and trading with other cities, complete with alliances, trade deals, and wars. Eventually I became an OP and eventually an admin, with all the responsibilities that entails at the age of 13. But obviously EVE is another level of complexity.

An interesting article related to minecraft economics can be read here: [https://www.alicemaz.com/writing/minecraft.html](https://www.alicemaz.com/writing/minecraft.html)

<comment><USER11> Haven't played minecraft much, but isn't minecraft just server-based in one instance? With servers upwards of up to 100 players?

Nothing from one server translates to another though to my knowledge

Trade deals come from just NPC's and whatever player interactions had with those NPCs, depending on the plugins installed to the server?

<comment><USER12> It's been a while for me but there were definitely some server mods starting to pop up that would allow that kind of cross server play/material transfer. With mods the sky is kind of the limit for what you can do in MC even on servers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nice read into a world I've never visited and know very little about. I am really interested in how the economics of the newspaper work. How are they able to obtain the ships they report from? Do people have a subscription, donate? A pity this wasn't addressed in the article.

<comment><USER14> A good little ship that supports cloaking is maybe... a 2-3 weeks of training in terms of skills and relatively cheap at 30-40m for a basic fit with bonuses to warping and agility.

Could easily source that yourself over a few hours but no doubt, they more than likely take donations to their corporate wallet in game.

<comment><USER15> You could probably beg for a covops/stealth bomber/etc in about 20 minutes of casual jita spam. There's usually someone feeling kind (it's even been me on occasion)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This type of in-game realism is fascinating. It's a kind of immersion you can't get through graphics alone. The Discworld MUD has also been running player-led in-game newspapers for a long time: [https://dwwiki.mooo.com/wiki/Newspapers](https://dwwiki.mooo.com/wiki/Newspapers)

<comment><USER17> No way, the Discworld MUD is still alive? I used to wake up at 6am to play it before school in 1998-ish because that was the only time I could get 1-2 hours of uninterrupted dial-up uptime. I wonder if the LAG is still around to kick, and if someone has ever managed to kill Carrot :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I absolutely love reading about Eve. Its like a cross between good scifi and reality tv :)

<comment><USER19> If they made an eveonline reality tv show I would watch it.

Battles, chat conversations, player reactions... maybe dip into top players personal lives a bit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I hear the entire game is controlled by goons from an unfunny comedy website.

<comment><USER21> The goons are currently on a power upswing, having been without any influence for a while.

<comment><USER22> Weren't the goons the ones betrayed and stolen from when there was a large ship released? I remember reading an article about this big backroom-deal betrayal but I forget who the actors were.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I miss EVE, the game has all over MMOs pointless :/ Its been so long since i played for real too. Still got a fair amount of assets, although i suspect 50 bil is probably pocket change nowadays.

<comment><USER24> > 50 bil is probably pocket change

barely enough to afford a supercap!

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Good game, VERY complex. I play it on and off since 2004 but I can't do it for more than a few days/year. It's incredibly slow paced and full of politics.

<comment><USER11> There's a joke that its considered a 2nd job if you take the game seriously enough

<comment><USER26> I've seen this twice in my journeys in IT as a consultant.

Two separate IT Directors had a second PC in their office that just had Eve on it. While working with them, they didn't pay attention to it, but when we would take a break or I was setting stuff up they would hop on for a few minutes here and there. Both said it was their part time job, and they did make some ISK out of doing it. I don't know anymore details though.

It was kind of distracting in the same sense as people who hop on their phones for a minute between pages or whatever.

I'll give them this, they did pay attention to the training or whatever and I had no issues with working with them.

<comment><USER11> EvE doesnt really require micromanagement its all macro based mostly(possibly, alot of it), so multitasking is realistic with EvE.

Alot of real money goes through EvE, sometimes in the hundred thousand dollar range

[https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.technobuffalo.com/2014/01/30/largest- eve-online-battle-in-history-causes-330k-in-real-world- damage/&ved=2ahUKEwiIgd2G4IHdAhXOMd8KHecGAN8QFjAAegQIAxAB&usg=AOvVaw3KOuvrTT43gojErBviT1lI)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Does this newspaper exist in the game? Or only on the web?

How much of "doing EVE" is not actually in EVE?

<comment><USER28> The newspaper is not in game.

>How much of "doing EVE" is not actually in EVE?

If you're talking about the total game, politics, and all the other stuff that influences the game as a whole, a whole lot.

As an individual player who's not involved in politics or things like that, more than half your time is spent in game. It's a thinking game with a ton of complexity so the thing about it being "spreadsheets in space" is kind of true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Curious how the fundamentals of (good) journalism (impartiality, being seen to be impartial, sourcing facts reliably) all transfer to a galaxy far far away

<comment><USER30> EVE reporting have a long history of being very biased, some of the largest organizations in the game usually run their own news sites.

I think it's very difficult to make people see you as unbiased in a world where everyone is an enemy, even your "friends" are probably spies waiting to stab you in the back and steal all your stuff.

<comment><USER31> So basically it mirrors journalism and reporting in real life?

<comment><USER32> I've seen long time friends F each other for all they own or to gain favours in the greater political hierarchies. It's _savage_ once you get to a certain point in terms of resources or logistics.

<comment><USER33> So really just like real life then?

<comment><USER32> If you live in a developing or cartel/mafia driven land.

<comment><USER34> Wait. You don't think 'friends' backstab each every day to get ahead at work? Or that 'friends' hold each other back out of jealousy? The crabs in a bucket analogy has been around long before Eve.

<comment> bjelkeman-again Not where I work now, no.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Man, now I kinda want to start playing Eve — I enjoy (fake) politics like this.</comment>


Show HN: Simple monitoring service - <AUTHOR> https://ping.gg <comment><USER2> Congrats on shipping. I run a very different kind of monitoring service (alerts when your cron jobs and other scheduled tasks don't run or take too long, see my profile for details). I'm wondering why you don't offer paid plans. In addition to reward for your work, business users really would rather rely on a business and not a hobby. Maybe your target market is hobbyists but you should certainly consider a paid plan early on. Our subscribers are an important voice in our product decisions and doubly so early on.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. This project for me is just a proof of concept. Having paid customers would require dedicating massively more time to initial development and maintenance, which simply I'm not ready to do until the idea is somewhat validated. Best of luck with your venture!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> btw, the ping engine is a Go app that pings each hosts in a separate goroutine. I might open source it in the future once the code has more tests and less shame.

<comment><USER3> There is no minimum quality requirement for an open-source release :)

<comment><AUTHOR> haha, there is if I ever want to get another programming job! It's bad, trust me. The ping function is just a retouched version of Go's icmp test: [https://github.com/golang/go/blob/master/src/net/ipraw_test....](https://github.com/golang/go/blob/master/src/net/ipraw_test.go#L95)

and that's the _good_ part.

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't worry too much about it. Everybody writes horrible duct-tape code at some point, and showing how you improved/refactored the code is a much nicer thing than showing how you supposedly magically got it right the first time :)

<comment><USER4> I would also like to see it open. I'd love to host something like this for my own networks which are not internet reachable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is awesome but what is the motivation behind this? Why do you care to set up a server and pay for the (minimal) bandwidth that is needed for this service? Is this purely an act of goodwill? Do you hope that this will gain traction so that you can start charging for the service? Are you secretly harvesting clusters of IP addresses of HN readers?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question! I think most of us with pet projects do it either to learn something or with the hopes of gaining a lot of traction and one day implement some paid feature. For me it was both.

Maybe one day if there are a lot of users I'll implement paid accounts with more than 10 alerts and history dashboard. But most likely it will never gain enough traction for that, in which case it's no problem, since I have 6 tiny servers for different activities and this only uses 2 of the with minimal resources (it's just ping). It will just sit there alerting me and some others when something goes down.

<comment><USER6> +1 to this. I've set up a few services of a similar nature, and a couple were worth enough _to me_ to go to a further length and monetize, but only insofar as it paid my server bills and added a little on top for taxes and such.

It feels great to hack on something like this, and not worry about billing integration and supporting paid customers at first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe you should slow down the ping interval a bit, because there is no authentication and someone might run it on a big number of IPs of the same network class, and that will quickly get your IP banned on routers. No one really needs to check the server every 5 seconds (not on free service at least). Perhaps you can make a burst of 4-5 pings every minute or 5 minutes, that would be quite sufficient IMHO, and would significantly reduce your traffic and expenses.

<comment><AUTHOR> I gave the interval some thought, and while I might have to increase it in the future, I think 5 seconds is a good place to start. This is just a single innocuous ICMP echo packet, not port scanning. And a single user can only set up 10 pings, so it will require quite some manual effort to generate some noticeable traffic.

When I implement HTTP checks however, yes, the interval will have to be in the minutes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Any plans to implement feature like complete server monitoring? Like Google analytic's for Server monitoring?

This is simple yet helpful tool. Those who wish to stay away from nitty gritty of configuring complex apps to monitor their server this can be helpful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed there are plans in my head. But that could only happen if I manage to get a big user base while at the same time I find a way to fight abuse without compromising simplicity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Congrats on shipping!

I wrote a software like this, tried to ship it but I failed. Now it's open- source for everyone.

If you're interested, grab it.

[https://github.com/rafaqueque/responsly](https://github.com/rafaqueque/responsly)

</comment><comment><USER10> Checking every 5 seconds...! You will probably get blocked by a firewall....

Every 5 minutes is more than fine for a free service (and do future upgrades for every 1 min or constant monitoring).

In any case let the user select their interval.

Nice work btw!

<comment><AUTHOR> I've never been block by just pinging anything, but if that happens for someone, well... it'll simply won't work for that user. No big deal, that's the upside of being a free no-SLA service :)

As for my own side of the net, I asked someone at DO and I was told that it should not be a problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice job for releasing this. However, seems hard to compete with pingdom, who have exponentially more features and integrations and are relatively inexpensive. Kuddos on shipping!

<comment><USER12> > seems hard to compete with pingdom

As a DevOps, I'd like to disagree with this. Pingdom previously was a joy to work with. Now that they're attempting to bring in PagerDuty-esq features (escalation policies instead of simple alerting), their UX leaves a bit to be desired. Also, I don't have high hopes after the Solarwinds acquisition.

<comment><USER13> I created [https://webmon.com](https://webmon.com) . I'd love to hear your feedback on it since you were a Pingdom customer.

<comment><USER14> Too expensive... Why all monitor services charge so much for so simple service?

<comment><USER13> It's not as simple as you'd think. Monitoring 1 website is easy, monitoring 1M websites and gathering results in realtime from stations around the globe to make a proper decision is a different thing. Significant bandwidth, and CPU are needed to achieve this, not to mention relying on third party services like twilio and sendgrid to notify customers and that cost money too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is fun:

$ curl email@example.com/127.0.0.1 [ ok ] Ping alert created for host '127.0.0.1' and email 'firstname.lastname@example.com'. Check your email to activate it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, I actually thought about replying a "you are an smartass" error when someone subscribes to to 127.. or ping.gg itself :)

There is an alert limit per host, so not everyone will be able to do the same. Congrats!

<comment><USER15> Why not just blacklist local-only IP ranges?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Very nice. I wish more services would be as simple as thigs ^_^

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks. Indeed the service totally lacks features and maybe reliability, but my whole intention was to find the lowest possible barrier of entry, which I too find very high in most online tools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does this mean if I set up an alert for a server anyone can then add me to any number of alerts without further confirmation?

<comment><AUTHOR> if someone knowns your email address and that you've confirmed it, then yes, that someone could set up more, but the limit is 10.

If that ever happens to you, you could: 1) pause the unwanted alerts, and remove some only when you need new ones. 2) if you panic, use the "unsubscribe" button that will block any future emails to your address.

Having such a low barrier of entry does not come without tradeoffs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The links in your sent emails appear to be broken. All URL's to deactivate and pause alerts are pointing to localhost.

<comment><AUTHOR> When did you receive that email? is it new? that bug should have been fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I like the fact your signup boils down to one HTTP GET and a verification email. That's some revolutionary stuff.

</comment><comment><USER20> I love the interface! However, I'm getting "looks down from here" alerts for every URL. oops!

<comment><AUTHOR> some bored guy is attacking it right now, try again a bit later. also, which host did you try?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I love this kind of tool, simple and useful. Extra points for leading with a commandline example.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was particularly proud for thinking of colouring the reply for curl, I had to show it off :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is very useful, thanks for hosting it. Awesome website too, and super easy to set up.

</comment><comment><USER23> Does it monitor itself? If yes, what is it showing right now? (Site is down for me)

<comment><AUTHOR> actually, I just realized someone is trying to DOS the site creating massive random accounts. Please unknown hacker, don't be a dick, this is just a pet project.

<comment><USER23> Boo to that. I hope they stop/you manage to block them!

<comment><AUTHOR> Boo indeed! Seems like he/them got tired of it for now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very simple and very nice, how cool! Good job.

</comment><comment><USER24> How to stop?

<comment><USER25> There's a 'remove alert' link in the activation email.</comment></comment>


Zuckerberg's discussion of search - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/16/faceboogle/

<comment><USER2> Wow, Facebook is already doing 1/3 the search volume of Google, as Zuckerberg says, "without even trying". That's pretty crazy.

</comment><comment><USER3> _What sushi restaurants have my friends gone to in New York in the last six months and Liked? Or which of my friends or friends of friends work at a company that I'm interested in working at because I want to talk to them about what it's going to be like to work there? These are questions that you could potentially do at Facebook if we built out this system_

This is an interesting UI problem. Its a behaviour that people will already be using FB for. The questions is, through a new UI [1], can you help out the process? Because if so, you're now in a win-win: You can infer intent and you can shift hours on FB from "vanilla" FB time to FB time with intent that they can monetize. This is 30K feet view, but now its an engineering problem for his team. The logic seems worth trying.

So, +1 for Zuck.

___________

[1] I mean a new "FB interface" style. It would be a lot of work--not just surface, etc.-- all around.</comment>


Physicists say energy can be teleported 'without a limit of distance' - <AUTHOR> http://io9.com/physicists-say-energy-can-be-teleported-without-a-limi-1511624230 <comment><USER2> this is pretty awesome</comment>


Is it unethical to quit just before a project? - <AUTHOR> http://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/2366/is-it-unethical-to-quit-just-before-a-project-that-im-the-only-one-suitable-for

<comment><USER2> Er... what? Wouldn't the time before a project be the absolute best time for you to quit from the perspective of your employer?

>However, a potential large and troublesome project (it requires me to rewrite an system embedded in an access database file to Java) is coming up and I seem to be the person who could get it done.

Read: I'm the only poor sap they could convince to offer up valuable skills for low pay.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ethics is one of those things employees consider but companies rarely do.

I might be a bad person but beyond my job contract and my reputation I try to avoid considering my ethical obligations to a legal entity (the same way I avoid considering my ethical obligations to a rock).

<comment><USER4> A group of people working together is not a "rock" and cannot be dismissed as a legal entity.

<comment><USER5> I believe the point is that this group of people working together will easily consider him, an employee, to be a legal entity and a commodity and will not take ethics into account when dealing with him. Why should the employee treat the company any differently?

This is beside the point anyway. If you are considering leaving a company, then often ethics is the last thing on either entity's mind. Things are already wrong and it's time to move on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Of course it is unethical. Regardless of anything your contract might state and regardless of your other options, if your employer needs you, you are bound by duty to stay. You have an ethical obligation to make things as easy as possible for your colleagues, no matter what hardships or long-term commitments this requires that you take on. Having collaborated on a project with others gives the collaboraters an unlimited moral claim on your future time and energy.

<comment><USER7> So you think it's good for the employer if an employee wants to quit because they think they are underpaid to stay and work on said project? Especially when they seem to they are screwing him?

<comment><USER8> He was being sarcastic (I hope).

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I was. Since I'm getting quite a few down votes I'll just add that I felt the sarcasm was warranted because I don't understand why this question even needs to be asked. What would ever make someone think that they had some sort of ethical obligation to start some project just because their employer asked them to? And even if the thought did occur to you, the implications are obviously absurd.

<comment><USER9> I think some of the downvotes you got are from people who just didn't read the whole comment. After your first sentence, I wanted to downvote you too. It wasn't until the last line that I was sure you were being sarcastic, so I can understand other peoples confusion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A company will have no qualms about firing you right before you made a large purchase, or a wedding if it were in their best interests to get rid of you.

Why should an employee have any qualms about leaving a company they are not happy with, or even a company they are happy with?

</comment><comment> alex-g The alternative would be to wait until you weren't doing anything important, and had nothing important on the horizon - which is when your employer will be thinking of you as a dead weight. If you're a valuable employee, then you'll always be working on something that your employer values. It's far better to move on when you're the star performer and they're sorry to see you go, than when you're the slacker that they can't wait to boot out.

Things look a bit different from the other side of the table, anyway; the original questioner's project is a tricky one but it doesn't sound like it's absolutely critical to the company. If he's not around then they can probably make do with somebody else (maybe a new hire), or just live with the old system. People come and go for all sorts of reasons, and it's the responsibility of management to cope with that. As long as he gives reasonable notice and cooperates with the process then there should be no grounds for hard feelings.

</comment><comment><USER11> I left an employer after designing a large project. I might have put them in a time crunch on that one.

But I didn't feel bad about that, because they had just had me work mandatory overtime and weekends throughout the summer to finish a project that slipped anyway.

Projects at that company lasted over a year. I wasn't waiting for the next one.

The guy I was working with on that project seemed a little bitter when I left. I hope he realized that there's more than one way for your partner to be hit by a bus. I didn't throw him under it. If he was understaffed he should look to management, not to me.

</comment><comment><USER12> Of course it's ethical.

Companies don't even blink about firing you (or umm, "laying you off") just after you bought a house, found out you need to put your remaining parent in an assisted living facility, or about your child's expensive learning disability, etc, ad nauseam. Even after they just lured you to quit your previously stable, if perhaps not entirely creatively rewarding position to come join their pipe dream / lemmings march. And guess what, most of the time you don't even get an explanation beyond "it's just not a fit" or "sorry man, turns out we had less money than we thought."

So by all means -- yeah, it's ok to spend a few minutes thinking about their needs versus yours -- but at the end of the day, you have to do what's right for you, and for the people who depend on you (or who may depend on you in the future). Because it's virtually guaranteed that your employer won't grant you anywhere near the same level of thought and consideration in making the decisions they will inevitably make about your fate.

</comment><comment><USER13> If you ask my boss, yes. I don't think so. Here I'm with UnoriginalGuy, if it doesn't harm you quitting isn't unethical. How could it be? Every contract can be desolved within a certain time frame. If this time frame is to short for the employer, well there are a lot cases where shorter tim frame highly favour employers.

If the alternative is to good to be passed, don't. Some opportunities simply don't wait.

</comment><comment><USER14> Go to your employer and ask for $LARGE_AMOUNT per year pay. Make $LARGE_AMOUNT be something in the range of 2x what you think someone doing your current job is worth.

But, when you ask for $LARGE_AMOUNT, you do it by asking, "What can I do for you that's worth $LARGE_AMOUNT per year to you?"

If your employer says, "Nothing." Well, then time to find someone else to ask that question to. If they counter with money but don't tell you what they want in return, that could be a good thing (you'll get paid more to do the same thing). Hopefully, a good employer will think about it and counter with some things you could do that would make you worth values near your $LARGE_VALUE and that would provide you with learning / skills / whatever that improves your career.

It's never a _bad_ time to ask. And if they don't give a good answer, it's never a _bad_ time to leave. Ethics doesn't play here, employment contracts do and most say "at will."

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm having trouble seeing how quitting could ever be unethical.

<comment> excuse-me When you have the 747 on final approach it's considered a little rude to just say to the first officer - "here you are" - and leave your seat.

<comment><USER15> You know, quitting doesn't mean washing your hands of the whole matter and walking off. You can do that, but that is not its intrinsic meaning.

In your example even the quitting is not the issue, it's how it would have been done that would be the ethical issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> No idea how it could be unethical. He can offer to complete the project as a freelance consultant if they're desperate enough.

<comment> excuse-me That's possibly a little more unethical.

You're about to ship some big project, a key person says; I'm leaving, there are no docs and I'm not training a replacement - call me if you want any help at 10x my salary.

That could be regarded as a little bit naughty

<comment><USER17> Well if there were no docs or other knowledge about the project then that's a complete failing on the part of whoever ran the project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Short answer, No.

If you don't have a contract in place, they wouldn't hesitate to lay you off just before a project because the company saw a good opportunity to be sold or pivot, why should you be any different?

That said, if you are only 'stuck' because of the salary then you should have that conversation with your manager. They might ask you leave, so you should be prepared for that, but it would 'unstick' you :-).

</comment><comment><USER19> When it comes to salaries, promotions, and job offers-business is a game. Except in extreme situations, it's not _possible_ for something to be ethical or unethical.

You don't owe your company anything that you didn't explicitly promise. Similarly, they don't owe you anything. If you're bored, underpaid, unhappy, or have a better offer-move on. No need to be so serious about it.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is one of the places where younger folks seem to really be at a disadvantage--you've got to be comfortable moving on.

The conventional wisdom in a lot of industries is that you put in your time with the company, get the watch, get the raises, and all's well. This doesn't really seem to be the case anymore, especially given the way that the economy has been the past few years. Blame what you will--globalization, Wall Street, whatever seems most harmful--but seemingly gone are the days of most companies really taking care of their employees (if they ever existed in the first place) beyond what is legally required.

The worst thing is, minor perks like office coffee or food, or health care, or nice workstations, are easily interpreted by employees as signs that their employer cares about them--employers actually care (or should care, at least) about maximizing employee productivity.

If I have to spend $3,000 dollars up front--say, chair, good workstation, etc. --on an employee who runs me something like $100,000 a year in salary, insurance, and taxes (and that may be pretty low depending on the area), I am not really going to notice the difference, especially if it means that they get more work done. If I spend $5,000/yr in catered lunches, but can guarantee that I get more work out of my employees due to increased communication or loyalty, it pays for itself. _Especially_ if I can bring up the "perks" around the time they might expect raises.

If your company does these sorts of things, don't interpret it as anything other than maximizing an investment. And if your company doesn't, well... that's a thing, isn't it?

The other issue is that younger folks may be insufficiently mercenary and experienced to know when they're being taken for a ride. Hanging in there when you can't get significantly better pay, when you can't fix a broken project, and when you can't improve the working environment is not some sort of badge of honor--it's just plain poor decision-making!

<comment> excuse-me It's also worth remembering that replacing a technical employee costs something like 40-100% of a years salary. If you use an agency their fee will be 33%, then you have the lost time while they get upto speed.

Managers know this and are prepared to spend a few $ on friday afternoon beers or pissa to get people to stay

<comment><USER20> Bingo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> No, it's the best time.</comment>


New York Times Should Apologize for the Awful Op-Ed It Just Ran on Student Loans - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/06/08/lee_siegel_new_york_times_op_ed_is_this_the_worst_op_ed_ever_written_about.html <comment><USER3> The first paragraph of the original article clearly implies that at least some of these were private student loans, originated by a for-profit bank. His mom co-signed, but ended up declaring bankruptcy independently.

If they're private loans that he defaulted on, nobody is "pickpocketing the government" — a bank made the wrong investment decision and lost money, which happens to millions of ordinary non-corporate people every day in a 401(k) somewhere. It's all just business until a real individual human being makes some bad decisions... at which point it's all his fault, it's a moral issue, he's a terrible person, and he better spend the rest of his life fixing this.

</comment><comment><USER4> FFS ... breaching a contract is business decision, not a moral one. He did the right thing.

When US can borrow at negative rates charging high interest rates (6-8.5%) on college loans is also a business and immoral decision.

<comment><USER5> Please read the article before commenting. There's more to the story.

"After pursuing not one, not two, but three degrees from an Ivy League university, he chose to default on his student loans at taxpayer expense, because he felt that paying them back would have hampered his ambitions of becoming a write"

As for a business decision, it's a really bad one because the government can garnish your wages:

"Astoundingly, Siegel never mentions, nor demonstrates that he understands, the fact that in most cases of default the government can simply start garnishing up to 15 percent of borrowers' disposable wages directly from their paychecks. That's more than the 10 percent they would owe if they simply signed up for the newest income-based repayment plan that the Department of Education offers. "

<comment><USER6> The horror. Not one, not two, but _three degrees_... two of which were graduate degrees.

It is not typical to pay for a graduate degree. If you have any reason to go to grad school, you have a scholarship, a grant, or a teaching workload, or some combination of those.

The article's author (Jordan Weissmann) seems completely unaware of this dynamic, even as he grudgingly acknowledges in an edit that the tuition for the three degrees he is so shocked about is not actually part of the debt.

It's true that defaulting on student loans is probably not a good plan, but it's also true that this article damages its point by opening with an unjustified, moralizing attack on Lee Siegel's educational career.

<comment><USER7> > It is not typical to pay for a graduate degree. If you have any reason to go > to grad school, you have a scholarship, a grant, or a teaching workload, or > some combination of those.

This really depends on the field of study. A PhD candidate in a STEM field-- yes. A masters degree in anthropology--not so much. Even with work study, that person is going to have some student loans if they cannot pay for it outright.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yeah, the blowback couldn't have been easy. Personally, it wouldn't work for my life stage. The pain and stress of making more income enough to service the student loans comfortably is less than the pain and stress of the aftermath of a quarter million dollar student loan default.

To his defense Lee Siegel, the author or the original article, happens to have a different class of loans that's being issued today. His likely don't have the benefits of forgiveness or income based repayment.

Given all the options available to students today, before you decide to default, make sure that you're on your way of your income earning peak potential first - as in, don't default at 26 - right after law school. You may switch careers (like me), and find a new start in job prospects and opportunity.

Original article: [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/opinion/sunday/why-i- defau...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/opinion/sunday/why-i-defaulted-on- my-student-loans.html?_r=0)

</comment><comment><USER9> Obviously, defaulting on debt is immoral, unethical, unmanly, whatever you want to call it. But that doesn't matter and it's useless to talk about it that way.

The reality is that lots of students are taking on way more debt than they can't handle. Because discharging that debt is not an option in most cases, bad debt remains on the books with the assumption that it's good debt and can be repackaged and priced accordingly. Say what you will about morality, this is a financial catastrophe in the making.

A huge amount of this debt will never be paid back. 50k at 9% can't be paid back by someone on a Starbucks wage. When letting the government garnish your wages becomes less expensive than servicing the interest on your student loans, only a fool would continue to pay on them. That's not a political opinion, that's math. We need to be realistic about this.

Frankly, if people walking away from their student loan debt does anything to deflate this bubble, I can only see that as a net positive.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think there is a great essay to be written about rebelling against student loans, but this wasn't it.

I believe the student loan program has been harmful. I don't mind that "bankruptcy" has social and moral as well as financial implications, but I also agree that there are times when it is acceptable to fail to pay your debts, with regret.

This is why we have bankruptcy law. We accept that there are times where circumstance, usually combined with bad judgement, have put someone into a financial hole that they will never climb out of. We don't, as a civilized society, see much point in garnishing someone's wages for the next 50 years to pay off a debt (or perhaps only make a dent it it). We accept that after a total collapse and loss of all wealth, followed by period of credit purgatory, you may rejoin the economic world with a more or less clean slate. This has an additional benefit in that it forces creditors to be careful too, as they should be. I have no personal interest in watching my government's courts, resources and monopoly on physical force used to chase down payment of a foolish loan for decades and decades.

So to me, the real problem here is that the government guarantees the loans in exchange for a very unusual loss of bankruptcy as an option. This allows private lenders to loan money at low interest rates without fear of non- payment, but is that a good thing? I understand that there may be some social value in these loans, and that there is a greater risk of someone "walking away" (ie., they mythical med student with 200k in debt who declares bankruptcy, lives with his parents during residency, and starts making huge bucks just as the credit purgatory ends). But overall, I do think it's useful to ask "would it make any sense for a private lender, subject to normal bankruptcy laws, to make these loans?" 20k for a masters degree in engineering? Yeah. $150k for a masters in philosophy?

It gets worse. Because this easy but very dangerous credit was extended to students, Universities (in my opinion) raised their prices to reflect the availability of money. This reduced the available options for students who were clear-eyed about the debt they were taking on. It's still possible - <USER2> California, community college followed by a UC or State school can yield a very very high quality education, especially considering that half of UC students pay no tuition. But I think it's very likely that universities that would have looked for ways to offer lower cost educations instead charged more simply because now students _could_ pay for it through these loans.

And because the loans couldn't be discharged through ordinary bankruptcy, the trap was now set. It doesn't help that these loans are also typically taken out for something that traditionally happens in your first year of legal adulthood. In short, at age 18, the _very first year_ someone is even allowed to enter these sorts of agreements, we set them up to take out loans that can't be discharged through bankruptcy and will follow them their entire lives.

Ok, so, it's pretty clear I'm disgusted with the way student loans work (just to be clear, I think it's fine for the government to fund education, I just think that the student loan program, as it was implemented, ended up doing harm). But I'm also not impressed with the writer of this op-ed. He ran up a huge debt getting humanities or writing degrees, and then decided that because the debt would prevent him from becoming a writer, he just wouldn't pay it.

You know, there are lots of people who would like to be writers, musicians, or artists. They find a way to pay the bills and live, while pursuing their passion. Sometimes they have to give it up, other times they don't achieve what they would have otherwise. Many of them walked away from degrees that might have provided the career boost Mr Siegel got from having attended Columbia, understanding that the trade-off wasn't worth it.

In short, I think the NYTimes gave one of the least sympathetic or compelling people the bullhorn on this issue.

I'd love to read a compelling op-ed on this topic, but this wasn't it.

</comment><comment><USER11> Wow, reading this made me so furious I'm surprised with myself.</comment>