The sad story of Facebook Platform - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2013/07/23/move-fast-break-things-the-sad-story-of-platform-facebooks-gigantic-missed-opportunity/ <comment><USER3> It's worth noting that a lot of the apps that Facebook "killed off" (iLike, Social Reader, RockYou, Zynga games, etc.) really did detract from the user experience. Let's take Washington Post's _Social Reader_ as a case study. You had to authorize the app in order to read the articles (that were often loaded with linkbait-y titles), and any time you _did_ read (or click on) an article it automatically shared it with all of your Facebook friends. Zynga is another example; I'm sure I wasn't the only one constantly bombarded with invites to Whateverville. I had to unfriend some people to avoid them, because there was no way to turn them off.

It felt like these apps had found a hack that was taking advantage of the platform, but really this was just the result of the platform being poorly designed itself. The selling point for developers who picked up on it was, "You can make everyone who uses you spam all of their Facebook friends." Unfortunately spam, especially when it's coming from your friends, works like a charm. Facebook eventually had to stop allowing that before it let itself turn into a MySpace filled with little widgets.

Facebook's real problem wasn't just that it wanted to own everything itself, but that it didn't build the platform the right way in the first place.

<comment><USER4> Couldn't have said it better myself -- this is exactly what I was thinking as I read this article. I was really surprised that they spent so long lamenting the loss of spam and ugly widgets on users' profiles.

I remember when they opened it up so you could add 3rd party widgets to your profile, and that was dangerously close to myspace... just about as close as Facebook ever got. And I'm glad they didn't get any closer. The reason facebook took off against myspace was that the user experience was good and it was clean. Ruining that is just not something they could afford.

I think you really nailed it with this particular statement:

> Unfortunately spam, especially when it's coming from your friends, works > like a charm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Facebook made three clear mistakes:

\- Not building in a revenue model into their platform, like Apple did with iOS. This is so stupid.

\- Not creating clear and consistent access rules around the social graph and notifications, with the ability to throttle down (but not altogether remove) access for offenders. They could even automate the throttling based on user feedback (in the form of clicks).

\- Breaking things _constantly_. My brief, frustrating experience maintaining a Facebook application consisted of the app breaking every two weeks as Facebook somewhat randomly changed things without warning.

All of these were pretty foreseeable.

<comment><USER6> _My brief, frustrating experience maintaining a Facebook application consisted of the app breaking every two weeks as Facebook somewhat randomly changed things without warning._

When did you have this experience? How long ago is it? For now quite some time, Facebook has been open with upcoming "breaking changes", giving Facebook App developers three months in advance to adapt accordingly: [https://developers.facebook.com/roadmap/change- policy/](https://developers.facebook.com/roadmap/change-policy/)

<comment><USER7> How about two weeks ago? They fail to mention in their list of breaking changes that the id format would changed from profileId_postId_commentId to profileId:postId:commentIdThatMightContainUnderscores

Except that not all posts follow the new ID format. Not all new posts even follow it. It's now a mix of the two.

<comment><USER8> Here here. You can't trust the Facebook docs to be complete. I have numerous comments in our codebase of "Facebook API docs are wrong, it's actually X..."

<comment><USER9> It's odd that they chose stackoverflow for their support system, because most of the answered questions there are way obsolete by now.

<comment><USER10> They chose StackOverflow for their support system _at one point_.

At one point, they've also chosen a web forum, a wiki lots of devs bought into (but which they later _entirely blew away_ and replaced with Bing searches of their site), and probably a half-dozen attempts at official on-site docs.

When I saw they'd offloaded to StackOverflow, I thought that was an idea that had some promise, but the big question in my mind was how long until it reached the critical mass where it would consist of more out-of-date answers than current ones. And what they'd do when it does.

The answer, of course, is likely move fast and break something, and heaven help the people who had the idea of building something on top of their quicksand.

<comment><USER8> _a wiki lots of devs bought into (but which they later entirely blew away and replaced with Bing searches of their site)_

They seemed to have fixed it now, but for a while the search box would return results from the wiki, which had been removed, leading you on an endless tempting "the answer you want is just around the corner" unhelpful drugery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Facebook's inconstant behavior on Platform, however, has never been malicious. Rather, it is a result of an engineering-led culture"

Seems me and pandodaily have a different definition of "engineer". I'm not an engineer, as I don't have an engineering degree, but I do feel bad for my friends who do, are professionals, and get grouped in with the type of programmers who are just haphazardly winging it to this degree.

"has never been malicious": heh, the argument is that encouraging businesses to rely on a platform that intentionally and knowingly doesn't deliver isn't malicious because the root cause is incompetence or not caring. Not sure about that one.

<comment><USER12> _Seems me and pandodaily have a different definition of "engineer"_

Hear, hear. That comparison was insulting.

That's like calling a child playing cowboy with a plastic gun a member of the SAS; it really puts down all the hard work and skill of professionals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> <dropping knowledge> What many people don't know is that the motto never was intended to be "move fast & break things." Rather, it's "move fast and don't be afraid to break things." Slightly less bold, yes, but definitely more empowering to feel confident and not be afraid to take risks.

There's a bit of internal debate that now that the phrase has been shortened that it's used as an excuse to be sloppy for the sake of "getting shit done" (as they say at Box). Still, given that I used to work at places where mistakes were consistently held against you, I like the idealism here. </dropping knowledge>

<comment><USER14> Except that there is an illusion of "mistakes won't be held against you" some managers are shitty, some people are viciously protective over their fiefdoms within FB and if you step on their toes you get immediate negative pushback...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Here is the money line (IMO):

 _> Outside of games, there has been no killer Facebook app._

Given the current policies, I'm not sure what killer app _could_ exist other than maybe dating.

I've done a lot of fiddling and prototyping on the Facebook platform and API (albeit mostly on the business/page side). With every-changing policies and API specs, no startup founder should consider anything more than Facebook "features"–never anything your business model hinges on.

<comment><USER16> Facebook could have branched off into a few profitable models with their vast network. As you mentioned, dating would have been one avenue. Match.com may not have flashy revenue numbers but their profit margin is impressive.

They could have also been LinkedIn before LinkedIn really took off. People tried to use FB in that manner but the real value of LN is in the features they offer to businesses (recruiting, sales, etc). Again, they had this enourmous network but didn't think to add value to it.

They could have gone after Craigslist, especially in the realm of real estate where CL wants to make sure any searching is as painful as possible.

I also feel like they dropped the ball in regards to business marketing. Plenty of small businesses can't afford a real website, FB could have been a powerful platform for finding the kinds of small businesses that are buried by other sources. They know where you live, they could know what your network likes, and they could have offered cheap, professional looking pages that get the businesses close to you on board.

Their network has so much hidden potential but they've done nothing to dig it up. Use among my network is declining but not long ago it was the hub of the internet for many of my friends. They had the eyes and mindshare to get a billion people to at least try a new service. Add the power of all those connections and they could have deprecated half of the underpopulated, poorly designed, or poorly managed sites like Yelp.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is ridiculous. Facebook is the de facto identity provider for a large fraction of mobile and web. If Facebook had let their platform continue in the original direction it was going, it would've choked off their core value prop (social networking) with spam.

And the Facebook Platform has provided significant value for non-games, too. Spotify, for instance, is only as popular as it is because of its early integration with Facebook.

Could FB have handled their platform better? Yes absolutely. The constant API changes and failures caused no end of headaches for developers and significantly reduced their platform's value. But, I think the claims in this article are ridiculous.

<comment><USER18> _And the Facebook Platform has provided significant value for non-games, too._

Where I come from, "significant value" for a businessperson is defined as earnings (profit). I am aware (from other posts to HN) that some developers of some apps on Facebook, and some advertisers on Facebook, think Facebook is a new environment for their businesses that provides new opportunities to profit. But is that the general experience? Is the Facebook ecosystem as a whole a profitable ecosystem that allows third-party companies hosted on that ecosystem to profit, and meanwhile allows Facebook to profit?

As I have written before here on HN, "Facebook will go the way of AOL, still being a factor in the industry years from now, but also serving as an example of a company that could never monetize up to the level of the hype surrounding it. I used to see friends on AOL. I never felt an obligation to help AOL monetize just because of that. Networks are a dime a dozen. Right now, Facebook is a very convenient network, and I like it. I do not predict that Facebook will make a lot of money because of users like me."

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> My experience with building an alternative Android Facebook client (which naturally uses almost every part of the API):

1) Just keeping up with documented and undocumented breaking changes is probably a full time job.

2) Expect that some feature of the API breaks every 2 weeks, especially login on their Android SDKs cannot be relied upon.(reliable for me is the industry standard for server uptime usually advertised - 99.99999%) If your application just uses few parts of the API it probably once every 1 or 2 months.

3) Substract 0.5 to 1.0 points from the rating of your app in the Android or iOS app store, depending on how heavy you rely on Facebook, because of the instability of their APIs.

4) Expect to spend at least a day per month writing bug reports. (Or just give up like I did)

5) You will do lots of reverse engineering to work around the bugs which they are constantly creating at a mind blowing rate.

My final conclusion after almost 2 years of working with their APIs (as a good actor) for my app (link: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.flipster&h...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.flipster&hl=en)) is that I will never ever ever build again something that relies that much on Facebook.

If I need a friends list in a future project, I'll just use the users telephone book, like I already did on a VoIP/Messaging app for mobile that I built for the company I work for.

If I need private messaging I'll just set up my own XMPP server.

If I need login, I will sure as hell save myself the headache of using their fucked up (and even when it is working - bad converting) login, and build one myself!

</comment><comment><USER20> The two most painful patterns over the course of Platforms early life were:

1\. The lack of timely bug fixes and the lack of internal Facebook developer contact with external developers. The only consistent employee at Facebook in the IRC channel was Joel Seligstein. I also actually directly heard one of the Platform PMs say that she thought "triage" meant high priority. They did hold events but that was more a social gathering than anything.

2\. The ridiculous lack of spam control and enforcement of policies on the large developers. It's easy to see why people started disliking apps looking back at how much time users had to spend sifting through spam notifications!

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands "We've designed Facebook Platform so that applications from third-party developers are on a level playing field with applications built by Facebook"

I can't imagine people were so naive they would think Facebook would let this platform be a "level playing field".

<comment><USER21> >I can't imagine people were so naive they would think Facebook would let this platform be a "level playing field".

I don't blame people who would think that back in 2007. This was a new way to build and deploy applications. It could very well have worked out great (e.g. Amazon for example, has been largely successful in building an e-commerce platform for third party vendors that also compete with them. Not to mention competitors (e.g. Netflix) using AWS). Having said that, after developers were burned by Facebook, Twitter and Google, I don't think anyone should trust social-cloud platforms enough to base their entire business on them.

<comment><USER14> Amazon has a lot smarter people working for them on a far more complex product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Back in 2007... [http://blog.jgc.org/2011/08/my-email-to-mark-zuckerberg- abou...](http://blog.jgc.org/2011/08/my-email-to-mark-zuckerberg-about.html)

<comment><USER23> I posted a "Future of Facebook" question to HN many days ago... funny to look back on it now.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=82706](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=82706)

Facebook moving the application "profile boxes" off the main profile page was really the turn-key event where it clicked that things were headed downhill. They did it because people were getting fed up with app spam, but it also demonstrated that they had zero regard for existing Platform apps that had built infrastructure around a given set of assumptions.

At that time, companies like Zynga were still in their infancy and had plenty of success runway to go, but it really marked the inflection point.

As an app dev, I saw the writing on the wall years ago... at the time of that post it looks like I had about 550k users. Ended up selling all my apps six months later at ~1.3m, chalk one up for foresight == hindsight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Admittedly I did not make it through the whole article, but the comparison to iOS early on is laughable. The difference is A) access to a social graph of your friends and their trivial online activities vs B) a powerful touch screen computer in your pocket.

The Facebook API did not have some incredible mishandled potential. Instead, it was a very cool and forward-thinking API that had to constantly be modified to fight spam and keep up with Facebook's rapidly evolving product (which is a couple orders of magnitude more engaging now than it was in 2007 I might add).

Sure the Facebook API could have been better managed. Documentation and stability could have been better for sure. Maybe even the features could have been better. But the Facebook API is not a world changer. The Twitter API is more along the lines of a world changer, but they decided they needed to build the most profitable business possible and being plumbing was not in the cards. The Facebook API is a way to bolster the core Facebook product (which is amazing, probably the most engaging product ever created in human history short of addictive substances). This idea that if they just did right by developers it could have been so much more amazing is just a cyberpunk fantasy. The Facebook API could never be more than a reflection of a product.

Looking back on the mashup era, the future is not going to be from the goodwill of corporations to provide amazing APIs. Rather it will be open source, open protocols and open data that allow for true advancement in the state of the art.

</comment><comment><USER25> This article fails to consider the (possibly very legitimate) reasons why Facebook backed away from this.

To me, the two biggest ones are:

1\. As others have said, spammy apps hugely detracted from the experience of using Facebook.

2\. I haven't seen this discussed elsewhere, but I think it's huge: Facebook apps were never allowed to serve dynamic content on people's profile pages. This significantly impaired how rich, useful, and "social" these apps could actually be.

For example, I used to work for BillMonk, which was a way of tracking social, informal debt between friends. It should have been a perfect app for Facebook. But it wasn't possible for us to serve content in our widget that would give you up-to-date information about how much you owed a friend (or they owed you). You had to "push" your updates to this content, as I recall, but it wasn't technically feasible for us to push content updates to Facebook every time there was a change to our database.

I think Facebook imposed this limitation very deliberately for a very good reason: if an app could serve dynamic content, it could also monitor how users were using Facebook. Someone could create a "stalker" app to tell you who was visiting your profile. If such a thing existing it would significantly deter people from using Facebook. You'd have to think before every click about the social implications of visiting the next page.

It's an important part of Facebook's model that you can look at whatever you want without looking like a stalker.

</comment><comment><USER26> Facebook Platform, as conceived, was just a bad idea anyway. Zuck nailed it when he said that "today social networks are closed systems" but here's the kicker - Platform didn't really do anything to change that. They wanted people to build apps to run _inside of_ Facebook, not to communicate _with_ Facebook. They weren't ever tearing down the garden walls, they were asking everybody else to move into the garden with them. And most people didn't and the people who did (mostly) realized that it was a mistake.

I think they finally moved on from that a bit, but the "let's run an app inside a social network" thing was always of very limited value.

</comment><comment><USER27> Reading this article the one idea that persisted in my head was that this was a case of people not really knowing anything about ecology trying to create an ecosystem. Sure they used the word "Platform" and maybe that was actually the first clue, but what they really wanted was an ecosystem of actors creating increased value for their domain.

I think that my favorite piece of writing by Cory Doctorow is his essay "All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites" and I thought of it early into this piece. Any ecosystem of any interest will always have parasites within it. When you attempt to indiscriminately remove them all you almost invariably end up with something sterile and far less interesting. When I discover a weed on my lawn, my reaction isn't to burn the lawn and pave it. Sure I wouldn't have any weeds that way, but a concrete sheet is far less interesting (to me at least) than a lush lawn. So I suck it up and deal with the weeds on a case by case basis, because that is the only way to do it without torching the rest of the ecosystem that I want to maintain. It seems like Facebook, when faced with the weed problem, went the concrete sheet route, torching both the parasites and the rest of the actors that actually made up the ecosystem. Sure, it means that there are no more weeds, but it means that there also aren't any of the other organisms that create value in your ecosystem.

Another thing to consider is the energy cost of "putting down roots" so to speak in an ecosystem and evolving with changes. An organism has to spend energy to establish itself within an ecosystem, and it also has to spend energy changing itself to adapt to changes in the environment. Every joule of energy it spends doing this is a joule it doesn't spend enriching the ecosystem it is a part of. Going back to my lawn, I don't change the soil composition every year, and I also don't pull up the grass and set it back down to resod every 6 weeks. Eventually it would die, because I would be forcing it to spend all of its energy adapting to changes I introduce rather than helping the ecosystem thrive. And then I'm back to my barren field problem.

I don't have a good ecosystem analogy for competing against their developers, but I will note that it can be framed in energy terms again. Any other organism, after watchers other repeatedly expend their energy in a particular ecosystem only to be crushed will likely decide against attempting to establish themselves in your ecosystem and instead choose one of several other competing ecosystems, even those that appear initially less attractive, because what is the use if you likely end up failing anyway?

So, my takeaway given only my shallow knowledge of what happened based on this article is that other organizations attempting to establish an ecosystem (and that is really what they want when they say platform) and reap the numerous benefits that an ecosystem can produce should spend some time thinking about how ecosystems become established and thrive in the real world before charging clumsily forward with their own naive attempts.

<comment><USER28> This is an overly simplistic analogy.

No platform developer, when faced with weeds would say "let's torch it".

What really happened in my opinion is that they tried a weed killer. However, as in real gardening, it turned out that distinguishing a weed from a non-weed is complex, subtle, and full of value judgments. In some cases, even if a plant has weed-like traits or capabilities, it's not a weed in the eyes of the gardener. It depends how the capabilities are used.

There were also cascading effects (and here is where I really stretch the metaphor). Once a few non-weed members of the ecosystem were killed, the garden suddenly looked a lot less inviting to others.

<comment><USER27> I agree that the analogy is simplistic but I disagree with your weed killer analogy. I use weed killer on my own lawn and when I do I apply it in a targeted spray specifically to the weeds in question. I am still making a judgement and doing the hard work to separate parasites from useful organisms. Based on the article is sound like they sprayed everything ie removed the apis in question, and weed killer will indeed kill the grass surrounding the weed if you are not careful.

So I think that the analogy still stands, in that if you want an ecosystem there isn't really any way to mechanize it yet and you have to be prepared to do some of the work by hand. Creating an ecosystem worth having means offering up interesting capabilities. Offering up interesting capabilities means that parasites will appear. You can remove the parasites either by removing the interesting capabilities, or by doing the hard work to single them out. Doing the former can have grave consequences for your ecosystem even if it appears easier/cheaper in the short term.

<comment><USER29> Simplistic or not, I think the analogy serves its purpose very well (thank you for sharing it). As I was reading the GP post the analogy I was thinking of was spraying weed-killer indiscriminately everywhere and naively thinking it would only take out the 'bad-guys'.

Doing it properly does involve understanding both what 'weed' means to you and 'desirable plant' then being careful not to poison the latter (and actually encourage it) while you try to deal with the former.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I have had a difficult reading relationship with pandodaily. After some good initial articles, they started producing trash. This article, for a change, is reasonably good.

<comment><USER31> Same with Verge. A lot of sites are following Business Insider and Mashable down the high-volume shit-chute because that's how you make money when people won't pay for stuff.

<comment><USER32> So, what is a good tech blog to read these days?

<comment><USER11> Personal blogs mostly, I haven't seen a for profit non-tiny organization ever not turn into a content farm when it got down to either firing people or turning on the crap firehose.

Reddit and HN are great for scanning for new bloggers to follow (hence the number of posts in these places pissed about the Google Reader shutdown).

<comment><USER30> True, although Reddit's programming subreddit been degrading in value. I have been trying since a year to revive it by posting regularly, mostly from Hacker News. I have earned Karma but the subreddit overall is on a downhill journey.

<comment><USER11> In my experience they all are, it's pretty much built in to the model (not just Reddit). If content is determined by voting and the community grows then you get regression to the mean. And "the mean" type of content is probably why the early adopters moved to something else in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> My problem with facebook; it's a reminder of how much our current society bothers me. At first is was cute-- kind of, but as the time went on it just got nauseating. The narcissism The birthdays The baby picture--animals fine, but enough with your spawn. The touching quotes The pictures of what you ate. The head tilted portrait. The reminder that people don't change.

Actually, the only facebook posts I can stomach are from the Amish--sad, but true.

<comment><USER34> What are this amish posts? I've never seen them(I live in Spain)

<comment><USER35> I believe he's speaking on users in his feed that are Amish: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish)

<comment><USER34> Thank you, I know who the Amish are, it just gave methe impression that he has subventionated posts by the Amish and not normal feed. I'll check the link anyway!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Back then I also was working on a Facebook app, not only working but I even finished it. You were find restaurants in whole europe and book a table right from facebook inviting your friends and stuff. We were just kicking in the advertising machinery when we found out that one of our core features, messaging your friends (about that you got a table for all of you) wasn't allowed anymore. This was one of the main reasons our application never took of, the other was that FBML was really slow, so while I had a normal HTML view which rendered in perhaps 300 ms the roundtrip for FBML from the browser to a facebook server then to our server then back to facebook and finally to the browser always took more then two seconds.

But honestly, even if I was disappointed about all the fuckups we as developers had to deal with, as a user I am really happy about the fact that there are no attention claiming apps on Facebook, it is actually therefore I still use Facebook, in my free time as a normal user.

</comment><comment><USER37> For all this article's many faults, at least it is long-form and has more than two sources. I hope PandoDaily continues to support long-form journalism and I hope they inspire other tech blogs to do the same.

</comment><comment><USER38> This has unfortunately been my experience with the Facebook Platform as well. I remember talking with someone 5 years ago, saying that Facebook would be the one site that they log into in the morning, they would get their daily news, their friends updates, their word processing, etc. They would never have to leave the site.

Instead, it hasn't done any of this, and their best attempt at monetization is "Would you like to buy your friend a gift on their birthday?"

It was obvious with Zynga how quickly things could go viral, and yes, sometimes things were extremely spammy, but for the most part, you could have a lot of fun apps on Facebook. Now, there are almost no apps left, except core Facebook. The only thing people appear to use it for is to get login information, or for mobile-type contacts information.

I tried making my own Facebook app, and ran into a bunch of issues, including really poor documentation. You couldn't even google for things, because things changed so quickly that you couldn't tell which was the most recent information. It wasn't a pleasant experience at all. It's too bad, because like the article says, there was so much more potential than what it has turned into. And I know people have been saying this for years, but I really am seeing a lot more of my friends simply stop logging into Facebook now, because it's boring. It will be interesting to see if they have what it takes to make bold, innovative moves to make the platform more attractive again.

</comment><comment><USER39> Maybe Microsoft will buy Facebook and kill two birds with one stone.

<comment><USER40> Zuck would never sell.

<comment><USER41> Maybe not for the money, but I could see Zuckerberg being in charge of MicroFace being good for him and both companies. Sort of like AOL-Time Warner only hopefully without the bubble as backdrop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I think the "Release now, figure it out later" came to haunt them. By accepting so many crappy apps, the overall experience declined. They also got no revenue out of it. Yes, some of the 3rd party apps were leeches on the motherships. Many more were innocent victims. Now we have an environment of diminishing utilization, and no apps. How many people really use Facebook now more than 12 months ago? Or 3 years ago?

</comment><comment><USER43> Their platform is ok. It jittered a lot, and I'm really not a big fan of the social graph, but some stuff is good, some stuff is bad, it's on the balance ok.

The problem is that they're selling advertising access to their people. That's all they're selling, via direct ads or graph access and 'sharing'. Impressions. Period. So there's a very natural friction between people who are investing a bunch of dev time and expecting their impressions for free and facebook, who doesn't want you to piss off their users with a bunch of spammy ads without at least paying them for it. So facebook is locking it down, little by little, and all the devs who were used to getting something for nothing are seeing their marketing vector dwindle little by little (unless you pay).

The whole 'review process' I found extra annoying, though. I will tolerate that shit from Apple, but not from facebook.

</comment><comment><USER44> _"Right now, social networks are closed platforms," Zuckerberg said. "And today, we're going to end that."_

Impossible (for Facebook). Open platforms are open decentralized social networks like Diaspora. Facebook will always have profiles exploitation interest and it's a failure by default for anyone caring about openness of the Web.

</comment><comment><USER45> Facebook likely used the platform as a way to spam you and all your friends by proxy. Thus, the apps took the heat and Facebook got the boost in growth it needed. Well executed I say.

</comment><comment><USER46> "North America's Kik"

Why not just say Canada?

</comment><comment><USER47> A very well-written and judicious obituary of Facebook Platform. I started building for it shortly after it launched, in late 2007. I had high hopes for it; I felt I was at the forefront of 'the next big thing,' like others, so I invested a lot of my time into it. I made apps that served millions of people, one of which reached #1 in DAU at one point among all apps (back when they ranked apps by DAU).

As a lone developer keeping up with the changes and additions wasn't easy - <USER2> literally ran the gamut - from FBML to FBJS to FQL to xd_receiver.htm to the JS SDK to FB Credits to Graph API. Initially I cut them some slack - it was a new platform, and we all make mistakes.

But things never really got better. I couldn't tell you how many times I came across 4, 5, 6 different ways to do the same (seemingly simple) interaction with the platform, only one of which worked, and of course not the officially documented method. Or inaccurate or nonexistent API docs. Or how many times my app would suddenly break without pushing any changes - I became accustomed to just waiting it out until Facebook would release a patch for whatever they broke, and have to tell my users to just wait it out. This would usually occur Tuesday night/Wednesday if I remember correctly.

Solutions to problems would usually lie in an obscure forum post after about 10 minutes of googling, posted by another friendly developer who probably tore his hair out looking for a solution. Ah, the camaraderie. Here's a recent one I just came across (and they're not hard to find) [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16649634/ios-url- scheme-f...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16649634/ios-url-scheme-fb- event-llu-no-longer-working-in-6-1-1) Accepted answers that start with "Facebook seems to have..." and end with "change or remove them completely at will" tend to give developers more than a few gray hairs.

It also doesn't help that Facebook tends to treat developers like sheep. At first this didn't bother me - after all, they weren't forcing me to build apps for them, and I was free to leave at any time. In the early days I'd contact developer support (I don't think there's a published number) to report bugs/issues, suggest improvements, or genuinely ask for help with a problem. I never got a single non-automated response. Not once. So I stopped wasting my time and just became more and more bitter with every breaking change.

The 30% credits tax was the inflection point of the downfall. IMHO, that was a "me too" response to Apple's iOS platform (coincidence that they came up with the same fee structure?) and was, for me, the tell-tale sign that they were no longer interested in their developers' well being. Yes, I understand they need to make money. I am all for ringing the cash register. But Apple and Facebook are different platforms. Apple has a highly trafficked worldwide app store. They let me put my app icon on my users' home screens (that's valuable real estate), and I could push out unlimited notifications to my users' devices to keep them engaged and coming back with one click, among other things. Facebook has no such equivalents. I guess you could argue you're paying for the viral distribution, but after they've heavily curtailed their viral channels and people have become more and more immune to app invites, there's really no way to get free distribution anymore from Facebook. You still need to be buying ads, mostly from them.

If they wanted to make money and curtail spam, all they had to do was charge developers by each notification, invite, or newsfeed post they'd send out. Set a fixed price per message, or use a competitive auctioning system like adwords. The crapplications would never be able to afford their own spam.

I've since migrated my apps away from Facebook, either to mobile or on standalone web sites. Needless to say, my life as a developer has gotten a lot easier, and since I have more time to focus on improving my apps rather than keeping up with breaking changes, I'm doing better than I ever have before.

</comment><comment><USER48> [http://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2013/04/a-new-kind-of- platfor...](http://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2013/04/a-new-kind-of-platform/)

</comment><comment><USER49> Welcome, surprisingly honest reporting on facebook by tech press.

</comment><comment><USER50> we really thought fB was going to become the user auth + data persistence layer for the entire web as they were pumping this platform idea: like noone would need to build user account storage ever again, and all the world would base their user accounts on top of fB ... that would've been worth billion$ but n0t g0nna happ3n.

</comment><comment><USER51> It's like a curse in the software industry to innovate oneself to death.

</comment><comment><USER52> This is cool. On MSFT buying someone, I hope it ends up being bbry</comment>


Ask HN: Is there value in online degree? - <AUTHOR> I work a $16 an hour job but constantly listen to podcasts on my phone while I work which is allowed I'm motivated and driven to be successful in life or just make a lot more than what I make now.
I work normal warehouse job and construction jobs but want more out life. My passion is CS degree more specifc Web development but my job gets in the way for physical school right now 40 hours of job.
I'm thinking online degree in CS or Business is it worth it? valuable? hireable ? <comment><USER2> A degree is a degree, online or not. The value of a degree is that it teaches you theoretical concepts you can use on the job and it's a permission slip to enter industry and go into a career. Go to a reputable university, I'm going to a state college to get my online masters. State colleges are generally cheaper than private universities and are generally seen by industry as "good". There are some drawbacks with online though. You need to be very motivated compared to traditional students. University professors don't consider online students first class citizens either, emailing them is your only viable communication method and it's easy to ignore emails. Regarding degree choice, you don't need CS to do web development. You could definitely learn HTML, CSS and JS with tutorials online. I think webdev is more of a marketing and customer interaction oriented profession than it is technical, so business would serve you better there. CS will teach you higher level computing concepts that will go far beyond web development. Management of Information Systems is another option you may want to look into because it's a technical degree taught in business colleges. Regardless, the best time to have planted this tree was 4 years ago, the next best time is now.

</comment><comment><USER3> Some people get better jobs from a degree. Some people don't finish. Some people make more money. Some people wind up with more debt. Some people perceive a social benefit from a degree. Some people gain psychological satisfaction. Some people find intellectual fulfillment.

Others don't. Predictions are hard. Especially about the future.

For online degrees, Western Governor's University is a public university with relatively low tuition and a long track record of not-for-profit online college education. It was designed to solve the problem of educational access not increasing revenues.

[https://www.wgu.edu/](https://www.wgu.edu/)

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> this looks so good is it legit? I'ma sign up soon for it noticed even bill gates donated $1 million to the site.

<comment><USER3> Western Governor's University is legitimate. When it has come up before on Hacker News, former students have shared their experiences. It might be worth searching HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Like with attending college in person, some online programs have a better track record and better reputation than others.

I was pursuing an online degree (never finished) back when that was pretty cutting edge. I liked it.

But I already had good study habits and didn't need the professor to explain much. So YMMV.</comment>


The Factorization of RSA-240 - <AUTHOR> https://listserv.nodak.edu/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A2=NMBRTHRY;fd743373.1912&FT=M&P=T&H=&S= <comment><USER2> Does any one here care to explain what impact this will have on modern crypto security systems?

<comment><USER3> Zero. If you're using anything with 800-bit security, you're probably a time traveler from the 90s.

The more fun academic contribution to this is they found a faster sieve, here [http://cado-nfs.gforge.inria.fr](http://cado-nfs.gforge.inria.fr). It's very neat stuff, I think they claim 30% less CPU years using the identical hardware to crack RSA-768, when applying this same software to RSA-768.

As with the original list, it's just unsolved problems that may help reveal more and more efficient ways to find/generate primes.

<comment><USER4> > I think they claim 30% less CPU years using the identical hardware to crack > RSA-768, when applying this same software to RSA-768.

Are you sure? My reading was "in 70% of the the time it took to crack RSA-768, using their hardware, we cracked RSA-240" \- this would match up relatively well with the fact that the expected difficulty increase was x2.25 and then they say "Taking this into account, and still using identical hardware, our computation was 3 times faster than the expected time that would have been extrapolated from previous records."

Collaborating this, the previous record took ~4000+1500+900+200=6600 core years and the current one 4000. The Xeon Gold 6130 used has a single thread passmark of 1754 while the Xeon E5-2660 used in the RSA-768 factorization scored 1471, from [0]. Normalizing for passmark, the new RSA-240 factorization took 72.3% as much compute as the RSA-768 factorization. I would not be at all surprised if their software saw smaller gains through the generations than Passmark did, and it wouldn't take much to bring 72.3% to 70%.

0: [https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Xeon- Gold-6130-vs...](https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Xeon-Gold-6130-vs- Intel-Xeon-E5-2660/3126vs1219)

<comment><USER5> I agree, this was 3x faster than expected.

Note: Factoring RSA-240 only took 900 core-years the additional 3100 core- years were on the discrete log.

RSA 240 is 8 digits longer, it takes ~2x as much work for each 5.5 additional digits so this should have taken 2.7x as much compute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wolfram Alpha won't do the multiplication for me. Google does it but I only get the 7 most significant digits. Any other online ways to check this?

[https://www.google.com/search?q=5094359522858399145550510235...](https://www.google.com/search?q=509435952285839914555051023580843714132648382024111473186660296521821206469746700620316443478873837606252372049619334517+*+244624208838318150567813139024002896653802092578931401452041221336558477095178155258218897735030590669041302045908071447)

EDIT: This one works: [http://www.javascripter.net/math/calculators/100digitbigintc...](http://www.javascripter.net/math/calculators/100digitbigintcalculator.htm)

<comment><USER7> I will take the opportunity to promote Maxima, which is a very nice open source maths tool with a very long history (started in the 60's, and still being developed). It leverages the bignum support in Common Lisp, and has no problems handling numbers like these.

[http://maxima.sourceforge.net/](http://maxima.sourceforge.net/)

[https://wxmaxima-developers.github.io/wxmaxima/](https://wxmaxima- developers.github.io/wxmaxima/)

You can use Maxima's built-in command "factor" on this number as well, although I guess you'll have to be very patient.

I obviously also want to promote my own project, which is different UI on top of Maxima:

[https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.dhsdevelopments.Climaxi...](https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.dhsdevelopments.Climaxima)

<comment><USER8> Bignums are there _because_ of Macsyma (Maxima's ancestor)!

 _" Bignums—arbitrary precision integer arithmetic—were added [to MacLisp] in 1970 or 1971 to meet the needs of Macsyma users."_

[[https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/HOPL2-Uncut.pdf](https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/HOPL2-Uncut.pdf), P. 10 bottom]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting, RSA-230 was factored a little more than 1 year ago.

</comment><comment><USER10> What is going on with the URL? Also this user submitted something along this RSA-240 factoring twice. Seems really phishy that they're using a .exe in the url.

<comment><USER11> wa.exe is the web interface for LISTSERV on Windows: [https://www.lsoft.com/manuals/16.0/htmlhelp/list%20subscribe...](https://www.lsoft.com/manuals/16.0/htmlhelp/list%20subscribers/IntrototheWebInterface.html)

AFAICT this mailing-list post is the original public announcement, but perhaps the submitter followed up with the Schneier link in anticipation of concerns like yours.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the explanation!</comment></comment></comment>


Against Tulip Subsidies - <AUTHOR> http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidies/ <comment><USER3> Everyone who's looked into this issue knows the solution is to use examinations rather than education - a degree should be given if you can pass some stringent examinations regardless of how the knowledge got into your head. You separate instruction from assessment and the incentives work out much, much better. And the cost goes way, way down.

However, we are stuck in this horrible equilbrium and I don't see much hope of getting out. Scott has a post on these awful equilbriua called Meditations on Moloch that's pretty depressing:[http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on- moloch/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/)

I can see one way of maybe getting out of this. If one nice country was to implement this examination-based approach and then offer citizinship to those who score very well on a "general degree examination" (basically an intelligence test) they might be able to setup a brain-drain dynamic that would maybe push us out of this awfulness.

Said country could even subsidise the very brightest with the equivalent of a signing bonus. Even a permanent no-strings-attached basic income for the brightest of the bright would be very cheap as they're so rare, and may be worth it for the positive externalities as they're the type of people who build new industries. "We'll pay you to live, work, learn, and be credentialed here" may be enough to dull the luster of the ivies.

<comment><USER4> Examinations are just a proxy measure (like grades in general). They have historically been used for logistic reasons, many of which no longer exist (or are much less compelling). They stick around for the same reason that everything else sticks around in academia: Because It Has Always Been So (another example: lectures).

A portfolio of actual work is much better than an examination. A github repo with a bunch of actual working code in it is much better than an hour of writing pseudocode on a whiteboard.

<comment><USER3> Of course they are a proxy, but they are much better and cheaper proxies. I was assuming that credentialism would remain - examination-based degrees make credentialism much less costly.

<comment><USER4> Cheaper? Certainly. Better? That's debatable.

I don't see any compelling reason for thinking that the degree of knowledge that can be measured on a one hour (or even a five hour) exam is comparable to the degree of knowledge that can be measured from a larger body of work (whether that work represents continuing interaction between an instructor and student over the course of a semester, or a self-directed large-scale portfolio project).

I'm probably showing my age here, but in the heyday of Novell there was a phenomenon called the "paper CNE". The military has long referred to those who've gone through an abbreviated officer training process as "ninety day wonders" (not a compliment). Other examples abound.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> white-flame I take a more classical view on University: It never should be "job training". It should be about general life enrichment, beyond-industry research, philosophy about the world and its workings, and broadening horizons.

Sure, people who went through that (ie, independently interested in, was recommended in or could afford it, and succeeded) tended to be more capable people. Let's roughly compare it to becoming an Eagle Scout or a Navy Seal in terms of a generally impressive life accomplishment. Shuffling _everybody_ through the same system is useless, wastes everybody's time and money, and devalues the magic paper gotten in the end.

Many skilled professions require training, and specific training institutions are all well and good. But let's not confuse training to become a mechanical engineer or doctor as being equivalent in an employment eligibility sense to more enrichment-oriented university degrees. The latter being required to get a sales/front-desk/entry-level position is a burgeoning and absolutely needless weight on our entire society. Conflating the former with the more heady University worldview is also odd, and eliminates eligibility for those who would be great in their field but are not that compatible with academia.

<comment><USER5> He somewhat address this in the article. Would as many people pay the substantial cost of college merely for the "life enrichment".

<comment><USER6> His argument on this point is short enough that it's worth just quoting entire:

> (Yes, it is nice to have college for non-economic reasons too, but let's be > honest – if there were no such institution as college, would you, totally > for non-economic reasons, suggest the government pay poor people $100,000 to > get a degree in Medieval History? Also, anything not related to job-getting > can be done three times as quickly by just reading a book.)

<comment><USER7> Personally, I'd say yes to his question - and indeed, this is a question, not an argument; and it's a question that presumes a knee-jerk reaction against Medieval History majors...

Gross world product has been growing along an exponential function for some time, and machines are threatening to allow us to be comfortable even if we don't work as much as we physically can. Maybe giving everyone some years in their youth to enrich their lives would be a good way to organize the economy once it's a viable option. Maybe a lot of people agree with this, and in wealthier nations it's ~just~ now close to being within reach, but it isn't quite there, so what we're feeling would be considered friction in the transition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I seldom refer to knowledge I gained from university classes. It was an important signaling device and a great time socially, but it was not an efficient use of my time as far as preparing to be successful in my career.

I would be surprised if there isn't a good alternative to higher education for bright kids 10 years from now, but I don't think it will have anything to do with legislation.

<comment><USER9> I still get a lot out of the systems approach to engineering from my university classes. Still, this is something that could be taught in weeks instead of years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> People have a hard time separating the value of an entrenched institution from whether it's a good value. More school is often good, but that doesn't make it a good deal.

Every time the discussion of cs degrees comes up here it's followed by an avalanche of people saying how college gave them this and that and then a story about the one idiot they used to work with who didn't go to college.

I went to two years of community college and have never had student loan debt. I've worked on harder problems than many cs grads have. I've gone farther and actually retained more knowledge. I got a great deal taking the path I've followed.

</comment><comment><USER11> So, this whole thing is an attempt do argue against Bernie Sanders proposed universal free college tuition by comparing it to a country that offers free college tuition and is used as an example of a better system by the author?

<comment><USER12> Yeah and his analogy is plain wrong. Bernie Sanders is saying to make the tulips free, not to give everybody enough money to buy them..

<comment><USER13> It's not wrong. Making something free means paying for it in a transparent fashion.

Bernie Sanders is not talking about changing the institutional structure of college such that it somehow has no cost to provide. He is talking about the government paying that cost on behalf of students.

I agree with free education, by the way. We currently spend our budgets on much less useful things. But let's be honest about what it means and how it works.

<comment><USER12> Yes it is wrong, paying the cost of education at cost (for a government), or paying students to pay market prices (inflated by perception of value) is a huge difference. Which do you think Bernie Sanders was implying?

<comment><USER13> Bernie is not suggesting nationalizing all american colleges. That would be absurd.

<comment><USER12> In real life there are more possibilities in between 0 and 1.. Also look at how its done in other countries. Apparently americans can go to Germany to study for free in a recent article. Absurd indeed.

<comment><USER13> You do understand that all of those options require someone to pay for the services? I don't know why we're still having a conversation about this. An institution with employees costs money, unless the institution is entirely comprised of volunteers (in which case the volunteers are paying with their time).

Germany pays.

Bernie's plan is to pay institutions.

That's all well and good, but that's what it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've just searched what are now 58 comments for the phrase "prisoner's dilemma" and got zero hits. WHAT!

Higher Education is now a prisoner's dilemma, and that's really the point of the tulip article, even if he didn't use the phrase. Rational actors will want their children to have a college education and then higher degrees, even though everyone choosing that makes society worse off, not better off. Classic prisoner's dilemma. (Also a "Tragedy of the Commons", I would argue.)

Perhaps the most profound argument against our present system of higher education is that despite his philosophy degree (and I'm guessing at least 70 or 80 other degrees amongst the commentators) neither the author nor anyone else has said the two words "prisoner's dilemma." It's a simple concept, taught in every University, most undergraduates supposedly know what it is, and yet nobody can manage to recognize a gargantuan real world example! (I have yet to see the term PD applied to this subject in other media, either.) Time to scrap them crenellated white towers.

<comment><USER15> The top post [1] mentions the "Meditations on Moloch" post, which is basically a generalization of the PD/Tragedy of the Commons/arms race. I assume most posters are aware of the relevant dynamic.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9671686](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9671686)

<comment><USER14> PD shows up as one of ten examples of traps in that long article. Note too that not every local minima is going to be a PD, or even close! Equilibria are sometimes now confused with PDs, due to the publicity given to Nash's Equilibrium, but that's a popular confusion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> We could try the "Unincorporated Man" (aka equity-based) approach to paying for higher ed: [http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/04/unincorporated- man.htm...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/04/unincorporated-man.html)

Instead of paying with loan money or hoping for grants, anyone could go if they will give up (for example) 10% of all future income (this is not the same as "income-based repayment.") Instead, a system like this would have whoever is buying the shares (I'd prefer it be universities themselves) give you a _full ride_ (not just tuition, but books, room and board, transport, food, etc.) and you'd pay them out of your gross income after you graduate. The big difference is that just about anyone who is willing to give up the percentage could get it. Sticker shock and rising bills do not come into play. Right now, you're at the mercy of the financial aid system and all its fickleness (relatives make too much/too little, you have too many/too few assets, you are in a high CoL area and loans don't cover anywhere near what you need, the amount they're willing to give you shifts with the political winds, etc.)

The advantages of this system are that you would never have to worry about your relatives being able to fund you; you wouldn't need to work while going to school; you would not need to reapply each year and hope you get enough; and there's no issues with bankruptcy or anything else (the obligation would be non-dischargeable, just like now, but since it's a percentage, the sting is much less.) Instead, the money would all be there the whole time.

On the investor side, it would be like VC: most people would produce standard returns (let's say 5-15k a year), while a few Elon Musks and Larry Ellisons would return _billions_ \- I'm sure many universities would be happy to occasionally get one of those.

In any case, there's no way it could be /worse/ than the system we have now.

<comment><USER17> _10% of all future income_

The general idea is interesting, but this is an insane amount of money for most college graduates, who would be far better off with even unsubsidised loans.

<comment><USER16> Percentage is definitely up for debate. Maybe MIT/Harvard/Stanford could do 8-10% and University of Whatever could do 4%. Or maybe they could vary it based on projected likely future earnings or some other factors. In any case, if the option was there, I'm sure many would take it. I would.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The author was doing great right up until the last paragraph. His proposed solution is silly because it makes no distinction between jobs for which a university education is essential and those for which it is irrelevant. Then there is also the large grey area in between, in which a university education in certain fields might be useful but not essential. What he would do is abolish the right of those professions in which such an education is essential from applying the same standard he lauds earlier: that physicians must attend medical school. For engineers, a university education with a specialty in engineering is exactly what medical school is to physicians.

Many people here believe that a university education is not required to be a computer programmer, and I agree. But programmer is a vocation, like plumber or firefighter; it requires specialized skills and experience to do well but does not require a university education. If you spent 3 months learning one language and one or two common frameworks for making e-commerce sites, you are reasonably qualified to work on e-commerce sites for companies that use that language and framework. However, being a programmer and being an engineer are not the same; an engineer has been educated both more broadly and more deeply, and should be capable of solving larger and more difficult problems, designing whole systems, and in general should have the education and experience to understand new problems more thoroughly. It's the difference between the architect who designs a building (or one of its systems) and the construction crew who erects it. Both are essential, but they have (properly) different qualifications.

There are many other fields where some sort of education is required. I agree that many of those fields conveniently piggyback on university education (usually with a particular field of study requirement) when other similar mechanisms might do as well. But the notion that such an education is universally irrelevant is absurd.

If the author wants people without university education to be paid as much as people with it, the solution is not legislation. Instead, he should hire them.

<comment><USER19> _His proposed solution is silly because it makes no distinction between jobs for which a university education is essential and those for which it is irrelevant._

His solution is to evaluate people as people, not by external indicators. If it so difficult to tell if someone has a university education or not without having to explicitly ask, then perhaps it isn't as essential as you seem to think?

<comment><USER17> _> If it so difficult to tell if someone has a university education or not without having to explicitly ask, then perhaps it isn't as essential as you seem to think?_

It is trivially easy to think up questions that _any_ Computer Science student from a non-crappy university will be able to answer, but someone without a degree probably will likely not be able to answer. Just pick a particularly challenging problem off of an Algorithms or Linear Algebra final and hand them a textbook and an hour.

The question is how to ask questions that _matter for a particular job_. If the job is hacking out an e-commerce site, it's really easy. If the job is designing a distributed system for real-time processing of data at 100s of GB/s of data that nobody has tried processing at that speed before, the single set of questions that tell you whether this person is competent is far less obvious. What you really need is to engage with the person in weeks or months worth of examinations on various subjects. Fortunately, university courses have midterms and finals that do _exactly_ this.

<comment><USER20> _" If the job is designing a distributed system for real-time processing of data at 100s of GB/s of data that nobody has tried processing at that speed before, the single set of questions that tell you whether this person is competent is far less obvious. ... Fortunately, university courses have midterms and finals that do exactly this."_

But solving problems that nobody has solved before is the kind of job that's usually filled by senior developers, not by recent graduates. By the time you have 5-10 years of work experience, the things you learned during your working career probably play a much more important role than the stuff you learned in college. If I've spent the last ten years actually designing distributed systems, why does it matter whether I've gone to college or not?

<comment><USER17> > But solving problems that nobody has solved before is the kind of job that's > usually filled by senior developers

> By the time you have 5-10 years of work experience, the things you learned > during your working career probably play a much more important role than the > stuff you learned in college

I submit these two quotes are not contradictions, but are at least in tension.

In general, 5 years hacking out code doesn't prepare you to write code that's mathematics heavy or design systems that require careful mathematical analysis.

 _> If I've spent the last ten years actually designing distributed systems, why does it matter whether I've gone to college or not?_

It doesn't. But I bet I can pay a fresh CMU/MIT grad less, and that they'll be able to figure things out.

<comment><USER20> _" But I bet I can pay a fresh CMU/MIT grad less, and that they'll be able to figure things out."_

Sure, but it could take them much longer to figure it out. College work doesn't really prepare people to work on cutting-edge problems that nobody has solved before. Problems assigned to undergrad CS majors are generally straightforward applications of what was taught in the course, and the professors already know the solutions and how much work they involve (e.g., an assignment due in two weeks is known to be possible to complete in two weeks of effort).

 _" In general, 5 years hacking out code doesn't prepare you to write code that's mathematics heavy or design systems that require careful mathematical analysis."_

How many CS grads have had experience with mathematically oriented code? The only math I remember doing in my CS classes was in theoretical courses like Algorithms, and that mostly involved proving things rather than writing code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > App Academy graduates compete for the same jobs as people who have taken > computer science in college, a four year long, $200,000 undertaking.

No they don't. I have never once considered a recent bootcamp graduate to be equivalently talented and knowledgeable as a recent CS graduate. Their earnings difference certainly reflects this. (Try getting a job at Google as an "App Academy" graduate vs a fresh Stanford grad.)

<comment><USER9> >Try getting a job at Google as an "App Academy" graduate vs a fresh Stanford grad

I know of an App Academy graduate who went on to a job at Google.

<comment><USER21> > I know of an App Academy graduate who went on to a job at Google.

I'm not saying it's impossible. But it's significantly less probable.

<comment><USER9> "Less probable" is still competing for the same jobs. Perhaps not as well, but competing nonetheless.

<comment><USER17> I call this the Einstein fallacy. It says that quality Q is of questionable relevance/utility/value because there exist people without quality Q that do X, even though the vast majority of people who do X have quality Q. But that argument is kind of insane.

If you want a job at Google, you're much better off getting a degree from a good university. Anyone who says otherwise is delusional.

(EDIT: And no, App Academy graduates do not -- _on balance_ \-- compete for the same jobs as recent Stanford graduates. On balance, they compete for very different jobs and have far lower starting salaries. The existence of exceptional outliers is not a good basis for policy or decision making.)

(edit2: whoever just downvoted every single post I made on this article: the reply button is there for a reason :-) Otherwise, the early career salary for Stanford is $97,100. Are you saying that the average app academy graduate makes ~6 figures right after finishing the academy?)

<comment><USER9> >Are you saying that the average app academy graduate makes ~6 figures right after finishing the academy?

Yes. I know of a/A graduates who have accepted offers at $90k, $100k, and $115k. The $90k was their first offer, and the general reaction was that declining it in favor of continuing the search was probably higher value.

<comment><USER17> _Average_ , which has been hammered home in three posts now. Anecdotes are non-answers.

Edit: Incidentally, according to App Academy's own numbers, they're about $10k behind Stanford in average salary (and, I'd argue, the comparison is apples and oranges to begin with. Stanford graduates are much more geographically distributed, that's noise. Many Stanford graduates will go on to graduate school, that's noise. Some a/A graduates already have a college degree or experience in another industry, that's noise. And so on.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Requiring a degree for a job that doesn't utilize the information the acquisition of which the degree is meant to connote is clearly untenable. That's a given. The author is on point about market demands for higher education being inflated but is way off base about the value and role of education in society and economy, and his dismissal of Bernie Sanders's proposal for free higher education is similarly untenable. The main failing in the author's argument is a poor framing of the issue. The author assumes that the economy and society can be planned without acknowledging the social harm a planned economy and society will necessarily cause. Furthermore, the author assumes that our economy and society can be planned - a false assumption - <USER2> that the government's primary role is in planning the lives of its citizens rather than assuring their lives, liberty, and opportunity - a very dangerous one. The author frames education as a doorway to a career, when in truth it is more akin to a hallway allowing access to many more doors than are available without it. Worst of all, the author is completely incorrect about the main pressures causing a rise in the price of education.

Take the argument not to allow free education as per the Sanders proposal. To reduce it to absurdity, what impetus is there for us to educate plumbers beyond middle school (8th grade)? From what I know of the profession, most of the education they will utilize has already been acquired. What impetus is there for us to educate fast food workers beyond elementary school (6th grade)? From what I know of the profession, most of the education they will utilize has already been acquired. What reason at all is there to educate police officers? From what I know of the profession, they aim at POC regardless of whether there's a multiple homicide or a birthday party in progress; such simple instructions require no education.

The impetus is that we don't live in a planned economy and society. We don't know who will be what when, and we don't want to enforce that such decisions be made once and for all at any point in a person's life. A kid might want to be a fast food worker, like his dad, in 1st grade; a firefighter, like the men who recently saved his little sister from a house fire, in 6th grade; a police officer, to eradicate the drugs ruining his neighborhood, in 12th grade; a lawyer, to protect the poor renters like his parents from being evicted due to gentrification, as an undergrad; a software engineer, to his account book back into the black, when he fails to get into a law school. Individual lives are very chaotic and our expectations of what we want to do change throughout our lives. And in facilitating our ability to dynamically change course, education is the cornerstone. It's easy to look at the current occupation of a person and say, "You're a software engineer. You didn't need any of those Legal Studies courses or History courses or Latin-American studies courses.", but to do so is to dehumanize the person and her life experience, it is to discount her earlier hopes and dreams and ambitions, her current regrets and pains and struggle, it is to shrink wrap a person inside her professional title and place her on a supermarket shelf, deriding her "extra, useless" ingredients while doing so.

In this the author is also incorrect in distilling the value of education to the knowledge a degree or diploma is meant to proclaim. Education is also an experience. It's a breather while we choose course. Our economy is becoming so dynamic and unpredictable for such large sectors that during our middle years (30s-50s) and even soon after college, many of us change professions to more profitable sectors. And that's nothing to say about what we want to accomplish with our time on this planet. Those questions loom forever large on the horizon for much of our lives. College allows us to interact with thousands of others in a similar lost state. A college town is filled with mapmakers trying to see which way to go to "get there." Interacting with them gives a person the ability to see a little bit more of what her possibilities and potential can be. College helps those of us who are still lost after high school to get unlost. And even college is proving insufficient as a compass and square. Many, if not most, of us are still lost after college.

Moreover, we don't want to be living in a planned economy or society. We have done that before in the developed world, and much of the 2nd and 3rd world is doing that now. And along which lines would be plan our economy? Would we tie down youngsters to what they want to do at age 22? 18? 14? 12? 6? Would we force them to pursue their parents' profession? Answers to such questions are the basis of a very draconian government.

The "waste" of extra education is the price we must pay to allow ourselves varied opportunities and possibilities. Sanders is correct in urging the US to universally pay for higher education. Sanders's call is especially urgent to us as we are finding that many of us must go back to college or night classes much later in life to work for the remaining 10, 15, 20 years before the government will allow us to retire with enough in Social Security to live comfortably. Many middle-aged workers are finding themselves without work after the effects of the ongoing high tech revolution. Going or returning to college at the government's expense would allow them to take time and resources to direct their lives in a direction more desirable for them. In fact, Sanders's proposal, if it were to include living expenses as well as tuition, would be an excellent solution to homelessness. Not only would we be providing food and shelter, we would be providing a chance at a more meaningful life for those who deem it more meaningful and can't afford it.

The tech industry and its moguls are quite taken to pointing to a few outliers and saying that college is not essential, and to encourage college and high school students to drop out and pursue their dreams, entirely dismissing that those dreams might change in a year or even a month. The underlying assumption is that we magically know what to do with our lives at all times. But the truth is closer to most of us being lost throughout our lives. Dropping out and pursuing your life dream is great for those few for whom it works (Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos comes to mind), but the plan fails for a much greater number of us who end up going back to college anyway to improve our station in life at least.

I am suspicious as to whether the rising, oft frivolous degree requirements for many professions is due in part to a higher availability of such degrees. Why hire a high school graduate when you can get a more woman who graduated with a BA in History to do your firefighting? The woman holding the BA has demonstrated that she is smart and gets things done - at least enough to get a BA in History. If History BAs are applying, it should increase the requirements of getting the firefighting job. To turn the author's argument on its head, I assert that there is higher demand for education not because some jobs are requiring education when it is unnecessary, but because more of us are pursuing higher education to direct or re-stabilize our lives and some jobs are requiring education when it is unnecessary because it is becoming pore plentiful and readily available in our economy and society. And that's a good thing. People should be better educated, especially in the Liberal Arts ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education)) and Humanities. It would dramatically increase the quality of life for all of us. Or at least it would stop repeated isolated incidents of young Black men getting shot in this country.

As a last thought, I'm reminded of a recent NY Times (?) article posted on HN which ended with something akin to "Everyone is sure college isn't right for everyone, except their own kids."

Long post. Sorry for any mistakes.

</comment><comment><USER23> Yeah, no thanks. I prefer doctors and lawyers that have gone to school rather than watching MOOC videos on a bus.

<comment> white-flame You missed the point. Doctors in the US take 4 years of generally medically- unrelated undergraduate schooling before they're allowed into medical school. Why not just allow them into medical school?

<comment><USER11> Actually the author forgets to mention that you can have any major to get in to medical school but many medical schools still require quite a few core courses you are expected to complete while in undergrad including two years of Chemistry, a year of math, physics and writing.</comment></comment></comment>


Bank of America - Why I'm Switching - <AUTHOR> http://vsd20c.blogspot.com/2010/12/bank-of-america-why-im-switching.html

<comment><USER2> Oddly, I have always received absolutely excellent customer service from Bank of America, except for the guy who half-threatened me that I was going to ruin my life the second I canceled my credit monitoring service. They were very helpful for all my card misplacements as well as the time I had to dispute a charge.

However, I do not think their web/ATM interface comes close to others (like Wells Fargo, have you seen that shit? Their ATM UI is beautiful) and I do not support them locking my money from WikiLeaks. I've been looking at Electric Orange and Schwab, both of which are free and have the same APR.

<comment><USER3> I've had great customer service from Bank of America for the most part. I switched from Washington Mutual to Wells Fargo to Bank of America in search of better customer service, and B of A is the best so far. I have 2 personal checking, 1 savings, 1 health savings, 2 credit cards, 1 joint checking, 1 IRA, 1 business checking, and a mortgage through Bank of America, and I wouldn't think of switching.

That said, I've found with any bank the quality of service improves as your balance increases. All of the problems the original poster mentioned go away when your average daily balance is $10k or more. At that point every interaction with a teller is an opportunity to upsell you on CD's, IRA's, wealth management, etc. Plus, they are making enough from investing your money to justify paying someone $20/hour to talk to you.

<comment><USER2> Actually, I've averaged about $200 at most throughout all my accounts for all the times I've asked BoA for help.

<comment><USER3> I think this is what sets BofA apart from the others. When I had bad service at Washington Mutual or Wells Fargo, I had a far lower average daily balance than you (before my business took off, my account balance rarely reached 3 digits). Bank of America was the one bank that treated me with respect even when I was broke, and for that they've earned my business for life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Never knew banks can take away your teller right? - And then charge you for it?

Is that equivalent to Paypal locking your account?

<comment><USER3> There must be more to the story...it sounds like they converted his account to an eBanking account (which has no fees, minimum balance, or direct deposit requirements, but also no teller access). He most likely inquired about ways to eliminate monthly maintenance fees, and agreed to the switch without realizing he lost teller access.</comment></comment>


Wave – A private and unique messenger for iOS - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/za/app/wave-%EF%BE%89/id1434827986?mt=8&ref=producthunt <comment><USER4> Reading through the Privacy Policy, I have some concerns.

Under "Usage Information":

> We may collect information about: how you communicate with those Wavers, > such as their names, the time and date of your communications...

I know you're not storing the actual messages (in plain text at least), but I don't like the idea that you're storing who I'm talking to.

Under "Information Provided By Third Parties":

> \- Advertisers may let us know you installed a new app or games so we can > determine whether we showed you an ad for it.

> \- If you interact with one of our advertisers, they may share information > with us to help target or measure the performance of ads.

> \- If another user uploads their contact list, we may combine information > from the user's contact list with other information we have collected about > you.

That's too much profiling for my liking.

In the end, even though the messages are "private", I don't feel that this app is taking my _privacy_ seriously.

Otherwise, I like the design, the UI and the idea. We need more competitors in this space. I do desire a web version of any message platform I use. It makes it easier for me to communicate throughout the day.

<comment><USER5> Hi!

Thank you for your feedback.

Presently, Wave (^‿^)ノ is privately funded and in no way supported by any advertising revenue.

The information that you made reference to was included as a precaution should some future involvement come to fruition.

Please bear in mind that this project was made by an individual. Your feedback regarding encryption / clauses in the terms of service / privacy policy are greatly appreciated as they serve as guidance on which areas can be changed or improved upon.

Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Norwegian eight digit numbers are not possible to submit in the signup form. Strange that they need the phone number for an "anonymous " messaging device.

<comment><USER5> Hi! Wave (^‿^)ノ does not support numbers less than 9 digits. Support for numbers with 8 digits or less will be added in the very near future.

Thank you for your feedback.

<comment><USER7> How do you "optimize" for numbers with 8 digits? Sounds intriguing... /s

Edit: comment has been made obsolete due to edit of parent comment

<comment><USER5> How do you edit a comment?

<comment><USER7> You click on the "edit" link above your comment.

<comment><USER5> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow Marc, thanks!

Hey HN, Wave (^‿^)ノ is privacy-focused instant messenger designed to keep the nature of conversation fun and fleeting.

No other messaging platform offers complete messaging peace of mind by being totally anonymous.

The app offers two message types: WaveFlash: 10 words or less - <USER2> displayed word-by-word rapidly. WaveLength: 1000 characters or less - <USER3> anywhere to close the message when read.

Ask me anything here!

Features:

↩ Send and receive messages in one place. No chat lists. Messages are secured in capsules that have to be manually opened to be read. Any unread message can be unsent without notifying the receiver. Messages are displayed without showing the sender's name. All messages can be viewed once only. Messages are end-to-end encrypted. Quick reply by swiping sent/received message capsules inwards. Custom contact names for any chat

<comment><USER8> > Any unread message can be unsent without notifying the receiver.

So you can test whether the recipient read your message by simply sending+unsending the message until you can't unsend anymore? :)

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure I fully understand the question but you the only limitation to the unsend feature is the message being 'read'. You can send and unsend as many times as you like.

<comment><USER9> They're asking if the unsend feature exposes whether the message has been read..... but I can see in the screenshots that there's a 'read' indicator anyway, isn't there? So it was a ignorant question and I wouldn't worry about it.

<comment><USER5> Yes! This is correct.

Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> chupa-chups Is this end-to-end encrypted? The store page says

> Messages encrypted using a combination of 256-bit symmetric AES encryption.

<comment><USER5> The app utilises AES encryption method using this library: [https://github.com/RNCryptor/RNCryptor](https://github.com/RNCryptor/RNCryptor).

<comment><USER10> Is the encryption end to end, or is the key known to the server?

<comment><USER11> Seems like there is a "password" required to encrypt/decrypt but the app's descriptions says:

> \- No Sign Up / Log In / Usernames / Passwords.

So I'm guessing this password is stored server-side and the passwords are associated to device ids.

Seems like it would read your contacts and then send them to their servers too, not a fan of doing that personally.

I'm not sure why the app mentions encryption/security as it seems far from being the main point of the app.

<comment><USER5> Messages sent on the app are end-to-end encrypted and the key is not known to the server. The only way anybody can read your messages is if you allow them physical access to your phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ugh, I hate everything about this. They claim to be privacy focused but collect metadata for ads.

The app appears to have 15 fake 5 star reviews that don't at all accurately review the app as an ephemeral messaging platform. One compares it to Whatsapp.

there is no website explaining how this app works.

they're forcing users to provide a phone number for no discernable reason.

<comment><USER5> Hey buddy!

Regarding your privacy concerns, the way in which it is designed makes messaging private. All communication is also end-to-end encrypted.

No metadata collected other than what development platform requires for basic analytics.

There is absolutely advertising.

The reviews are fake...?

Most messaging apps require a phone number.

The app works the same way as Whatsapp does. Both users needs each other saved in their address book and both users need the app installed.

It was designed to be very user-friendly and simple.

Hope this in someway alleviates your frustrations.

(^‿^)ノ

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> &ref=producthunt ?

<comment><USER14> They got the link from product hunt who adds that, the mods should likely remove that part of the link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Google's not defending the Wave trademark?

<comment><USER4> They don't own Wave anymore.[0]

[0] [https://incubator.apache.org/projects/wave.html](https://incubator.apache.org/projects/wave.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> how does this compare to signal/imessage?

<comment><USER5> It doesn't.

Sending and receiving a message on Wave (^‿^)ノ is different from any other messaging platform.

<comment><USER4> It would be great if you expanded on _why_ it's different.

<comment><USER5> The most notable difference is messages being stored inside capsules.

This means that you have to open a message to read it. You can only view it once. When displayed, messages do not include the senders name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> RIP Google Wave -- you were ahead of your time.

Unfortunately no iOS in this household to try it out so best of luck to the new Wave. :)</comment>


UniCredit hit by data breach of Italian client records - <AUTHOR> https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-unicredit-cyber/unicredit-hit-by-data-breach-of-italian-client-records-idUKKBN1X70HM <comment><USER2> Will the GDPR kick in?

<comment><USER3> They informed authorities, just as required by GDPR article 33, a good question is whether they reacted within 72 hours of finding out, given that the breach is from 2015. They seem/claim to be compliant with article 32, but I guess they should be investigated.

See section 2 here: [http://www.privacy- regulation.eu/en/index.htm](http://www.privacy-regulation.eu/en/index.htm)</comment></comment>


Good design for the rest of us? - <AUTHOR> http://www.qingting.biz/index.php?action=qpro

<comment><USER2> I have long wondered why no one seems to be able to compete with Apple.

The reasons are fairly simple I think.

1\. Apple has 34 years of history. This adds value to their brand. When you buy an Apple product you are buying much more than just the good looks.

2\. Apple has complete vertical integration. In other words, should you choose to go after them, you won't just be competing with them on a few verticals but on every possible vertical, from chipset, to industrial design, to interface design, to server technology and the list goes on.

3\. Apple has managed lately to build the de-facto strongest digital ecosystem out there. An ecosystem mind you based on product purchases, real money.

4\. Apple seems to be following the principle of, the best way to predict the future is to invent it. Apple simply creates their own markets.

5\. Apple have perfected the art of profit making. Their real accomplishment is selling less than their competitors but still make more money.

It's not difficult to see just how strong this setup is. They are dependent on no one at all besides their customers, which seems to be loving them.

In other words. Nothing perhaps with the exception of an Apple without Steve Jobs can really touch them.

</comment><comment><USER3> Design? I don't really think that producing a knock off of the MacBook Pro counts as design. I'd also be extremely surprised if the build quality was anywhere close. The MacBook Pro required some fairly careful engineering and matching of parts, etc. to get the heat production situation under control. I would be more than hesistant in expecting this to work without flaws.

</comment><comment><USER4> Engadget's title says it all: "Keepin' it real fake: because in China, even websites aren't safe from knockoffs"

[http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/01/keepin-it-real-fake- becau...](http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/01/keepin-it-real-fake-because-in- china-even-websites-arent-saf/)

</comment><comment><USER5> What is this? I see a bunch of Apple products with the apple logo photoshopped out. Some shots clearly show OS X (and were presumably lifted from apple's website), even though the closeups show a windows key on the keyboard and an off-kilter looking mac.

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if the build quality is up to par. Nvidia ION? Wasn't that for really small set top boxes and netbooks? Maybe they made an ultra low cost version then?

<comment><USER4> It's netbook specs all around, it even has a 1.66Ghz Atom processor. Also, it comes preinstalled with Windows 7, even though the screenshot on the main page shows Mac OS X.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Seeing how much of their website's features are for-show only (try the nav buttons under the image), I'd be hesitant.</comment>


Circling Ourselves: The Story Behind Asana's Rebrand - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@micahdaigle/circling-ourselves-the-story-behind-asana-s-rebrand-e8247516705a <comment><USER2> I've been using Asana for about two years as my work-related feature rich TODO list. I've learned that if I'm extremely diligent about putting tasks from my email inbox (or meetings, etc.) into Asana, then I don't have to ever worry about dropping tasks when things get hectic. For me, this is a pretty huge deal.

I'm very impressed by the introspection exhibited by the Asana team, illustrated by the following quote:

 _> [W]hen his friends introduce him to other people, they whisper: "Give the guy a chance; you'll love him once you get to know him."

Until this week, that's how many of us felt about our brand and our product._

I've been on the sending end of this conversation _very_ many times. Because of my success with Asana (and the fact that it's free), I've recommended the product to many people... and invariably been met with the same skepticism, based in the lack of a contemporary UI. I've convinced people to give it a shot anyway, but it was always a bigger road block than I would have imagined.

It's awesome that the Asana team realized this, and fixed it. I'm sort of indifferent to the UI at this point (although it does look nice), but I'm sure getting new users will be much easier from now on. Huge kudos to the Asana team!

<comment><USER3> Thanks a bunch, David! I was an Asana user for years before I joined the team, and this was always my experience too. So when I joined, I quickly popularized this metaphor. It kinda stuck. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The new look is nice. Sleeker, cleaner - nice. That said, the product feels a lot slower now. They added a lot of ajax-y elements, and something as simple as showing "Later" tasks on the "My tasks" page now takes up to 5 seconds to load (tested on multiple machines and networks).

Also, Asana didn't _really_ need a new coat of paint. It needed (and needs!) a _fundamental_ UX/UI re-thinking. It still feels just as clunky to use as ever - it just looks a bit fresher.</comment>


Ask HN: Can I get the skills I need at 45? - <AUTHOR> TL:DR:  I'm 45, intelligent and the "go to computer guy" for everyone I know, currently a teacher but want to get out.  No qualifications of worth to speak of.  Can I learn enough part time over the next couple of years to have a stab at getting a job or being able to contract doing it?
I'm 45, have always been interested in computers and technology (I've dabbled with all sorts of programming tasks and languages, and whenever I've had a personal project to work on which has been applicable, I've programmed / built the solution), and I'm everyone I know's go-to-guy for computer issues. I currently teach Music Tech, but the landscape is changing and I don't see a long-term future.
I have flexibility in my timetable to study 2 days a week.  I don't have much in the way of qualifications (I don't have a degree, but I did an apprenticeship in Electronics/Instrumentation at a nuclear facility in the UK - 25 years ago), I'm determined and disciplined and have been self-taught and self-motivated in everything I've done so far, professionally, and I think I have a good general awareness of lots of things.  The kids call me Dazopedia as I "always have the answer".
I want to gain the skills that I'll need in the future, I'm wondering if there is a path that I can follow in terms of giving me a chance in a couple of years at a foot in the door somewhere.  I'm in the UK (South Coast), and relocation isn't really an option because of my personal and financial circumstances.  I'd follow a self-study plan (as I have done with pretty much everything I've done in the past), and I'm disciplined.  I guess I'm 25 too old, but I would like to think I have something ahead of me for the next 20 years other than what I do currently.  I'm not expecting to earn a fortune, but would like to earn a decent living creating things that work and work well.
I realise this probably looks at pie in the sky to many reading this, but I thought I'd put it out there.  Thanks for your time, HN. <comment><USER2> From reading your story it seems to me like you have plenty of aptitude towards programming. Getting a degree is definitely not a requirement to get a job in this sector, so that should not be an issue.

The most valuable thing is experience, and not the 'x years' kind, but the 'x projects' kind. If you can demonstrate that you have an ability to build things, you have value to an employer. (Or you can employ yourself and just sell things you make)

There are tons of great courses online that teach you all the things you would learn in a traditional CS course, but I would suggest a big focus on building things. In the end the best (most employable) programmers are the ones who build things, and getting a CS degree from reading books doesn't make you a good programmer.

Build some projects of your own, or build things for others in your surroundings. If you get confident enough you can even charge people money for the things you make. If you don't have any inspiration on what sort of things to make, there's lots of online resources that can help you with this as well. Things like [https://javascript30.com/](https://javascript30.com/) are great to get you just building things.

Another bit of advice is to try and find a mentor with some experience working in the field, just for advice on day-to-day things. It's hard to find a book on 'how to be a programmer', things like how to set up your work environment, what tools people use, all the meta-things. By far the most effective way to get into this is having someone experienced around who can show you some of the chops.

Good luck on your journey! Nothing is impossible if you believe in it

Feel free to contact me with any questions you may have

</comment><comment><USER3> Tech is one of the worst industries for age discrimination. I once hired a 50-year-old engineer with 30 years of professional experience. His resume was excellent except for his age, and his skills were very advanced. He'd been unemployed for 2 years.

</comment><comment><USER4> Without a doubt you can improve your coding ability really quickly. Lots of great courses and resources out there and you can be building things in no time.

What I would say is do you actually want to do that? Long term, do you see yourself in that kind of job? If that excites you then great! If not, ask what kind of lifestyle are you trying to work towards.

It sounds like Music Tech and teaching are great skills you already have. Is there a way you can put those 2 study days into building your own business in that space instead? If you can see which way the industry is headed, perhaps you can get ahead of the game and offer things of value from your existing wealth of knowledge.

That way you are adapting to the industry and learning new skills - not just to prepare you for a new job but so you can actually work on something you enjoy.

I would suggest to build up from your existing foundations if it is something you actually enjoy.

</comment><comment><USER5> Certainly. Obviously, there are some things where age is a requirement. I'm not going to become a professional footballer at 40. But most professions are not age specific.

I'm not the biggest fan, but SimpleProgrammer.com has some great tips on how to get your name known in the programming world. It's mostly centered around blogging... but it's good stuff.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yes, you definitely can. You are going to need hard work, but I feel that this is not the question. I am 35, software engineer (without a degree), and I am going to start learning about fiction writing. Am I too old for this? We both know the answer.

</comment><comment><USER7> tl;dr yes.

The tech industry doesn't care about qualifications, it cares that you know your stuff. The way you show that is experience.

Key point: write a CV that shows you _do this stuff already_ and have years of experience in it. Because, in fact, you do.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks all for taking the time to reply, and suggestions of things to check out. I'm formulating a two-year plan to execute. You've given me the confidence I need to give it a go!</comment>