The Rise of the Content Marketing Moron - <AUTHOR> http://finchsells.com/2012/09/03/the-rise-of-the-content-marketing-moron/

<comment><USER2> Despite all his whining about people hustling to spread their content, in the end he is doing the exact same thing. These people have existed forever, there's nothing new here. Just the pot calling the kettle black.

<comment><USER3> The difference is that most other grey-hat SEO is now ineffective and the only "scalable" SEO left to do is low-quality content marketing.

There was a podcast interviewing an SEO company on HN recently that was getting upvotes: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4412907>

His whole recommendation was hiring cheaper content creators on fiverr or elance for articles/videos to build links.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been on the receiving end of emails from content marketers and I absolutely despise them. However, I'm currently in a situation where I need to promote my business and make sure it ranks highly in search results and I've seriously been considering doing some of what the OP is railing against.

Whenever I write a blog post or write a comment on HN, I always try to add something valuable to the discussion (I don't always succeed, but that's a discussion for a different day). This is why I'm not a promiscuous user of HN/reddit/what-have-you, and this is why my blog postings are highly infrequent. I take satisfaction in _giving back_ to the Internet instead of banging out flamewar-inducing piles of words, and the kind of writing I want to do takes time. However, "growth hackers" tell me that I should be posting content often, that I should be compiling easy to consume top-10 lists, image macros and videos. I've even seen some tutorials on crafting linkbait headlines to generate more clicks. Some marketing advice out there actually encourages people to start flamewars on HN and troll people to create discussion and ensure that their story stays on the front-page for a longer period.

Faced with this situation, what is a guy like me to do? I don't have an advertizing budget of thousands of dollars per month. I can produce bullshit lists that grab eyeballs, but I can't do that without feeling slightly guilty. Plus, I feel it kind of ruins your "brand". (Note that it's not all bad. I have some great ideas for quality content I can post on my company's blog, some ideas for videos and pictures that are actually useful, etc.)

Does anyone have an opinion on this? How do you go from 5 to 500 users without generating megabytes of fluff? How do you get word out on the Internet about your startup without seeming like a complete sleazeball?

EDIT: fixed minor stylistic snafu.

<comment><USER5> I've had a lot of success with web games, you can read about it here: <http://blog.method.ac/advice/traction.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is no guy customizing emails, it's just a SEO CRM where they have metadata about your blog and it automatically e-mails you on the week if you don't respond.

Just hit the spam button and move along.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sure that's true. But some content marketers have followed in those same footsteps thinking it's the 'correct' way to do things! It's sad when a human being can't do a better job - or be more creative - than the copy and paste button.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I appreciated this, as I've heard the phrase "content marketing" but didn't quite grasp what it was, aside from another form of spam, of course (because, "marketing"). This is a good example of how opinionated writing can convey a more objective understanding of a subject; the "neutral" explanations of this spam technique that I'd encountered left me hazy about what it actually entailed.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> No problem with people hustling to spread their content. It's how they do it that causes the irritation.

</comment><comment><USER7> Related: [http://www.howtospotapsychopath.com/2012/08/31/a-frequently-...](http://www.howtospotapsychopath.com/2012/08/31/a-frequently- to-be-repeated-offer/)</comment>


Spanking Is Ineffective and Harmful to Children, Pediatricians Group Says - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/05/health/spanking-harmful-study-pediatricians.html <comment><USER2> What about past generations that were spanked? How would they have developed differently had they not been spanked?</comment>


Peter Thiel sells most of remaining Facebook stake - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-stake/peter-thiel-sells-most-of-remaining-facebook-stake-idUSKBN1DM2BQ <comment><USER2> By the way, Peter Thiel already sold the majority of his FB shares around the time of the IPO. See:

[https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/peter-thiel- facebook-...](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/peter-thiel-facebook- stock-sale-billion-dollars-364152)

Notice that at the time the article was written he had sold about 37 million shares and had only 5.6 million left. The prices he got were absolute peanuts compared to the current price -- he sold 17 mln shares for $38, and another 20 million for about $20. The current price is $180.

I am not writing this to criticize Peter Thiel, obviously the stock market is very difficult to predict. And, unfortunately, I did not buy FB at $20, so I cannot say I had a better mastery of the market than him. The point I want to make is that is downright silly to make any conclusions about FBs valuation based on this sale.

<comment><USER3> Only on Hacker News would we consider making over a billion dollars "absolute peanuts," and criticize Thiel for not being enough of a visionary to wait.

When you're Thiel, having the money liquid is more valuable than waiting. One way to look at is that he could have 5x'd the money had he not touched it. But I'd bet whatever he did with the money since the 2012 IPO (starting companies, investing in companies, etc) had a much better return than 5x.

<comment><USER2> Only on Hacker News I can write an entire paragraph explaining how I am not criticizing Thiel and then still get slammed for criticizing him.

<comment><USER4> There's a lot of really weird vicarious worship of the wealthy around here. It's ironic that it's called Hacker News since traditionally hackers came from more of a "fight the man" zeitgeist. At times it borders on sycophancy, like when every single utterance of a VC no matter how banal is analyzed as if it's the words of some venerated guru.

The extreme of this would be the Silicon Valley right and its full and explicit embrace of feudalism and monarchy.

... and no, I'm not criticizing Thiel. The vicarious sycophancy of the HN community is a lot weirder and at times more troubling than the behavior of the actual SV rich.

<comment><USER5> That's cause we are all temporarily embarrassed billionaires.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is non-news. The sale was "part of a previously established trading plan" \-- VCs set these up all the time to slowly sell off shares in a way that's not disruptive to companies. If you owned 10% of a company and sold all that stock in one swoop, you would crater the stock price and piss off employees. Thiel had already sold over a $1B worth of shares by 2016 and FB stock is up 60%+ this year.

<comment><USER7> The first sentence of the story notes that fact, but it is still news since Thiel is a board member. Regardless of when the plan was initiated, it's interesting that Thiel owns so little of FB.

<comment><USER8> As a board member he is going to granted a lot of free FB stock in the future. A good problem to have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Holy Cow! That is Insane. Facebook's market cap is half a trillion. As somebody that knows nothing I cannot believe that it is that high. It is on par with Amazon. Anybody thinks we really are in a bubble?

Relevant Market Caps:

Facebook: 525.34B, PE Ratio: 33.61

Alphabet: 727.00B, PE Ratio: 35.12

Amazon: 558.65B, PE Ratio: 292.63

Apple: 895.91B, PE Ratio: 18.99

Tesla: 52.64B

Ford: 48.08B, PE Ratio: 10.98

IBM: 140.35B, PE Ratio: 12.65

Microsoft: 641.20B, P/E Ratio: 28.12

<comment><USER10> FB and GOOG have been hoovering up practically all growth in the digital ad space. Those PE ratios are high, but they have been blowing out their earnings quarter after quarter.

FB has 2.07 billion monthly active users, about 1/3 of the world population, with significant user engagement. Their userbase is on par with major world religions and continents.

Google is the same, though their engagement is a lot more fleeting.

Amazon is hoovering up almost all of the retail growth in e-commerce, and is now extending beyond e-commerce. They to an absurd extent, try to match their R&D and capital investment to their revenue and almost operate as a non- profit, so their P/E ratio always looks absurd, but their book value has increased tremendously over the years.

This isn't 1999 where like Tesla, there was no P/E ratio because there were no earnings (profits), and in the life of the company there had never been a single dollar of profit made, and companies were often rated at 50x their revenue numbers!

These are companies that have shown sustained revenue and profit growth. You can call them overvalued, but this is not in my opinion a bubble, and I think its important you understand the difference between now, 1999, and 2007 or you won't recognize the next one when it comes. In 1999 there was an absolute mania over .com stocks. In 2007 we had a credit bubble that was clear in many statistics and being shouted from the rooftops by some that was impossible to sustain and accompanied by speculators flipping houses, phrases like "buy now or be priced out forever," and other nonsense.

Today, while there are some high P/E ratios, they are at least backed up by long periods of sustained growth rates. Of course it can't last forever, and one can only hope that they will gently reduce their growth rates and have a soft landing rather than a hard crash.

<comment><USER11> This is nit-picky but the world population is 7.5 billion these days so it's closer to 1/4 (27.6%) the world population than 1/3.

<comment><USER10> That's actually a good thing for their long term outlook- a higher ceiling on their potential growth.

<comment><USER12> True, although the number of active users is only a small component of Facebook's enormous growth.

In past 4 years Facebook have grown their user base by 80%, mostly in lower- income countries. But over the same period revenue has grown 400% and pretax profit 600%.

So Facebook will likely have significant growth long after their user base levels off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Facebook has been slow to realize that ads that they show are effectively messages from Facebook. Which is why they are culpable in so much gunk, they don't screen ads well enough and they let absolute nonsense rule the feeds. It's really a poor case of selling out to attractive bids. Now that they started camouflaging ads as regular posts from your friends, it's even worse. Now they exert influence and pretend they don't.

<comment><USER14> I am not a facebook user, how do they camouflage ads as posts from friends?

<comment><USER15> They don't. Every ad is clearly marked as "Sponsored post," and it definitely never shows up as being posted from one of your friends.

<comment><USER16> But they do slip ads into your newsfeed with a "Bob likes Soylent" header at the top. It's deliberately similar to how they display "Bob shared Soylent's post" or "Bob commented on this."

Bob liked Soylent a year ago and has had no recent interaction with it that would merit showing up in the newsfeed. That particular one is funny because Bob swore off Soylent after a few months and just didn't bother to unlike their page.

<comment><USER17> That could actually be a negative for the advertiser, and positive for consumers.. hey Bob, I noticed on Facebook that you "liked" soylent- I am thinking abut trying it too! Do you have any thoughts? Bob: Umm, don't, Soylent is terrible! Thanks for letting me know, I will unlike them!"

Of course, not everyone will actually ask Bob for his opinion, but if I really cared about the fact that Bob liked something, and that was a factor in my purchasing decision, I would probably ask him about it, myself.

<comment><USER16> In that case I don't mind it anyway because I like food and I'm not interested in their product. Makes the ads are easy for me to mentally skip over.

As a whole, it really dilutes the news feed because half of it is actual "news" from friends (when they _recently_ posted, liked, or shared something) and half is advertisements disguised as posts with my friends' endorsements written at the top because they liked NYT or KFC's page five years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Peter is a smart guy, and this does suggest Facebook is not worth holding long term. Sean Parker's comments a few days ago were not positive either. Anecdata-wise, things are not looking too rosy; many of my more intellectual and interesting friends have abandoned the platform, barring the occasional message (e.g. if they lost their phone and had to change numbers) - the less interesting people I know (not friends, but acquaintances) seem to be fully immersed in Facebook still. Not sure Facebook can even hold the attention of those people much longer, as the platform is simply feels noisy, boring and out of date!

<comment><USER19> Which platform did your more interesting friends move to ?

<comment><USER18> They did not move to any platform. You ask the question as if being associated with a platform is a basic necessity!

<comment><USER20> Well, unless they are purely communicating in person or by phone, SMS, or email (or snail mail) they ARE on some platform.

<comment><USER18> Yes, if you're being pedantic about it, but they did not go from one Facebook- like platform to another. I think people just don't see much value in Facebook-esque platforms like before, because they recognise them as places filled with all sorts of irrelevant junk that can usurp copious amounts of valuable time.

<comment><USER20> That's true but to an extent that a social networking platform derives most of its utility from having people present on it, it being a non-FB-like platform may only be a matter of time. It could become more FB-like (if that was deemed necessary) or it could be bought by FB or FB-like companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Has anyone else noticed the shift in their use of Facebook? I'm starting to use it more and more for selling and buying things hyper local than craigslist. I've had so much better luck selling people who don't show up and try to haggle you down further with facebook than craigslist. It's become my one stop shop to offload junk I don't need, vs use it as a social network.

<comment><USER22> I don't like the idea of my Facebook friends knowing what I'm selling.

<comment><USER15> Is selling a cabinet or a pair of skiing gloves a pretty major privacy violation for you?

<comment><USER23> "Oh, you're selling an old kitchen cabinet? Sounds like you're doing pretty well to be able to afford a kitchen remodel. Must be nice."

"Wait, you don't have time to come to my kid's birthday party, but you're out skiing so much that you had to upgrade your skiing gloves?"

I'm not saying it's right or makes sense, but there are a lot of contextual layers and subtle subtext inherent in other people's relationships that may not affect your own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Or when forced to pay for access to Facebook that is not rate limited people may not use Facebook as much....

<comment><USER25> I'm still betting amazon and fb will start making their own pipes

<comment><USER26> How will they succeed where Google couldn't?

[https://gizmodo.com/what-happened-to-google- fiber-1792440779](https://gizmodo.com/what-happened-to-google- fiber-1792440779)

[http://www.sacbee.com/news/nation- world/national/article1106...](http://www.sacbee.com/news/nation- world/national/article110655177.html)

[https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2016/10/googl...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2016/10/google-fiber-laying-off-9-of-staff-will-pause-plans- for-10-cities/)

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/26/google- fi...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/26/google-fiber- internet-stops-alphabet-layoffs)

<comment><USER27> The stakes are going to be higher, so perhaps they're willing to put up the $$ (in shameless bribes to local councilmembers, etc.) to do it.

<comment><USER24> They were just waiting until they needed it. They didn't fail they were just playing a different game. Now there is money to be made in sniffing all that additional traffic. Plus the last administration was on their side and that seems to have changed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Peter Thiel was a terrible hedge fund manager who lost his clients money. I would not read too much into his stock market investing tactics.

<comment><USER29> Was he ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I have a feeling that something scandalous is going to drop about Peter Thiel in the near future. This news comes on the heels of YC cutting ties with him [0].

[0] [https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/19/y-combinator-severs- ties...](https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/19/y-combinator-severs-ties-with- peter-thiel/)

<comment><USER31> Like giving some Senate candidate in Missouri a bunch of money to go after Google?

<comment><USER32> Was that actually illegal? If it was an above-the-board campaign contribution, I'm not sure what the issue is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I don't think this has to do with politics (or Presidential Candidates). It's too big of a business decision.

I don't know enough, but I am curious if someone who has spent the time and effort researching this...Is Facebook's future limited? Is there a new challenger?

Thiel continues to swim against the current and win. Is the writing on the wall?

</comment><comment><USER12> I recently bought Facebook shares at $1.79 each, so my view is the polar opposite of Peter Thiel. Here's my estimate of what will happen to the components of Facebook revenue over next 10 years:

1\. Number of Facebook users * average user income grows 50% (keep in mind that new Facebook users are mostly in developing countries)

2\. Amount of time on internet spent by average user grows 100%

3\. Number of ads served to an average user per hour of internet time grows 30%

4\. Effectiveness of an average Facebook ad grows 160% (ie. 10% per year)

Now 1.5 * 2 * 1.3 * 2.6 = 10.14, so I'm guessing Facebook's _revenue_ will grow tenfold in a decade. Their _profit_ will likely grow even faster because expenses will grow more slowly than revenue.

<comment> chroem- What are these estimates based on? They seem to be the exact opposite of all the major trends that are beginning to affect Facebook.

<comment><USER12> Just an educated guess, plus personal experience.

For example, consider how much "Number of Facebook users * average user income" will grow over the next 10 years. Over the past 40 years world GDP per capita has risen about 4.5% per year [1]. A portion of this growth was due to China's economic boom so outside of China we might expect GDP per capita to grow a little less over the next decade - let's say 3.5% per year ie. 41% in total. But world population is growing and Facebook's penetration is growing on top of that (albeit mostly into poorer countries) so it's reasonable to push that estimate from 41% to 50% or 60%.

Regarding "Effectiveness of an average Facebook ad" here's my experience: In April 2017, Apple released a new Macbook Pro. It looked great - fast, sleek, beautiful. So I visited the Apple website, clicked 'Buy Now' and chose my configuration options. But when I got to the credit card payment screen I had second thoughts - it's very expensive and my old computer was still working fine. Plus I wasn't really sure if I wanted the one with the Touch Bar or regular keys. So I decided to think about it a bit more. And for the next 6 months I was undecided - occasionally going back to Apple's website to drool over the specs - until I finally bought it a few weeks ago. _Within those 6 months I didn 't see a single Facebook ad for a Macbook._ So there is still some low hanging fruit for Facebook to pluck.

[1] [https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Could this be the begining of the end for Facebook? Is 2017 for Facebook what 2009 was for BlackBerry and Nokia (when they were still getting _record_ profits and revenues - they were already toast, they just didn't know it yet)?

[https://www.emarketer.com/content/snapchat-snags-second- plac...](https://www.emarketer.com/content/snapchat-snags-second-place-in- social-media-stickiness)

The significant drop in engagement may also be why Facebook is dumping the media sites from the news (ha!) feed like a hot potato. Although that was a very Facebook thing to do, it still seemed a little desperate and like it was happening sooner than expected.

<comment><USER35> What is a better source of local events than facebook?

<comment><USER36> Nextdoor is much better for me, but most of my Facebook friends live farther than 15 miles from me.

<comment><USER37> Where I live, Nextdoor is pretty much just old people complaining about things.

<comment><USER38> My town's Facebook group is the same way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Why do you think he did that?

</comment><comment><USER40> Good time to get as much out as possible before the FCC allows ISPs to start shaking down Facebook.

<comment><USER41> Net neutrality is likely to help Facebook more than it hurts them, because they can pay for access, which startups probably cannot. All the social companies FB bought (plus the one they couldn't, SnapChat), would have had a much harder time of it if they needed to pay a per-subscriber fee.

<comment><USER40> This assumes that Facebook could afford to pay that cost, as ISPs know that Facebook is highly valuated, and that Facebook is willing to pay that cost, knowing that an ISP without access to Facebook is currently useless to the majority of their users.

<comment><USER41> You think people will use an ISP that Facebook says is forcing slower connections on people? I think you're underestimating their market power.

<comment><USER42> You think people have a choice? There are many areas where consumers have to choose between one crappy ISP and other even crappier options (like satellite).

<comment><USER41> I think the vast majority does have a choice. I know about the places you are describing and they all have one common feature — not many people live there.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple bricked my MacBook and there's nothing I can do about it - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rongarret.info/2016/06/apple-bricked-my-macbook-and-theres.html <comment><USER2> Yep, exactly the same thing happened to my wife's iMac two weeks ago. Bought it in the US 4 years ago, private sale, reputable owner (senior MS exec if I remember, bought it for his wife, she didn't like it).

Back in Sydney now some two years. I don't have the receipt or any record of the purchase. When i phoned Apple, they wouldn't help, said I wasn't the registered owner.

But what really pissed me off was that they wouldn't even reach out to that owner. So I'm stuck.

As a family, we've purchased our fair share of Apple hardware over the past 7 years or so, you name it, we probably have at least one.

Not any more.

</comment><comment><USER3> There are a number of videos on YouTube which demonstrate bypassing the EFI PIN code with USB-based brute force tools. Here are two which included purchase links:

Finding your lost EFI PIN code on a locked MacBook Air 2015 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-9VCAUyJlM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-9VCAUyJlM) [http://www.cmizapper.com/products/brutus.html](http://www.cmizapper.com/products/brutus.html)

Unlock ICloud Locked Macbook Pro, MacBook Air, Imac , Mac Mini [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIo3jK- cd_w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIo3jK-cd_w) [http://pfdinc.wix.com/icloudunlock](http://pfdinc.wix.com/icloudunlock)

I have not had any experience with these, so cannot vouch for their efficacy (or safety). A comment for the CIMzapper claims recovering a 4 digit code can take up to 2 days and a 6 digit code up to 200 days, and that only numeric codes can be recovered.

Good luck regaining access to your MacBook!

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually tried this. It didn't work. The PIN entry is throttled, and after a while it stops accepting guesses altogether. At the moment it says, "Try again in an hour." It has been stuck in that state for a few weeks now.

<comment><USER3> Did you try the "CMIzapper Brutus"? It claims to work on models as recent as 2015 and 2016. Might be worth emailing the apparent maker anyway: firstname.lastname@example.com .

<comment><AUTHOR> I did not try that exact model, no. I don't see how that (or anything else) could get around the throttling limit.

<comment><USER3> Looks like you might be in luck!

Apple EFI firmware passwords and the SCBO myth

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11974806](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11974806)

[https://reverse.put.as/2016/06/25/apple-efi-firmware- passwor...](https://reverse.put.as/2016/06/25/apple-efi-firmware-passwords- and-the-scbo-myth/)

The site is under heavy load at the moment; here is a cached version:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://reverse.put.as/2016/06/25/apple- efi-firmware-passwords-and-the-scbo-myth/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I saw that. Unfortunately, it requires re-flashing the EFI ROM, which is beyond my hacker-fu at the moment. I don't have the right hardware. But this does offer some hope that I can keep the machine out of the landfill.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Kubernetes-in-Docker – Like dind but with Kubernetes, for CI testing. - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bsycorp/kind <comment><AUTHOR> Interested to hear any detail people have about whether privileged containers work with their CI tool of choice. Seems like docker-in-docker (dind) is allowed by some SaaS CI tools so people can build their images? Bit hit and miss though.</comment>


Apple: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL - <AUTHOR> https://developer.apple.com/macos/whats-new/ <comment><USER2> If you're wondering about what they are moving to, here is the WWDC introductory presentation on Metal 2 [https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/601/](https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/601/)

and the WWDC video on Using Metal 2 for Compute: [https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/608/?time=5...](https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/608/?time=59) \- Performance shaders are coming to Mac.

</comment><comment><USER3> Main discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17231593](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17231593)

</comment><comment><USER4> What does this mean for WebGL?

</comment><comment><USER5> Apple is trying really hard to become the new Microsoft.

<comment><USER6> How so?

<comment><USER7> DirectX</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Extension to rate news bias and suggests better stories for topic - <AUTHOR> https://www.civikowl.com <comment><AUTHOR> Howdy folks! We are a team of 4 who love reading news.

Some of our best conversations are the result of reading a great story. But recently, those conversations have become less enjoyable as we instead debate if a story is biased or outright false. Speaking with hundreds of people, we found this mistrust and confusion around the news to be pervasive.

Today we're excited to announce CivikOwl to help you get news you can trust. We are releasing a Chrome extension which instantly rates news stories and suggests better stories for the topic at hand.

Here's a blog post that goes into more detail : [https://blog.civikowl.com/can-you-can-trust-the-news-you- are...](https://blog.civikowl.com/can-you-can-trust-the-news-you-are- reading-654e50bc5cd3)

Hope to open source the extension code in the near future.

Would love to hear what you think!

</comment><comment><USER2> I have been using the product for a month now and I have been pleasantly surprised by the news sources I have found that have good quality news. I have also seen that one news sources doesn't always have the same quality across all their content so this product is helpful in evaluating that too. Definitely recommend it to anyone who wants to get multiple perspectives on an issue and care about understanding news.

<comment><USER3> Hey Arjun,

Congrats on your launch. You might want to disclose your interest in the product here, though.

<comment><USER4> Hi there! The preceding review is from my sister who has a very similar sounding username (amoothy12 vs. amoorthy). Still, I'm thrilled to have her as a shill for CivikOwl :)

Looking forward to some non-biased reviews on our product. HN users have given us great feedback in the past - blunt and thoughtful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Timely and useful tool.

</comment><comment><USER6> Such a needed tool!</comment>


Much of the web is rude, thoughtless, or chauvinistic - <AUTHOR> http://rossignol.cream.org/?p=1005 <comment><USER2> Isn't much of _anything_ rude, thoughtless, or chauvinistic? I can buy that it's true of "the web", sure, but also "businesspeople", "academics", "the people who live in your neighborhood", "the people on TV", "the people who watch TV", and "your classmates", depending on what situation you're in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well yes, but the internet provides native affordances for said behavior: <http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> And I wouldn't change a thing. Feel free to contribute content to change it though. Please avoid trying to pass laws.</comment>


Peer Community in X: A free recommendation process of scientific papers - <AUTHOR> https://peercommunityin.org/ <comment><USER3> One of the problems with the current peer review system is the ease with which a reviewer can recommend rejecting a manuscript based on personal conflicts of interest (for example, viewing the work as competitive with their own). Making reviews open, and possibly de-anonymizing them, could alleviate this (allowing the public to review the review itself). Since the review requires the manuscript itself as context, the manuscript then needs to become publicly visible regardless of the reviewers' decisions.

Another problem is the difficulty that editors have in finding reviewers (to work for free essentially). One solution could be to require authors to act as reviewers before they can submit their own work. For example, if a manuscript requires N favorable reviews to be accepted, then for each manuscript an author submits, they must provide N reviews of other manuscripts.

There is still something missing from the above in terms of "reviewing a review". The closest thing I can think of is comment threads where the post is the manuscript... There needs to be a way for low-quality reviews to be reported as such and invalidated. Right now all this is on the shoulders of the editor, who doesn't have time to do more than add up the recommendations of the reviewers.

<comment><USER4> > to work for free essentially

I don't understand this. If you are an academic, or in industry R&D, then it's part of your job to take part in the community - you are being paid for it.

<comment><USER5> You pay to publish in a journal, you pay to have access to the papers of the journal and you review for the journal for free. Do you see the problem? You review for free but pay to access the content and to publish.

Note: the journal is not related with the people who pay you to do research.

<comment><USER4> People review my papers for me and don't ask for any extra money for it. So I review their papers for them and don't ask for any extra money for it.

Neither me nor my employer have never had to pay to publish any of my papers, but my employer does pay a few dollars a year for access to a papers repository run by a non-profit who just help the community come together - <USER2> hosting isn't free. I imagine it's one of the cheaper of the web services we pay for and a trivial cost of running a business.

I really don't see any problem.

<comment><USER5> Publish in a Congress is like $1000 (fee+trip), journals is less, access to the papers is millions for the universities.

They don't review the papers for you, they review for the Congress or journal, so they can decide which papers are worth to publish because otherwise they don't know.

Web hosting for universities would is nothing. So that is no an excuse to charge you for accessing the papers. Notice that the researches cannot have their papers in their web site because once they publish the papers the publisher has the rights.

Some things are changing but it is still so broken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> ArXiv-overlay journals like _Quantum_ seem like a strictly better approach.

[http://quantum-journal.org](http://quantum-journal.org)

<comment><AUTHOR> Stated end goal of Quantum:

"The point of "becoming an attractive journal for researchers in every stage of their career" is crucial: Quantum should become an attractive publishing venue for the whole community of researchers in the field, including those who support Quantum's vision but who, due to external constraints, cannot afford to take the risk of not publishing in a high-impact journal. Arguably this can be achieved in one of two ways: either the whole incentive system is overturned, or Quantum must become comparable to high-impact journals for the purposes of career advancement. In the short and medium term, only one of these options seems realistic. The decision to create Quantum as a selective journal is to a good extent based on the belief that it will give Quantum a much higher chance of making a difference." [source: [http://quantum- journal.org/should-quantum-be-selective/](http://quantum-journal.org/should- quantum-be-selective/)]

I think it's an apples and oranges case given one (PCiX's) is a platform and the other (Q's) is a journal. It also seems to me that PCiX's goals are explicitly aligned with facilitating the sharing of results in a trust/reputation network, whereas Quantum seeks to address additional e.g career issues as well (which can limit it to more conservative decisions.)

<comment><USER6> As plainly written, that's a case of Quantum actually trying to consider real- world constraints, not a different end goal. It demonstrates seriousness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting. Romain Brette has been doing something similar by himself for computational neuroscience (and other subjects that catch his interest) [http://journal.romainbrette.fr/](http://journal.romainbrette.fr/)

</comment><comment><USER8> I like the idea, but I am afraid that as long as there are no "big names" behind it, it isn't going to make much headway in the conservative world of science. As tough as it sounds: reputation is the currency of science, and PCiX needs to get some before it can become a viable publishing alternative to the established journals.

</comment><comment><USER9> Best scientific initiative of the entire history.

Just saying it because I had this idea 4 months ago (not that I'm claiming ownership of the idea, since it's a pretty simple idea that probably was thought of by thousands) and presented it to a friend which is a scientist (I'm not, thank you, God) and he promptly dismissed it.

</comment><comment><USER10> Is there a reason to think this would be better than just computing the pagerank of every scientific paper based on the citation networks? (Optionally, use signals to predict future pagerank of recently published papers.)

I would expect that using the citation data from published papers would be more valuable, in the same way that revealed preferences are more valuable than polls due to the cost.

While Google Scholar implicitly uses pagerank to rank academic papers, I've put together a tool that explicitly shows you pagerank for each paper, available at [1]. Currently, this contains only pubmed, which means that it does leave out a significant set of physics/computer science papers, and also doesn't yet capture preprint archives.

1 = [https://pubrank.carbocation.com/](https://pubrank.carbocation.com/)

<comment><USER11> To discuss how a paper is wrong you have to first cite the paper. The need to discuss bad papers can arise for a number of reasons. So some papers cite rank != quality.

<comment><USER10> True. Pagerank is "importance" rather than "quality". But as your network of recommenders becomes larger and starts to approximate the scientific community as a whole, I'd imagine that there will be convergence. If not, that would be a welcome and (to me) surprising result.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I expected other people to suggest here, or maybe come up with a link of, a system totally decentralized of peer-reviews.

</comment><comment><USER12> I really, really hope this takes off. Current system is so flawed...</comment>


Enterprisify your Java Class Names - <AUTHOR> http://projects.haykranen.nl/java/ Make sure your Java class names are Enterprisified(tm), use the Enterprisify tool! <comment><USER2> If you want additional class naming inspiration, just browse the Spring codebase! Some of my favourites:

\- SimpleBeanFactoryAwareAspectInstanceFactory

\- AbstractInterceptorDrivenBeanDefinitionDecorator

\- AbstractInterruptibleBatchPreparedStatementSetter

\- SimpleRemoteStatelessSessionProxyFactoryBean

\- TransactionAwarePersistenceManagerFactoryProxy

[http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.0.x/javadoc- api...](http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.0.x/javadoc- api/allclasses-noframe.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, these names are pure gold! I've added about 30 new terms including classics such as 'Advisor', 'Filter and 'Generic'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A related blast from the past: Steve Yegge's "Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns" blog post:

[http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in- kingdom...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of- nouns.html)

<comment><USER4> Yes. The site on this post seems to be "the word made flesh", though. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> To be honest the "before" names look just as Enterprise-y as the "after" names.

</comment><comment><USER6> I did something similar at <http://methodnamer.com/> and also some useless graphs and rants about the long names in Java ([http://www.fatvat.co.uk/2011/05/method-names-in-java- develop...](http://www.fatvat.co.uk/2011/05/method-names-in-java-development- kit.html))

<comment><AUTHOR> Pretty cool, but they're not long enough ;)

<comment><USER7> Change the dropdown to "Spring Framework style"

Gems such as setAspectListenerJobsToNativeIfStatements shall be yours!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Want to find the longest class names in a Java codebase? Try this one-liner: <https://gist.github.com/338197>

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm on a Spring project, and the devs seem to do all the variables in this superLongVerboseHardToReadStyle.

Most of my work is Python/JavaScript/PHP, and in all three cases, the dev culture is mostly about short, succinct variable names.

So what is it about Java that makes developers tend toward these incredibly verbose variables? It makes it impossible to produce templates with reasonable line lengths sometimes, especially after adding on JSTL directives.

<comment><USER10> I guess it's twoo things: first, It's a common thing in java to somehow work the role a class plays in a design pattern into the class name, and the second is that variable names often reflect the type (class name), so there you go. Love it, hate it or go out and have some fun...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Surely someone here has programmed in Cocoa, right? NSAccessibilityScreenPointForLayoutPointParameterizedAttribute, anyone?

</comment><comment><USER12> Unfortunately, I work at a place where most of the programmers here use naming conventions like these. I'm pretty sure it's to cover up their lack of ability or maybe they are suffering from dunning-kruger.

<comment><USER13> _> dunning-kruger_

This does not mean exactly what you think it means.

<comment><USER12> your interpretation of my comment is not what you think it means

<comment><USER13> That's not my fault ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sure, you're laughing now. But somebody you work with is going to find this site and use it in earnest, and before you know it you'll be setting your Eclipse window to automatically open across four monitors in horizontal series just to be able to edit one file at a time.

No parody is so foolish that no fool will ever take it seriously. Take care who you show this to.

</comment><comment><USER15> My personal record:

        PropertyWithADifferentDefaultValueAlreadyExists

And I've missed to add `Exception` to its end, because that's what it is.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've found that most of these complex class names are found in the very frameworks which exist to simplify Java development (Spring being the big one), therefore I find myself never having to create a class with a name like this.

<comment><USER17> But to be fair, unless you are really digging in and extending Spring you don't normally interact with these classes that often. That doesn't make the class names great but for most people Spring provides a lot of functionality and does simplify a lot of tasks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> All developers of these codebases need to do is place some ads on their documentation pages and they'll rake in a fortune from the amount of times people have to load it up to remember a class name.

Symfony2's namespacing is a good one for this too:

        \Symfony\Bundle\SecurityBundle\DependencyInjection\Security\Factory\SecurityFactoryInterface
        \Symfony\Component\Form\Extension\Core\DataTransformer\DateTimeToLocalizedStringTransformer

<http://api.symfony.com/2.0/classes.html>

</comment><comment><USER19> What do you guys think of this?

[http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/HashWithInd...](http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/HashWithIndifferentAccess.html)

[http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/Cache/Compr...](http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/Cache/CompressedMemCacheStore.html)

<comment><USER8> Child's play!

<comment><USER20> Not enterprise enough!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> lol

<comment><USER21> Well, I guess you guys are in a bad mood today.

<comment><USER22> The culture around here dislikes noise. A post which just says "lol" adds nothing to the discussion, and will likely get downvoted.

<comment><USER21> I'm quite aware what the culture is like. Frankly, I don't care, I thought the original post was funny, and I said so. It's not that big of a deal if I get downvoted, but honestly, don't you think this type of downvoting is a sign people just might be taking things a _bit_ too seriously?

After all: the original post was a site that made progressively more ridiculous names for Java classes. I could argue __that __post adds nothing to the discussion in the first place (other than being amusing).

<comment><USER23> _don't you think this type of downvoting is a sign people just might be taking things a bit too seriously?_

Put simply no, there are a plethora of other sites that allow humor, many here find them to be too noisy or they keep their humor and one liners to the other sites. I personally like humor but have seen how it can destroy an otherwise great informational site. If it where allowed on HN the quality of HN would be destroyed in less than a years time. I have been around the net a long time, and have seen many come and many go, the common thread among all of the ones that went was the posts became utter garbage. One you loose the post, the high value contributors move on, then the quality of information suffers and provides further fuel for poor comments.

So it may seem that HN is a bunch of sticks in the mud, but remember we have a lot of high value people in this community many of us, helped create the net in the very early days, while others are Vally insiders, yet others are successful product people. HN is one of the most valuable resources in the tech world, to loose that would be a grave loss.

That being said, I agree with you on the quality of this article, I think it speaks volumes about the point I am trying to make.

<comment><USER21> Fair enough. I can see your point.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Old Techies Never Die; They Just Can't Get Hired as an Industry Moves On (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/us/bay-area-technology-professionals-cant-get-hired-as-industry-moves-on.html <comment><USER2> So I turned 55 years old last Monday, am employed as a senior software engineer for a startup in the voter education and civic engagement space, and I guess I'm qualified to comment on this. I read this same refrain over and over, and if I peer just a little bit between the lines I think I perceive a common pattern. A lot of these people are just not up to keeping up. Learning the next thing is a wearisome burden for many of them. If you get to that point in your career, then yes, that's pretty much death in this business. If you haven't moved into management by that point consider another line of work.

For my own part, this is still what I love to do. I'm busy 10 or more hours a day and at least eight of them are spent with some technology I knew nothing about six months ago. I was layed off from another startup at the end of September and started this current gig three weeks later. We just finished five weeks ramping up on Google Container Engine, during which time I also learned to use GNU make for the first time, and learned about etcd and Google Compute Engine. What it boils down to is this: stay interested, and stay current, and you stay employed. If those things are not within your power you no longer belong in this craft.

<comment><USER3> As a 34 year old I always like hearing of people who actually manage to pull off a long career, it gives me hope.

If you notice, a lot of these people in that article are in hardware design: electrical engineering, probably Verilog and the like. A lot of that work has successfully been outsourced which I think is the real cause of the decline. I suspect it didn't look like it was a particularly bad field to be in until it suddenly wasn't.

It's a long way from webdev though. And yeah these are presumably smart guys who could pick up webdev, but could they make the career transition without getting bumped back down to Junior by the hiring manager? And who wants to hire a 45 year old junior web developer?

There was an article recently about YCombinator shifting its investments to biotech. Suppose webdev dried up and all the funding started flowing to biotech. I'm sure I could learn what I'd need to know and I bet you could too, but could we head over to the biotech companies and sell ourselves as "middle aged web guys, self taught biotech engineers (no experience)?"

<comment><USER4> As someone who has gone the other way I would say no. Getting to the forefront in biotech is a 10 year full time journey. I have met a few developers who have tried to learn, but they have all struggled.

Having said this don't worry, if you think the job prospects are bad for old developers they are far worse for old scientists.

<comment><USER5> Biotech also pays a lot less.

If you look at current jobs such as "bioinformatics programmer", the salaries are somewhere between a biologist and a software engineer even though it requires more knowledge than either. Remember, biologists start off at around 35-50k/yr on jr. level, while SEs start at ~100k+.

Basically, it is better to be a junior level SE than a super senior bioinformatician.

<comment><USER6> "even though it requires more knowledge than either"

It doesn't usually require more knowledge. The majority of bioinformaticians that I know are pretty poor coders, and know just enough Perl or Python to count some stuff up an do some stats on it or plot a graph. They have no idea how to set up a server, write maintanable code, design a database well or keep a website secure. Obviosuly there are exceptions, but the majority that I have worked with are junior level programmers with knowledge of biology.

<comment><USER7> "knowledge of biology"

I am not sure you fully appreciate what " knowledge of biology" means. As a programmer who did a lot of molecular biology in the past - doing molecular biology is not simple. The learning curve for a lot of biological topics - especially the ones that get close to organic chemistry is really steep.

<comment><USER4> This is something that I have seen people with a CS or EE background really underestimate. The amount of biology information you need to keep in your head is huge. There is not a core of day-to-day knowledge that you can use and look up the rest when you need, you need to keep all of it in your head just to get the most basic things done.

<comment><USER7> Its the same everywhere.

Programmers underestimating the value/knowledge of accountants/lawyers.

Businessman assuming tech work is simple.

People by default assume what looks simple for someone to do must be simple - even if they spent 10,000+ hours practicing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm in my 40s and recently changed jobs. Every single company that I sent my resume to contacted me and I got through the phone screens on all but 1. That company sent a frontend developer just out of college to interview me, but I'm pure backend and didn't know too many frontend concepts, which flummoxed the interviewer. He basically had no idea how to interview me and gave up.

Of the companies I went onsite to, half of them gave me offers. The others didn't, but not because of ageism but because my interview performance wasn't as strong as I hoped (asking questions in areas I wasn't prepared for, lack of expertise in their desired programming lang, screwed up the coding question, etc). All of the offers I received were an increase from my current job.

Overall I would say that ageism doesn't exist. Employers want people that can contribute quickly without a lot of handholding and without training. This applies whether or not you are a fresh grad or a veteran programmer. If you instill confidence that you are highly qualified to the interviewer, you will generally get the job.

And as someone who has been intimately involved in the hiring process as a hiring manager, I can say the same thing. I've interviewed people of a variety of ages and the only takeaway I care about is will they hit the ground running and contribute to the team quickly. That's why software developers are highly paid. When I first started working, IBM would give aptitude tests completely unrelated to programming, and if you did well, you would get a job and be trained.

Unfortunately those days don't exist anymore, for the most part. It's a problem caused strictly because of how highly paid engineers are. If salaries were 50-60k, then I'm pretty sure companies would be more apt to training and waiting for new people to get on board. But salaries are easily 3X that in the Valley, so at that price, you need to be contributing very quickly otherwise you're a waste of money.

<comment><USER9> Ageism does exist in some companies. But like any bad bias, clever companies can exploit that, and thereby reduce the impact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Don't know where I sit in this bell curve. Probaby far to the right. The question is - what moral to the story can be gained from my case.

I turn 68 next month. 7 years ago I was cold-call recruited (they called, not me) and offered by three companies all wanting embedded systems expertise. All at the same time. Never rains but it pours, eh?

Two were boring embedded Linux. One was fun gaming console OS. Audio SDK and DSP, specifically (although I was not pointed there for a good year after hiring). I'm still there. And the interesting bit is - I had never coded Audio or DSP before. They liked my technology surfing history, that wide 'T' shaped profile on LI. And, clearly, age had nothing to do with it. Experience, proven adaptability, and quick at learning new stuff did. Is my theory, anyway. But that is not something one can decide to add to the CV in a panic after the fact of layoffs. It starts in ones' teens and never stops.

But then, this is an established Japanese company in Seattle. Two major differences to SV start-ups.

<comment><USER11> The media likes to imply that the only tech companies are start-ups or Google, FB, Amazon and Apple but in reality there are plenty more established companies looking to implement new (and well-established) technologies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Now, this is just my impression... I have no statistics to back this up. But I've been working in IT for 20 years, and eh, it is changing. The sort of person who gets hired is changing.

My impression is that the industry is changing... not really in the tools we use (UNIX is older than I am; we keep re-hashing some combination of C and lisp, it seems that virtualization tech is on a one decade cycle. It's the same shit, new packaging) - no, the industry is changing because more "normal people" are entering it. Standards are going up in terms of expectations of things like social skills, being tall, good looking, etc, etc, all the things you'd expect to need to succeed in sales or management or other things that a normal person might do. My observation of my unemployed friends; the sort of people who were seriously into computers in the early to mid '90s, is that they are generally rejected on "cultural fit" grounds. "You aren't cool enough to work here"

I mean, it's still way easier in tech than in sales, for a person with poor social skills or poor confidence, a man who is short, or someone who is plain ugly, but every year, the vast difference between sales and engineering seems to be shrinking. It's pretty dramatic, really, because when I started in the '90s, it seemed like this was the haven for people who were not welcome anywhere else. Being smart enough to do the job excused a lot of negative attributes that would not have been excusable in other fields.

<comment><USER13> When the investing community saw Facebook pull a shit ton of cash directly out of the sky, it said "We must be 'social.' Social is the way, the truth and the life."

Couple that with the following realization: the folks in pure product innovation roles at startups -- the people who are supposed to be insightful oracles creating compelling visions and perfect shortlists of vital user stories for killer apps -- these people are not ... really ... that ... good. (Even the ones from Stanford.)

So, now programmers must define the product, create the product AND sell the product (with their cool, unshaven, youthful faces).

All programmers must now be brogrammers. The pure nerd work is sent overseas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Due to a startup failing I had occasion to do two job searches in the course of a year. For one, I had %100 correlation-- when the call was a video call (Even to HR reps who know nothing about technology) I wouldn't get called back. Now I'm not ugly, I'm handsome, but my beard is white. On the other hand, when the contact would be via phone call only, I would get offers.

This is with bay area startups. Outside the bay area I can't say... but because I'm not in the bay area and all interaction with them was remote I can say there was a comparison to be made.

It's the dipthong startups that are the problem-- these kids these days don't know nothing about technology and believed Mark Zuckerberg on the Startup School stage in 2007 when he said "Don't hire anyone over 30 years old! Young people just get it." (paraphrasing, but I was there, it was obvious he had no understanding of the concept of wisdom.)

Anyway, discrimination means you miss out on the best people-- and at least according to my employers, they're pretty grateful to have me.

But pebble, digital ocean, and the like... they can't see past the grey beard.

<comment><USER15> Shave.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I seem to recall seeing this a few years ago, and I think the same basic addition still applies.

"Old Techies Never Die; They Just Can't Get Hired in Bay Area Technology Companies and Startups as an Industry Moves On."

</comment><comment><USER17> Many great businesses were started by founders aged 50+.

"The average and median age of U.S.-born tech founders was thirty-nine when they started their companies. Twice as many were older than fifty as were younger than twenty-five."

Cites: [https://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/advisor/older- entrepreneurs-...](https://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/advisor/older-entrepreneurs --the-startup-mentality-is-not-bound-by-age-000959494.html) ; [http://www.kauffman.org/what-we- do/research/2009/04/educatio...](http://www.kauffman.org/what-we- do/research/2009/04/education-and-tech-entrepreneurship)

<comment><USER18> I'm always do relieved to be reminded of this. I'm in my early thirties and an getting nervous about the window of opportunity passing.

<comment><USER19> Don't worry about that. The thing you'd want to worry about, if anything, is spending years just grinding away in your one little niche.

Lots of old people start companies, but the key to success is having a wide variety of experience, and not being afraid to get more (like sales! like marketing! and so on!).

You can do it! (I did! And just landed my 4th customer for a high-dollar-value subscription service!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> 45 years old, been a professional developer since I was 13 (sold my first code in '83), been through all the ropes in 3 decades .. and am now facing the agism of this industry with a fury.

My advice to all of you - young or old - is never forget to learn new things. Always have at least 5% of your stack of things, to do with learning something new. Software development is not a 'career': its an art form. There will always be new states of the art, and as an evolving process, will necessarily involve abandoning the old and continuing with the new.

Nobody cares if you're old. Everybody cares if you've been doing it for 30 years and still can't write a parser, or compile a new library, or spend 8 hours to hack up some code in a new language that nobody knows about yet. Keep that stuff up, newbies and old-folks alike .. its the only way forward.

</comment><comment><USER21> In today's tech environment, you have to be a fickle programmer to get yourself hired. With age however most people learn just the opposite - to be less fickle and more focused.

I think that the current complaints about age-discrimination, apparent and false though they may be, indicate a misguided but passing phase that the industry is going through. People are hedging with trivial ideas and products, hoping they will stick. These guys built a CAD product on the cloud called Onshape, check out their engineering team - [https://www.onshape.com/team](https://www.onshape.com/team)

<comment><USER22> The passing phase in question has been going on for 10+ years. Up to 20, depending how you count.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Old Techies/Janitors/Bartenders/Drivers/Personal Assistants/Writers/etc..... Never Die....

There is this sense that many problems are unique to one industry when they are shared across many.

</comment><comment><USER24> My uncle is a 65 year old COBOL programmer who has never been out of work.

<comment><USER22> A reminder that one way to keep your job security is to learn an important legacy tech really well.

I have high hopes for Ruby on Rails -- it won't have the longevity of COBOL, but it's gonna be a nightmare of a legacy system ;-)

<comment><USER25> In some cases, Rails already is a nightmare legacy system. Lot's of fun upgrading Rails 2 apps on the side.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Didn't think much about this until recently, and while gainfully employed, haven't been able to find a new interesting job this year despite actively looking. It's now November.

I'm an expert-level python, web, and javascript dev, with wide experience in admin and QA as well. In my 40s, up to date, and a much better developer than I was a decade ago.

</comment><comment><USER27> Although it's obviously more of a problem for hardware people judging by this article, this makes me glad, as a sysadmin, that my career has been almost exclusively contract based.

This wasn't much of a conscious choice, it was just the way it panned out for me early on but after 21 years in IT and only 1.5 years of that in 'permanent' employment, I feel glad that this way of working has forced me to chop and change roles, technologies and sectors so that I have done UNIX/Linux SA, DBA and storage work and have had some recent AWS/ansible experience too.

If I had stayed at my first 'enterprise' role, I could probably be in some management role now or be in a technical role that would have made me hard to employ elsewhere too. I'm much happier that I think I now have a record of varied experience showing I can pick up new stuff.

</comment><comment><USER17> 50+ here, starting [https://www.trycryptomove.com](https://www.trycryptomove.com). Some of the top cybersecurity advisors (and our increasingly growing list of pilot customers) seem to believe in me just fine. Age is just a number!

Languages, tools, and frameworks evolve (including the brand new distributed programming language I invented, 'Hello', available at [http://www.amsdec.com/](http://www.amsdec.com/)).

But good software architecture and engineering is an art that improves with time.

<comment><USER28> Which is why so many job postings request "generally good software architecture and engineering skills" instead of "5+ years with Amazeballs Framework and HotLang."

<comment><USER13> so true and so typical.

Amazeballs wasn't even invented until 2014. we all know that.

stupid recruiters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Some of these guys may be super specialized, and not find easy opportunities in their line. Others may just not be agile enough to stay on top of the latest thing that came up in the last 6 months, which is perhaps more of a DevOps mentality.

But on the hardware aspect, I would think there is hope. Given the increasing move towards the new maker mode of desktop fabrication & IoT, there should be demand for people with hardware skill sets that integrate well with web, cloud & mobile.

The problem always remains that the smartest minds are frequently poor at marketing themselves.

</comment><comment><USER30> From what I'm gathering as a developer moving into 30, you have two options:

1\. Market yourself so that when you hit the pay ceiling, you can move into consulting/freelancing with enough of a name for yourself that you can justify your rates to businesses.

2\. Move into management. If you hate marketing, start looking for management/mentoring opportunities now so that your next promotion/job has some sort of manager title, which will continue your mobility up to the Director -> VP -> C-level.

<comment><USER31> 3\. Squirrel away as much as possible while you have that high paying job and retire early. When retired, work on open source hardware and software.

<comment><USER32> So much this. Save as much as possible when you're young; just like football players and strippers (or any industry where age is paramount), it doesn't last forever.

EDIT: 32. Didn't save enough in my 20s. Saving as much as I can now (living below my means, paid off my mortgage, maxing out 401K/HSA/IRAs).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> In legal / medicine / accounting / other fields there are annual license requirements for continued education.

Obviously these fields move slower than tech but would be fascinating to see what could be put together to broadly engage and keep technical people (self included) on their toes.

Mix the curriculum between the applied (new languages / dbs / OS), emerging market exposure (vr / crypto currency / self driving), and the novel (snapchat / vine / etc).

</comment><comment><USER25> One thing I do at least once every 6 months is freshen up my CV and apply for jobs. The process of looking at job postings, talking to recruiters and noting what you're getting the most calls/emails about can help you decide where to focus your energies in the next 1-3 years and/or spot trends early.

</comment><comment><USER34> Date (2012).

<comment><USER35> Thanks—added.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The article has

"stay on the cutting edge".

Ha! The real _leading edge_ is work that is at least "new, correct, and significant" and published in a peer-reviewed journal of original research in _information technology_ , yes, and also powerful and valuable in practice.

So, put on resume that have published in original mathematical statistics for detecting zero-day problems, in artificial intelligence, and in optimization, and still get silence. With Silicon Valley, _leading edge_ has no connection with peer-reviewed original research!

So, do a startup. Web development? Taught myself -- the Web page code works fine. The difficulty was a lot of poorly written documentaiton. The software was fast, fun, and easy.

"Leading edge"? Yup -- my startup is based on some original applied math I derived, complete with theorems and proofs. Likely and apparently I'm the only person in the world who understands that work. Definitely _leading_.

The problem my work solves, a lot of people have regarded as important. So far, I have the only good solution. Some of the people trying to solve the problem say that the solution I have is impossible -- they didn't understand what the heck they were talking about. They couldn't come up with a counterexample why not or a theorem of why can. The people just were not very good.

Problem is, really, _leading_ is not what Silicon Valley is looking for. They wouldn't know the real stuff about _leading_ if it slapped them in the face. My best published papers, nearly no one in Silicon Valley has the prerequisites to read, and likely no one outside of Stanford or Berkeley and only a few people there.

Instead of _leading_ , they want two years of experience in just what the heck low grade, routine, simple minded, poorly documented API or OSS they are struggling with today.

Those people are being self-taught on their way to the _leading edge_ and are floundering around and stand not to get to the _leading edge_. E.g., they keep saying _Bayesian_ and _power law_ but don't know the difference between the weak and strong laws of large numbers or about conditional expectation, non- parametric hypothesis tests, the Radon-Nikodym theorem, anything about martingales, the Neyman-Pearson lemma, etc., enough about conditioning even to understand the definition of a Markov process, a basic result such as

E[E[Y|X]] = E[Y]

the role of sigma algebras, or any such things.

Early in my career, I started in computing and started to get self-taught in the often associated applied math. I made good progress in some things but otherwise floundered around with low quality materials, etc.

Then I went for a good Ph.D. and got one. Now I can say, nearly no one in Silicon Valley startups is in any significant sense even near the _leading edge_ and, instead, they are just floundering around.

Back to my startup -- a few good days and I should be able to go live.

<comment><USER37> > the role of sigma algebras

i.e. the definition of probability? yea, i expected ppl to be more interested in that, myself

otoh, be careful about minimizing other skill sets. doesn't take much more than basic arithmetic on the math side to understand the linux kernel, but the skills needed to be productive with such an engineering challenge aren't any kind of joke.

<comment><USER36> It's easy enough in elementary treatments of probability to say what is meant by random variables X and Y are _independent_. And in both theory and applications, independence is just crucial. Well, what about uncountably infinite collections A and B of random variables being independent? Also, random variables that are functions of independent random variables are independent, etc. The sigma algebra generated by a random variable, or a collection of such, is important to be able to work with. E.g., just in the Poisson process, that is, the vanilla arrival process, need to talk about the time to the next arrival being independent of all of the past of the process.

> Linux kernel

Difficult? Right. No doubt by now it's huge, and I have to believe has many patches. And I have to suspect that it's not well documented. And people that use it especially want it for high end work where they make modifications, and then the problems of complexity, documentation, testing, etc. get much worse.

Difficult? Yes. _Leading edge_ , not in the usual sense of knowledge. More broadly, tough to make progress in any sense if still have to spend much effort with the Linux kernel -- we're supposed to be past that by now. This may be wrong for some niche need, but people should try to keep their careers out of such niches.

Linux kernel performance? Might want some math there!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Something journalists like to say. Not true. Hacker News classic nonsense.

</comment><comment><USER39> The more I examine it, the more I realise that at this point in time, the programming profession is a trap.

I'll try to explain it.

1\. 20 years ago we were called "computer geeks". Young people fond of computers. This term does not apply anymore. Now everyone under 20 is a computer geek.

My daughter is 5. You know what 5-yo kids draw in school ? User interfaces. That's right. Checkboxes and buttons and sliders. They don't know what they are called, but they know how to use them. Every day they draw UIs and computers and they play with them at school, then they come home and interact with their tablets.

But that is the coming generation. Today, even if you've never seen a computer, you can catch on pretty quickly, because:

2\. There is almost no entry barrier into the profession. After a month of tutorials and interview training you can get a job as a junior developer. In fact, there're so many learning opportunities right now that it doesn't seem fair. _Anyone_ _anywhere_ can learn to do what you do - and better, because he can learn from the best. And they can produce better code faster, because:

3\. Services like Github have trivialised code sharing and reuse.

Each library solves some kind of problem. Before, it required days or even months of work and research. Now, it's just a 'pod install' or 'npm install' .

But it's good, right ? It's so much easier to develop software now... That's true, however, given the way things are evolving: 3.1. If it has any 'general- purpose' value, what you're working on right now is (or will soon be) obsolete, because someone else will release it as an open source lib. Good for everyone, not as good for all the programmers who would have been paid to develop their version of it.

Of course, we can ride the wave and try to keep current with all that's happening, right ? Well, turns out that's not so trivial anymore, because:

4\. The field has become extremely wide and each area is an ocean in itself. Take 'the backend' : there are dozens of languages and frameworks, each of them being updated weekly. Or iOS Development. Machine learning ? Computer vision ? Sound engineering ? .... You did notice this didn't you ?

And if that isn't enough food for thought, then

5\. AI will eat our lunch pretty soon. Maybe 5, maybe 10 years from now, there will be no 'programmers', because everyone will be a programmer. The tools, libraries and techniques will be sufficiently advanced for anyone to speak the requirements and design ideas and the AI will write all the underlying code.

AI combined with the 5 year olds of today who are already doing UX design.

Note that this wasn't the case 5-10 years ago. Before the iPhone, Github, Khan academy and Coding Bootcamps, the industry was a different beast. What the future holds is of course unknown, but the signs are that 'programming' is not a skill that will feed you for the rest of your life. Time to think about other things you're good ;).

<comment><USER40> I call BS (in as good natured and respectful way as possible), and I have my own numbered list to share:

1) I've been hearing this every 5-10 years for the past 30 years, and it still hasn't happened (which is enough to explain my scepticism but granted doesn't prove anything).

2) The hardest part of what programmers do isn't pasting crap into an editor, snapping blocks into scratch or waving their hands at Jarvis, it's understanding the frickin' problem and thinking clearly about it.

3) The second hardest thing is maintaining that clarity while holding multiple levels of abstraction in your head at the same time. Most people struggle with this and don't really enjoy it. It may explain why people that like maths gravitate to programming (and vice versa).

So, yeah, things are going to get weird (and awesome!), and maybe there will be fewer job codes, but there will be a role for "explains things to computers" until Skynet (or the Culture) is online. IMNSHO.</comment></comment>


How to Think - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/409043/how-to-think/ <comment><USER2> Synthesize new ideas constantly

Learn how to learn (rapidly)

Work backward from your goal

Always have a long-term plan

Make contingency maps

Collaborate

Make your mistakes quickly

write-up best practices protocols

Document everything obsessively

Keep it simple</comment>


Efficient storage: how we went down from 50 PB to 32 PB - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@andrewsumin/efficient-storage-how-we-went-down-from-50-pb-to-32-pb-99f9c61bf6b4#.ju1t29abd <comment><USER2> Possible security problems:

\- It may be possible to use timing to determine if a file already exists. So it could be possible for an attacker to determine for someone if some other mail.ru user received a file with some given contents.

\- They rely on no-one being able to construct a collision of (SHA1, CRC32, size) I believe SHA1 collisions are at least possible. If it was possible to construct such a collision you could change someone else's files by sending an email earlier with the collision.</comment>


Reverse engineering guide for beginners: Methodology and tools - <AUTHOR> https://0x00sec.org/t/re-guide-for-beginners-methodology-and-tools/2242 <comment><USER3> I highly recommend this guide on how Samba was written, describing the techniques involved on RE [0].

[0] - [https://www.samba.org/ftp/tridge/misc/french_cafe.txt](https://www.samba.org/ftp/tridge/misc/french_cafe.txt)

<comment><USER4> Thanks so much. I respect Samba developers so much for how we take them, and Wine devs for granted, and especially Tridge for RE'ing the Bitkeeper protocol and taking heat from Linus and indirectly leading to git with his unstoppable curiosity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> After brushing up on this, if you're looking for something "fun" to work through, the NSA's 2016 Codebreaker challenge is good, granted you have a .edu email address (only US .edu too, unfortunately).

[https://codebreaker.ltsnet.net/challenge](https://codebreaker.ltsnet.net/challenge)

I think they're going to be keeping the 2016 version up for a while longer. They generally start a new one in September each year.

<comment><USER6> Damn, too bad they don't accept .ac.uk addresses :( I feel like there should be a standardised way to ensure users are students/affiliated with an educational institution (maybe an international federation on top of SAML a la the UK Access Management Federation).

I guess at the end of the day the NSA want students in the US, who are likely US citizens and thus eligible for a job.

<comment><USER7> > I feel like there should be a standardised way to ensure users are > students/affiliated with an educational institution

or you know, they could just open it for the public, given that there's such a wide gap in quality, cost, subsidy and affordability between higher education worldwide.

only after I stepped out the university bubble, I saw how unfair this "educational license" stuff really is. so many people who just can't afford to, so many people who don't have access to actual quality education (and don't want to throw money away just to get a piece of paper), so many smart people that spent years in "lower" (level) education (often family background not aiming high enough for their daughter/son) and then not qualifying for further funding (I'm seeing this a lot in the Netherlands, recently, it's really sad).

question is, what are you _really_ selecting for by only accepting affiliation with an educational institution? who are you excluding and why?

(note: I put "lower" in quotes, because I feel everyone should in principle receive education to the best of their abilities. learning skills/knowledge/stuff is the goal and there's nothing wrong if that's not university-level. it's a wide world out there with so many beautiful different kinds of people)

<comment><USER6> You raise some really interesting points, and it's something I've never really considered befoer. I'm curious as to how you think it should work, though - <USER2> universal non-commercial license that people can use personally?

Do you think there's much scope for abuse in terms of people using the licenses commercially without funding the company behind the product, though? As an example I'm considering JetBrains' IDEs, but I think the same concerns could be applied to a wide variety of products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> An excellent introduction to Windows reverse engineering are lena151's video tutorials: [https://tuts4you.com/download.php?list.17](https://tuts4you.com/download.php?list.17)

<comment><USER9> I learned a lot from lena151's tutorials 8 years ago but I'm not sure if her tutorials could work on Windows 10.

<comment><USER8> I don't see why not. What problems are you having?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe fix the title to make it clear that this is about reversing _binaries_? Because RE is _quite_ a broad term, even within the field of computing and/or generally "topics of HN interest". You can reverse engineer so many other things than just executable binaries. And not just other kinds of software (web), but hardware, communication protocols, even organisations and bureaucracies, or processes in the widest sense of the word.

It's not like this article teaches much about the general "reversing mindset" (similar to the "hacker mindset", but not quite exactly the same), or the "methodology" as promised in the title. Because yes there is some very interesting overlap in skill within the broad field of RE. Ask any pentester who also picks locks.

Not to discredit the article itself, btw, which is fine given what it actually covers. Which is about Linux binaries, and in particular with the object of solving a crackme puzzle.

Maybe "Reverse engineering a crackme for beginners" would be a bit more descriptive.

<comment><USER10> Just to provide another perspective: I was expecting exactly this when I saw the title. Maybe we could also use reverse engineering for binaries and come up with new terms for all those other, largely unrelated, things. It's probably too late though and naming things "by committee" is unlikely to work anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Binary Ninja is a fine piece of software, but it is more ethical to advertise this article as "nice reversing tutorial included with said software", because not-so-hidden shameless advertisement for it is worse.

<comment><USER12> IMO, I really don't see this as "shameless advertisement". As far as I know, there are really only three worthwhile static analysis tools available right now, Radare2(free), Binary Ninja($99-$300), and IDA pro($500-$5000+). Using Radare2 at the beginning can be very daunting if you are new to RE. IDA is so expensive you can really only obtain it legally through your workplace or college/university, or if you're willing to spend a very large sum of money. That really only leaves Binary Ninja.

With that said there is nothing stopping people from starting with radare2 if they wish to, there is a lot of great tutorials for it available online. But in this case the recommendation of using Binary Ninja was one which the author (Nitrax) made because "due to its low cost .. compared to the functionalities provided", the author even further added "A demo version is available for free and should be enough for beginners."

I can understand the insistence on free and open-source software, but a lot of OSS tools in many fields have simply not caught up to their paid counterparts in all aspects. And to me, it feels much like calling someone a shill for saying "Make sure you use a good drill for this" instead of supplying references to a free & open 3D printable drill schematic.

<comment><USER13> (Hopper is also $99.)

<comment><USER12> Ah, yeah. I totally forgot about hopper. I've never used it, but it looks nice, especially for Objective C and Swift.

<comment><USER14> I'm sad that Windows support for Hopper was discontinued.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'd love to know more about disassembly. I've recently had more and more reason to go deeper into applications I'm running as dependencies. A few issues I've found and fixed just by using strace to get an idea of the system calls.

There was one thing in particular where I knew there was a jump somewhere (if some_length < some_width) that caused bad outputs. I was playing around looking at registers etc in gdb while following along with a disassembled version of the code, but it was impossible to get any idea where to start.

I wanted something that could give me a few seconds worth of samples of where the instruction register was spending its time as a starting point, but couldn't find any such tool (linux).

Within my control:

        - giving input files to explicitly set unique numbers to watch out for
        - giving inputs that would generate bad output numbers only in the bad code path
        - giving inputs to force a load of jumps down the bad or good code paths

Does anyone have any advice on how you might approach such a situation?

<comment><USER16> AFL automates this to a large degree. It doesn't do it with the type of machine control and monitoring you are asking for, but if you can instrument it with AFL, this is a perfect use case for it. It will do the hard work for you.

If you want to control the computer, you have options. Qemu can give you fine grained CPU level logging you want: [http://moyix.blogspot.jp/2014/07/breaking-spotify-drm- with-p...](http://moyix.blogspot.jp/2014/07/breaking-spotify-drm-with- panda.html) \-- this is an article that walks through logging them instructions. ([https://github.com/panda-re/panda](https://github.com/panda- re/panda))

Finally there are RE frameworks where you can instrument (hook) function calls (Frida being a good cross platform option).

I would try AFL first. But playing with Panda can be really fun too.

(edit: and a colleague just pointed out -- [https://github.com/angr](https://github.com/angr), which will also let you work right at the level you want to, I think).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> orthogonal :

I honestly wish CMU would release the lectures and full class materials for 15-213 (the course most typically associated with the bomb lab mentioned here). The lectures combined with the accompanying text and labs form a masterpiece, and it's a shame the community at large can't take better advantage of it. It's like SICP for systems : that effing good.

The tests, however, are just awful. Those can safely be dumpstered.

<comment><USER18> [https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~213/schedule.html](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~213/schedule.html)

That includes PDFs of the lectures and videos of said same. It looks similar to Berkeley's CS 61C.

<comment><USER17> Thanks for the link. Didn't realize they'd started both recording lectures and releasing them. Probably has something to do with the change in teaching faculty for the course. Wonder if the second half of the semester is available somewhere (I assume it'll be uploaded throughout the summer).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The bomblab is from CS:APP student labs section if anybody is interested [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14522391](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14522391) specifically here [http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/3e/labs.html](http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/3e/labs.html)

</comment><comment><USER20> Upvote if you grew up on Fravia and tKC

<comment><USER21> Was going to mention Fravia. He died in 2009 if you weren't aware, age 56.

Website here: [http://acrigs.com/FRAVIA/index- old.htm](http://acrigs.com/FRAVIA/index-old.htm)

+ORC ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Red_Cracker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Red_Cracker) ) always interested me. Like Satoshi Nakomoto, he has never been identified. Fravia's site has his tutorials here: [http://acrigs.com/FRAVIA/orc1.htm](http://acrigs.com/FRAVIA/orc1.htm)

Some pretty serious old school hackers.

<comment><USER22> Yup, blast from the past. I got serious about programming when I wanted to hack games for extra lives on my Spectrum.

When I later moved to the PC +fravia's resources were very much a sight for sore eyes.

Though I admit it was only years later when it occurred to me that +orc was almost certainly +fravia in a weak disguise. I took it literally at the time..

<comment><USER21> Obviously I don't know for sure, but the +ORC == Fravia seems to be rejected by most(?) +ORC stalkers.

[http://www.woodmann.com/crackz/Orc.htm](http://www.woodmann.com/crackz/Orc.htm)

Of course, without looking deeper he's the most obvious candidate

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> OpenSecurityTraining[1] videos are also a golden resource for beginning reverse engineers

[1] [http://opensecuritytraining.info/Training.html](http://opensecuritytraining.info/Training.html)

</comment><comment><USER20> Evan's debugger is nice for Olly fans

<comment><USER24> edb is great. Very useful. Also ht editor, very similar to Hiew and very keyboard friendly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> In around 2001 I started reverse-engineering games on the PC before having any programming skills (later moved to programming).

I remember MadWizard's assembly tutorial[0] being very helpful at the time.

[0] [http://www.madwizard.org/programming/tutorials/](http://www.madwizard.org/programming/tutorials/)

</comment><comment><USER26> wow times have changed from using softice and ollydbg. When I used to RE for fun it was sad seeing how expensive programs could just be rigged by a simple NOP or JNZ/JMP change.

My best challenge was Brazil (3ds render engine). It had all types of checks that would only show up when rendering.. But that was no match.. Good times

</comment><comment><USER27> Where RE is reverse engineering, as opposed to say, regular expressions.

<comment><USER28> Nobody in tech thinks RE stands for regular expression...

<comment><USER27> Search Google for "re documentation" and look at some of the results.

<comment><USER29> Google is effectively aliasing RE to regular expression. None of the links use "RE" as an acronym. Regex/Regexp has always been the accepted acronym.

<comment><USER27> They do though. RE is a python library, an Erlang library, there's a reference to perlre, clojure calls it re, etc. Then there's the C lib pcre.

Also Google chooses to alias certain things for a reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Blank page without javascript. Bye.

<comment><USER31> Idiot who voluntarily breaks their web browser, then complains that it's broken. Bye!

<comment><USER32> Context: Visiting a website written by/for reverse engineering, a subset of Hacking.

Assertion: Visiting a hacking website with Javascript disabled is a bad thing.

Hmmm...

<comment><USER31> Not a bad thing. You are obviously more than free to configure your browser however you want. Just don't whine about it. Maybe give some constructive criticism (It would be nice if..., Maybe you could consider to...).

Or just open the developer console and inspect the source, like a hacker/reverse engineer.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Playable HTML5 demo of Space Quest authors' Kickstarter project (Chrome app) - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lomnnfeooofoenddphjjfdfbpkiiboof

<comment><USER2> Hey, Rahul here, one of the guys from Q42 who built the prototype.

We approached the "Two Guys from Andromeda" just over a week ago with the idea of helping show them that HTML5 is a viable adventure gaming platform. They were so surprised that they brought us on with them to help prototype an early game demo during the Kickstarter period.

We had a lot of fun prototyping this, and it's just the beginning. Each time the Kickstarter pledges reach another $100k, we'll release another iteration based around fan feedback. This could mean better art, sound and narration, expanded gameplay, death sequences, etc - we're really looking to just interact with the fan community on this.

As far as we're concerned, getting to do this (working with our childhood heroes while using our favorite development platform) is a net win for hackers and geeks, so I thought it would be a relevant post here. Have fun!

<comment><USER3> If it's HTML5, why does it require Chrome? Is there any way I can have Firefox have a go at it?

<comment><USER2> Since it's a prototype we're focusing on fast iterations using webkit specific CSS properties and such without worrying about cross browser support. I think it works okay in Firefox, but we haven't tested it and don't guarantee it for this phase.

It requires Chrome because putting it up in the Chrome Web Store allows users to download and install it, which removes concerns about latency (since the assets total 7MB, we don't want the game art loading in fragments). It also allows us to point to a single place where people can get the game. And Google is in charge of hosting and bandwidth, something else we don't want to be worrying about right now.

If your concerns lie with Chrome being a Google product, I believe you can install it in Chromium as well, though I haven't tried it myself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is hardly a demo. It's barely even playable. There's no sound, no color and if it's supposed to highlight HTML5 (since that is in the title of the post), why does it require Chrome?

Spoiler alert: the end of the 15 seconds of the demo (if you can manage to get your walking sprite thing to it without getting stuck) is just asking for more money and redirects you to a website.

I'm a massive fan of the Space Quest series, and Sierra adventures in general, but this is just insulting and, in no way, makes me want to donate money to your cause.

"Hey it's Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy, the legendary (and charismatic, funny, brilliant and ever good looking) game designer duo!"

"You vaguely remember a post on Gamasutra about them getting filthy rich over some Kickstarter campaign."

...

"So why are you still standing here? Go make yourself useful!"

Really, why are you still standing here? Go back to the Kickstarter campaign and help get us to $200,000!

Aaaand... redirect to [http://guysfromandromeda.com/finishing-audio-scott- mark-prot...](http://guysfromandromeda.com/finishing-audio-scott-mark- prototype/) \- which has terrible display issues in Chrome. Were you guys intentionally attempting to make it look like you were just trying to squeeze money out of people? That's all this felt like.

This demo doesn't "interact with the community" or invite any sort of interaction with the community. It doesn't mention it in any way, shape or form in the "demo" or the website you're redirected to; saying so after the fact doesn't help at all.

I _was_ very excited about this. Color me very disappointed.

</comment><comment><USER5> Martin from Q42 here, also one of the guys behind the html5 prototype thing.

This first prototype is the least viable "playable game" to illustrate Mark and Scott really think highly of getting fans involved from the earliest sketch to the final adventure game.

Doing that and iterating quickly on (the overwhelming) responses needed a flexible engine and easy deployment to the PC, Mac and Linux platforms with an experience that is 99% similar on all of those. HTML5 and the Chrome Web Store are ideal for that.

So it's not about HTML5 itself actually, it's about being able to act upon fan feedback and incorporating that in an improved next prototype in a matter of days.

It feels like pioneering and the entire team (Two Guys and Q42) is very excited about what's coming up. A next prototype with real artwork, a real avatar and in the end music and all that - that's the bar we've set and it will be one that will resonate better with the most sceptic voices heared so far as the "prototype" will be as close to - or equal to - a real short adventure game. Only this time done with fans in a really short time.

</comment><comment><USER6> I played the demo and the dialog at the end really rubbed the wrong way. It felt like you were making a big joke about raising $100,000 and that the demo was just a ploy to get another $100,000.

You should consider the effect you're having on all the people who've trusted you and given you the first $100,000. The dialog at the end makes a mockery of their belief in you.

<comment><USER2> I understand what you're saying and we probably could have worded it differently, but ultimately we _do_ need another $100k. In fact, we need $500k or the game won't happen. So we're trying to focus the community on working towards those goals with us. After all, they want to play the real game, not just the prototype.

I prefer being honest about what the demo is: it's a great way to interact with the community and a great way to help spur further pledges. Hopefully playing the demo will convince people to up their pledge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great demo, it immediately felt like being back in the Space Quest world.

But did anybody try visiting q42.com? I'm not sure if this proxy server here is blocking some critical content or not but I find it impossible to navigate the 3D stuff. Once I click on a block of text I'm stuck and have to navigate back with browser buttons to see other options again. Some options seem cut- off from visibility. I wanted to see if they offer some sort of HTML5 game engine but I've had to give up because I can't figure out how to navigate this site. _Edit:_ Finally figured out that hectic scrolling with the mouse wheel allows me to navigate.

<comment><USER2> Haha, sorry about that. q42.com is very experimental, perhaps too much so. It works really well in Chrome/Safari, okay in Firefox, and not at all in the lower-end stuff.

You can use the keyboard to go back and forth between steps.

We don't offer a HTML5 game engine yet, but we'll build one if we need to. Right now we're using a light-weight version of what we made for sarien.net.

<comment><USER7> It's a cool idea and performed perfectly first try in Chrome once I figured how out to navigate it... for all I know it could be my mouse scroll sensitivity is the issue. Sarien.net is awesome BTW :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I must've missed the build up for all of this because all I got was a very, very buggy interface and two floating guys insulting me and I didn't get it.

That said, I did enjoy SpaceQuest as a kid -- looking at Wikipedia, I wasn't more than 10 when the last game came out. It seems like Kickstarter has become a mechanism for making me feel old.

<comment><USER2> What did you feel was very, very buggy about the interface? Please let us know so we can work on improvements.

<comment><USER8> Walking around in general felt painful - For example: I got stuck getting in to the first cave because I was standing on the wrong spot, so I had to walk around a bit to move forward, though the environment really didn't give me any clues that was the case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This doesn't appear to use Canvas...</comment>