NASA JPL C Coding Standard [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://lars-lab.jpl.nasa.gov/JPL_Coding_Standard_C.pdf <comment><USER2> I agree with almost all of it except for one thing: gotos have pretty much one legitimate use, as C's equiv to finally {} as part of a try {} block, ie, that specific form of cleanup after error management. NASA implies they have no legitimate use.

longjmp banning is also slightly questionable (although I can see why because it is very easy to do wrong). I use it inside of my code as part of an STM implementation (so begin_tx() setjmps[1], abort_tx() longjmps; its faster than manually unwinding with if(tx error) { return; } spam in deep call stacks.)

Using longjmp for this makes writing code much easier (no needing to error check every single tx function call), so less chance for bugs to slip in.

1: The only ugly part of that is begin_tx() is a function macro, which I prefer never to use in code that is executed; I tolerate it in "fancy template-like generator" setups, though.

<comment><USER3> You mention longjmp as useful in an STM implementation.

But you'd never see something like that in flight control software. Simplicity begets correctness. Correctness begets safety.

When the software is flying a rocket ship, I'm okay with it being 10% longer but 10% safer.

<comment><USER2> I wouldn't _use threads_ in mission critical software such as that, so that solves the problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A few summers ago I was an intern at JPL working on a static analysis suite for this exact standard.

Writing code checkers for these sorts of rules is a really interesting exercise and it helped me grow a lot as a programmer! I went from having no exposure to formal languages, parsing, and grammars to actively playing around with these concepts to try and help build more reliable software. It was a humbling, challenging, and incredibly rewarding experience.

Sometimes, a rule is extremely simple to implement. For example, checking a rule that requires that an assert is raised after every so many lines within a given scope is just a matter of picking the right sed expression. Other times, you really need an AST to be able to do anything at all.

A rule like "In compound expressions with multiple sub-expressions the intended order of evaluation shall be made explicit with parentheses" is particularly challenging. I spent a few weeks on this rule! I was banging my head, trying to learn the fundamentals of parsing languages, spending my hours diving into wikipedia articles and learning lex and yacc. The grad students at LaRS were always extremely helpful and were always willing to help tutor me and teach me what I needed to learn (hi mihai and cheng if you're reading!). After consulting them and scratching our heads for a while, we figured we might be able to do it with a shift-reduce parser when a shift or reduce ambiguity is introduced during the course of parsing a source code file. This proved beyond the scope of what I'd be able to do within an internship, but it helped me appreciate the nuance and complexity hidden within even seemingly simple statements about language properties.

Automated analysis of these rules gives you a really good appreciation of the Chomsky language hierarchy because the goal is always to create the simplest possible checker you can reliably show is able to accurately cover all the possible cases. Sometimes that is simple as a regular language, but the next rule might require you to have a parser for the language.

For what it's worth, this is only one of the ways the guys at LaRS (<http://lars-lab.jpl.nasa.gov/>) help try to improve software reliability on- lab. Most of the members are world-class experts in formal verification analysis and try to integrate their knowledge with missions as effectively as possible. Sometimes, this means riding the dual responsibility of functioning as a researcher and a embedded flight software engineer, working alongside the rest of the team.

If anyone's interested in trying out static analysis of C on your own, I highly reccomend checking out Eli Bendersky's awesome C parser for Python (<http://code.google.com/p/pycparser/>). I found it leaps and bounds better than the existing closed-source toolsets we had licenses for, like Coverity Extend. At the time, it had the extremely horrible limitation of only parsing ANSI 89, but Eli has since improved the parser to have ANSI 99 compliance. Analyzing C in Python is a dream.

<comment><USER5> > A rule like "In compound expressions with multiple sub-expressions the > intended order of evaluation shall be made explicit with parentheses" is > particularly challenging. I spent a few weeks on this rule! I was banging my > head, trying to learn the fundamentals of parsing languages, spending my > hours diving into wikipedia articles and learning lex and yacc.

Hmmm....how about this? If the code is parenthesized enough, then the precedence and associativity of the operators has no effect on the shape of the parse tree. So, if you take the expression and repeatedly make random changes to the operators and parse it, and you keep getting the same shape for the parse tree, it is sufficiently parenthesized.

<comment><USER6> Reverse the order of precedence and then compare the ASTs. If they're the same, then pass.

Smart.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Oh if only the project that I had been working on followed any of these rules. Most of the code was generated from Matlab, but some had to be translated by hand. I'm not sure any of us knew this even existed...

</comment><comment><USER8> Wait.... no malloc or sbrk? That means all space has to be stack allocated? That's a pretty serious limitation and would probably make it hard to do anything really interesting.

<comment><USER4> You don't want to do anything interesting in a space flight mission. Code affecting a space mission only has one chance to get it right in many cases. In general, memory management in these systems is extremely serious business. Think of all the ways that manual memory management in C has damaged the reliability of software you have written in the past.

In addition, a lot of the rules are created to make the task of reading source code easier, both for humans and machines. I remember Dr. Gerard Holzmann once half-joked in a meeting that he wanted to disallow any declaration of pointers except at static initialization. I sort of thought he was joking, but then he assured me that it was a serious consideration. He reminded me of the gravity of the situation and explained that $2 billion of public funds were on the line.

Disallowing pointer indirection would make the task of certain automated analysis techniques much, much simpler to perform. Adding a pointer indirection can really conflate matters sometimes.

<comment><USER8> But without pointer indirection and dynamic memory allocation, why even use C? The big idea of C is pointers. Aren't there languages designed for mission critical and embedded environments (Ada for instance) ?

<comment><USER4> This is a much larger discussion, akin to most religious wars in software ;-). There is a huge argument for what you're saying, but there's other forces at play. One aspect that plays into it is that C is a really nice layer on top of assembly, and there are a lot of extremely talented embedded C software engineers, (I'm assuming) moreso than the number of available Ada engineers. Also, keep in mind this is a pretty conservative domain. What has worked in the past is trusted much more than what might work better. Up until a decade or so, there was no operating system to speak of and most development used hardware controllers.

Also, C is not the only horse in town. In fact, I hear that Ada is actually pretty popular in space-flight. Other missions have successfully leveraged FORTH even. Using a Lisp read-eval print loop from many millions of miles away once saved the Voyager mission.

One really interesting point of view on this topic is Ron Garret's essay called "Lisping at JPL," available at <http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl- lisp.html> .

<comment><USER9> In my experience, I have never come across Ada in the spaceflight domain.

Among the big players in spacecraft flight software, there seems to be a divergent east-coast/west-coast preference for C and C++, respectively. In my estimation, this is the reason: there is a wide variety of target hardware and OSes and the need for FSW to be reused across all of them (embedded linux, VxWorks, QNX on PowerPC, SPARC, intel architectures). In terms of development environments and compiler toolchains, only ISO C (and to a slightly lesser degree C++) is supported by all of them.

Edit: Various instruments on spacecraft may be programmed in Forth or other nifty languages, for example, and there's a growing effort to make some of the more "interesting" challenges in spaceflight (autonomy, fault management, guidance-and-control, etc..) to be coded in custom domain-specific languages or other scripting languages like Lua.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "A recommended use of assertions is to follow the following pattern:" if (!c_assert(p >= 0) == true) { return ERROR; }

Why not: if (!c_assert(p >= 0)) { return ERROR; }

<comment><USER9> Because the whole point is to be maximally explicit and not implicit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> One thing that stood out for me was the vehement "no" to goto. That's a little too harsh, one thinks?

<comment><USER12> That is anything but an uncommon stance.

<comment><USER13> for C? it's very commonly used to jump to implement "catch" (jump to clean-up on error).

<comment><USER12> goto is commonly used that way in C... and it is just about as commonly straight up banned in C.

I am not defending the bans, but find it strange that people would be surprised by them.

<comment><USER13> > I am not defending the bans, but find it strange that people would be > surprised by them.

yes, i think a lot of replies here are speaking past each other, making valid and not actually contradictory points, but not really replying to each other.

if you read the entire doc it is clear that they are pushing c in a very safe, but somewhat unusual direction. there's no dynamic memory for example, so the main reason that most of my c code uses goto - to free memory on failure in a "catch" - is irrelevant.

taken as a whole, it's not what i would call normal c use, and i don't think it's very useful for most other people as a guideline, but it is internally consistent and, for the specific use case, reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Compared to other coding standards I like the brevity: 22 pages, 31 rules.

</comment><comment><USER15> This document reinforces my opinion that most coding standard documents suck. I've seen a countless number of coding standards from different companies (some of the companies I even worked for) and they all sucked. No exception. Even though coding standards have some common sense advice and guidelines which is generally helpful for producing code of good quality, the amount of arbitrary irrational rules and beliefs that coding standards writers put into the standards and try to enforce through the standards actually end up hurting the quality of the code produced by developers trying to follow those rules.

Case in point with examples from the NASA JPL coding standards for C:

* no direct or indirect recursion What is it, FORTRAN-77? Some algorithms are way easier to implement recursively whereas the iterative algorithm can be much less straightforward and buggier. Think sorting: it's easy to prove that the recursion is finite and that the implementation of the algorithm is correct. Do they use sorting in NASA or is it prohibited by this rule?

* no dynamic memory after initialization FORTRAN-77 again! While dynamic memory management can be challenging in real-time systems and the generic malloc/free implementation is not acceptable, it doesn't mean that statically pre-allocated fixed-size memory is better. It inevitably leads to brittle code ripe with excessive memory use, bugs like static buffer overruns, and sometimes even inability to use dynamic data structures like linked lists. To work around this restriction, a developer can construct a linked list structure in a statically allocated memory, but doing so is essentially equivalent to creating your own dynamic memory manager which is more likely to be poorly implemented than a good dynamic memory manager. Instead of denying the use of dynamic memory they should develop memory managers with acceptable performance characteristics.

* The return value of non-void functions shall be checked or used by each calling function, or explicitly cast to (void) if irrelevant. Given that there are a lot of library functions in C that return some error code rarely useful, this rule leads to code littered with (void) casts: "(void) printf(…)", "(void) close(…)", etc. Along with the littering the rule doesn't make the code any more robust because it encourages to use (void) casts to ignore error codes and therefore error codes will likely be ignored rather than handled correctly.

* All functions of more than 10 lines should have at least one assertion. This leads to littering code with assertions in those functions that don't necessarily have anything to assert and that are accidentally longer than 10 lines (for example, due to mandatory parameter validation checks. I hope parameter validation checks are not assertions, are they?).

* All #else, #elif and #endif preprocessor directives shall reside in the same file as the #if or #ifdef directive to which they are related. This is just a bizarre rule. What developer puts #ifdef in one file and #endif in another? Unless of course he's drunk or high but I hope that's not how NASA develops its software.

* Conversions shall not be performed between a pointer to a function and any type other than an integral type. Wait, pointers to functions should be converted to which integral type? They are a number of integral types: char, short, unsigned long long. Which one do I choose? Why not void* or intptr_t?

* Functions should be no longer than 60 lines of text and define no more than 6 parameters. Finally a good rule. But what does the explanation say? "A function should not be longer than what can be printed on a single sheet of paper in a standard reference format with one line per statement and one line per declaration." Printed on a sheet of paper? Is this still how code is reviewed in NASA?

And before you say "these coding standards are for a special kind of software that runs on space flight control systems," embedded devices these days are more powerful than desktop computers ten years ago. Embedded sortware grew beyond draconian restrictions a long time ago and it's much closer now to non- embedded software.

Let's not forget that NASA did use Lisp in their systems and they were able to solve pretty difficult problems remotely with help of Lisp REPL (<http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html>). Lisp code certainly can't be subject to any of the restrictions from these coding standards, which is another indication of how irrelevant these coding standards are for producing robust software.</comment>


Hiring Hackers - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/ash3003/how-to-hire-awesome-developers-37190930

<comment><AUTHOR> What are the difficulties you face to attract technical talent? Maybe, I can help here!</comment>


Meat the top cause of global warming? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/29/business/media/29adco.html?ex=1346040000&en=afd55f3af97a69be&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss <comment><USER2> Look for someone with a cause other than helping the environment when they say "X is a big cause of hurting the environment".

For the practical minded, the best thing you can do to help the environment is to move to a place where you don't need much AC or much heating, but the latter matters more. Good Insulation do much more than almost anything else to decrease your footprint, but it isn't sexy and you can't show it off to the Jones next door.

I look forward to hearing what Woz has to say, now that he's on his quest for efficient homes.</comment>


Is Scala Really the Next C++? - <AUTHOR> http://www.codecommit.com/blog/scala/is-scala-really-the-next-c

<comment><USER2> Why wouldn't Erlang be the next C++? Erlang's fast, compiled, but still flexible and dynamically, strongly typed. It has a type inference engine so you can look over your code, and it's fairly easy to do IDE integration with Erlang.

Erlang's distribution and multi-threading primitives are unbelievably well tested, and everyone could learn a thing or two from the OTP model.

I can't imagine why we'd ever consider Scala over Erlang.

<comment><USER3> I think you missed the point of the comparison. One of the reasons C++ took off was that it was deliberately compatible with C (the dominant language at the time), so you didn't have to discard your existing C code and could ramp up from your existing skills. Likewise, today the dominant language is Java, and Scala compiles down to Java bytecode and allows you to continue to use your existing Java libraries. To my knowledge Erlang doesn't have these capabilities.

<comment><USER2> Erlang can integrate with anything out there, because it deliberately discourages binary inclusion. Instead you make remote "ports" that act like servers or vendors of results.

It's a very weird approach, but it's surprisingly effective.

<comment><USER4> Well can you give more info about these ports? Sounds like you want to do interprocess communication of some kind with the JVM?

1\. How exactly would you setup the JVM? Will you need to wrap every Java class you want to use with some kind of communication mechanism? What about callbacks?

2\. Can you subclass a Java class?

3\. What is the overhead of calling Java methods from Erlang?

4\. Has anyone demonstrated a bridge to a non-trivial Java library using a language not running on the JVM?

I feel interprocess communication might be ok for some apps but not all apps.

<comment><USER2> 1\. Yes, you write a communication mechanism. You can either use an existing one (like Thrift) or use the Erlang binary protocol. Erlang expects you to be acting like an erlang message-based process, like an actor.

2\. No. Erlang is not an OO langauge, although its concurrency model is the actor concurrency model, which sometimes feels like Smalltalk's object model.

3\. The cost of communication. Having implemented a few systems that do this, I've found it to be fairly small, even using a slow glue layer like ruby. See <https://github.com/KirinDave/fuzed/tree> ... Powerset uses almost exactly this codebase to manage query analysis on its frontend before dispatching to our results retrieval layer. Thus far, it's been one of the most flexible and robust parts of our architecture.

I felt this way too, and it is the case in some very specific scenarios. But the truth of the matter is that Java itself is often the wrong tool in these cases, so it's somewhat of a red herring to say that.

4\. [http://erlang.org/documentation/doc-5.6.1/lib/jinterface-1.4...](http://erlang.org/documentation/doc-5.6.1/lib/jinterface-1.4/doc/html/java/com/ericsson/otp/erlang/package- tree.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I took a look at Scala about six months ago. It's quite a nice, full-featured language, and is a real contender for anyone forced to deploy to the JVM. However, it has a lot, and I do mean a whole hell of a lot of growing up to do before I'd actually use it for anything.

Its support for editors and tools was pretty horrible. The Eclipse plugin outright sucked (bundled compiler lagging behind the language release, syntax highlighting which came and went unpredictably, weird compilation errors which didn't matter --- and when I submitted a bug report ticket, the Scala team took four months to respond). I tried the Emacs mode, but it had such flaky indentation that I didn't know what it was doing half the time. If I absolutely had to use Scala, I'm sure I'd fix the Emacs mode, but it just wasn't worthwhile back then.

In addition, the language changes rapidly in ways which break existing code (I ran into an incompatible change in the Actors library, but don't remember the details any more). Granted, that's actually a good thing, because it means that the developers do not want to be stuck with bad design decisions from the past, but I'd like to be able to write production code, too. Since it seems that Scala's authors use it as a testbed for their research in languages, I have my doubts that it'll stabilize quite enough. (Counterarguments welcome!)

</comment><comment><USER6> here's a pdf about the language <http://www.scala- lang.org/docu/files/ScalaByExample.pdf>

it's definitely not bad. whether or not a language has first-class functions is a major point for me, and Scala has strong support for functional programming and even has some specialized sugar for it

the only thing i don't like about it is the type/object stuff, which always feels unnecessary

</comment><comment><USER7> _If C++ had just abandoned it's C legacy, it would have been a much nicer language._

A much nicer language no one would have used. It is Stroustrup's opinion that if C++ had not been backwards-compatiable with C, it never would have become popular. I agree.

I also have difficulty with calling C++ a "failure."

<comment><USER8> Yep... c++ is a great language. Doesn't force one paradigm onto the programmer. Fast, portable and very efficient too. I heard the new F-35 jet fighter is using c++ over ada.</comment></comment>


Apple Is Dead - <AUTHOR> http://paroday.blogspot.com/search/label/Apple%20Dead%20Microsoft%20Asus <comment><USER2> Before anyone else seriously critiques this article, it is a parody. It is posted to a blog called "paroday" purportedly written by "Graham Paulo". Read "Microsoft is dead" (<http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html>) by Paul Graham for the target of the parody.

</comment><comment><USER3> There is something very wrong with this article. It has a publish date of Oct 2008, but then talks about the intel atom processor and nonsensically explains how apple tried to 'keep it broken'. But according to wikipedia, the Atom processor wasn't released until Dec 2009. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Atom>

Lots of other nonsense in this. Can anybody gleam what is going on here?

<comment><USER4> The Intel press release announcing the Atom came out March 2, 2008. The December 2009 announcement was for a follow-on generation. But given that this is the only post, the blog seems substantially deader than Apple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The guy who wrote this is from an enterprise consulting background... enough said.</comment>


What programming languages are used late at night? - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/04/19/programming-languages-used-late-night/ <comment><USER2>
      C programmers start the day a bit later, keep using the language in the evening, and stay up the longest. This suggests C may be particularly popular among hobbyist programmers who code during their free time (or perhaps among summer school students doing homework).

... or they're the only ones stuck down a rabbit hole chasing some obscure memory leak that keeps bugging them until late in the evening.

<comment><USER3> Use address sanitizer and leak sanitizer (-fsanitize=address). Compile with options that forbid omission of frame pointers (-fno-omit-frame-pointer) to get a nice backtrace of where the allocation occurred. Also compile with full debugging info (-g) so that leak errors contain file and line numbers. Problem solved.

EDIT: this apparently only works on x86-64 Linux. If you are targeting something else, it might be slightly harder.

<comment><USER4> Unless you're working in the embedded space, there's no reason to not write your C project to target whatever arch is the most debug-friendly first, and then just port it to the system it's "for" at the end.

<comment><USER5> Unless the issue ends up being arch specific

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Learning haskell" is pretty much in the same category as "Write that novel I've been thinking about."

<comment><USER7> Learning Haskell has been made much easier with Haskell Book[1]. Unlike LYAH, it actually has a ton of exercises and in-depth explanations so you understand the _why_ behind things as you make progress. That said, it requires discipline to read through.

[1] [http://haskellbook.com/](http://haskellbook.com/)

<comment><USER8> The big problem I've had with Haskell is that even after gaining a pretty good understanding of the language (including monads and such) I still can't fathom how to do anything real with it.

Exercises are great and all, but once I try to go past exercises, I start getting lost in layers of monad transformers, and I struggle to figure out the "right" way to do anything. It just feels like there are all these layers of abstraction and complexity that are required for even simple applications, and I can't seem to reach the point where it all clicks for me and becomes manageable.

Reading the TOC and chapter notes for that book, I'm not convinced it'll help me. Even the "final project" at the end of the book is described as "a little weird, but small". I don't need more weird, small examples, I need a full- fledged application! I've tried picking out random Haskell OSS apps and studying them, but without newbie-friendly documentation to walk me through the code, I find it very hard to follow what's happening....

<comment><USER9> I'd recommend just making yourself pick up a project, and run with it. Try not to over think it, and if you start to feel paralyzed, just say "fuck it, I'll do it the first, shittiest way that comes to mind."

As an example, the first "real" project I wrote in Haskell was one or two weeks into learning it: a web testing framework/DSL (a la Capybara[0]) that spoke a (custom) protocol over socket to a headless webkit instance[1].

Looking back, I abused stuff like type-classes and such, but then again, it was all a learning experience. I should probably be a little embarrassed about how I left the project, but in the interest of providing some inspiration, here it is in all its gory -- I mean, glory: [https://github.com/cstrahan/happybara](https://github.com/cstrahan/happybara)

[0]: [http://teamcapybara.github.io/capybara/](http://teamcapybara.github.io/capybara/)

[1]: [https://github.com/thoughtbot/capybara- webkit/tree/master/sr...](https://github.com/thoughtbot/capybara- webkit/tree/master/src)

<comment><USER10> > I'd recommend just making yourself pick up a project, and run with it. Try > not to over think it, and if you start to feel paralyzed, just say "fuck it, > I'll do it the first, shittiest way that comes to mind."

I tried that. When I got stuck (fairly early on), I ended up switching my project from Haskell to Clojure :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >My final (and favorite) observation is that developers in Paris take the longest and most consistent lunch breaks. Well, if I lived in Paris, I would too.

A contributing factor might be that a lot of French companies include meal vouchers in their benefits. Generally employees are given the choice to deduce some amount from their payroll and get nearly double that amount in meal vouchers, because the vouchers are government-supported including a tax concession. You can use these at most restaurants in Paris.

You can, of course, use the vouchers to grab a sandwich anywhere and eat it in front of your code, but overall it encourages actual restaurant breaks, since you basically have more money specifically to spend on your lunch.

<comment><USER12> The fact that you work in one of the most beautiful & well-designed cities for walking around or eating outside doesn't hurt either!

<comment><USER13> Also more money for food usually means more wine usually means more time before return to work

<comment><USER14> The voucher do not cover alcoholic beverages [1]. That and the difficulty to code after drinking do that peoples generally do not drink during lunch. But yes, Frenchs take their time for lunch :)

[1] [http://www.edenred.co.in/Our-Offerings/Work-life- Benefits/Ti...](http://www.edenred.co.in/Our-Offerings/Work-life- Benefits/Ticket-Restaurant-Meal-card/FAQs.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Otherwise written as "what programming languages are being asked about late at night."

To me, who rarely pulls up SO, correlating SO questions and page views with usage is a bit biased.

<comment><USER16> Whoah! The big news for me is that there is a programmer who rarely uses SO.

I use it constantly. Can you say more about:

1\. What your programming set up is.

2\. What you do when there is an issue?

I didn't know there was a reasonable alternative. I do the Google -> SO a lot. The only time Google brings up a different page is if the question is REALLY basic like how to use a function.

Edit: added this postscript:

I have found a lot less need to look up things like "are there optional parameters in .len()?" because the IDE helps with that.

I need to look up strange errors that I don't understand. (Like when you install a new library and your code breaks). Those are almost never in the official documentation because they didn't plan for it.

<comment><USER17> I also don't use SO that much, I never have. Maybe I google a few things once in a while and sometimes I stumble upon a StackOverflow page, but never to actually solve errors. It's usually to get a bit more insight out of curiosity.

Professionally, I work at Google and internally we have an extensive corpus of knowledge for various problems and programming patterns that really are tied to in-house technologies that don't really exist outside of the company. That's mostly the #1 reason why I almost never stumble upon SO.

> 1\. What your programming set up is.

I code in Python, Bash, Haskell and sometimes Go. Plus a couple of internal languages that aren't really interesting (mostly config languages). I write code with vim and manage my project with tmux sessions.

> 2\. What you do when there is an issue?

I look at the logs, look at the code, I look internally for any resources we might have, I spend some time trying to figure out what is going on and usually that takes care of 90% of the problems. If that is not the case, then depending on the type of problem (is it an internal library? is it something externally available?) I either ask on the internal IRC for specific teams in charge of that platform, or I go to the external internet in search for help. Most of the time, if that is the case, the situation is so specific that I can't really find an relevant answer on SO so I more often than not just end up in a #freenode channel for that library/language and directly ask questions to the interested people.

<comment><USER18> > I look at the logs, look at the code...

This bears repeating.

READ \ _clap\_ THE \ _clap\_ FUCK- \ _clap\_ -ING \ _clap\_ LOGS.

READ \ _clap\_ THE \ _clap\_ FUCK- \ _clap\_ -ING \ _clap\_ CODE.

I'm amazed at the devs who just scroll up in the logs to the first error they see, then copy-paste that into google or SO.

<comment><USER19> I don't know if it's the team I work with or a problem in general, but a lot of my time these days I spend on getting annoyed with developers who just keep reporting "it's not working". Hardly any effort in looking at logs/stacktraces and then mapping it back to the code - all of which they have access to. When asked for more details about the issue, I almost always get answers like "here's the place where we have the log files, can you look into it and tell me what's wrong".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is cool but every time I see something like this I think that this kind of data could be seriously skewed by individual language communities. For example, in the Elixir community we have our own forum, IRC, and Slack channel. Because of this, I almost never visit SO for my Elixir needs. However, I do when I am working with JavaScript, C, Java, etc. I know other languages like C++ have similar communities which take care of much of the questions which would otherwise be posted on SO. Does anyone else feel that their language is misrepresented by data such as this?

(Not trying to knock SO here, this is a very cool analysis, but I do feel that some of these problems are relevant.)

<comment><USER21> Same for Unity3D, which is one of the tags they have in their post but it doesn't look very popular there. Unity3D has their own separate SO-like site called Unity Answers, plus a large forum, plus a (somewhat out-of-date) community wiki. So lots of people won't be hitting SO for help

Still, most of this particular blog post is about relatives between hours of the day per language, rather than comparisons _between_ languages, so it won't be too affected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> What language people learn out of own motivation, vs what languages people do for pay.

I'd say based on this graph it, and knowing Haskell myself, that choosing Haskell is still a viable way to attract talent. (that Haskell-spike in the animated chart half through the article is... opportunity I guess)

<comment><USER23> Just be aware that the animation makes it look like everyone is using Haskell in the evening. That's false and caused by normalization. Other languages are still more used.

<comment><USER24> That's right: Haskell is _disproportionately_ used in the evenings, but it's not highly used at any time. You can see in the 4th graph that of the 250 languages considered, Haskell is one of the lowest traffic.

<comment><USER25> This is assuming that SO is a popular destination for Haskell questions.

Github would be the better indicator. Especially if Github could include anonymous stats for private repos too. That would give a good indication about the commercial viability of the various languages.

I'm one of those people who uses Haskell a lot at night time and I rarely use SO for it. I often find answers in documentation, blog posts, IRC, and books. Whereas during my day job I tend to run into a lot of obscure framework errors when I work with Ruby on Rails or the various weird quirks in Javascript where SO is indispensable. I have different kinds of queries with Haskell rather than copy/pasting error msgs, likewise when I use Erlang/Elixir.

Another example is Reddit:

        /r/python 122.1k users
        /r/javascript 82.4k users
        /r/java/ 51.4k users
        /r/php 40.8k users
        /r/cpp 35.7k users
        /r/ruby 31.1k users
        /r/csharp 28.2k users
        /r/haskell 22.8k users
        /r/golang 20.7k users
        /r/c_programming 19.6k users
        /r/swift 17.1k users
        /r/rust 16.1k users
        /r/sql 13.6k users
        /r/scala 10.4k users
        /r/lisp 10.3k users
        /r/clojure 10.0k users

Haskell is not far behind Ruby, C#, or CPP on Reddit. Yet the difference in the SO chart is dramatic.

But no doubt it's not as popular professionally as other languages, sadly, but it's not quite as fringe as this particular data source indicates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I generally switch from C# to Drunk Python.

<comment><USER27> I'm there too, except Drunk Swift. I tried Drunk React/Redux a few times but almost died.

<comment><USER28> I do a fair bit of drunk C. Something beautiful about a pointer to pointer after a couple of gin and tonics.

<comment><USER29> Being drunk also really helps in dampening the excruciating pain from shooting yourself in the foot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I wrote a blog post awhile back comparing the differences between day and night commit messages :-D. [http://randomlyunique.com/data/2016/late-night- coding/](http://randomlyunique.com/data/2016/late-night-coding/) (it's a fun looking wordcloud)

</comment><comment><USER31> Interesting to see that C is used a lot in the evening. Maybe that's because C is used in many Open Source projects, and many people contribute to OS in their spare time?

</comment><comment><USER32> I really do not understand how anyone could judge up which languages are being used at X time during the day or night based on stackoverflow.

I rarely use stackoverflow (like once a few months), how do we factor in the data which we don't have in it? What's the accuracy of the current data? And how can we foem conclusion?

The post should say, "What tags are used to ask questions on stackoverflow at night?" Because, as powerful as they are, SO can't quantitatively decide which languages are used at what time, they don't have the data!! I learned an entire language without ever looking at a SO qn, it was Go language.

<comment><USER27> The point is that it's interesting to infer trends. This is not the supposed to be the authoritative source for what people are doing during day and night. It's just interesting and you can glean some patterns for sure. Stack overflow is hugely popular and millions of developers use it.

Some people I guess are just so bright that they don't need it. That is not most people.

<comment><USER32> Their title makes it sound autoritative!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I find myself using stackoverflow more while using certain languages, and almost never when using others. IMO, a C/C++ developer or a backend developer is less likely to use stack overflow as compared to a python/javascript/php or frontend developer.

</comment><comment><USER34> Is this done in EST/EDT? Does it account for developers in India, US, Europe, etc simultaneously or does it convert the time stamps to say, UTC?

<comment><USER35> The time charts are labeled "local time", so I'd assume they're using ip geolocation or profile info to normalize everyone's times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Haskell wins as the most nocturnal, but I suspect it's because a good portion of its users are students.

It's funny that the runner up is on the opposite side of the abstraction spectrum: assembly. Students, longbeard contractors, and hax0rs must be the nocturnal contingent there.

Meanwhile, COBOL programmers are stuck in bank basements with no internet access.

</comment><comment><USER37> Anyone knows what they used to render the plots?

<comment><USER38> Almost certainly ggplot2 in R.

<comment><USER39> Also, the author says in the comments that he used ggplot2 for the static plots and gganimate for the animations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> What I'd really like is the correlation between different kinds of tools, languages etc. and forced overtime...

</comment><comment><USER41> Is it just me or does this not actually tell you which programming language tags get the most traffic at night?

</comment><comment><USER42> I find it interesting how during the daytime hours, most languages are in the Microsoft camp...

<comment><USER43> Because most people are forced to use Microsoft technologies at work. But in their own time they would rather use other technologies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Ironically, if this was a question on stackoverflow it would be deleted.

</comment><comment><USER45> What this data definitively effectively demonstrates is that only about 1/5 of developers/engineers are taking a lunch. Way to go! Keep up the hard work guys!

</comment><comment><USER46> Excel in the streets, Haskell in the sheets

</comment><comment><USER47> In this context I would love to see more programming languages available for tablets, because tablets are good for learning.

</comment><comment><USER48> > C# programmers start and stop their day earlier

Maybe because they're often in finance?

Why wasn't Java compared?

<comment><USER49> I can't answer why but if you want to see the Java stats, they shared this tool : [https://dgrtwo.shinyapps.io/tag-traffic- hour/](https://dgrtwo.shinyapps.io/tag-traffic-hour/)

<comment><USER48> Oh nice. Well, C# still starts earlier than Java. Interesting. I thought they'd line up more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Completely ignores VPNs? Everyone in China uses a VPN. Maybe China has more C programmers.

</comment><comment> anshou- Yet another graph pointing toward the conclusion of "Tuesdays are the worst."

</comment><comment><USER51> It would be interesting to merge this data with GitHub commits.

</comment><comment><USER52> They've given the answer to 'Which programming languages are used late at night by people coming to StackOverflow for help.' Interesting I guess, but flawed from the start.

</comment><comment><USER53> TL;DR: Only students use Haskell</comment>


Clinton Emails: FBI Recommends 'No Charges' - <AUTHOR> http://news.sky.com/story/1722032/clinton-emails-fbi-recommends-no-charges <comment><USER2> I wonder how John Deutsche and Samuel Berger feel about this. Both were charged for retaining classified data. And the many regular people whose clearances have been revoked or who faced administrative sanctions and lost jobs. The FBI recommendation is statutorily correct, but the absence of any accountability doesn't seem just.

<comment><USER3> Statutorily correct, what does that mean? They claim a lack of precedent. The only reason there's a lack of precedent is that email is a young technology.

<comment><USER2> No, they claim no evidence of intent, which is key for proving criminality. Gross negligence is an impossible prosecution where a defendant at a jury trial is a 68 yr old grandmother and the central issue is an email server. The upside here - if there is any - is that now Comey has all the credibility he needs to investigate the Clinton Foundation.

<comment><USER3> The defendant is not a 68 year old grandmother, the defendant is a former secretary of state with a staff of "experts", and everyone knew better. Ignorance is not a defense in any court of law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The difference between Hillary Clinton and others who were charged for retaining classified data is that Hillary Clinton had the authority bestowed to her by Executive Order 12958 and 13526 to classify and declassify information at the "top secret" level that originated from the State Department.

Source: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact- checker/wp/2016/02/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact- checker/wp/2016/02/04/how-did-top-secret-emails-end-up-on-hillary-clintons- server/)

<comment><USER5> I guess we would have to read the emails to know if she had the authority to reclassify them. Otherwise "This authority(...) did not extend to information generated by other agencies, such as CIA."

<comment><USER6> And the very worst stuff we've learned about is some of Sid Blumenthal's emails, who shouldn't even have access to this stuff, forwarding highest level NSA stuff, the sort that can get people killed in real time, the stuff that's protected at as or higher a level than, say, nuclear weapons secrets (I have friends who've worked for both the NSA and LLNL).

There is no possible way she has the authority on her own, or the State Department by itself, to allow her kitchen cabinet blow the covers of these people and methods, she in fact had a duty to report such breaches.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'll just leave this here. Eerily similar: [https://www.fbi.gov/sacramento/press-releases/2015/folsom- na...](https://www.fbi.gov/sacramento/press-releases/2015/folsom-naval- reservist-is-sentenced-after-pleading-guilty-to-unauthorized-removal-and- retention-of-classified-materials)

<comment><USER8> I wouldn't call the two cases eerily similar.

One is about operating a private email server and using it for official business that occasionally included sensitive information that shouldn't be held on internet connected computers.

The other is removing classified information from secure systems (I think it's implying SIPRNET) and keeping copies of them in your home.

One case is a person not saying "hey guys, we shouldn't talk about this here" when topics get sensitive and the other is a deliberate copying of classified information.

One constitutes careless handling of sensitive information, one constitutes intentional mishandling of classified information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This isn't fair to the men and women charged for the same or similar actions.

<comment><USER10> Nothing about the process is fair, and neither outcome in Clinton's case would change that. The government needs to stop classifying material indiscriminately, and stop treating all whistleblowers like criminals. And that's just for starters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Gotta be careful, don't wanna piss off your future boss.</comment>


Larry Ellison now on Tesla's board of directors - <AUTHOR> https://www.tesla.com/blog/tesla-welcomes-larry-ellison-and-kathleen-wilson-thompson-new-independent-directors-its-board <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18776563](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18776563), which was posted earlier.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here we go round the recycled executive collection.

</comment><comment><USER4> Can we please update the link title to not exclude the woman of color?

<comment><USER5> An executive from a pharmacy chain joining Tesla is significantly less relevant to a tech community than one of the highest profile tech executives in history. Not everything is racist, which is what you seem to be implying by highlighting "woman of color".

<comment><USER6> Parent poster is calmly pointing out HN's long running title policy which is that submitters don't get to fuck about with the title unless it's misleading or clickbait.</comment></comment></comment>


The Soul Crushing Reality of the Stay at Home Dad - <AUTHOR> http://narrative.ly/the-soul-crushing-reality-of-the-stay-at-home-dad/ <comment><USER2> I give up -- beyond society's endorsement of the mothers's dominant caregiver role (and a likely set of inborn traits) -- why is this child-rearing (exclusively) considered a soul-crushing bummer for men, not for women?

Plenty of mothers flame out at some point along the job too, you know. And when they do, the results aren't very pleasant to watch.</comment>


Usability and the Penny Gap (App Store) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.andrewparker.net/2008/07/15/app-store-is-a-solution-to-the-penny-gap/

<comment><USER2> When the article says that $0.99 is the most popular price, it means popular in number of apps, not in number of downloads: [http://www.pinchmedia.com/percentage-of-free-applications- de...](http://www.pinchmedia.com/percentage-of-free-applications- decreasing/#comment-286)</comment>


CI is a timesink, and it is our fault - <AUTHOR> https://laszlo.cloud/ci-is-a-timesink-and-it-is-our-fault <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, the author here. I've been thinking for some time whether the complexity in CI is essential to the domain, or we just add a bunch of accidental complexity as we have no better place to put it.

The article is just my state of mind and I tend to think it's the latter as you can guess.. What do you think?</comment>


Iphone Tutorial: Creating a RSS Feed Reader - <AUTHOR> http://cocoadevblog.com/iphone-tutorial-creating-a-rss-feed-reader <comment><USER2> Neat. When you're ready for more, be sure to check out <http://courses.csail.mit.edu/iphonedev/> for a quick dive into Objective-C + iPhone SDk. Then to get a non-trivial Hello World, check out this:[http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi- bin/drupal/download...](http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi- bin/drupal/downloads-2010-winter)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for those links - both of those plus the OP's post look really instructive for Objective C noobs like me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This one at Stack Overflow is a good resource as well:[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1939/howto-articles- for-i...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1939/howto-articles-for-iphone- development-objective-c)

</comment><comment><USER5> Yuck! After all these years of high level languages, having to use a mid-level language like objective-c to develop for iPhone feels like a step backwards! If only HTML5 / phonegap was more of a viable option.

<comment><USER6> I'm finding Objective-C to be a powerful addition to C and refreshingly simple compared to C++. What are you comparing it to, and what should I be missing?

<comment><USER7> You are right, compared to C++ and C ObjC has advantages. But compared to other langues it has major drawbacks. Here are some reasons I don't like Objective-C (these mostly apply to iPhone dev only)

\- Header Files: These are archaic and require you to repeat code unnecessarily. Don't require humans to do something that computers are better at.

\- No Automatic Garbage Collection: On the ObjC 2.0 we have this, but not on the iPhone. Unless you are making a high performance game, there is no reason the phone can't handle Automatic GC.

\- No NSDictionary/NSArray literals: [[NSDictionary alloc] initWithObjectsAndKeys:@"value", @"key", @"value2", @"key2", nil]; // Enough said

\- No regex: You kind of get regex's in 3.2, but they are very limited. Regex literals are much more powerful

\- Xcode: You are pretty much required to use Xcode and I don't like Xcode. Even if you use the "xcodebuild" command-line script, you still have to create the project through Xcode.

\- Closures: I guess we will be able to use these soon, but it is going to take awhile for all the API's to get updated to accommodate them.

\- No dynamic variables: It's handy to be able to shove data into objects sometimes. It's a hack, but as long as you treat it as such you can save a lot of needless code. (You can do this via the ObjC runtime, but it's messy)

\- No namespacing: ObjC handles namespaces by prefixing class names. Blah, that is so 1978.

\- Unit Testing: ObjC has the poorest excuse for unit testing out of any language I've ever used.

<comment><USER8> It's not technically a language thing, but I can't get used to the unbelievable verbosity of the method names. (And for calibration purposes: I used to do a lot of Common Lisp.)

In a language inspired by Smalltalk, they turned "at:" into "objectAtIndex:"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm going to comment on this to act as a bookmark.

Thanks for the post

<comment><USER10> FYI: Anything you upvote get's "saved" for you. Just click on your name, find the "saved" link, and it will show you all the things you upvoted for easy reference. =)

<comment><USER9> Thanks</comment></comment></comment>


Maroon on Techstars - <AUTHOR> http://mattmaroon.com/?p=327

<comment><USER2> There's a lot of money in Boulder - far more than the random towns Matt mentions. As far as quality of life goes, it's utopian and not very expensive (4br house in a great part of town for $2200/month). The pace is a bit on the slow side, but I can't speak to the pace in the bay area. I'm headed to a tech event in Boulder in early Feb to get a better feel for the size of the startup community there - I know a number of people out there are working to improve the community. Could TS help? The stats on the TC article are good - 80% funded? It's not Silicon Valley, of course, but if the community there is enough and the access to additional funding rounds is enough and this recession hits it's a beautiful place to weather the storm.

<comment><USER3> I was obviously joking about Boulder being behind Sheboygan, but it's so distantly behind SV that it's essentially worthless.

Also, that 80% stat means nothing. Who funded them, for how much, with what terms. Getting some funding is trivial, getting good funding is not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Also I believe the stat from techcrunch was 80% received either funding, are profitable or received acquisition offers.

Being profitable at such an early stage and if you aren't drawing salary is a bit meaningless. Acquisition offers are almost completely meaningless without an actual acquisition. Also agree with matt, raising $500 from your parents might be "funding"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think YC is better than Techstars, but between Techstars and "just move to the valley", I'm not sure that the latter is better. It depends on what sort of connections the Techstars guys can provide you with.

And I'm not so sure Boulder really is _that_ bad, either - there are a lot of guys who made their cash in the valley and then wanted to live somewhere that's not an armpit who have moved out there.

</comment><comment><USER5> Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I suppose. It'll be interesting to see how they compare to YC. My guess is either they'll not fare as well in the long term, or there will be no difference. If the former, then that means that SV and PG really are super extra valuable. If the latter, then maybe it's just the seed funding + advice that pushes companies over the edge to success. Personally, though, I'm super glad I'm part of YC and not TechStars...

</comment><comment><USER6> at some extent i agree with you. My reaction when i saw they copied the form was pretty much the same.

Although most people here agree that implemention and execution matters more Why should someone trust their ideas with them if they copy so open without a note and lets be serious good ideas dont come knocking the door unless you really cope for.

      However lets dont trash them just yet. i dont know even how is life in colorado so i cant comment on that except that it really doesnt matter because you wont have a life during start up anyways but i am pretty sure for someone not living in US anywhere would be just fine plus you could easilly relocate after you get traction and investors which they seem they can get you

<comment> daniel-cussen Yeah, they're not setting a good precedent of respecting (often vulnerable) IP by copying YC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There doesn't seem to be any reason to fuel the fires of any intended or unintended conflict here. You know - high road and all.

<comment><USER8> You are absolutely right. Some people still think that yc funding has little value to startups, but most of us here believe the opposite. Let's give techstar some room and if we can't support, let's not throw stones at anyone who is trying to fill a void.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Frankly this whole startup hub crap just gots to be over with. I mean we are talking about tech companies and we still can't overcome location. Like we are real estate agents. Boulder has to start somewhere and I think they should push it. There will be a time (soon) when hubs won't exist anymore. Startups won't need to move, even after acquistion.

<comment><USER9> Face to face communication is still the best. One of the reasons that Silicon Valley works so well is that it is so small. Many industries develop from hubs and it's not surprising that web technology companies would be any different from automobiles (Detroit), insurance (London and Hartford CT), or movies (Hollywood and Bollywood (Mumbai)) to name three other examples.

For some background on Silicon Valley see

Anna Lee Saxenian's "Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128" [http://www.amazon.com/Regional-Advantage-Culture- Competition...](http://www.amazon.com/Regional-Advantage-Culture-Competition- Silicon/dp/0674753402)

"Clusters and the New Economics of Competition" by Michael E. Porter in the November-December 1998 Harvard Business Review [http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b02/en/common/...](http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b02/en/common/item_detail.jhtml?id=98609)

<comment><USER8> see i think if we all sit down and say SV is the IT and fold our arms it won't work. there needs to be some of us who say "it can be another way". people and money, no matter how abundant in SV, are resources that can and should be distributed in a better manner. before bollywood, first came hollywood. now what if Indians said "we can't compete with the billions of dollars and actors, and connections in CA?" it all starts with "what if?"

<comment><USER9> I believe that Silicon Valley will be a startup hub for at least another ten years. I believe that many successful technology startups will thrive in other parts of the world. I don't think these two statements are contradictory. Silicon Valley doesn't have to fail for you to succeed somewhere else. Especially if you are bootstrapping.

As far as I can tell, Bollywood formed around India's domestic market, a market that Hollywood was doing very little to serve. I think the primary barrier to establishing other Silicon Valley equivalent hubs around the world is finding a local culture that doesn't punish failure. It needs not just to tolerate but to celebrate the level of prudent risk taking defines entrepreneurship.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lulzsec Leaks Source Code of Sony Computer Entertainment Developer Network - <AUTHOR> http://www.thehackernews.com/2011/06/lulzsec-leaks-source-code-of-sony.html

<comment><USER2> Pretty boring chunk of PHP..

        $ cloc .
            2866 text files.
            2752 unique files.
           12473 files ignored.

        http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.51  T=9.0 s (217.8 files/s, 40512.2 lines/s)
        </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-
        Language                     files          blank        comment           code
        </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-
        PHP                           1508          29776          56381         166846
        Javascript                     195           8880           5486          40783
        HTML                            70           1050            477           9115
        CSS                             93           1473            732           8103
        Bourne Shell                    13            772            917           5267
        XML                              7           1418            177           3878
        SQL                              4           1550           3707           3515
        C                               10            590            924           3317
        Perl                            20            589            463           2738
        Python                           6            376            870           1493
        m4                               3            192              2           1008
        C/C++ Header                     3            173            145            930
        ASP.Net                          4             44              0            156
        Ruby                            21             38             97             84
        make                             2             12              5             26
        YAML                             1              2             15             18
        </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-
        SUM:                          1960          46935          70398         247277
        </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

</comment><comment><USER3> Its just a websites source code, no actual code to the PSN. It does have a SSLCert, but it looks like it expired in 2004. Looks like the dump is an older revision of the website.

</comment><comment><USER4> The last modified file is from 2008-07-17 02:14 (config.xml)

This seem to be a copy of an svn tag from tech.scedev.net/source/scedev_source/tags/20080616-33/scedev

It appears to be a snapshot of a smarty installation, so the most interesting stuff is actually in the database.

EDIT: Also, they seem to piggyback on HTTP authentication, and there is a snippet suggesting that they are using unsalted md5 passwords. Ouch.

</comment><comment><USER5> Hmm it is kind of interesting. You could probably infer a lot about current structures assuming they heavily reuse old ones, which is likely, come on its Sony, the last month or two has defined their track record there.

</comment><comment><USER6> Fun... who wants to read some legacy PHP code?!

</comment><comment><USER7> could someone verify this? Im at work, and cant download it.

If its true, I think there will be a LOT more cheaters...

<comment><USER8> It's a website source code, nothing to do with PSN.

It's annoying me how people keep mentioning PSN with these Lulz hacks.

They haven't hacked PSN, and probably won't be able to either. They are hacking Sony's side project websites.

Who actually used sonypictures.com? I had never even heard of it before this series of hacks.

<comment><USER7> dude, I said Im at work, and cant download it. I didnt knew it was just the website.

And just because they havent done it yet, doesnt mean they will never hack the psn itself.</comment></comment></comment>


Netflix sees the future, and it's digital - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/12/24/BUR214QV6B.DTL <comment><USER2> Two points I pulled out of this article about Netflix:

 __ _With the hiring last year of Anthony Wood, founder of ReplayTV and Roku, Hastings reinforced his intent to deliver video straight into the living room. Originally, Netflix had plans to build its own boxes a la TiVo, Vudu or Apple TV, but Wood convinced the company that it could get wider distribution if it embedded its software in set-top boxes and gaming consoles._ __

This was very smart. By not trying to get the whole pie, they're getting a smaller piece of a much bigger pie.

 __ _"It's a good strategic move," said Andy Hargreaves, an analyst with Pacific Crest Securities. "Netflix sees the world will go digital, no matter what they do. They realize there is more to be lost by waiting than doing it early."_ __

The last line is crucial. Too bad other businesses don't understand this.

<comment><USER3> It's not that they do not understand this. It's often not in their short-term interest to go digital. Imagine being in Sony's position trying to sell their blu-ray products. Why promote an alternative form of content distribution?

<comment><USER2> I agree with you, but their short-term interests are putting them out of business. Businesses that take a long-term approach are the ones that are winning (Amazon and Toyota spring to mind).

Point being I don't think anyone can compete with Netflix right now. They've done everything right. Blockbuster deserves to loose because their short-term interests were to delay and drag their feet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is what one has to do to stay relevant. As the times change, you adapt and keep creating value.</comment>


Amber Waves of Green - <AUTHOR> http://www.gq.com/news-politics/big-issues/201207/amber-waves-of-green-jon-ronson-gq-july-2012?printable=true <comment><USER2> The trials and tribulations of the poor and rich ends of the spectrum don't tend to surprise me, but the wildly varying ways the middle class perceives their incomes always does.

It surprised me that a family bringing in $900 a week ($47k per year) doesn't feel comfortable in _Des Moines_ (statistically it's above local median). But then they note every 2 weeks they pay $375 for health insurance.. 20.8% of their pre-tax income! Yet their "state and federal" taxes are only about 10%?

For all the bleating about paying "less tax" than other countries, it's ironic that an ostensibly "free market" healthcare system is less efficient, more cartel-like and wildly more expensive for its users than, say, the "socialist" one in the UK where you could live well on the same money and still be paying your fair share without getting any handouts.

<comment><USER3> Are you excluding the "free" healthcare in the UK from your definition of "handout"?

What "fair share" of taxation would they be paying in the UK?

<comment><USER2> (For simplicity, let's assume a household with a single earner of $47k / £30k.)

Sort of, but not exactly. I was implying that a household with that income would be making close to a median contribution to the tax base so, purely in my own opinion, would be paying a "fair share" in absolute terms. That is, they should not be either highly subsidized or a major contributor. But.. let's run the numbers to see if my hunch is wrong! :-)

Said household would have a gross income of £30000, pay £4505 in income taxes, pay £2732 in "national insurance" (ostensibly to fund social security, sick pay, and various benefits), and be left with £22,762, or 75.9% of pre-tax income.

(A "hidden" part to this is that (most) employers also make employer "national insurance" contributions, in this case of £3164 so it could be argued this is a hidden salary cost for employees.)

The total NHS budget in 2008/2009 was £94bn and there are around 25 million households in the UK. This gives an expense of £3760 per household or 36% of the total earned in direct taxation on our imagined household. This is double the percentage of the national budget dedicated to health, so my initial assumption may have been wrong.

However, with indirect taxation, especially VAT at 20% and high fuel duties, and subtracting the contribution of things like corporation taxes to the tax base, the total tax paid vs the absolute "fair share" is likely to come _pretty_ close for this family.

Sorry if this is boring but I was intrigued and thought I'd look into it! :-)

<comment><USER4> FYI, speaking as an employer, Employer's NI doesn't feel hidden at all! It is basically part of the cost of employing someone. It may be hidden from the employee, but that's just a sleight of hand...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Was anyone else bothered by the pictures not matching up with the sections? Each picture was followed by a section that wasn't related to the text, which was a bit confusing.

<comment><USER6> Also, for some reason all the 'ffi' trigraphs are replaced with 'ffl': For example, the second sentence in the first paragraph starts with "The offlce building..."

<comment><USER7> Some bizarre OCR technology, or special typesetting code from the print edition getting misinterpreted?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder what folks on HN thought of PG's essay on this subject: <http://paulgraham.com/gap.html>

I'm simply not sufficiently well versed in economics to be able to judge what's best for society. I'm also hoping that this is not purely subjective, and that indeed there might be an optimal golden middle.

On one hand PG's arguments make sense to me, on the other, I cannot but feel pulled in the opposite direction by some kind of populist/socialist desire to chip in more and make society a better place. That said, I don't have millions (billionaires seem to be more generous, so I'm not going to consider them) and thus if I ever were to become wealthier, I wonder if I also would really mind sharing more.

I already don't particularly enjoy paying 30% or more of my income, but I feel like I'm doing my part (being originally from EU perhaps conditioned me to think that this is "the norm"), although I wish that money was better spent by the people in power.

<comment><USER9> The essay is truly horrible. I don't have the time to take it to bits, but a couple of starting points:

\- he conflates earnings and effort, as if by earning 100 times you were necessarily 100x more productive at some point.

\- related: wealth is categorically different. The worst chess player and the best chess player must both play the same game. But if chess were wealth, the poor guy would have to carve his own pieces and rent the hall, while the rich guy would turn up and sit while the game played itself, no effort required

\- he's right that the middle-classes are the true engines of wealth creation, not the rich. This is the crux of the problem: income inequality _destroys_ the middle class. It leaves only very poor and very rich. No middle class = no wealth generation. That is why it's an issue for everyone, and no amount of "smart people who work hard deserve to control 99% of capital" changes that.

<comment><USER10> Could you define "middle class", and perhaps explain how income inequality "destroys" it? By most common definitions, your statement can't be true.

Taking a typical relative definition, if the middle class is [50-X%, 50+X%], then by definition the middle class always makes up 2X% of the nation and nothing can destroy it.

If you take an absolute definition of middle class (i.e., middle class = home with X ft^2/person, tv, car, refrigerator), then inequality is pretty much unrelated to how many people are middle class.

In short, for your claim to be true, you must be using some uncommon definition of middle class. It would help to explain what it is.

<comment><USER11> [http://blogs.reuters.com/great- debate/2012/01/13/a-shrinking...](http://blogs.reuters.com/great- debate/2012/01/13/a-shrinking-middle-class-means-a-shrinking-economy/)

Go to figure 6.

<comment><USER10> Using that definition (people in the range of [0.5 x median, 1.5 x median]), the middle class has only shrank because more people have become rich.

[http://www.nationalreview.com/agenda/288306/guest-post- scott...](http://www.nationalreview.com/agenda/288306/guest-post-scott- winship-obama-administrations-questionable-mobility-claims-reihan-sal)

The number of people who are _middle class or higher_ has remained contant since 1970. Using Alan Krueger's definitions, all inequality has done is moved people from middle class to rich. Is that a bad thing?

<comment><USER9> Yes, if it leaves in its wake massive income inequality.

The middle class is the engine of wealth generation. It both spends high proportions of its income and has enough income to start new enterprises. A middle class drives an economy.

What you are asking is if it's OK for the middle class of merchants to shrink because many are now rich enough to be lords and kings. That may be, but it still leaves a society with no merchants: only the very poor and very rich.

<comment><USER10> _It both spends high proportions of its income and has enough income to start new enterprises._

Why can't a middle class person who became "rich" (although most people don't consider >1.5x median to be rich) do the same thing?

Suppose my income dropped dramatically and I suddenly entered the "middle class" (by Alan Krueger's definition - I'm actually middle class by the definition of most people). How would this make it easier for me to start new enterprises?

<comment><USER9> _Why can't a middle class person who became "rich" (although most people don't consider >1.5x median to be rich) do the same thing?_

Starting new businesses: It's more a matter of "Don't" than "Can't." A middle- class person who became rich is either tending the business that got them there or has otherwise lost the impetus of need that drove them to start a business. If your income suddenly dropped dramatically, what would you do: adjust to your new income level and be happy, or strive immediately to retain your previous level?

Spending income: It's easy to spend 99% of a median income. It's almost impossible for the very wealthy to spend anything like what they make.

Additionally, there are only so many needs to be filled. It's more economically productive to have a very large number of people willing and able to buy modestly priced items than it is to have a very small number wanting to buy very highly priced items.

<comment><USER10> You clearly haven't read any of the articles cited in this thread. Alan Krueger defines middle class as more than $25k/year, but less than $75k/year (at contemporary income levels). Rich is presumably $75k or more. The middle class has shrank because people have moved from $65k to $85k.

This has _absolutely nothing whatsoever_ to do with the very wealthy.

If you have evidence that people going from $50k to $80k is bad for the economy, go ahead and present it. You haven't yet. All you've presented are vague misconceptions and demonstrated you don't understand the numbers under discussion.

<comment><USER9> Sorry, if you want to turn this into a flame war, I'm out. I understand that it's difficult to see or admit flaws in a system and an industry that has personally benefitted you, but the flaws remain nonetheless.

In particular, you have not provided evidence for your contention that the middle class has shrunk solely because people have moved "from 65k to 85k", you have shown only that they have not dropped below 25k.

The facts -- income stagnation and wealth inequality -- are in direct opposition to your "the disappearance of the middle class is fine, they're just getting rich" fantasy. People have either gone to exceptionally above 85k, are stagnant, or are dropping towards the lower end.

What they are not doing is just edging into "rich". That's not a supportable claim.

And, ultimately, irrelevant. The problem is income inequality, the shrinking middle class is its symptom. If you have evidence that a society can survive this level of wealth inequality, please present that.

<comment><USER10> _...you have not provided evidence for your contention that the middle class has shrunk solely because people have moved "from 65k to 85k", you have shown only that they have not dropped below 25k._

True - $65k -> 85k was an example. Let me be more precise: the middle class has only shrunk because people have moved from X to Y, where $25k < X < $75k and Y > $75k. I.e., no one became poorer, and some people became richer.

 _The facts -- income stagnation and wealth inequality -- are in direct opposition to your "the disappearance of the middle class is fine, they're just getting rich" fantasy. People have either gone to exceptionally above 85k, are stagnant, or are dropping towards the lower end._

No one is dropping towards the lower end. The number of people at the lower end (below $25k) is the same (about 25%). Since the number of people between $25k and $75k shrank, it must be because the number of people above $75k increased. That's just basic arithmetic.

You still have yet to show how people's income exceeding $75k causes any harm at all, short of vague hints that it's almost impossible for them to spend anything like what they make.

<comment><USER9> "Let me be more precise: the middle class has only shrunk because people have moved from X to Y, where $25k < X < $75k and Y > $75k. I.e., no one became poorer, and some people became richer."

Again, you haven't shown this, either. Many people could have gone from $65k to $35k while a few moved from $65k to $650k on the same set of facts. That nobody has dropped below the baseline of the middle class does not mean it is not shrinking or that nobody in it has gotten poorer.

"You still have yet to show how people's income exceeding $75k causes any harm at all"

This is not the point. The point is that massive wealth inequality causes the harm. A shrinking middle class is a symptom of that inequality.

Whether or not you continue to deny or justify the symptoms is not going to change the facts of the underlying disease. I'm not going to show you how dying causes cancer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> TED talk from Nick Hanauer (2nd richest amazon guy in the article): <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBx2Y5HhplI>

</comment><comment><USER12> My wife and I are fortunate. We're not wealthy by our standards, but I do recognize that we certainly would be considered wealthy by a lot of Americans. Our household income is about 4-5x the national average, and we have no children.

My understanding of the stats informs me that our household income puts us in the top 2.5%. Certainly a very blessed situation to be in, and one that we both work very hard to achieve.

But here's the striking truth about wealth distribution in our country...

The power-law-ish distribution of our wealth means that quantitatively, as a percentile, I'm much closer to the "1%" than I am to the "50%". But qualitatively, the struggles I face -- saving for retirement, knowing that if I had a serious illness our cash flow would dry up, etc -- my life is nothing like the "1%".

Another way to put it... I'm near the very top of the small pile of wealth shared by normal Americans.

I'm having a hard time properly articulating this but I think you get the point. It's almost as if, by percentile, you'd think "wow, I really have earned a big slice of this pie" only to find out that more than half the pie was taken by 0.5% of Americans before it was ever put on the shelf to cool. That until you're invited to take a sliver from that first half, you'll never get more than crumbs of the share that's split 298.5 Million ways.

<comment><USER13> "knowing that if I had a serious illness our cash flow would dry up"

I will never in my life understand how Americans (myself included) can think this is, in _any way possible_ , okay.

Or, how, if we just moved it more toward private companies having more control over our healthcare than they already do, that it'll get better. It's asinine.

<comment><USER12> I didn't mean that as a commentary on our healthcare system. I mean that my income would be reduced to whatever level our long-term disability insurance provides.

Since you mentioned it, though: for people that are well-off in this country, the healthcare system works fine (more or less). That's probably a large source of the complacency. For both my wife and I, our health insurance plans are very good. They are paid 100% for us. They include a 10% co-insurance but a relatively low out of pocket cap.

<comment><USER14> I agree on the last point, but I'd say it's more like it works "acceptably", as in you do more or less get healthcare in some fashion. If you're a salaried professional and have good health, it's more or less ok, with some weirdness around changing jobs (which is getting more common). It does become a _huge_ problem still if you end up unlucky enough to have a major health problem earlyish in life, e.g. a congenital heart problem or cancer in remission. Then you in effect have to work for large companies to get into their group plans, be very careful about coverage gaps, and don't even think about doing freelance or a startup. It also produces weird moral dilemmas; for example, if you have a major preexisting condition and join a small company that offers health insurance, you may inadvertently be punching a big hole in their budget by massively worsening their employee risk pool from the perspective of the insurer (and the business isn't allowed to ask you about things like that before hiring).

The other big anger-relieving valve is Medicare, which removes a large proportion of major illnesses (anything with onset age 65+) from the problem space that private-sector health insurance has to address. If the elderly had to buy health insurance on the private market, or alternatively have their insurance covered via employer pension plans, I don't think the system would work at all, and there would be a lot more angry people (who vote at high rates).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's a real scandal that a person that makes 500.000 $ a month pays only 11% taxes. This system is completely unfair. This is not liberalism: this is simply the law of the strongest.

<comment><USER10> I agree. It is a scandal that reporters constantly focus on the individual tax bill of investors while completely ignoring taxes paid by the corporations they own.

The solution is simple: stop taxing corporations and replace it with taxes on capital gains/etc. (Also, while we are at it, equalize the taxation of cap gains, dividends and interest.)

<comment><USER16> It's a simple sounding solution but I'm skeptical of the issue being that simple. There's a world of difference between GE style corporation and an S-corp owned by a single person.

The GE type corporations effectively pay very little tax in the present system. They also have the right to spend an unlimited amount of money on election campaigns. In the U.S. system corporations are treated as persons. If a person makes an income (profit) they get taxed.

What we presently have is a broken system in my opinion. The very rich earn their money through capital gains and the capital gains tax is very, very low. The very wealthy in the U.S. do not pay a fair share of the tax burden or for the cost of government. Perhaps eliminating corporate taxes while simultaneously greatly increasing capital gains taxes would be good. There could also be some bad consequences to eliminating corporate taxes altogether.

<comment><USER17> _The very wealthy in the U.S. do not pay a fair share of the tax burden or for the cost of government._

They don't?? The top 1% of taxpayers paid 36.7% of all income taxes in 2009[1] (yes, that includes capital gains). The top 10% paid 70%!

[1] <http://ntu.org/tax-basics/who-pays-income-taxes.html>

<comment><USER16> One needs to look at overall tax receipts. Not just income taxes. The very wealthy primarily pay capital gains taxes and not income taxes. Also, the 36.7% figure is not meaningful without knowing the percentage of wealth the very rich control.

<comment><USER18> so actually Top 10% pays more than 70% of the taxes when we also consider capital gains (because they are the ones who play with the capital)

well, i think we all should be grateful for the %10, we are basically funded by them. Thank you rich folks!

<comment><USER16> The top 20% of the U.S. control 93% of the financial wealth of the country. I don't believe they pay 93% of the total tax burden.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I hope that if I ever find myself making $625,000 per week, I'll be a bit happier with my life, and less angry about poor people getting too much, than this Wayne fellow is.

<comment><USER19> I was really worried at this guy managing to be so poorly educated for the power he has (see: his SuperPAC contributions). I know this was a long time ago and he is old now, but he must have interacted with a lot of poorer people, especially when he had to earn money to pay for college, some of whom must have been generous in their own way. It takes a high level of magical thinking to think he was the only one to give the kind of selfless help that _Dr. Hudson's Secret Journal_ recommends.

<comment><USER20> How selfless is it when you consider it the critical, deciding factor in your own success.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Considering how much the US has spent and is still spending on the military for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I don't quite get the perception that taxing the rich more would fix anything. The bucket is leaking like crazy at the bottom and the solution is to pour more water? It may be fairer, but will it produce that much benefit, especially when compared to how difficult it would be to make this change? Is this tax-the-rich issue a red herring?

How much more money would end up in Uncle Sam's coffers anyway if the richer are taxed more?

<comment><USER22> Since just a few percent of the US population make 40%+ of the money in a given year, increasing taxes on those relatively few people would have more effect than taxing any other group of citizens. Also, since their effective tax rate is actually lower than most peoples', bringing their tax rate into line with the rest of the country seems like a no-brainer way to increase tax revenues substantially.

<comment><USER10> _Also, since their effective tax rate is actually lower than most peoples'..._

No. The people with the highest incomes already pay a disproportionately high portion of their income in taxes, far more than the poor or middle class.

Bringing their tax payments into line with the rest of the country would cause them to pay a lot less in taxes than they do now.

[http://taxfoundation.org/article/new-data-top-1-pay- greater-...](http://taxfoundation.org/article/new-data-top-1-pay-greater- dollar-amount-income-taxes-federal-government-bottom-90)

<comment><USER22> Warren Buffet famously observed that he paid a lower tax rate than his secretary. I'm mainly talking about income tax, but that chart seems to include all kinds of taxes including real estate etc. It's not at all surprising that the top few % are paying higher taxes on their property and other static wealth, my point is that they're paying lower rates on income taxes. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_State...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States#Effective_income_tax_rates)

<comment><USER10> This data comes from federal tax returns. As far as I know, there are no federal taxes on real estate (except for capital gains when real estate is sold).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm not sure that if the author tried to write an article that did nothing but reinforce stereo-types he could have done a better job of doing so.

I read that article and I don't think anything in the article surprised me.

Immigrant working for next to nothing? Check. Middle class family living paycheck to paycheck in middle america? Check. Millionaire who drops 100k for a business manager? Check. Dot.Com millionaire who takes everyone he can on his private jet? Check "Self-Made Man" who doesn't want to pay more taxes? Check.

<comment><USER19> There's a lot more detail than that. The way the lower-class people were paid (prepaid cards!) and how they budgeted were interesting to me; the details and evolution of the healthcare costs in particular were eye-opening. I'd have appreciated similar detail for the richer ones, but it would take a lot more virtual ink I suppose.

<comment><USER23> "The details and evolution of healthcare costs in particular were eye-opening"

How long have you been working? I ask out of curiosity, because I've been working for the past 12 years as a software developer. For the last 8 years if I didn't change jobs or get a promotion there was only 1 time that my raise out-paced the insurance increases.

The fact that the lowest paid guy got paid via pre-paid debit card is only surprising because I assumed it was cash under the table. I know that in central Missouri that if you work construction it's common practice to pay you in cash for the first 2 weeks because too many people don't stay on for two weeks. As a result employers see it as too expensive to fill out all the paperwork etc.

I guess I just thought most (if not all) of this was common knowledge, and I'm in a upper-middle bracket and come from an upper-middle class family, so it's not like I "came up from welfare" and saw all this first hand.

However, I assume that the stories of these family run a lot deeper. I just kept thinking "Is it really news that a dishwasher gets taken advantage of and lives in a scary neighborhood?"

<comment><USER19> I live in Europe. I was aware of some aspects of US healthcare: expensive overall, a tendency to bankrupt people, failing to prevent easily avoidable harm, it's just that the first item was a statistic to me. 21% of income for someone who has a median income drove it home. The trend also escaped me, I didn't follow the US social climate until recently.

I assumed cash as well, especially since the employer is shady; our cards also have chips and would easily be tied to an ID, so I was a bit thrown off. We do share the problem of catering relying on undocumented labour.

<comment><USER23> Sorry, my clearly US centric bias was showing. I didn't even think about someone who actually has decent insurance replying on this thread :)

I've been fortunate enough to get promoted & change jobs over the past 5 years so I've actually out-paced insurance costs. We'll just see if that continues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> On that great universal healthcare system in the UK, [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/elderhealth/9362183/NHS- fa...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/elderhealth/9362183/NHS-facing- colossal-care-bill-unless-system-is-overhauled-urgently.html)

</comment><comment><USER25> > _Frantz washes dishes at the Capital Grille restaurant, a posh steak house > near the harbor in Miami's financial district. He nets $200 for a twenty- > seven-hour week and receives no food stamps or government assistance of any > kind._

I HATE any kind of posh establishment that doesn't pay it's employees well.

When I want to spend some money on a posh restaurant or hotel (not that I have any money to do that often) I don't want the people tending me to be making minimum wage, while dinner costs $200 per person. Pay your bloody employees better.

To me, any establishment that does that kind of thing, are fake-posh. Paying their staff like shit is like having a huge chandelier made of plastic, or "silverware" made of nickel.

<comment><USER17> I bet there's some competition for those dish-washer jobs: If you believe the article, he's being paid more than minimum wage since he's netting $7.40/hour after FICA and other taxes.

Why is he only working 27 hours/week? If he's serious about raising himself out of poverty, finding another part-time job would seem to be a priority.

<comment><USER26> I would like to politely suggest that a) finding full-time work when desperately poor is maybe not as easy as you seem to believe, especially when there are massive transportation issues at play and b) the tendency to focus immediately on what the poor could be doing better, instead of on how the rest of us could do a better job in _helping_ them, is kind of insane (though extremely popular on the internet).

Could Maurose Frantz raise himself out of poverty if he just pulled a little harder on them faithful ol' bootstraps? Maybe! You'll never know, of course, since you don't know his actual situation and have almost certainly never known anything like it, but your go-to move of imagining that this is the case --that it's basically 'his fault' he's poor--is definitely a good way to calm your conscience. We all sleep better when we're convinced the world is just.

Maybe you've gathered from my tone that I don't think this is exactly the smartest way to go about fixing America's problem with poverty.

<comment><USER17> I think you're making an awful lot of assumptions about my point of view from my merely pointing out that nobody, no matter what government programs are available, is going to raise him or herself out of poverty working 27 hours a week.

And seriously: The article doesn't tell us, but we can assume he's a first or second generation immigrant from Haiti, a place of _truly_ grinding poverty. "We" have already given him an absolutely tremendous hand up by giving his family a chance to be here. We could easily deal with the "problem" of poverty like Frantz's if we simply didn't let Haitian refugees and other extremely poor individuals migrate here. But I think it's for the best that we do offer that opportunity when we can.

<comment><USER25> > _I think you're making an awful lot of assumptions about my point of view > from my merely pointing out that nobody, no matter what government programs > are available, is going to raise him or herself out of poverty working 27 > hours a week._

Actually people have raised themselves out of poverty by working far less. IIRC, one guy in the article, just chanced upon Jezz Bezos and invested a small sum in Amazon.

That said, there are people unable to work themselves out of poverty even by working more than 40+ hours per week. Try talking with people working on your nearest Walmart for example, for some insight. Those kinds of salaries are spent as soon as they are received, in gas, rent, utility bills, foods, the kids, etc, rarely leaving anything to pursue something more, enroll in some educational program, etc.

Plus, people working 50+ hours a week in some office job, a lot of times slack, browse the web, gossip around the water cooler, and such, that in the end their productive time ends less (and much much easier on their body and mind) than a guy working 27 hours a week in a restaurant kitchen, which could be a no-breaks, work constantly, hell.

<comment><USER27> > He invested all the money he had on hand—$45,000 cash

Not a good example for "raising oneself out of poverty"

> His parents made good money in the pillow trade, and after college he set up > a few okay businesses

That is not poverty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The original title was useful. Changing a descriptive title to a useless phrase is disrespectful of the HN reader's time.

<comment><USER29> ...and probably killed this thread.

I wonder why its done, there's no reason for it.

<comment><USER30> Was it originally the same title as in the html?: <title>The Surprising Truths About Income Inequality in America: Big Issues: GQ</title>

<comment><USER31> It was when I first started reading the comments.</comment></comment></comment></comment>