Ask HN: What encrypted chat application to choose? - <AUTHOR> I have been using Google Hangouts for IM until now, but recently became interested in an app that would ensure privacy of my conversations.<p>I have looked at several solutions, however, there doesn't seem to be a clear leader amongst them. There has been talk about Telegram's crypto protocol being broken, while TextSecure seems to only be available for Android. Desktop client is a must for me. <comment><USER2> I'm no expert here, but in terms of HN love, TextSecure is the clear leader. tptacek (founder and former leader of security company Matasano) seems to support it, and it's developed by a legitimate security researcher, Moxie Marlinspike. moxie, in turn, I've seen supported by cperciva (all around genius and developer of tarsnap).

Now, take this all with a grain of salt since this is all just HN celebrity- worship / appeal to authority, but I don't really know what else to go on, not being a security researcher myself...

That said, as far as I know TextSecure is Android only, as you say, but I believe I read that both a desktop and iOS version are under active development and nearing release.

Wasn't it recently partnered with WhatsApp? Does that mean if you use WhatsApp between two recent android clients it's encrypted? If so, WhatsApp might be an option for you.

But it doesn't seem like that's the case, though, since I've used TextSecure and there's some (necessary) complexity in the interface to generate and share a key, as well as notifications about whether your messages are loaded in memory unencrypted. I haven't noticed any of this with WhatsApp.

</comment><comment><USER3> A good start would be EFF's Secure Messaging Scorecard. They measured all existing solutions using 7 security features(from end-to-end encryption to open source and public reviews).

A few solutions fulfill all requirements (e.g. Telegrams code hasn't been publically reviewed while TextSecure was).

One problem is though, that many open source solutions aren't available for iOS due to issues between Apple's ToS and the GPL.

[1] [https://www.eff.org/de/secure-messaging- scorecard](https://www.eff.org/de/secure-messaging-scorecard)

<comment><USER4> The EFF scorecard is technically unsound and not a good place to start. It actually caused a small controversy among crypto and security people when it was released.

<comment><USER5> To clarify, the most criticism that the EFF secure messaging scorecard had was:

* CryptoCat got a perfect rating, despite it's long history of insecurity, attack vectors, and questionable audits.

* Skype got rated more favorably then is likely the truth. It has since been corrected though.

* PGP got buried as a recommendation.

* A good number of tools were missing on initial release.

The big issue with the scorecard is the lack of rigid definitions, such as code audits. Developers will audit and review each other's code all the time. But most won't qualify that as a "security audit". So, does a security audit require a cryptographer to audit the code? A third party security agency? How in depth do audits go? Are there any standards or "best practices" to go by when auditing crypto code, or is it just a rubber stamp?

With that said, it does list (incompletely) a good set of tools that you can investigate, that you may not have heard of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >Tox is a free and open-source, peer-to-peer, encrypted instant messaging and video calling software. The stated goal of the project is to provide secure yet easily accessible communication for everyone.[1] The Tox Foundation took part in Google Summer of Code 2014.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tox_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tox_\(software\))

[https://tox.im](https://tox.im)

</comment><comment><USER7> Privacy against whom? What is your threat model? What platforms must be supported? What level of technical knowledge do your contacts have? Sadly those questions are still relevant.

<comment><USER8> My take (I doubt this exists, and won't use chat until it does) -

 _Privacy against whom?_

Privacy against all parties not participating in an exchange. Also, I will not use an app that uploads my contacts. This suggests that contacts are added manually, probably using an email address as an identifier, with mutual authorisation.

 _What is your threat model?_

Information disclosure, spoofing, tampering and non-repudiation. The threat tree might include elevation of privilege. Denial of service is also important, in that I want it to use decentralised servers - if one goes down (or is taken down) another server picks up the load. New servers should be easy to add by anyone.

Side note - servers are preferable to me, so that messages get through when one or more parties in an exchange are offline.

 _What platforms must be supported?_

All the platforms my contacts use, so Windows, Windows RT, and Windows Phone; OSX and iOS; Android; Linux. A nice-to-have fall-back is a browser-based client.

 _What level of technical knowledge do your contacts have?_

Enough to install the app, register and log in.

</comment></comment><comment> andrey-p I've had some experience using Pidgin's OTR plugin [1] via Google Chat. It's a bit clunky for everyday use but it does the job.

[1]: [https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/](https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/)

<comment><USER9> Yeah the OTR plugin is really nice. I think it has suffered from some serious not-invented-here syndrome in terms of not being baked into Pidgin as a core feature (which it should be).

It has been included in Mac OS X's Adium client for many years, which probably means that it has the largest installed base of any end-to-end encrypted chat client, other than Skype. (Although I don't know if Adium automatically enables it, but at least it doesn't require another download and a clunky plugin enablement.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would recommend tox. If there is any other decentralized, open source, fully encrypted chat service I would recommend that as well.

</comment><comment><USER11> Use a OTR-able client like Pidgin. OTR is protocol-agnostic and works over most IM protocols.

<comment><USER12> I've never successfully been able to get pidgin otr to work in Ubuntu. Have any links to a step-by-step tutorial?

<comment><USER13> Install the pidgin-otr package, enable the plugin, use it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm with you. Not having both a desktop client and a mobile one is a large impediment to using many of these apps. Your best bet is something that uses OTR right now, probably, such as Pidgin on desktop with ChatSecure on mobile, or CryptoCat (but it seems it still only has an iOS version right now).

I'm waiting on TextSecure to gets it own desktop version (hopefully with video support as well), but I haven't seen any updates on that for half a year, so it's probably going to take at least another 6-12 months to be done.

</comment><comment><USER15> I use usually Threema, but since you want a desktop client Word isn't bad. Still in beta though (I think)

</comment><comment><USER16> For something more like encrypted anonymous email (that keeps sender and receiver location hidden), there's: [http://voluntary.net/bitpost/](http://voluntary.net/bitpost/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Are there any practical examples of Telegram's protocol being broken?

<comment><USER18> According to their docs, the server can MITM encrypted chats.

[https://core.telegram.org/techfaq#man-in-the-middle- attacks](https://core.telegram.org/techfaq#man-in-the-middle-attacks)

 _After that, if both clients trust the server software,_

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I would recommend [http://prism-break.org](http://prism-break.org), where you can find a comparison between free alternatives for popular software.

</comment><comment><USER5> First, know your adversary. Is it your ex-wife, your ISP, some disgruntled hosting provider employees, or law enforcement? That will help you narrow down your choices.

Second, for an email-like replacement, you may want to look into Bitmessage. It's decentralized, trustless, and end-to-end encrypted. Unfortunately, it may be vulnerable to some attacks: [https://bitmessage.org/forum/index.php?topic=1666.15](https://bitmessage.org/forum/index.php?topic=1666.15)

For a live chat-like replacement, you may want to look into Tox. It is also decentralized, trustless, and end-to-end encrypted. It is designed to be a Skype replacement. However, this thread regarding a security audit and the software it uses is slightly concerning: [https://github.com/irungentoo/toxcore/issues/121](https://github.com/irungentoo/toxcore/issues/121)

Both Bitmessage and Tox are wet behind the ears, so-to-speak. PyBitmessage, the main client, is written in Python. As such, the proof of work needed to calculate for each message is not optimized. Attackers have written clients in C to take advantage of Python's weakness to flood the network. Until the main client is also written in C, and the PoW algorithm is designed to take advantage of it, I'm sure there will be other network flooding problems on the Bitmessage network.

uTox and Venom seem to be the most used Tox clients, but I have had trouble getting uTox and Venom to actually work with video. Further, when both parties are using uTox, in some situations, while my video and audio testing work fine, the other party cannot see me or cannot hear me. I use uTox for signing PGP keys, so I've used it a number of times, and it's probably 50% at this point when it Just Works.

Both Bitmessage and Tox, however, have not had a security audit of the code.

Also, OTR and PGP have proven to be reliable, stable, secure, and enjoy large communities. With PGP, you can end-to-end encrypt your email, and with OTR, you can end-to-end encrypt your live chat, although video and audio are not supported. It doesn't matter about your email or chat provider either, and software exists for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and BSD for both.

Freenode also offers TLS-supported IRC servers, including hidden servers on Tor. Although Tor has been getting some press lately of the FBI successfully taking down pedophiles and drug markets, these are all due to mistakes by the end users, and not insecurities with Tor itself. So, Freenode on Tor might be a good one-off solution, where you just need to chat quickly, without registering for accounts, and staying hidden. See [https://freenode.net/irc_servers.shtml#tor](https://freenode.net/irc_servers.shtml#tor)

Finally, if you're not familiar with the EFF Secure Messaging Scorecard, you might want to take a look at it: [https://www.eff.org/secure-messaging- scorecard](https://www.eff.org/secure-messaging-scorecard). There are a lot of clients there, including the various security margins of each, so that might be of interest.

</comment><comment><USER20> retroshare is all you need!!

</comment><comment><USER21> IRC.

</comment><comment><USER22> try cryptocat</comment>


Request for feedback to make code more accessible - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dafer45/TBTK <comment><AUTHOR> I'm interested in feedback on a project that I'm hosting on GitHub ([http://github.com/dafer45/TBTK](http://github.com/dafer45/TBTK)). In particular, I am interested in feedback on the README file, and how it can be improved to increase the accessibility of the project. Comments on the documentation and supporting site [http://www.second- tech.com/](http://www.second-tech.com/) is very welcome as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Let me for example know what the first unanswered question that comes to mind is.</comment></comment>


Email without the Inbox - <AUTHOR> http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/08/launched-little-startup-email-without.html

<comment><USER2> Effectively a duplication:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1648921>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1648778>

And when I click on "Tell Me More" it says:

      The change you wanted was rejected.
      Maybe you tried to change something
      you didn't have access to.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

<comment><USER2> OK - for reference it doesn't work in on older version of Konqueror (3.5.1 on KDE 3.5.1 on SuSE 10.1) but it does something more sensible on on older version of FireFox (188.8.131.52)

Now I've just started to watch the screencast - it's taken nearly two minutes of chatting and story telling to get to actually show me anything. I feel like screaming "GET TO THE POINT ALREADY!!!"

The script needs to be tighter - _much_ tighter - and you can do that without losing the gentle, folksey feel. Just watch it again from the point of view of someone who thinks "I have no time to waste - maybe this will help." So far it's wasted 2 minutes of my time. Yes, it described my problem, but I already know my problem!

</feedback>

<comment><AUTHOR> Well that's good feedback but I strongly suspect that Giles Bowkett, the author, may not get it here. I hope you don't mind, I'm going to email him a link to your comment.

<comment><USER2> Feel free.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lobby The U.S. Government, With Crowdfunding Site We The Lobby - <AUTHOR> http://www.flarevine.com/2012/01/25/lobby-the-u-s-government-with-crowdfunding-site-we-the-lobby/

<comment><USER2> Does anyone know if people from outside the US can donate?</comment>


How to Mail a Package from Space - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/xkcds-randall-munroe-on-how-to-mail-a-package-from-space/ <comment><USER2> Related: spy satellites used to drop film back to Earth periodically [https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jpzpkg/the-first-spy- sate...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jpzpkg/the-first-spy-satellites- had-to-drop-gigantic-buckets-of-film-back-to-earth)</comment>


Will people like your game if it's ugly? - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/hwmmbr/people_wont_like_your_game_if_its_ugly/ <comment><USER2> Dwarf Fortress, as mentioend in one of the comments, is a big counterexample. Other older ASCII art games that remain popular fall into this bin as well (NetHack, Rogue). Not to mention any of the popular Flash games with graphics somewhere in the range of minimal to shitty.

It is definitely much easier to draw people into playing your game if it looks nice/has a cool and cohesive aesthetic (the 6-second GIF heuristic mentioned in the top-comment), but if your game is a major success in other ways, it can be a hit _despite_ what it looks like. But that doesn't mean you should neglect the aesthetics: part of getting something to be popular is removing as many of these "despites"/barriers-to-entry as possible.</comment>


Apple's Core Could Soon Include In-House Chips - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/11/new-hire-will-d.html <comment><USER2> "such a transition is inevitable since the company is already working on a mobile processor, explained Rob Enderle"

Don't trust Enderle, he's worst than most analysts, and never knows what he's talking about. Apple are reaping huge benefits from using Intel right now on their desktops, like for example allowing people to have virtual machines for Windows. This is possible through emulation with different machine architectures but not as fast.

Anyone that reads daring fireball will know to be cautious around anything Enderle says.

Here's some video of Enderle presenting Windows 7. It's funny because multi- touch doesn't work.

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7696648.stm>

<comment><AUTHOR> Apple did buy a CPU company a little while ago... [http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/23/apple-buys-chip-p-a- semi-...](http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/23/apple-buys-chip-p-a-semi-chip- designer-intel-says-wha/) My guess is that they'll use this together with Intel chips to add functionality.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I'm fully aware of that, but p-a-semi conductor is for mobile chips. I don't discount that Apple will be making chips for it's mobile iPhone platform to replace the ARM processors but stating that Apple is going to break away from Intel on it's larger machines is ludicrous. Apple is still supporting G4's and G5's and the move to Intel is still fairly new.

Nothing is impossible, but saying that Apple will be moving from Intel in it's desktop/laptops is ludicrous. That would be a long term play of 10+ years, and I don't think Robert Enderle ever thinks that far ahead.

<comment><USER3> > I don't discount that Apple will be making chips for it's mobile iPhone > platform to replace the ARM processors..

I'd say this is unlikely too. ARM is a pretty decent platform and not too expensive to license. There is a whole toolchain/support/knowledge around ARM that is pretty extensive.

Unless you were doing something pretty far-out there isn't really a compelling reason to jump... And Apple is hardly a Transmeta type. The most I'd expect is licensing the design and then combine/customise in a specialised way (e.g. adding some of the baseband pieces in?).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> apart from a full fledged cpu, apple might be going for a h/w based encryption/decryption for their iphone (among other things). this would be similar to whatever happens on the blackberry. pa-semi folks do seem to have done significant stuff here e.g. with sibyte (which was bought by broadcom).</comment>


Lockless Algorithms for Mere Mortals - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/827180/a1c1305686bfea67/ <comment><USER2> It seems the answer is "Not available right now, let's work on an API"? I think that matches my perspective on this, in that it isn't worth a "mortal" developer's time right now. Rarely have I hit a scenario where a lock is the primary source of inefficiency and crossing thread boundaries.

The Go approach of "Do not communicate by sharing memory" holds well, because CPU and memory do not always compose as one would expect (As the author of the post notes). Passing messages simplifies a lot of things because you learn to now rely on a specific thread or order, or program defensively against that possibility.

<comment><USER3> My experience is that I've often seen locks being an _unseen_ source of performance woes in enterprise systems. So when you say that "rarely have I hit a scenario", I'd say that there's an even chance that you have, it's just that you didn't know it.

Here's the acid test: Imagine if you got given a two-socket AMD EPYC server with 128 cores to run your software on. No virtualisation, local NVMe SSD for storage, 400 Gbps Ethernet for networking. No hardware bottlenecks of any type! Could your software utilise all 256 hardware threads of this computer? If not, why not?

Maybe you got lucky and you really haven't had issues with locks, but certainly other developers have.

The most common issue I see is with implicit locks in things like logging frameworks. E.g.: Sending output to a text file can be a bottleneck for larger servers like in the example above. Similarly, console output in multi-threaded software also requires locks, and also often has contention issues.

Even innocent-looking code that simply uses dynamic memory allocation ("new", "malloc", etc...) can be bottlenecked by cross-thread contention on the heap data structures and the associated locks. Some modern allocators have thread- local pools, but this doesn't always work. E.g.: often large allocations go to a shared pool. Code that over-allocates large buffers and rapidly frees them can hit this issue all too easily.

Web application servers will often hit the wall on something like a shared cache or the session-state store. Unless 100% of the shared data uses efficient lock-free algorithms, then given enough threads eventually some mutex somewhere will be the limit.

There was a study done recently that showed that no modern database engine can scale past 64 cores properly, let alone 128. Not Oracle, not SAP, not SQL Server.

At the rate TSMC is advancing with chip technology, they'll hit 300 million transistors per square millimeter in just a couple years. I fully expect AMD to release 128-core CPUs once they're on that process. A quad-socket server with those will have 512 cores or 1,024 threads. Completely lock-free algorithms will be the _only_ way to scale up to just one server at that scale!

PS: I remember reading the content on [http://www.1024cores.net/](http://www.1024cores.net/) a few years back and thinking to myself that this guy has the _right idea_ , but he's thinking too far ahead. Now... not so much. Now I think the author of that site is a visionary that more people should have paid attention to.

<comment><USER4> > I fully expect AMD to release 128-core CPUs once they're on that process. A > quad-socket server with those will have 512 cores or 1,024 threads. > Completely lock-free algorithms will be the only way to scale up to just one > server at that scale!

How often will we need that scale in a single address space?

It's certainly desirable for hypervisors/kernels, database servers, perhaps L4 load balancers and reverse HTTP proxies. Those aren't nothing but far more people work on web application servers than all of them put together.

Web application servers are often written to be stateless (with the possible exception of caches) so they can scale to multiple machines. That's important for high-reliability sites even if they aren't large enough to fully saturate a single huge machine like that. As long as you need to load-balance between machines, it's not a big problem to also run multiple instances per machine. If the application scales well to 32 cores, run 16 of them per 512-core machine. Seems a lot easier than going to extraordinary efforts to make one address space scale...

<comment><USER5> Even if you have 1024 separate processes not sharing much of anything, there are still locks in the kernel running them.

For example, a pair of threads (inside one of those 1024 processes) synchronising with each other will often go through the kernel to do so. In Linux this uses the futex syscall; Windows etc have similar. If to do that the kernel takes a lock that is shared with other processes, even if just for a moment, even if it's hashed on address and memory space, even if it's a spinlock and there's little contention, that lock causes memory traffic between multiple cores and separate processes.

Same for processes that are reading the same files as other processes, or (for example) running in the same directory when doing path lookups. There's a lot of work done in Linux to keep this scalable (RCU), but it's easy to hit scaling barriers that nobody has tested or designed for yet. Once 1024 core CPUs are common, of course the kernel will be optimised for that.

<comment><USER4> Yes, I included the kernel in my list of things that are desirable to scale well for that reason.

That said, in some cases I don't think it's strictly necessary for even the kernel to scale well as long as you have a hypervisor that does. It's not unusual to deploy software in VMs on a cluster. Having more, smaller VMs per machine is a way to handle poor kernel scalability, just as I suggested for the web application server. VMs are higher-overhead than multiple containers on a single kernel, so this wouldn't be my first choice, but many people use VMs anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It would seem to be a failing of the C language that ultimately prevents us from coming up with re-useable recipes for this. Macros or generics of sufficient power in a language with an advanced type system should be able to accomplish this.

I wonder, if language is the primary barrier here, if this is a way to integrate another language for specific small pieces like this.

<comment><USER7> C actually had better support (than C++) for double-checked locking (which is a lockless algorithm) up until relatively recently [https://preshing.com/20130930/double-checked-locking-is- fixe...](https://preshing.com/20130930/double-checked-locking-is-fixed-in- cpp11/)

<comment><USER8> Huh? Both C and C++ only added support for atomics and double-checked locking in the same year: 2011 (C11 for C and C++11 for C++). How did C support double checked locking before C++ when the standards were released contemporaneously?</comment></comment></comment>


Database for PNG images - with possible high compression rate - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/albertz/png-db

<comment><USER2> Pretty interesting.

I've played with this idea as well, to make a lexicon of image tiles, and then puzzle them together to achieve compression/recognition of large sets of images and video data.

I wonder, though, how well does this work in practice, for photos and illustrations? Deduplication works great for the specific application of screenshots, but there is almost a zero chance that the tiles from two different photos match exactly.

You'd need some kind of fuzzy matching, which will greatly increase the computational cost of the algorithm.</comment>


What to see in Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN! Next tuesday about 10 kids from central Indiana with a passion for innovation will be visiting SF, and Silicon Valley. We will be in the city for about 5 days and are excited to experience technology and innovation in this awesome city. We have already scheduled tours of Facebook, Google, and plan on going to the Computer History Museum. We are interested in maybe seeing some startups or really anything (does not have to be tech related). Let me know if you think there is some place that we shouldn't miss! Thanks! <comment><USER2> If you don't have big places to buy electronics, a trip to one of the Fry Electronics stores would be a nice diversion. If they are shopping for bits and pieces of electronics, Weird Stuff or HSC would also be a possibility.

San Francisco public library main branch has a massive computer/technology section. (if you get a library card you can check out e-books)

If you re interested in engineering and a little hiking the SF streets the cable car museum is cool (corner of Mason and Washington).

If you are into games and mechanical amusement Muse Mechanique at pier 45 next to (Fisherman's Wharf) is something to see. Exploratorium is also in the area there.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hard to say without know the kids ages but

[http://www.thetech.org/](http://www.thetech.org/) [http://www.calacademy.org/](http://www.calacademy.org/) [http://www.exploratorium.edu/](http://www.exploratorium.edu/)

SF in general will have way more museums and sights to see than the peninsula which is mainly business parks, residential, and scenic drives along the coast. Also traffic...

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd try to find a tech meetup that'd be ok with you bringing 10 kids along. They're often hosted in the offices of startups/tech companies. The museums are great, but this could be a cool experience that lets them see a side of SF that's a bit removed from the rest of the touristy stuff.

</comment><comment><USER5> The Tech Museum Rocks! If you want to do a little something different, book at tour ahead of time to Alcatraz.</comment>


Thoughts on a Successful Launch - <AUTHOR> http://skribit.com/blog/2009/12/22/thoughts-on-a-successful-launch/ <comment><USER2> I'm going to go write up a "Thoughts on a failed launch" post will post in like 30 minutes

ok here is the link:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1011341>

<comment><USER3> well? it's been more than 30 minutes. i've been waiting anxiously for it.

<comment><USER2> just putting the finishing touches on, doing the images took longer than I expected</comment></comment></comment>


Yes, an Eee PC can run 10 operating systems in parallel - <AUTHOR> http://sam.ai.ki/qemu.html

<comment><USER2> It's funny how you can now refer to a 1Ghz/1GB machine as a 'not very powerful' computer with a straight face.

Your average computer scientist would have given his right arm and his first born for such a machine not all that long ago.

Sure qemu is efficient, but that little machine is plenty powerful in its own right. The fact that you normally don't actually use much of that power is why you can do this in the first place!

<comment><USER3> Amen.

I'm usually taking my personal AspireOne on business trips. Our operations guy refuses to stock netbooks because they are "underpowered". And, at least once I had our contractor remark that it's impossible to work on such an underpowered machine - while it was happily rebuilding Linux kernel at that very moment.

The thing's so much lighter and compact than company laptops, it makes huge difference when you have to climb a 70m tower with it, or unfold it during 13-hour flight. And most typical tasks in personal computing are not resource- intensive at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> I got an HP mini this week, runs Ubuntu 10.04 very nicely, and has a lovely matte screen. It was the only laptop in shop with a nice matte screen, even the super $3000 3d laptop had a glossy screen! Who wants a glossy screen, are they insane?

I deliberately use slower machines so that I write more efficient code!

<comment><USER4> It could be that most laptop manufacturers are copying Apple's glossy-only- unless-you're-rich Macbook design.

Which is - I'll agree with you on this - rather ridiculous.

<comment><USER5> Glossy screens have a much higher contrast ratio, aren't covered in plastic and are much easier to clean. You can easily stick a matte layer over the glass if it's that much of an issue.

<comment><USER6> Can you recommend a good matte cover? I was just going to replace the entire screen on my MacBook.

<comment><USER7> The anti-glare film from PowerSupportUSA.com is the best computer accessory I've ever bought.

<comment><USER6> Thanks! Ordered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What matter to me is how they perform under load. IO/network/cpu benchmarks between your 10 VM would be probably more interesting.

<comment><USER9> Not really. There is no way they are not going to suck, even just one does not work that well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> How does one install a MacOS in a VM? Does Apple allow it?

<comment><USER11> Hackintosh. And no, not to my knowledge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why?

<comment><USER13> That's what people wondered when Twitter and Facebook (and many other "projects") were first launched. Pun aside, what I mean to convey is that experimentation is a vital aspect for innovation and hackership.

<comment><USER14> Where's the pun in that?

<comment><USER13> The pun is in the irony. Many people still question the usefulness of Twitter and Facebook.

<comment><USER2> Maybe because it isn't useful to everybody?

<comment><USER15> Is anything (non-biologically-necessary)?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Buy a poster and support Wikipedia - <AUTHOR> http://hackerwalls.tumblr.com/

<comment><USER2> My opinion: You should be less transparant about the costs/profit, and you'll probably get less resistance for the fact that you're making some profit on it.

If you would just say "$10 of every sale goes to Wikipedia" people wouldn't know, but also wouldn't care that you're actually making a small profit.

Test it out using some A/B tests.

</comment><comment><USER3> You're using Wikipedia's goodwill for personal gain, which doesn't seem very nice to me.

</comment><comment><USER4> The author is not very transparent that 40% of the profit also goes to themselves.

<comment><USER5> _Every poster is $40. They come in A2 size, 420 × 594mm. Print costs $9, shipping costs $9 (I'm from Europe). That's $18. 60% of the $22 goes directly to Wikipedia._

and

 _I want to pay up a small amount of debt I got into (less than 1k), and I figured I could throw 3 hours into this experiment to see if I could pay a part of that debt and do something good for Wikipedia. The lean way!_

Seems fairly transparent to me.

<comment><USER4> "Posters for your walls & money for Wikipedia" & "Buy poster and support wikipedia" seems to strongly imply that the money is directly supporting Wikipedia. Sure he posts the figures but in an overly confusing manner and as part of the small print. If he's going to be pushing the fact that your money is supporting Wikipedia then he needs to be very clear about the cut he is getting. At no point does he directly state he is getting a cut, or how much - he leaves it up to the purchaser to work out.

<comment><USER5> Come on.

That "small print" is at the top of the page. Apart from the title it is the only text!

<comment><USER4> Still less than half the size of the main text.

If I had it on a donation bucket with "Cancer research" and then below it I had "Bucket cost $5, stickers for bucket cost $2. That's $7. 60% of the $10 average donation will go directly to Cancer Research." in much smaller font - do you think people wouldn't feel misled that I'm getting 40% of the profit?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Japanese startup offers unlimited cloud storage with its new data compression - <AUTHOR> http://gigafile.net/ <comment><USER2> The front page is Japanese, and autotranslation to English didn't reveal any references to compression.

But it briefly made me nostalgic for '90s usenet where unfounded compression claims were not uncommon -- enough so that it inspired its own FAQ section. [http://www.faqs.org/faqs/compression- faq/part1/section-8.htm...](http://www.faqs.org/faqs/compression- faq/part1/section-8.html)</comment>


Hosting for $1/month. Clients in Africa; me in Europe. Am i doing this wrong? - <AUTHOR>

I am starting a hosting "company" for clients in Africa and plan to charge $1/months for some basic hosting (sitting on top of a VPS). I am in Europe. Can this actually work, HN? <comment><USER2> A second visit to this thread got me thinking and I got curious about your reasons for offering cheap hosting for Africa.

I could only think of 2 reasons, either you are trying to do some good or you just a guy on hustle trying to build something successful.

As a web/software developer from Africa who spends lots of time working on the next facebook, I pay my bills from the revenues from my web hosting business.

By offering hosting for $1 per month you'll end up leaving a good number of African tech hustlers broke. When you think about what you're doing, there is no big difference between you and Franc Lucas.

I don't mean to judge your intentions and I totally understand you trying to make a buck(its actually a cool idea and am sure it'd sell) but I thought it'd be nice for you to know the impact you'd have on Africa.

#SmartHustle

</comment><comment><USER3> What kind of customer are you focusing on? Personal homepages, blogs, basic online presence for brick-and-mortar businesses, e-commerce sites, application hosting?

What level of access do your clients have? Web interface only, FTP, UNIX account with SSH, root on a Xen VM?

At the $1 level, transaction fees may eat up a large portion of your revenue. What is your plan to deal with the issue?

Are you planning to make a profit, break even, or will the service require financing indefinitely?

How will you make potential customers aware of your service?

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks like you would be competing with nosupportlinuxhosting.com. If you are planning on offering a similar amount of support I can see it working. You might be able to save money on staffing by hiring locally (in Africa) if you can find the right skill sets.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually thought about answering support questions from locals by offering a support package for an extra fee. But the idea of the referenced website sounds very, very interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What does your service more favorable than others for clients in africa?

<comment><AUTHOR> Providing reliable and very cheap hosting, while the major local providers offer hosting packages starting at 4 USD/month. So, basically, it is a place where you get your small website hosted and don't overpay (given the economy of some African countries).</comment></comment>


Dual-screen laptop on sale by Christmas - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/6105506/Dual-screen-laptop-on-sale-by-Christmas.html <comment><USER2> I will now make a prediction that this will be a flop.

When you need multiple monitors, you're generally in a location where you can have multiple _real_ monitors. Also, the screen real estate provided is still much less than a single 30" monitor.

Finally, when I use a second monitor, I have one "main" monitor which is directly in front of my keyboard and mouse, and the "secondary" off to the side. The centered arrangement here seems just uncomfortable.</comment>


The Internet is nominated for Nobel Peace Prize - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/03/11/urnidgns852573C400693880002576E30069623A.DTL&tsp=1

<comment><USER2> See also: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1191262>

Report from a different source for comparison.</comment>


Windows 7 Can't View XP Share?…Turn off Simple File Sharing on XP - <AUTHOR> http://www.omegacoder.com/?p=465 <comment><USER2> Minor nitpick: You probably don't want to set "everyone", but instead add your particular user. Wouldn't want my roommates rummaging in my stuff uninvited!</comment>


Microsoft Surface Duo Trailer - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU78s9ExFFA <comment><USER2> Reminds me of the Nokia Navigator series and personal organizers from back in the day</comment>


Containers or virtual machines: Which is more secure? - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/which-is-more-secure-containers-or-virtual-machines-the-answer-will-surprise-you/ <comment><USER2> Best is Hyper-V isolated containers.</comment>


Blendle Is Up to Something Big - <AUTHOR> http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/10/05/blendle-is-up-to-something-big/ <comment><USER2> Another fun thing about Blendle is that it is open source. At least, only the front-end, and probably unintentionally.

They left their Webpack source maps on the server [1]. Chrome automatically unpacks the source map into a directory structure in the 'sources' debug view. It's nice to see how they are building their React application.

I've previously sent them an email about this, but never got a reply back. I've just sent them an email again. Let's see what happens.

[1] [https://www.blendle.com/js/app.js.map](https://www.blendle.com/js/app.js.map)

</comment><comment><USER3> Love how a nay-sayer (www.mondaynote.com/2014/11/02/the-new-york-times-and- springer-are-wrong-about-blendle/) got converted to a believer. Kudos to Blendle for changing the proposition and to the author for taking another look.

</comment><comment><USER4> Blendle offers articles across various outlets. It's a dataminer's dream: they can monitor the interests of the readers of the articles like no online newspaper/article site can as they can track what readers read across various sites, how long the reader is paying attention, how it is shared, with whom, in what order they're reading the articles etc. etc.

This is also the downside of this system: Blendle can create a very detailed profile of your interests and thus you. This is very sad, as Blendle isn't free, so you pay for the articles you read not only with money but also with your privacy, and with no influence on what will happen with the profile data Blendle created.

I know the group of people who is concerned about their privacy is small (or not big enough, I'd say), and this might look like paranoid whining, but in case you didn't realize this: now you do :)

<comment><USER5> Blendle Data Scientist here (living said dream). I'd like to mention that users do have influence on what is done with their data. We currently provide two ways of determining what data is collected, one setting (which is switched on by default) makes us collect data for internal usage. Switching this off will make us stop sending analytics events from the frontend and we will stop aggregating your data into a profile used for personalization. Note that these profiles are currently being developed and are not yet in use anywhere and once they will there only use case will be making Blendle better for its users. The other setting is switched off by default and allows us to share some data with one specific publisher (which is very clearly mentioned).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have been using Blendle nearly since the day they launched for reading Dutch newspapers. It is absolutely great: I can cherry-pick articles without subscribing to a newspaper, I don't have to shop around on different newspaper sites and they have this great feature where you can request a refund if an article is not what you expected quality-wise.

Also, they have this nice feature where you can register your newspaper subscription to get unlimited access in the Blendle webapp.

The only thing that I find lacking is an Android app - the webpage is sometimes slow on my nicely spec'ed ASUS tablet and I'd like to save longer articles for offline use.

<comment><USER7> They do have an Android app, but I must admit I haven't used it on an Android tablet, so maybe it is only for phones?

<comment><USER6> Thanks for pointing this out, I completely missed that they introduced an app. Maybe it was not available in Germany before? (Dutch expat here ;))

Edit: There also seem to be two apps:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nl.blendle.app...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nl.blendle.app&hl=en)

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blendle.ap...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blendle.app)

I cannot install the first (possibly because I am not in NL).

<comment><USER8> That first app is odd. I _am_ in the Netherlands, but it is "not available in your country". The second one is.

<comment><USER9> Hi, one of Blendle's Android devs here (Dutchie as well). The first one used to be the official app, but since it posed some problems we deprecated it. It'll be removed from the store soon. The second one is atm only meant for Germany, but that might change very soon... :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The one thing that is still bugging me is their automatic refill of your wallet. As soon as I noticed it refilled far more often than I liked, I quickly turned off the automatic refill. And now I am very conscious again of the costs of reading an article. I am constantly thinking: "Is this article really worth € 1,-?". Most of the time, no. Either I do not buy the article at all or I ask my money back after reading it. The thing is: their is really not that much content that is worth (like in paying for) reading. My favourite spot for reading opinions is currently Medium. The quality of the articles and the joy of reading is much better.

</comment><comment><USER11> Alexander Klöpping visited silicon valley for a series on dutch tv, I guess he got inspired there :) [http://dewerelddraaitdoor.vara.nl/media/230201](http://dewerelddraaitdoor.vara.nl/media/230201) (Dutch)

<comment><USER12> The thing with the Dutch adoption rate is indeed the use of public television for massive pitching of the product. He had an 'Oprah book club' opening and executed succesfully.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's increasingly clear that the future of publishing—for content providers—will be to relinquish control and publish their content directly to third-party distribution and engagement platforms.

See also: Snapchat Discover & Facebook Instant Articles.

<comment><USER14> I can't possibly believe publishers could be stupid enough to partner with Blendle. Blendle clearly, as demonstrated by the effort to duplicate content down to the pixel, intend to be a middleman and, if they get popular, control the pubs. If they were a SSO solution that allowed you to pay and see an article on the original pubs it might be a good deal.

After seeing what happened with apple and itunes/music, or amazon and kindle/ebooks, I just can't see how content makers are willing to make the same error. Letting a third party own your relationship with users never ends well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> @Blendle: Add Business Punk / t3n and ix and I will use your service! :)</comment>


The next big blue collar job is coding (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2017/02/programming-is-the-new-blue-collar-job/ <comment><USER3> _" But any blue-collar coder will be plenty qualified to sling JavaScript for their local bank. "_

Even highly trained software engineers can barely get security correct. What makes this journalist think somebody with a few years of high school programming can do any better?

I'm not sure I buy the "blue collar coder" prediction. At least not in the US. That type of work is currently outsourced to India and parts of Eastern Europe. There's an entire industry of code factories that already exists - <USER2> these US-based blue-collar coders going to be any more effective than off- shoring?

And within the US, code already permeates other professional roles. Staff accountants and data analysts do lightweight (and sometimes heavyweight) programming in Excel and other business tools. And hobbyists program things like home automation in Lua.

<comment><USER4> "Even highly trained software engineers can barely get security correct. What makes this journalist think somebody with a few years of high school programming can do any better?"

Why would they have to be better? You just made very point here. Some high schooler with a boot camp can do just as well as many "highly trained software engineers".

<comment><USER5> First, why don't we fix the cost of medical care by letting vocational schools train doctors? After all, there are high-profile medical errors and the world goes on.

(In case the sarcasm isn't obvious, my point is that the existence of errors by professionals doesn't mean the entire system would be just as good if staffed by non-professionals.)

<comment><USER6> Actually, we kind of do, in physician assistants. Having in recent years received most of my medical care, including emergency care, from PAs, and only rarely seen an MD, I have to say, I'm not sure you're doing a great job supporting your case - the care I've received from PAs has in no respect been below the standard I'd expect to receive from MDs.

<comment><USER5> I don't think the "blue collar" label applies to physician assistants.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=physician+assistant+training](https://www.google.com/search?q=physician+assistant+training)

<comment><USER6> No, but it doesn't matter. The comparison between a doctor and a physician assistant is quite closely parallel with that between a "conventional" and a boot-camp-trained SDE. Especially since our field has no certification requirements, minimum necessary training, or indeed any qualifications whatsoever beyond simply demonstrating the ability to do the work!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's going to take a generation for this to be the case because the basic everyday skills that we don't even think about are just not a part of the core daily activities for most people.

Consider the most basic skill you need to write code: Writing with the Keyboard. The majority of kids have never used a non-software keyboard. Technology isn't helping this either as autocomplete, swype, speech to text input etc... pushes new and basic users further away. My daughter has iPads in her school, not computers with keyboards. So although she's using computers, she's not using keyboards. Maybe IDE input schemes will adapt to this, or eliminate it completely but nothing so far has beaten writing with the keyboard.

The second most basic skill is also very rare today: OS navigation. Almost to a person, every developer I know including myself started playing around with computers at a young age literally just poking around to see what was inside. This means simple things like installing programs, configuring applictions, installing drivers, searching for folders, moving files, modifying text based program files and on and on. Now imagine not knowing how file structures work and trying to grok ls or mkdir in your bootcamp classes.

I think it's a solvable problem and I think we can get to where the entry level requirements for developers is low enough for the general population, but that means our tools (IDE, frameworks, installs) and structures need to adapt to support that.

As a community we don't particularly care to work on that, and we seem to like to gatekeep when it comes to our "special skills" and "special thinking." If we really care about communities and our economies it's up to us to help grow the developer base and transition the labor force because we're the ones building the tools and systems.

<comment><USER8> > Consider the most basic skill you need to write code: Writing with the > Keyboard. The majority of kids have never used a non-software keyboard.

Anecdotally, I just tested this. Kids aged 5 and 7: neither has used a keyboard 'that they can remember'.

Are we going back to 'Typing classes' (like this one: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCpZ3CP7IAs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCpZ3CP7IAs)) in the future?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Doubt it.

For whatever reason, it seems like the way of thinking required for even simple programming doesn't come naturally to most people. I saw this with a bunch of kids I went through nearly CS classes with. People who could not wrap their heads around pointers or reference semantics. People who didn't get polymorphism and seemingly couldn't no matter how many times you went through it with them. People who couldn't seem to _write programs_ , even very simple ones, despite being clever in most other ways that can be measured by academe. To be sure, it could be the slice I saw was not representative of typical people, but that would require typical people to be better suited to programming than those admitted to a high tier university. Maybe they are, but it doesn't seem especially likely.

<comment><USER10> Also, I've seen smart people just not have the patience required to work on programs. There's a level of pain tolerance required for debugging, for example, that some people just can't handle - or don't want to.

<comment><USER11> Agreed. The patience comes from actual interest. Few people if any just sit down and code a whole program from start to finish without hitting any bumps. A person's tolerance for dealing with those bumps will determine if they can be a programmer or not. No matter how smart someone might be, there comes a point where they will have to grind out a solution to a problem. That means sitting in the front of the compute for hours with seemingly no progress. That is challenging for many people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Bootcamps I swear train cargo cult programmers. It may work for some, but in my experience they lack the understanding of _why_ they are typing what they are typing. They can go through the motions of what they've been trained to do, but they get stuck extremely easily and have no idea how to help themselves. So then when you start explaining why their program does not work, their eyes glaze over when you start talking about the stack, heap, etc.

They are like cargo cultists. They go through the motions, imitating what the boot camp taught them, but without real understanding of what the computer is doing...

<comment><USER13> This is actually just how I learn. I never understand anything abstract the first time I read about it or use it. In fact there were many things in software that I just did because it was "best practices" without understanding why. I could read about the Why all day long but until I experience the Why it will never really click for me. I eventually understood why because I kept trying things out, asking questions, and didn't give up. I don't think you can expect most juniors to understand the Why to a lot of the things they are doing and one could argue that there isn't much value in ensuring they understand it right away. What matters is that you have processes in place to allow juniors to slowly learn why we do things the way we do. Seniors need to also understand that not everyone comes from a CS background nor is it necessary to come from one and be an effective worker. The work that 90% of programmers do out there is not complicated and anyone with a rudimentary understanding of algebra could do it.

<comment><USER12> I think you need a particular type of personality for the bootcamps to be effective. Like you said, you need to thrive on curiosity and have a thirst for knowledge. Not everyone is like that. I have a few friends who think programming is like learning how to solve a rubik's cube: you go to the training, learn how to do it, and bam, you are now trained and can solve any rubik's cube.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Blue collar jobs aren't low paying due to lack of skill or value, it's due to excess supply. In the bay area we have plumbers who charge $150/hr, the same rate I charge for coding, due to a low supply of plumbers.

The catch is that plumbing and other trades haven't changed much in the last 100 years. Coding is changing constantly. Therefore the supply of coders who can professionally use the latest technology is always small, hence a high paying rate. Only once coding itself stops progressing and innovating will supply be able to catch up to demand.

You might be seeing blue collar rates with HTML which is ubiquitous and changing relatively slowly.

<comment><USER15> 'Blue collar jobs aren't low paying due to lack of skill or value, it's due to excess supply.'

When told to children, this sentence can save lives.

By the other hand, the anachronic maxim, "who knows more, earns more" is poisonous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This topic recycles on HN pretty frequently. I don't believe it. I have many friends that aren't coders and it helps me remember how big the skill gap is.

Unless you've done substantial training, code seems just as opaque as medicine, or law, or most fields of engineering. Any job that requires substantial training and trust not to royally screw everything up pays well.

Perhaps 30% of the population has the creativity and analytical skills to make a decent programmer. And maybe 10% of those find a job largely comparable to doing math homework enjoyable.

Programming isn't as old as most fields of engineering, but it's older than a generation of workers. If coding was going to be commoditised it would have happened decades ago

<comment><USER17> > If coding was going to be commoditised it would have happened decades ago

I don't understand how coding would have been commoditised literally decades ago... when the reality is that not so long ago the demand has increased exponentially. Plus only now the supply is starting to pick up - remember you have countries (like China or India) pumping millions of programmers per year, and these numbers will increase - due to internet, free access to information, and of course the demand.

<comment><USER16> I learned my first few languages through the acid inpired O'Reilly tomes of early/mid 90's. Since then things are far more accessible but this effect is throughout society, not just programming.

You can teach yourself law or medicine these days online as well as engineering but it doesn't seem to have a commodity effect on any of these professions.

The main barrier remains. It's not easy to learn and requires a person with the "type". I believe the biggest barrier to highly skilled jobs isn't necessarily the skill but skill combined with interest.

Most people simply don't want these kinds of jobs regardless of the pay. Make 2-3x as much to do a job that requires endless learning and a lot of tedium, that only attracts a couple percent of the population that naturally enjoys this type of work or wants the money bad enough to put up with it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The article presents the idea of a future mass pool of novice coders who don't (or don't need to) level up, that can take care of simple things like "manage the login page". I think that underestimates the complexity of code. A lot of things could go wrong if you have the majority of your codebase being worked on by novices, no matter how simple the feature. The simplest feature can also be: a single point of failure for the entire application, bottleneck hurting user experience, huge security risk, evolve into an unmanageable mess of brittle code. I personally (without evidence) believe it's possible for every healthy human to learn how to code and increase their skills over time. I don't think a factory line approach works for building software. For that to happen there would need to be more advanced tooling that leaves developers with work more similar to configuration management than coding.

<comment><USER6> > I don't think a factory line approach works for building software.

Kanban is a factory-line approach, and also the basis of every commonly accepted best practice in software engineering today. I reserve comment on whether that argues for or against the point of yours that I've quoted, but certainly you'll understand why I note that point is likely to be a controversial one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Programmers overestimate how complex coding to solve problems actually is. Look at data science, you have tons of people with years worth of domain specific knowledge picking up enough python/ML on a weekend course to outperform those with PhDs in computerscience. And sure those people won't be able to write their own implementation of lisp in C, but they don't have to, that's not as valuable. I feel like we have English lit majors complaining that programmers can't write books because "they didn't study literature for 8 years" and we all know that to just be ridiculesly off. Yet here we have software developers saying that highschoolers can't program because they didn't spend 8 years studying algorthms and cryptography.

<comment><USER19> I believe coding is easy when it's to assist in your own work. Programming at scale is a different problem. I'm not certain, however CS jobs appear to reflect this on the two different pay scales (my work has two different programming roles with one compensated at almost twice the rate)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I buy it.

Two of my most blue collar friends just made the jump. One a mechanic the other a deli worker, via bootcamps in their late-20s. Neither hated their jobs, but they also couldn't afford to move out of their parents houses on those incomes.

For now, they seem to be doing "blue collar" programming work. Mostly freelance basic front-end and rails development. The question to me is if they broaden their scope into other specialties and how quickly that happens. That'll be my indicator to how long my own overpaid salary might last.

<comment><USER6> The people I know who've done the same are broadening pretty quick. Makes me glad I've been putting so much of my own overpaid salary into savings: 'Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.'

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> After reading the article I'm not so sure.

It suggests that instead of doing a course at university we should be teaching programming in school (great!) and also do more boot camp style education for your local bank's JS stack.

That's all well and good. I've worked at a bank that refused to interview boot camp grads. Anecdotal I realise.

I worry that these kinds of articles wrongly portray how hard programming/soft eng/comp sci really is to the average person.

</comment><comment><USER22> This article is from Dec 2016, and Anil Dash wrote about this in 2012: [https://anildash.com/2012/10/05/the_blue_collar_coder/](https://anildash.com/2012/10/05/the_blue_collar_coder/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Always the journalists coming up with these ideas.

<comment><USER24> I'm going to go on a rant, as I know this is an old piece. But, I feel like it's really sad to see the devolution on journalism quality as it has become digitized. Yes, it's always been easier to do an incendiary, low quality hatchet job on a tough subject that you don't know anything about than to do a well researched long-form think piece. But, it seems that all I see more and more of (exacerbated by social media) is low information fluff pieces that make grand, controversial assertions.

The problem is, there's no cultural penalty for being wrong, so there's no skin in the game from the authors. Right now, there's little stop the market from being saturated with trash. I had a lot of problems with the Gawker media properties, but I liked how cutting they could be, and how their snark could (at their best) act as a natural check against the cancerous growth of smarmy clickbait. Company ending lawsuit aside, they also did a fantastic job at capitalizing on their snark. Of course, even they had their biases and blind spots, but nowadays, I feel as if we really don't have too much.

One of my bosses at a former company used to quip "I love HBR articles. They usually follow the formula of a 2x2 identity matrix of the form of 'You're probably thinking A. Here's why B, which you weren't thinking about, is true while A is wrong.'" But it's really sadly true, and we don't do a great job of exercising the sociolinguistic tools to critique poor choices of A or B. I don't know whether this is a chicken or the egg situation that comes as a result of the factory oriented American education system, but it makes me pretty sad and disappointed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've seen this same thought expressed quite a bit through my ~20 year career. I think the earliest expression of this that I've found was a quote from the 1980s. So, people have been saying this for a long time.

In the early 2000s, I thought they were probably right, because a half-drunk baboon could put together a working application using VB6 (and later, if he sobered up, he could do the same with .NET WinForms). RAD was a real thing, and I thought it signaled the end of the high-salary programmer.

I was wrong.

Looking at modern tech stacks, none have productivity tools that are contextually equivalent to VB6 and .NET's WinForms. So, I think we're still wrong about this prognosis.

</comment><comment><USER26> Even if a lot of programming gets commoditised, I think that would still be a white collar job, not a blue collar one. But, of course, calling it "blue collar" can make for a better title.

</comment><comment><USER27> While I agree with the assessment that it might be the new blue collar job, I don't think it'll ever be understood very well by people without formal education, either through experience or study.

<comment><USER28> What about formal education is teaching it so well then?

And what do you mean by "it"? Coding, software development, computer science?

<comment><USER27> All of the above.

You either get a head start with formal study, or you spend years developing a decent level of skill.

You may be effective after just a year or a boot camp and think yourself amazing, but your knowledge is really shallow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think anyone who wants to explore the world of programming should do so, but I don't agree with this article. I fit the demographic that this article is talking about. I taught myself JavaScript for years, taught it to others and I currently work part time at a cloud technology start up and part time teaching online with another company. The reality is that contrary to the hype the truth is that it takes a long time for your mind to adapt to thinking in code. Learning programming is not something that most people can do in a year or even two. Basic programming? Yes, maybe. Basic Wordpress development? Maybe. But keep in mind for modern front-end development you are also talking about the DOM, async, frameworks like React and a hodge podge of things that can easily drown developers who have been working in the field for decades. I once had a bio-chem student who was extremely smart and had A's in his advanced math classes. No matter how much we tried to work through it he could not get his head around DOM programming. I went out of my way to try an help him but eventually he decided it just wasn't enjoyable and he dropped the course. I've also had many students that have assumptions about the attainability of this stuff that make my jaw drop. I've worked with online bootcamps that treat students soley as customers and instructors as pseudo-guru's that are expected to keep the student "happy". If the student complains because the instructor gave them a reality check - the onus is on the instructor. I do believe that most people can do more than what they perceive, but this article is not promoting a perception that I think is beneficial.

</comment><comment><USER30> Tons of people in denial here.

If you put up a job post for a software developer in NYC, you'll get 90% bootcamp graduates with less than 1 year of experience coding and no real passion for it.

<comment><USER31> The article is about workers, not applicants. Nobody is disputing that a lot of people have been bamboozled into going to these code bootcamps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Yes, anyone can learn to code and get a job with no formal training. However, this does not make it blue collar work or culture. There are similarities but they are distinct.

</comment><comment><USER33> Lots of people who don't know how to code talking about how easy it will be for others to learn.

Coding is a creative endeavor, as such very few people will ever be qualified to do it and even fewer will be good at it. If I had to wager a guess, I'd say at most 10% of the population will ever be equipped to write code.

<comment><USER34> I have to agree with this. If everyone can code then it would no longer be a commodity skill set of sorts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> No, it really super isn't. Look, I'm all for teaching CS/programming to toddlers through people in their 90s - but the blunt, brutal reality is that _not everyone can do this work_. Full stop.

That does not make programming a good candidate for widespread, blue-collar work.

<comment><USER36> Frameworks will eventually turn most jobs we do now into low-skill office jobs. Maybe not WordPress 6.0, but WordPress 10.0 certainly will be easy enough for just about anybody to use. We won't call them programmers, but they'll be doing all the jobs we used to do, if we're lucky enough to have moved up.

Just how like tasks that used to be done by doctors are now done by nurses, and tasks that used to be done by lawyers are now done by increasingly large staffs of paralegals and secretaries, coding will eventually be stratified like everything else. I would argue it's more inevitable in this one than it ever was in those fields.

<comment><USER35> No, they won't. Frameworks often introduce new layers of complexity and abstract away important details to the point where either entirely new frameworks are eventually needed, or you need an army of "framework specialists" who understand the subtleties of particular frameworks - and who end up needing to re-specialize on shiny new frameworks when old ones are discarded in an endless cycle of framework insanity.

In my 25 years of programming, I've never seen the ever-progressing march of new frameworks really solve the underlying technical difficulty of engineering software. Sometimes they help, more often than not they hurt, and are more often than not ephemeral in the grand scheme of things.

<comment><USER36> 25 years is the blink of an eye.

<comment><USER35> My point is: frameworks _(when they work)_ simply unlock the next level of complex problems for general "tackle-ability", and those problems require hard engineering to solve. We certainly haven't run out of complex computing/software engineering problems to tackle yet, and I simply do not see that slowing down.

<comment><USER36> The process of stratification is not driven by inherent complexity. You're absolutely right in that we still have, and will always have, hard problems to solve in software.

What I'm referring to is the fact that businesses do not have to solve all of these problems. And businesses are what ultimately drive the field. Think of all the other really complicated fields out there. Music, law, medicine. Still hard problems to solve in all of them.

Let's take music as the example at hand. We'll never reach the end of what's possible to accomplish with music. Yet there is an entire industry around it that commodifies musical services. You can spend an entire career focused on something exceedingly arcane like mid-sized arena acoustical materials.

We haven't gotten that way _yet_ with information technology, not because we _can 't_ get there, but because the field is still so very very young. Music has been an industry for thousands of years. The modern arena builds on technologies developed for theatre in _ancient Greece_.

You're right, each advance makes for new problems to solve. But unless you can make a credible claim that this time it's different, the field we inhabit and make a good living exploiting will move the same way every single other engineering field throughout history has always moved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I think the author is projecting a bit. After all, the skills needed to write an opinion piece for Wired are darn near universal, and supply has exceeded demand by so much for so long that such writing is practically blue-collar. I contend that the skills needed to make a career out of programming are just a _little_ less accessible or familiar to most people. Being a programmer might be comparable to being a plumber or electrician, which are "blue collar" but also very respectable and often profitable professions worth aspiring to, but it's never going to be like the kind of unskilled labor that people line up at Home Depot - or Wired - to do.

</comment><comment><USER38> Maybe this forum isn't quite situated to appreciate how dismal coding is for the average coder. Folks here tend to have interesting jobs making new things.

Imagine being one of the masses of coders slaving away at some dinosaur code base in a large company. Working with ghastly C++ code, 1M lines of cruft, moving from one platform to another for the Nth time. Writing a 'unit test' for an 'if' statement buried in some spaghetti code that you yearn to replace but no, your Agile board says change this if and retest.

They outnumber us probably 100-to-1. And they're definitely, totally, blue- collar folks.

</comment><comment><USER39> 1\. This is an article from Dec 2016. It should have a (2016) in the title.

2\. Those jobs are already getting eaten up by more flexible products and tooling. This will accelerate, because the hiring firms aren't trying to innovate here, just keep up with their industries. As the requirements are relatively stable, some shops will spin off their internal products into separate businesses and others will buy those instead of building their own.

3\. The underlying analogy of a blue collar programmer is closer to a plumber or electrician. The difference is that our tools are way smarter and getting smarter than wire or pipe.

</comment><comment><USER40> The next blue collar job is journalism.

And entertainment.

</comment><comment><USER41> I think the notion that coding is 'blue collar' is extremely dangerous. The closest 'traditional' job to software engineering is legal drafting -- anything but blue collar.

</comment><comment><USER42> The meaning of coding has changed a lot. It somehow changed from cpu, algorithm, data structure, relational model, programming language, http/tcp-ip to whatever latest js frameworks, whatever aws provides, NoSQL-ing everything and neuro-networking everything. And I feel like the way programmer solve problems seems to be evolving into finding whatever framework/SaaS that solves 50% of the problem, and bending the remaining problem at hand to fit the framework/SaaS they chose

</comment><comment><USER43> I really think the comparison here is apt. Although a more direct comparison would be that coding is a trade. Something that can be self-taught or learned through apprenticeship. Something that doesn't require a degree. Something that can be done for a company or as a freelance gig. Something that pays well relatively speaking.

</comment><comment><USER44> "But any blue-collar coder will be plenty qualified to sling JavaScript for their local bank."

I stopped reading there.

</comment><comment> d--b The article talks about highly skilled "blue collar" job. It compares programming to mining, saying mining requires teamwork, engineering abilities to solve complex problems etc.

If that's your definition of "blue collar" then yes that makes sense. Coding just won't be the next low-skilled job.

</comment><comment><USER6> I get that there's a lot of people here who don't want to think about the work they do becoming commoditized, and I get why. But I've been in the same line of work for twenty years now, and the reality is that it really just isn't that hard or that special.

The only part of it that's uniquely difficult is dealing with complexity, and complexity is something that a skilled senior can largely manage for juniors while they're working their way up the learning curve. In that sense and most others, it's the same as any other skilled trade; it's just a trade that happens to be in very high demand lately.

<comment><USER45> There seems to be a lot of elitism. Most coding is nothing special or particularly hard. Within a short period of time most people could get up to speed to fill a lot of the roles. You don't even need a college degree of any kind.

Senior level is different but that takes at least ten years in my opinion. And senior requires a lot of mentoring of juniors. Again this is only my opinion, if you aren't actively mentoring. You are a mid

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue- collar_worker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue-collar_worker)

</comment><comment><USER47> Probably not. Software has a very low producer to consumer ratio.

</comment><comment><USER48> "But any blue-collar coder will be plenty qualified to sling JavaScript for their local bank."

And any idiot is plenty qualified to write articles for Wired.

</comment><comment><USER49> Frontend javascript programming is already blue collar. Very little science left in most tasks, most of the time you are just smashing together packages and declaratively building interfaces to the point that most of the hard work has been done for you.

<comment><USER50> I'd say CRUD type stuff is moving in that direction too.

<comment><USER51> That's what they said in 1988 when I started my career. Seriously, the same sort as the article writer were saying the exact same thing in the 1990's. Nothing has changed. They were wrong then and are wrong now.

Someday, they may be right, but that doesn't make their "analysis" any more valid. Broken clock and all that, don't ya know.</comment></comment></comment>


NeverWet: Superhydrophobic Spray that Waterproofs Everything - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3013361/fast-feed/neverwet-a-coating-t

<comment><USER2> Cool stuff, but this is a repost.

[https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=neverw...](https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=neverwet&start=0)

</comment><comment><USER3> Soldiers everywhere are drooling over the idea of never getting soaked again.</comment>


Soccer Balls that Generate Electricity - <AUTHOR> https://yovigo.com/news/soccer-balls-light-night/

<comment><USER2> If you're actually trying to help the developing world, this is very low gains for a high amount of effort. Also, if you doled these out they would immediately be stolen or sold away and hoarded.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeh but how long does it last? This ball was designed specifically because normal soccer balls fall apart:

[http://www.oneworldfutbol.com/](http://www.oneworldfutbol.com/)

I kind of think a hand-crank is going to break down less often and be much easier to repair by hand. "Whelp, the bear ate our nightlight" is not going to go over well.

<comment><AUTHOR> but wouldn't it be better to have kids playing with a soccer ball that produces electricity all day than have them sitting around all day cranking a hand crank? Seems a little cruel...

<comment><USER4> The respective power outputs of a hand crank and this soccer ball differ by 2-3 orders of magnitude. Not to mention, only one kid gets to take the soccer ball home and light their led with it...

This is a design experiment, not a practical solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The real question is, how is it as a soccer ball?

</comment><comment><USER6> I think a better gadget to put in the ball is a camera, to capture play.</comment>


Websummit - <AUTHOR> http://websummit.net/campaigns/peoples-panel-voting

<comment><AUTHOR> VOTE ! to show this Indian's face amongst the world's top startup ecosystem crowd... Vote need to be placed here against my name " Shanmugavel Sankaran"

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [http://websummit.net/campaigns/peoples-panel- voting](http://websummit.net/campaigns/peoples-panel-voting)</comment>


DOOM running in a computer with hundreds of CPU cores - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/ares_emu/status/1284328853171605508 <comment><USER2> Those videos are almost certainly fake

[https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/hsryyn/windows_ta...](https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/hsryyn/windows_task_manager_runs_doom_896_cores/fyclcpx/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/hlo6nd/pokemon_the...](https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/hlo6nd/pokemon_theme_rendered_in_windows_task_manager/fx1dwvd/)</comment>


The Birth and Death of Privacy - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/the-birth-and-death-of-privacy-3-000-years-of-history-in-50-images-614c26059e <comment><USER2> Aside from the rather obvious issues of accuracy in the related anecdotes (as coldtea pointed out), it's a shame that the author of this piece doesn't mention one aspect in which the rise-and-fall nature is not a full circle: although in a tribal society you may have less privacy, there is also less reason to fear a lack of it.

Unlike small, homogeneous groups with intimate hierarchies, modern society is huge, the data available on your life is enormous, and the ability of someone to hurt you with that data (be it through impersonation or accusation) or indeed you to hurt someone else is virtually unlimited. There's no discussion of the ways in which the potential consequences of the violation of privacy make us more protective of it ("The Lives of Others" is a great film on the subject).

Maybe at some point we can achieve a society where the power structures and human relationships are such that we can again be as open again with strangers as we once were with our immediate families/communities, and in so doing relax about the need for strict rights of privacy. But right now the stakes are too high.

<comment><USER3> In a small community, when one person knows something, everybody knows it. One rumour, one false accusation and suddenly literally everybody you interact with knows and can judge you for it.

I'd far prefer a lack of privacy in a large community than a small one.

<comment><USER4> I disagree. In small group all people who can judge you interact with you on every day basis and they KNOW you. Also, they have all reasons to believe that "Do to others as you would have them do to you" actually works, since judges themselves are not hidden from judgement. The Internet, however, creates illusion of anonymity and turns people into assholes.

On Internet twitter/tumblr/[insert social network] will rip you to pieces for a wrong shirt.

<comment><USER5> _rip you to pieces for a wrong shirt_

Oh, there's plenty of small communities that will do that as well. Wrong football shirt, for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The "silent reading / not popular" thing is an urban legend, and has been refuted in established scholarly research. It's not even true in the famous example about St. Augustine's teacher.

Not sure about it but "beds used to be extraordinarily expensive" seems BS too. A bed is just some pieces of wood -- very easily made for families near nature/woods (as was the vast majority of the population at the time they mention).

The reason families often shared just 1 or 2 beds is because they lived in a much confined small house, not the cost of building a bed.

<comment><USER7> _" The right of privacy" was coined in 1890, inspired by fears of the polaroid camera_

First commercial instant camera was available in 1948, by Polaroid (which itself was created in 1937).

<comment><USER8> i've updated the graphic. I was using the generic term for camera, which was misleading.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It is not uncommon in European culture room to have mixed public saunas where people are naked. Human bodies are regarded as natural and there is nothing erotic or humiliating in such situation. Everyone minds their own business.

Also when I browse the web or I walk on the street, I am visible. If I enter the shop or web page, the owner of it will take a notice. I think it is all natural.

The situation changes when an interested third party appears who shows up keen interests about my doings. Follows me every corner, marks down at what I look, or what I buy, even follows me into public sauna with an intent to take pictures of me when I am naked and all of this with a sole interest to take advantage of me in every way possible. This is not natural, this is perverse.

This is where a normal person says: leave me alone, please respect my privacy.

</comment><comment><USER10> The word privacy is complex and might have grown to have too many meanings. There's privacy like not wanting people to see you naked, having sex or using the bathroom. Then there's privacy like not sharing a living space with several other people. Then there's privacy like online tracking and keeping certain information from being public or easily discoverable.

People seem to use those concepts interchangeably, which only clouds the issue. Someone from a small town might not mind sharing a living space, but object to online tracking. Or someone could say "I have nothing to hide" in regard to their daily communications, but still not want their showers to be broadcast. Or an exhibitionist could have no problem with public showering, but draw the line at sharing a bedroom with two other people.

So when people say that privacy is dying, which kind of privacy do they mean? "All of the above" is a valid answer, but the situation is probably more nuanced. This particular post provides an interesting view, but still lumps a lot of concepts together.

<comment><USER11> The essence is control and choice. Sure, history influences attitudes, but all the scenarios you (and the article) describe merely reflect the drive to freedom of choice, and the practical limitations on the expression of that drive in reality. It's not a spaghetti concept by any means, however. Privacy on the Internet is the evolving intersection of our desire for choice and the realities involved in achieving it.

Growing tired of choice, however, threatens more than privacy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Let's put it another way. It's not really the death of privacy. It's the appreciation of personal information.

A long time ago you could, if you had the means to, get an individual's life totally mapped out and that had some value. But today you can map an individual's life and then connect the dots between that individual's personal data and that of the people they interact with and build a social graph. And that is infinitely more valuable.

Now that Google and Facebook can earn up to $50 per head, they are really motivated to eradicate online privacy.

If you wanted to and if you could afford it, you could maintain your privacy. It would just cost exponential more than it would have cost just a few decades ago.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think that in the context of a discussion around a subject of evolution of privacy, it is important to remember where privacy originates. The privacy is not an invention of human civilisation but rather the principle expression of fundamental operation of self. Humans as probably is true for many other creatures in animal kingdom poses an inherent harbour of privacy within our minds. We are able to operate in as much privacy as we choose. The information revolution, however far into the past the development of our civilisation you choose to accept it spans, continues to expand our knowledge outwards into scriptures, books and recently the Internet and beyond. We should choose wisely whether to limit the plane to which we can comfortably, seamlessly and yes privately extend the operation of self - our minds. I would hate to find myself being only able to "think" privately inside my own skull. I think I would be less.

Yes, given the prospects of even that fundamental barrier being breachable the more important it is for the concept of privacy to be understood and widely accepted.

The only universal reason to limit privacy is that of control (whatever the motivation for such control).

</comment><comment><USER14> "More advanced health monitors used by insurers are coming, like embedded sensors in skin and clothes that detect stress and concentration. The markers of an early heart attack or dementia will be the same that correspond to an argument with a spouse or if an employee is dozing off at work. No behavior will escape categorization—which will give us unprecedented superpowers to extend healthy life. Opting out of this tracking—if it is even possible—will mean an early death and extremely pricey health insurance for many."

The health aspects are a long way off. Maybe when they get to the point where they can predict a heart attact--I'm game for anything the wiz kids tell me to strip on, or swallow.

Until that day, I want my privacy.

I want to be able to control what sites, like Google does with my information --yea, I know it's not going to happen.

In the mean time, I can opt out of certain sites that brag about the information they own about you, like Facebook.

Right now people don't seem to care about privacy, but that will change. It probally won't change in certain countries, but I see a change, a small one, in the United States.

</comment><comment><USER15> Will there ever be a relationship of Mutually Assured Destruction between people when it comes to abusing one anothers' privacy. i.e. if person A abuses the use of information about individual B, then person A has the immediate knowledge of that and ability to do the same or worse to individual B.

Therefore the temptation to manipulate or abuse private information of another party will be limited against by the knowledge that retaliation is assured and disproportionate.

This could work on a person-to-person level, i.e. if i use an individuals private image for public or private purposes without consent, and it could be used on a person-to-institution level, i.e. if an institution sells an individuals health records without consent.

Perhaps an answer to the eternal problem of privacy is that if all private information is open and accessible we will all be so terrified of the retaliation that we will not abuse others private information. (although i realise the hypocrisy of calling anything private if everyone has access to it).

</comment><comment><USER16> The silent reading comment is very interesting. I'm currently reading Augustine's _Confessions_ , and it's quite interesting. Augustine makes very modern observations of a very ancient society. For example, when he first describes Ambrose of Milan he finds it remarkable that Ambrose reads silently rather than out loud. It seems like the norm in ancient Rome was to read out loud, even in private.

</comment><comment><USER17> Some confused people accuse young Abe Lincoln of being homo because he shared a bed with a male housemate in his 20s. That was right around the era where solo beds were becoming a norm instead of a luxury. Before the industrial age it was pretty common for a whole family just to have one or two beds- parents and childrens. And if you stayed at a hotel or army barracks you shared a bed rack with a row of strangers.

</comment><comment><USER18> *The Birth and Death of Privacy in the Western World: 3,000 Years of History Told Through 46 Images

<comment><USER19> Except it's told via a large text with accompanying images. If you just look at the images, you don't get the story. ;p

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Nothing about toilet privacy which also was technologically induced not innate.

</comment><comment><USER21> I thought it was Aurelius Ambrosius aka Saint Ambrose who invented silent reading around 350 CE.</comment>


Ceptr (semantic web and agent hashchains and monotonic DHTs as "outside") - <AUTHOR> https://www.bitrates.com/news/p/holochain-part-3-forming-communities-projects-and-ecosystem-further-commentaries <comment><AUTHOR> thought the notion of isolating and "revealing currencies as 'current-sees' as flows" via regex-like semantic parsers and other such components, and then assembling all kinds of composable abstractions from those really... brilliant & smth incredibly useful, should it be eventually implemented in such a chaotic DHT-verse as envisioned... thought i'd share, see what you guys might think about that..</comment>


The Coming "Post Social Media" Era - <AUTHOR> http://world-startups.com/report/the-coming-post-social-media-era/

<comment><AUTHOR> By the way, I mentioned in the article that I am not much of a Facebook user, but didn't mention this great video about how the Facebook stream has become a kind of "alternate universe" \- almost proving that "the stream" has become nearly useless [http://goo.gl/TM7qz0](http://goo.gl/TM7qz0)</comment>


Hastur: Open-Source Scalable Metrics with Cassandra - <AUTHOR> http://www.datastax.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/C2012-Hastur-NoahGibbs.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> Links to other materials:

Video for the talk for these slides: <http://youtu.be/r2nGBUuvVmc>

Server: <https://github.com/ooyala/hastur-server>

Ruby client: <https://github.com/ooyala/hastur>

</comment><comment><USER2> Almost exactly what I have been developing except I'm using D for the agent, sigar for the system metrics, and thrift for the communication.

What are the community's thoughts on requiring Ruby for the agent to run? Also, are there plans to make this cross platform is this just scratching an itch for Ooyala?</comment>


How much money to set aside for legal work/fees? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> It cost us about $500 to incorporate/get a PO box. I figure another few hundred - on the cheap side - if we paid to get our TOS and/or Privacy Policy written by a lawyer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks... Did you go the LLC route?

<comment><USER2> We went with an Inc. since we had three of us with stakes and knew the number of people would only increase.

Make sure you go with Delaware in most cases.</comment></comment></comment>


What we learned from a code-free Chatbot MVP test - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@bam_mobile/the-5-things-weve-learned-about-building-bots-5cf1ba861c3b#.ryn4e3ozu <comment><USER2> Chatfuel's a good free platform - would be too concerned to build a business on it. Noticed they've just added analytics though.</comment>