Ask HN: Passive Income Suggestions 2016 - <AUTHOR> Similar questions have been asked in the past, but things change quickly. What are some passive income strategies that have worked for you in 2016? <comment><USER2> Perhaps a negative example might be interesting? I started working on game- development tools in 2015 and have sold a grand total of $0. Granted I have been contracting for the last year and haven't done development or marketing for a few months, but I would say it's a clear non-success.

If you're curious what it was, it's here: [https://codano.com/typeforge/](https://codano.com/typeforge/).

The reasons I've probably done poorly:

1) I haven't spent time networking with the people who are the market of the product. I worked with a few people on /r/gamedev on it last year, but never followed up.

2) There's a lot of other tools in this space, some free, some not-free (but platform-limited) and I haven't distinguished myself from any of those.

3) There's not a lot of supplemental material to suggest how people might use the product and why people might want to use this product over any others.

EDIT: and if you want a free license for kicks, just email me (see my profile).

<comment><USER3> Game Industry Vet here. Unfortunately middleware or tools for gaming have gone to the 0 margin, free area. Mainly because 99% of game generally don't make much money so people dont invest heavily. Those 1% that do make a lot of money tend to invest in the their own tool development or want to retain control of their middleware hence less money in the pot.

Another interesting point, IMO, is that game development attracts very capable developers. Thus they tend to be very adept at finding things for OS instead of forcing the company directors to buy large licences for convoluted software they don't need :)

<comment><USER4> I'm finding that people spend way more money in the rough prototyping phase than during the "ok let's build the real thing" phase. Especially in things like asset stores.

Myself and a bunch of friends working on VR stuff easily spend $10-50 on a random helper to get a prototype done in a few hours rather than a few days.

<comment><USER5> That is really interesting. I think definitely find myself doing this as well. It's easy to justify both personally and professionally. Thanks for bringing that up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> EXISTING:

1\. Rental properties. Have 3 rentals that we purchased last year as part of a 1031 exchange (after selling the family ranch). I manage them and its been fairly low maintenance so far (knock on wood). FWIW student rentals in a university town aren't as bad as you might think. Most have a steady source of rent (parents or financial aid) and if you choose students in hard majors, they're less likely to party and trash the place (my theory).

2\. Niche websites. I'm silent partner in a company that does website design and hosting for a niche industry. Obviously, we have people running operations and support so its only _passive for me_ , but it makes a lot of money. I know Wix and Squarespace and Weebly are the big players here but _tons of small businesses still need help with their website_. Don't overlook something you think is a solved problem.

IN THE WORKS:

3\. Jekyll-based landing pages. I think Unbounce and similar services are overpriced if you're just experimenting. So I've built a few landing pages specifically for Jekyll. I've ran a few tests with an attorney and another small business. Going well so far. Plan is to sell them as a one-time purchase for $29 or so. Just need to find a front-end/design partner to help crank out a few more layouts.

4\. An API for lists. This might sound weird but I always needs lists of things in projects I make. Think "all the currency codes" or "all the universities in the US". So I've built some scrapers for a bunch of lists and plan to provide them as a simple API or YAML/PList downloads (for iOS apps).

5\. Apple TV stuff. Got some Apple TV stuff in the works. Just not sure how that platform is gonna play out.

<comment><USER7> On lists I'd want: \- a list of all possible domain name tlds (org, edu, info, etc)

<comment><USER8> [https://publicsuffix.org](https://publicsuffix.org)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Bought a multi-family house in a hot housing market using an FHA loan. Yeah, you do have to intend to live in it. But FHA will make it possible to purchase a 2,3 or 4 family rental property with little down (as low as 3.5% but really depending on loan limits, which vary by county, here it's about 800k,1m,1.2m respectively).

Once I acquired the property (no easy feat since sellers favor cash buyers here in NYC), I waited a few months and refinanced out of the FHA into a traditional loan, since my property went up in value. The 15% I put into it, plus the equity, gave me the 20% figure I needed to refinance. That shaved 25% off my total monthly cost, saving me $900 a month.

I have a tenant in one unit, and now I pay less for a duplex with a backyard and land in the second most expensive city in America, than my neighbors pay for a 1 bedroom apartment. Soon I plan to fix up one floor of the duplex and AirBNB it, so I will have literally 0 monthly housing expenses.

Passive? Mostly! But I also have a tax shelter (mortgage interest for one part, and repairs for another part), build equity and go long on a hard asset. And I pay less for a whole house including taxes than my buddies who bought condos do for single apartments.

The passive income will scale with inflation since it's rent, while the mortgage will stay flat for 30 years.

<comment><USER10> What neighborhood? I've been looking but NYC real estate just seems hella expensive and bubbly. So you're living there too?

<comment><USER9> Bed Stuy. I'd look there, Bushwick, eastern Crown Heights, Ridgewood, and similar neighborhoods with quick travel to Manhattan and near trendy areas. Bubbly? Maybe, but if your rental income covers or can cover the mortgage then it doesn't matter, is my rule of thumb, it's a great deal. The city has 500k more inhabitants in between 2000 and 2010, rent has only one direction to go given scarcity of housing - - while mortgage costs are fixed! I figured land had to be a good idea to own given that. Crime is more of a concern at the moment, I think the investment is solid.

<comment><USER10> Hey, that's really awesome. I'd really love to hear more about this from you personally! I live in Crown Heights right now. Would you be willing to maybe grab a coffee sometime? If so shoot me a message at zachfeldman at gmail!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My approach is simple: invest the vast majority of all money after expenses into VOO (S&P 500 index fund). First max out tax advantage accounts like 401k and IRAs, then regular accounts.

I have $1,100,000 in VOO. Trailing inflation adjusted returns are 7% ish. Call it $25,666 for the first 4 months of 2016. I KNOW market returns aren't smooth like this but it is a simple approach that works for me (I'm not selling this stock any time soon so ACTUAL returns thus far in 2016 don't matter to me at all).

The math to get to that number is (($1,100,000 x .07) / 12) * 4 months

<comment><USER12> This is awesome - congrats on your success and saving. This is pretty what my financial strategy is. In another comment you said you first bought stocks in 1993 - were those the VOO or did you play around with buying individual ones for a while?

Any idea what the average amount you put in each year was? Just trying to get a feel for how long it will take me to hit that kind of number.

<comment><USER11> Save 2k a month and you can do it in 21 years. I'm saving more like 5.5K/mo now.

This is a great read: [http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the- shockingly-sim...](http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly- simple-math-behind-early-retirement/)

<comment><USER13> 2K is my salary!, I can't save more than 500euro

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have found the best side projects to be monetized versions of stuff which I built for my startup to save me time.

A recent example is a script which I originally hacked together to check for possible IP changes/submissions (copyrights, patents, trademarks etc) which might affect my startup's own IP.

It didn't cost very much to SaaS-ify the original script (outsourced using upwork.com) and after sending out a few emails and shoutouts in newsletters, events etc I have a pretty decent side-income from private clients and law firms (pays the rent & yearly holiday hopefully).

The hard part is making sure you don't let it distract you from your main project/job - I am at 3-4h/month and don't let myself go above that!

<comment><USER15> I've done some of this. Made some internal tech tools for non-tech business. Figured our problem may be one others also have, so made generic versions hosted online. A couple have become popular, but we're only talking hundreds of $$ each month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I built a themes website ([https://jekyllthemes.io](https://jekyllthemes.io)) in a weekend that's monetized using affiliate links and Adsense. After the initial work was done, it's virtually 100% autopilot and brings in around $80/mo.

<comment><USER15> What sort of traffic numbers do you get, and how do they discover you? This is the sort of thing that I believe can be easily duplicated. Not copied, but translated to different ideas.

Generating traffic can be difficult, so the subject, plus actually useful content, is important.

<comment><USER16> In the last 30 days the site received 27,000 page views and 7,000 sessions. Organic search made up 80% of traffic. The concept of a curated list for XYZ can be translated for other ideas, sure. Getting traffic was part luck for me. At the time it was a low competition keyword but now there are a lot of similar sites up.

<comment><USER15> Good info. Thanks. I've had similar experiences where, with some luck, I've hit upon a keyword/subject ripe for the picking or perhaps just too small or specific to have generated much competition up to that point. It's fun when you find something like that! The hard part is know when you've found it (or not).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been running [https://briefmetrics.com/](https://briefmetrics.com/) for almost 3 years now (email reports of your Google Analytics).

It has been going back and forth between 100% running itself and investing a couple months of effort into it. I discovered I really don't enjoy marketing/promotion, so it has languished for sure. It's up to a bit over $1,000/mo right now which I'm fairly happy about but I feel it could easily be x2-x5 of that with some sales effort commitment.

I'll write down some lessons I learned in hopes that I'll take my own advice in the future:

1) Avoid big-effort partnerships.

Briefmetrics was a partner in an app store launch for one of the biggest domain registrars. This required integrating with their single-signon and payment system and coordinating with their team in India and altogether what looked like a week of work turned into ~3 months of hell. A year later, all this effort yielded approximately 0 customers. The target audience fit was not very good (new domains is the worst time to get analytics reports) and the sunk cost of effort kept me going far longer than it should have.

I finally pulled the plug last month and I sleep much better. (Even pulling the plug took weeks longer than it should have, ugh. Never again.)

2) Commit effort to marketing/sales.

This is definitely advice I need to take for myself. I launched a bunch of new features to upsell existing customers (mobile reports, ecommerce, etc) but none of this is advertised anywhere for new customers. In fact, I've had a professionally-done redesign mockup sitting in my Dropbox for over a year now that I'm yet to implement. I have a half-dozen related blog post ideas I need to write about, audiences to target.

I'm seeing a lot of similar issues with other people here, "I built this but they didn't come." I feel you.

3) Seriously, do marketing/sales.

I built Briefmetrics because it's something I needed and my friends needed. I instantly had a set of initial paying customers, but organic growth from a small seed of users is slooooooow.

Meanwhile I see great salespeople grow to tons of customers on what amounts to a product cobbled together in a few hours. This totally makes sense to me, and we all need to respect it more.

I'm allocating a couple of weeks on the calendar to just focus on this. If you built something you're proud of, you owe it to the world to do a better job promoting it.

<comment><USER17> Dude, you should definitely raise your prices. I would pay at least $19 a month for this. Had to double take when I saw $8 a month.

<comment><USER4> Let's talk after you start paying. I'd love to hear how you're using it and how it's providing value for you—and even get a testimonial for the frontpage! :)

FWIW there are multiple tiers: $8/mo, $35/mo, $85/mo, $275/mo and I have one custom-priced "enterprise" client.

That's another lesson I learned: The kinds of feedback I get from paying customers vs drive-by trials is completely different and often opposite.

<comment><USER17> Ah, didn't realise there were multiple tiers. I thought you charging one flat price for everything. My bad! :)

I'd actually like to create a similar sort of service for a different niche, so find this very interesting. I'll definitely sign up and test it out. I'd also love to email back and forth to ask one or two questions about how you came to choosing certain data points over others. Will shoot you one after I sign up.

<comment><USER4> Looking forward to it! andrey at briefmetrics.com (or support or whatever at that domain) will do the trick. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I build a developer tool for premium plugin / theme authors in the Wordpress ecosystem. If you can build something that scratches an itch in a programming ecosystem, people are likely to pay for it.

Although with the amount of work I do on it, I'm not sure I'd call it passive ;)

<comment><USER19> I'm right there with you. I have a free core plugin with add-ons, and while it's made more money than any of my previous ventures (plugins, SaaS apps), I'm no where near recouping my hours, and I'm currently in the middle of rewriting the whole thing...

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Small pitch, I am the owner of Pressed ([https://www.pressed.net](https://www.pressed.net)), and we do white label managed WordPress hosting. So anyone can sign up to create their own Managed WordPress hosting brand, and refer clients to their brand and build recurring revenue. Our team handles all the running, support, etc for the brand so you can just sit back and feed customers into it.

Pretty passive :)

<comment><USER21> Genuine question. How can a managed hosting service be passive ? Specially since you handle the running and support.

<comment><USER22> Passive to the resellers, I'd imagine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Peer to peer lending is the best thing I have found this year. You can get around 5 to 7 percent interest and you don't need a large amount of capital. With all the other financial markets so volatile right now this is a pretty solid rate of return. There are always risks of default that you will need to consider, but most platforms allow you to mitigate that with automated diversified portfolios.

<comment><USER24> Careful though, you can quickly be picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. It's a low amount of interest for unsecured debt and when you don't get the principal back that 5-7% suddenly seems not so high.

And "automated diversified portfolios" is exactly what mortgage backed securities were a decade ago. Look how that turned out.

<comment><USER25> Mortgage backed securities were not risky because they were diversified. They were risky because nobody fully understood how undiversified they were, especially at the lower grade tranches.

Meanwhile, LC was alive in '08, and you can look at how their notes performed. Investors lost single digit percentages. In other words, they beat S&P by a lot.

<comment><USER26> > Meanwhile, LC was alive in '08, and you can look at how their notes > performed. Investors lost single digit percentages. In other words, they > beat S&P by a lot.

Comparing performance of 2008 vintage loans with 2008 S&P may not be appropriate.

First the 2008 loans didn't completely pay off until 2011. Second, the loans issued during recession (2008) will perform better during recovery phase (2008 onward). Such borrowers are likely to be with stable credit worthiness due to tighter credit criteria by lenders during recession. Also, as borrowers' economic condition improve with recovery, they are more likely to continue making payments instead of defaulting.

The worst performance for unsecured loans is generally for loans that were issued to borrowers during boom time and as economy is headed toward recession (2005-2008). Any event that impacts borrowers capability to make payment will impact first unsecured loans, credit cards, etc.

Federal Reserve (FRED) has quite a bit of data on different type of debts and how they have performed over the years if you are interested in exploring this segment further. I find the debt/lending/fixed-income/bond market segment very fascinating. It is generally not explored in-depth by most people and very quant/maths heavy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I just created [http://namestormy.com](http://namestormy.com) to solve a problem I had, which is finding relevant free domain names.

I've hacked it together one morning and in a few days it got featured on product hunt.

I have some features (like automatically filtering domain names without the paid api) rolling out soon and I hope that could make a nice passive income.

</comment><comment><USER28> I recorded some tutorial/lesson videos on niche tech topics and put them on YouTube. Spent about 40 hours creating and editing the videos. They have been online now for nearly 10 months and i have a total of ~250k views. That made me nearly $300.

Not a ton of money but considering it is truly passive and will probably be making another $500 in the next 10-15 months its acceptable.

<comment><USER29> Did you already have some experience creating/editing videos?

<comment><USER28> Yes, some experience. I should also mention that i purchased a entry level $50 podcasting microphone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Another fail example from me:

1\. My friends and I were building an app named OrderIt. It's basically targeted to be used by waiters / waitresses to order food and beverage for a restaurant or coffeeshop instead of using paper and pen. The idea is not new but we aim to make it even easier for businesses by providing cross-platform apps and useful features. We have the app prototype ready but failed to do marketing/sales stuffs in the last three-month which means no customer at all. All of us coming from tech background who have no idea about marketing and sale stuffs. We also open-source source code for Android app on github for anyone interested in ([https://github.com/leeu1911/orderit](https://github.com/leeu1911/orderit)). We have no idea about business model and how to make money out of it currently.

2\. I've built a website to use with Pomodoro technique (a time management technique). [http://web-pomodoro.herokuapp.com/](http://web- pomodoro.herokuapp.com/). So far, there's only me using it although it has around twenty views or so when I share the link on facebook. I need more seriousness I guess.

</comment><comment><USER31> I am working on a newsletter for frontend developers and plan to monetize it with sponsorships and job listings. I can't keep up with all the news out there related to frontend development and thought others might be interested.

It will not be 100% passive but since I am already reading those articles anyway, adding them to a weekly newsletter should be relatively passive. If things workout as planed then best case scenario, it should generate me $2000/month.

The first issue comes out June 1st at [http://frontend.curated.co](http://frontend.curated.co)

PS: If you have tips on promoting this and getting the word out let me know. I am running some targetted twitter ads for now and got a good amount of subscribers. My goal is to get it to 5000 subscribers very quickly.

</comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash One technique I have seen work fairly well is web development with a retainer for X hours a month done free of charge, with an hourly rate following. Customers tend to like having someone on call that doesn't tend to cost any extra.

Unfortunately, the market is never that big, since WordPress (and bigcommerce etc) covers most small business needs and any business of a decent size have dedicated developers or a contract with a dev shop.

</comment><comment><USER32> I wrote a book to help boostrapped startups choose the best hosting solution:

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

It hasn't sold much yet, but I haven't been able to dedicate as much time as I would have liked to marketing it.

</comment><comment><USER33> If someone wants to beat Stripe Atlas to the LLC formation game, I'll be their first customer.

<comment><USER6> I'm confused. There are plenty of services (LegalZoom) that allow you to form a Delaware corp/llc now. What exactly does Atlas offer that's new? Is it just a focus on non-US citizens?

<comment><USER33> It's the packaging of all of the other deals. Setting up bank accounts, preliminary basic legal advisory, accounting, etc., not to mention all the other benefits like AWS credits and introductory promo offers on B2B Saas vendors. The Atlas offering is quite compelling as a package, with the exception of needing it to be for a C Corp.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I built [http://www.randomnamepicker.net/](http://www.randomnamepicker.net/) last year and now get's $30+ per month from Adsense. Complete passive except for few updates here and there.

<comment><USER35> slight correction:

"click the 'Spin' button."

Nope, button clearly says 'Play'. Might wanna fix that.

Also looks totally sweet :)

<comment><USER34> Thanks for the feedback. I'll fix this in the next update. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Last year, I wrote a guide to help junior devs get their first jobs, targeted mostly at developer bootcamp grads: [https://kokev.in/hired- fast](https://kokev.in/hired-fast)

It sold decently in 2015, and later that year I shifted sales focus to bootcamps and schools as opposed to individual students. The response has been great and earlier this year I've set up a few recurring deals for batch purchases. It's not life-changing money by any means, but it's great to see my content helping people at "scale" ;).

</comment><comment><USER37> Make something that makes money. It can't be passive income without income. Figure out all the stuff you do to keep the money earning. Simplify that upkeep until it's a well documented set of steps or a nice web interface or something anyone can do. I'm finishing this part at the moment, having spent months converting my entire app business into an online dashboard.

Then you just need to find/pay someone to handle it for you. Lots of people online and in the real world are very well suited to well defined tasks they can 'just do'.

</comment><comment><USER38> It really depends on your skillset... if you code or do creative work, building a theme, shooting stock photography, or creating music with low licensing fees are all good things.

I found this Inc article from January of this year pretty on point as well: [http://www.inc.com/sujan-patel/you-don-t-need-to-be-a- millio...](http://www.inc.com/sujan-patel/you-don-t-need-to-be-a-millionaire- to-use-these-10-passive-income-strategies.html)

<comment><USER39> Highly recommend against stock photography. Especially with sites like Pixabay, it's a race to the bottom. And when I sold stock photos ten years ago, it wasn't that profitable anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm working on a for people looking to build equity in products. I'm just starting to work on this so no revenue yet, but thought this might be an appropriate thread to mention this.

So, if full-time isn't an option and your looking to work with a team because you don't have marketing, programming, design, administrative, customer service skills. email me.</comment>


Google acquires ReMail; shutters iPhone app - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=6076

<comment><USER2> What was remail?

<comment><USER3> I dunno, but you can't use it now anyways.</comment></comment>


Apple rejects Hey for second time, threatens removal from App Store - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1272968382329942017 <comment><USER2> I've had apps get rejected because 4 levels deep inside the app, in the support section, it launched an external browser to a support page that incidentally had the generic website nav on it with a link to a pricing page.

Apple claimed that IaP was being circumvented.

This is just absurd. No serious SaaS company is going to run their users through some crazy 12-tap flow that sends people through their support pages to "cheat" Apple and signup for a paid plan. What would the conversion rate be for a flow like that? 0.00000000002%?

If a developer flagrantly violates the policy by implementing their own signup and payment collection on the first screens, we could all empathize a bit more with Apple's position. Instead Apple chooses to throw the book at people for immaterial "violations", without any regard to developers who are trying to participate in good faith.

On top of that, it seems to happen at random because years of App Store reviews could go by before a reviewer stumbles into the support link that's been buried deep in the app for 3 years. Boom, there's your conversion event that gets you to 0.00000000002%.

Basically Apple is enforcing the letter of the law, not the spirit of the law.

</comment><comment><USER3> I get the feeling we're only seeing half the story here. Apple allows a lot of apps which have outside subscriptions, Basecamp is a perfect example. Also, Netflix and Amazon Prime for a long time. The outside subscription requirement is probably not the issue here.

I'm not advocating for Apple here, this particular post just strikes me as being an odd exception.

Just a wild guess here, but it's likely they have some language like "Click here to subscribe" which sends users to an outside link. That is expressly forbidden.

UPDATE: The MacRumors story is more coherent and perhaps has a clue to why the app got rejected: [https://www.macrumors.com/2020/06/16/apple-threatens-to- remo...](https://www.macrumors.com/2020/06/16/apple-threatens-to-remove-hey- from-app-store/)

Maybe their odd "Help Me" page is shooting them in the foot. by comparison, Fastmail has a simple "Can't Log In" button which takes you to the Fastmail support page on lost passwords.

<comment><USER4> We got a really similar issue. Apple rules are that every app with subscription should use apple pay. They added an exception for content streaming app though (so netflix, spotify, etc...) In our case (a small companion app to a web app which is the core of the service) they started rejecting everything saying we had to change our business model to have our customers using apple pay from now on. After finally being able to have more information other than "change your business model", they finally told us that, unless the user of the ios app is not the person who's supposed to pay, you have to go through apple pay and pay the apple tax. In our case we had several plans, the cheapest being mono-user. In this case the user is always the customer as well indeed. The solution was in our case to prevent users on our cheapest plan to use the ios app. Not that it's a great solution... Another one we thought was to always offer at least 2 user accounts but the impact on our plans was too problematic.

<comment><USER5> Could you also increase the iOS subscription price by 30 percent? Then people who want it on iOS primarily will use the in app subscription. However, those who know about the web version will buy on the website and still be able to log into iOS.

<comment><USER2> You can't. It's against App Store policies.

Here's where bathing s get annoying though; companies do this all the time. Microsoft Office , for example, has over 5 different pricing tiers for Office. They have a consumer pricing tier that matches Apple IaP pricing, then a set of a bunch of business, education, and enterprise plans. You'd have to do something like that and then negotiate with them that one of your tiers is the same price as IaP.

The point isn't that there's workarounds; what's problematic is how Apple tries to tell you how to price your product and run your business, even if you try to give them a cut.

<comment><USER5> You can actually charge different prices for in app versus out of app. Apple changed this policy around 9 years ago.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I think the sticking point in the different prices is that you cannot in any way indicate to the user that they can get the same service for cheaper or that there's an included Apple tax. This means that Hey would need to be charging $142 on iOS without a mention that $43 is an Apple tax that is not present when signing up on Hey.com.

<comment><USER2> $141.99 and $42.99. Apple won't let you charge round numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks like Hey is complying with all Apple's requirements and yet Apple is still rent-seeking. Not a good look for Apple.

<comment><USER8> No they aren't. This is just a rehash of every App Store for the last decade.

App Store is a distribution channel. And just like Best Buy wouldn't tolerate you bypassing their cut neither does Apple.

<comment><USER9> The Netflix app doesn't require you to use Apple Pay. Why should Hey be treated differently?

<comment><USER10> Are you able to manage your subscription in the Netflix app, though?

<comment><USER11> Great question/point! I had to check - tapping "Account" in the app brings you to the Netflix website.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wonder if they could simply offer it for purchase in AppStore, at a 30% markup, clearly presented as "Apple's cut".

Users can then choose where to buy and they will obey the rules...

<comment><USER13> How would that work with an annual subscription, though?

Or do you mean that they have the in-app purchase of that subscription and then, instead of asking $99 they'd ask

      $99.00 Subscription + $29.70 Apple Fees = $128.70

That would be clear and transparent, indeed. But it is also a bit of a finger to iOS users, though.

<comment><USER14> They can't show "Apple Fees" in the app, as per Apple's rules. They would only be able to show the total.

In many cases it's not a great idea because it makes it look like your product is a lot more expensive than it is, and the customer has no idea there's a way to get a better price. It happened to me with Youtube Premium, I thought it was expensive at €16 (instead of €12 in reality), and only found out by chance it was the iOS pricing.

<comment><USER15> >and the customer has no idea there's a way to get a better price.

Wouldn't you look for more information outside the appstore before you buy into a subscription? I mean if you do that you should stumble upon the actual price and maybe an explanation for the higher price in the appstore.

It's less a problem for Basecamp than for Spotify, who have a more mainstream product and audience.

<comment><USER16> Unclear to me, but this might disallow a higher price for Apple in-app purchases:

> 3.1.3(b) [...] You must not directly or indirectly target iOS users to use a > purchasing method other than in-app purchase, and your general > communications about other purchasing methods must not discourage use of in- > app purchase.

from [https://developer.apple.com/app- store/review/guidelines/#mul...](https://developer.apple.com/app- store/review/guidelines/#multiplatform-services)

<comment><USER15> They could just price it atronomically high in the app, like a bug, which will trigger people to reach out to others or investigate.

<comment><USER17> I don't think this type of clever lawyering is going to work when you're against a corporation that rules with an iron fist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's time for an anti-trust action against Apple.

<comment><USER19> While I agree that Apple's app store extortion policies are abhorrent, I don't know if I agree that legal action is the answer. Isn't it Apple's right to set whatever policies they want on their own platform? Isn't the answer to this problem just to stop using Apple products and move to platforms that are more open and not as hostile to consumers and developers? By using iPhones and Macs you're implicitly agreeing to and giving financial credence to Apple's practices. There are plenty of alternatives to Apple out there, and if Apple somehow provides enough value to you to make them more appealing despite their App Store strangleholds and anti-consumer policies, then haven't they earned that right?

<comment><USER20> Anti-trust laws are built exactly for the cases where it is not easy or feasibly possible to move to a different platform because the platform itself is too large of a market for others to sideline it if they get abusive. It's exactly designed and thought of to protect people (and smaller companies) from the power that a single entity might have over them.

How can you say that, realistically, the way forward for a company is to just drop one of the largest computing environments (iOS/App Store), even if a company would prefer to do that they can't because that would hurt their shareholders. If a smaller company then you are ostracised to a smaller market because of a bully company.

Yeah, Apple may start to bleed developers the more they start to be bullish but that doesn't mean they will lose users, and users attract developers. It's the same case as Uber: you encroach the base your business model depends on (driver/developer) into your influence while holding the bag that are their customers (riders/app users) and start to bleed them out slowly, upping the fees, adding more requirements for them to be allowed inside your walls, etc., until the breaking point, then recede a bit. Rinse and repeat.

Anti-trust exists to tame this, it's time for Apple to be challenged on their free reign.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> There's basically nothing new here that couldn't have also been said on day one of the App Store in 2008. It's just the standard App Store grievance regurgitated to market their new product.

<comment><USER22> It appears that before you could have a subscription outside the store. Now you cannot, and Apple picks and chooses favorites (e.g. Basecamp and Netflix can have out-of-store subscriptions, but this new app cannot).

<comment><USER23> You can, you just have to offer it in app _as well_. Also, check the Netflix page on the App Store, it now has in-app subscription options too.

<comment><USER24> [https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/28/18159373/netflix-in- app-...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/28/18159373/netflix-in-app- subscriptions-iphone-ipad-ios-apple)

> Netflix is no longer allowing new customers on iOS to pay for the streaming > service directly through an in-app subscription. It's the latest example of > a company with a high-profile, essential mobile app ditching Apple's payment > system to retain more profits for itself and stop handing the iPhone and > iPad maker a cut of every subscription activated within the Netflix app. > VentureBeat first reported the change, which Netflix confirmed with a short > "we no longer support iTunes as a method of payment for new members" > statement.

My Netflix's "account" section has nothing but a notice that says "Please go to Netflix on the web to manage your account."

<comment><USER25> our app is doing the exact same thing yet we got a rejection

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Does Apple get a cut of revenue from Gmail? Protonmail? Fastmail?

Why would Hey be any different here?

<comment><USER6> > _Does Apple get a cut of revenue from Gmail?_

No.

<comment><USER27> Pretty sure it was a rhetorical question to prove a point

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> We had an app rejected for this yesterday (June 16). We've skirted the guidelines in the past by carefully not mentioning any type of external payment system or subscription offering at all within the app. Users had to subscribe on a website for app content. Previously this was fine.

AFAIK you weren't required to implement in-app purchases for each subscription offering available outside of the app. That seems to be the change to the guideline or something that is now being enforced that was always there. This is a non-trivial integration to build and maintain. Not only will this have a real cost in engineering hours but the 30% fee is absurd - made more so by the fact that you cannot even inform your customers of the option to subscribe out of the app. I'd happily enable in-app purchases and increase the price 30% with help text that says "Want to save 30% - subscribe on the website HERE"

Netflix removed their in-app purchase options years ago. When you open the app it says you have to sign up on the website and provides no content or other utility without signing in. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

</comment><comment><USER29> After a decade at 30%, maybe Apple should reduce the cut? Economies of scale and all that...

<comment><USER8> People really don't understand what that 30% is for. App Store is a "channel to market".

So you're not paying for store hosting, payment features etc.

You're paying for access to tens of millions of willing buyers.

<comment><USER6> > _You 're paying for access to tens of millions of willing buyers._

With Apple marketing your competitor's apps even if a willing buyer is specifically looking for your app by its exact name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> unsurprising. But the main problem, IMHO, is that there is a company that has complete control of what apps can be installed on their phones. And those phones are not used just by a few fanatics in very special contexts, they are used by millions of (mostly unaware) people. This is the root issue, and it's completely unacceptable.

<comment> dan-robertson I'm not convinced this is the problem. The problem is that there is a conflict of interest between trying to ensure that only "high quality" apps are available and trying to tax the value people get from the apps. If I imagine a world where eg Apple get none of the in app purchase but some government get 30% as VAT then it still seems fine for Apple to curate their store but they wouldn't be incentivised to try to force apps to offer in-app purchases

<comment><USER30> I think that the high fees are shameful by themselves, but it's a different matter. The problem I am discussing is about control, freedom and anti- competitive behaviours.

I'll give an example I have lived myself: I developed a free app that was requested by some doctors to help them cope with the pandemic. The app was first rejected because "too simple". I appealed and they accepted it. Happy ending.

Now, the episode in itself doesn't tell anything, but it made me think: what if they kept rejecting it? What power did I have? Why should patients be denied that piece of software on THEIR phones, because a company decides that it's not cool enough? The problem lies with Google as well but, at least, it is possible to distribute apps through other channels on their phones.

I really think that there is no excuse for Apple: their devices are locked, their users are stuck with what the company decides to do with them and treated like idiots. They are a threat to business and innovation (unless it's theirs of course). Reminds me of Microsoft in the 90s...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> They could simply solve this with a PWA, no?

They already have a web client which is all server rendered with Rails and uses Turbolinks. If I'm not mistaken they also use this approach for the Basecamp iOS app [1].

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWEts0rlezA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWEts0rlezA)

<comment><USER32> iOS remains a holdout on the Push Notifications API, which is pretty important for an email app.

[https://caniuse.com/#feat=push-api](https://caniuse.com/#feat=push-api)

<comment><USER33> I was wondering... Can there be a native app on iOS that sets up notifications for all participating PWAs and then when a notification comes in, when the user views it - the native app simply launches the URL of the PWA?

It could be called "Web Events Notifier" or something. Perhaps it could include a UI for managing which PWAs you want to receive notifications for and maybe even a catalog of publicly participating PWAs.

<comment><USER34> That would work great until Apple rejects it. You cannot get around Apple's intentions with technical loopholes.

<comment><USER33> Yeah I'm just wondering - on what grounds would they reject it?

I don't see any TOS that would forbid it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I can understand dhh's frustrations. Apple should really only deserve the 30% if they referred users to HEY via the App Store. Outside of that is just unfair and predatory.

This is similar to what Wix requires when you develop for their platform. Wix requires developers to profit share 20% of your revenue for any customers that just so happen to use the part of your app that communicates with Wix. Why do platforms continue to think they're entitled to such a thing? And why would any developer want to integrate with Wix with such a clause?

<comment><USER36> > Apple should really only deserve the 30% if they referred users to HEY via > the App Store

Might be true that they deserve a cut if the app store wasn't a monopoly. You're not opting into a relationship with apple, they're holding everybody with an iPhone hostage for 30% of your revenue.

<comment><USER8> Curious if you have the same outrage for Xbox or Playstation.

<comment><USER36> I mean the situation is similar, but I don't really feel strongly because:

1\. I don't game

2\. consequently games seem less important to quality-of-life than phones do to me

3\. The ecosystem of "things i can play a game on" is pretty diverse. Xbox and ps are big players but pc gaming is WIDE open and then there's mobile gaming as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The Tweet replies are helpful, noting that paid accounts are typically set up outside the app to mitigate this issue.

<comment><USER38> That is what they are doing.

<comment><USER39> But they also don't allow you to sign-up for a free tier in the app, which as far as I know, is also against the rules. My understanding is that if someone downloads the app from the store and can't do anything but see a login page, it is a violation.

<comment><USER31> Unless they've recently changed the rules, it's not a violation.

I've had a couple of apps in the iOS and macOS stores that couldn't be accessed unless you paid for a service outside the app.

In fact, when submitting an app for review you can provide a user and password so that Apple can log in and test the private app.

<comment><USER40> Sure, you can give them an account but it is in fact against the Apple TOS and users shouldn't be able to see and download apps on the store they can't use. They don't catch all the caws but they're still in breach. Apple has other ways of distributing apps if they're internal apps or if the business manages the users somewhere else and the app store shouldn't be used then.

<comment><USER31> I can 100% assure you these apps were not in breach and it was no fluke. Apple questioned us multiple times about where and how would users pay for the service.

I think this was allowed because as someone else mentioned there are some exceptions to this rule. This was an education app which gave access to some digital books.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Twitter is such a horrible medium for a post/rant like this.

</comment><comment><USER42> > When he tweeted about the app's initial rejection last week, he got a number > of responses from developers who would privately rail against Apple's > policies but publicly make excuses for the company. "You listen to some of > these app developers, and they sound like hostages," Heinemeier Hansson > said. "They sound like they're reading a prepared statement, because > otherwise Apple could hurt their business. Which is true!"

<comment><USER43> I'd love to see these kinds of comments eventually start evolving into more substantive discussion on HN. Sometimes its nice to see select quotes form the article which helps me decide whether to click through and read it. But a lot of the time, like this one, it doesn't add any clarity and I have no idea what 'latexr is actually thinking regarding the topic.

Personally, I've always felt that 30% was far, far too high for an app store. It's clearly a case of captive markets. I remember being just as annoyed 17 years ago in high school; upperclassmen were allowed to leave school during lunch and go to Little Caesars and get a whole pepperoni pizza for $5. Lowerclassmen were not allowed to leave school for lunch and had to buy food in the cafeteria where a single slice of pizza was $4.50 --- it was clearly predatory pricing. I personally went out, got a $5 large pizza with 8 slices, sold 4 slices at $1 each to classmates and enjoyed my half pizza for $1 every day. But it was a pretty infuriating situation to me, as the students themselves had no choice or control over the market, despite deploying a huge amount of economic purchasing power every day.

I don't think the app store itself is adding that much value (30%). I believe Apple's practices are probably currently legal (at least according to my lay interpretation of monopoly practices) - Apple simply doesn't have a monopoly on the market of phone apps when you consider that consumers can choose to switch to Android. Hey! can access 120 million Americans through android and/or 100 million Americans through iOS. If apple cuts them out of 45% of the market, they still have 55% remaining to access. They can even still just have their users go to their website to read email via the Safari browser.

Obviously the U.S. Government (various branches) occasionally change how they feel about things even without any substantive changes in statutory or constitutional law. So I make no predictions at all as to what happens in the next 5 years.

However, I can say what I'd like to see to improve innovation in Silicon Valley (and I would LOVE feedback on this idea, to improve it and help to make the idea better)

Primarily I'd like to see any internal API's that are used between business segments to be granted the same access at the same cost to third parties. For example:

\- Google's "Popular Times" feature comes from Google Places (I think) and is used by Google Maps. However, third parties still have no access to this.

\- iOS messaging could be accessible by XMPP or similar open protocols, same with Discord, Microsoft Teams, Skype for Business, etc.

\- Instagram live broadcasts could be searched and accessed by API

etc etc.

I don't personally think there's a legal basis for compelling this right now, but statutory changes that promote something LIKE it would really be amazing for innovation. Letting _small companies_ compete with _small pieces_ of large companies would give consumers access to high quality alternatives for every service they need. I think it would also make the web more "hackable" (extensible) by teens and hobbyists, and likely propel our field forward immensely.

The walled gardens can be great options for convenient security (Apple's doing fairly well here honestly, even if not fantastically). But I'd like consumers to be able to access the data however is most convenient for them.

<comment><USER42> I haven't read your post in full. To your first paragraph, check my history and you'll be hard pressed to find another example of this. The quote was posted to another HN thread that has since been merged into this one where the conversation was already underway. In the other thread I hoped to have gotten some commentary to start a discussion; in this one I wouldn't have made it in the first place because by the the time it was moved it added nothing.

<comment><USER43> I completely understand, I first replied to you when we were the only comments before the move, I was also hoping to start discussion.

I've made extremely similar comments as this one of yours, very recently: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23179393](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23179393) and much to my (chagrin/horror/disgust), it's my highest rated comment ever. I wish upvotes were more correlated to effort and quality, but I always remember Wynton Marsalis saying in an interview: .

> In high school, I learned a breathing technique so I could play a continuous > trumpet solo for 10 minutes without stopping for a breath. But my father > told me, "Son, those who play for applause, that's all they get."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I was excited about WWDC next week. After reading about this, I just feel bitter about it.

</comment><comment><USER45> For Apple the math is simple. We should take "apple-tax" as much as we can, for as long as we can. It's a lot of money and it doesn't make sense for them to give it away until they have to. Nobody knows if they will remain dominant 10 years from now. So there is no point to be nice today when you have a monopoly.

Then there are some services with enough leverage that it makes sense for Apple not ask them for Apple Tax. It also saves more time for Apple to keep taking this tax from others that don't have leverage to fight back.

</comment><comment><USER46> It's really disheartening that when you don't even have any twitter/blog following, stuff like this happens to thousands of people and nobody ever hears about them.

</comment><comment><USER47> I've been following the tweets about hey.com from their founder for some time. The text about how they bought the domain is beautiful. I understand the proposal they offer about the service, and the reason for charging for a service that nobody has paid for a long time. It even seems obvious to me this trend of new opportunities to pay for email services. A trend, that this time, appears to be here to stay.

But it is a product that have a very aggressive marketing strategy. Arrogant.

The only thing I read from this episode is: The product is like this, the billing service is like that. We won't change anything and if you don't like it, you're wrong. Unfortunately, there is no chance that I will ever use this product. The price is stratospheric for me and probably for 98% of those who use gmail. Prontonmail, for example, offers several options, including a free one.

Well, apple also offers a service. What they are asking is for them to make a concession. But they don't seem willing to concede anything to that negotiation.

I imagine that this could be circumvented with other exclusive plans to subscribe using apple pay, or a free and very reduced version. It doesn't seem like a radical position from apple, which was the impression I got from reading the tweets alone.

<comment><USER48> > The price is stratospheric for me and probably for 98% of those who use > gmail.

Well, Gmail appears to have about 1.5 billion active users: [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/26/gmail-dominates-consumer- ema...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/26/gmail-dominates-consumer-email- with-1point5-billion-users.html)

2% of 1.5b is 30,000,000. I think Hey will be okay with only $2,970,000,000 per annum. :)

<comment><USER47> This is the potential market where all other paid email providers will compete. A reduced market. And yet, they chose Elon Musk's strategy. Create a premium product first to serve as a cash cow and financier, then perhaps offer other products with lower or even higher margins.

But my point is, they offer a premium service and have the possibility to get around this problem by negotiating since the mistake was theirs in not interpreting apple rules correctly.

[1][https://www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master- plan-j...](https://www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-plan-just- between-you-and- me#:~:text=The%20strategy%20of%20Tesla%20is,prices%20with%20each%20successive%20model).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Looks like they're not complying with the rules? Is there something more to this?

<comment><USER38> They are doing the same as Spotify and Netflix apps. Payment is done outside the app.

<comment><USER50> You can also make in-app purchases there, if you choose to. You can't with Hey.

<comment><USER51> You can't make in-app purchases in Spotify. Netflix got rid of in-app purchases for a while, but then renegotiated a new deal with Apple. You can't buy books in Kindle.

And the list goes on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> It's interesting that despite the fact that walled-garden platforms are concrete examples of companies using their marketshare to rent seek and stifle competition, the recent anti-trust investigations have been going after more nebulously defined cases like Alphabet and Amazon.

EDIT: Of all the things that HN would consider controversial, I did not expect an inane comment on walled gardens to be it.

<comment><USER53> I suspect that this is because Amazon and Alphabet have an overwhelming market share while Apple hasn't.

<comment><USER13> I thought iPhones had a significant majority of the smartphone market in the US.

<comment><USER53> As a single brand they have the largest share at about 40%. But in terms of platform they are on par, or slightly behind, Android. On mobile devices overall they are ahead but not that much.

This is in contrast to Alphabet and Amazon which have much stronger dominant positions and don't have comparable competitors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> This is one of the reasons why companies are so interested in the PWA/web app approach.

</comment><comment><USER55> It's hard for me to discern if they actually broke one of Apples rules or not.

What I can't seem to ignore is just how worked up DHH seems to get on Twitter sometimes.

This thread is 20 tweets in a row, not including his replies. To be fair, it is less profane and numerous than the Apple Card one[0]

[0] [https://mobile.twitter.com/dhh/status/1192540900393705474](https://mobile.twitter.com/dhh/status/1192540900393705474)

</comment><comment><USER56> It seems to me thay the AppStore works as intended so it should be resolved with "won't fix".

</comment><comment><USER57> It would be hard to argue--given this presentation of Basecamp's plight--that Apple's behavior here is not rent-seeking. Combined with Apple's massive earnings and cash holdings, this is not a good look for Apple.

<comment><USER58> Apple takes a cut of the sales you make in their store, like any other such platform.

<comment><USER59> They are in a duopoly with Google though- if Apple increases their tax to 35% tomorrow, what happens? What if they increase it to 50%?

What if they say you can't have a web app, you can only have an iOS and Android app?

What if they say they no competing services are allowed, so every iCloud, Apple news, weather etc. competitor is gone?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> its kindof hilarious that apple happened to pick this app to make a stand on. It was only a few months ago that DHH (the Hey founder) got apple to change (or at least clarify and apologize for ) their Apple Card application process because his wife got a smaller limit than him.

</comment><comment><USER61> As much as I despise Apple's arbitrary distinctions between apps and the subscription purchase mechanisms (as well as the comparatively stricter control it has on apps on the App Store), the Twitter thread is deviating from the key points and making comparisons (and using ad hominems) that sound very nasty. I get that DHH is fuming, and feels rightfully so, but this is a crude business transaction disagreement. He's no common person on the streets, and it would help for him to rethink some of the words and comparisons he uses in public.

On the whole, I'm kinda glad on the timing of this one. One can only hope that this brings in some positive changes from Apple within a few months. It's long due.

</comment><comment><USER62> Maybe because Hey/Basecamp decided to target Apple's email platform on Hey's home page as the cause of all Inbox woes?

Maybe before you go griping about technical details in Apple's App Store rules, Hey/Basecamp should have considered not blaspheming (unfairly) Apple's Email platform (among others) on their home page:

> "You started getting stuff you didn't want from people you didn't know. You > lost control over who could reach you. An avalanche of automated emails > cluttered everything up.

And Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and Apple just let it happen."

Pretty snarky of Jason Fried & Co. to accuse Apple of being the reason I lost control of my Inbox, and then beg and cajole Apple to let them have their Hey App on iOS without allowing a signup option via Apple's massive eco-system.

Typical Small Dev Thinking. "Hey is different and Apple is Evil and We have Single-handedly solved all the problems that Apple created! Oh, by the way, can we please be in the App Store so we can have access to Apple's bajillions of customers and $$$ so we can make a few $100k because the economy is tanking?".

Worse of all? Hey lied. Through the teeth.

Nearly all of their Top 20 "features" have been available via Apple's Email service for years, and in some cases decades, and most are also available via other email services like Gmail.

[https://mrtechimist.wordpress.com/2020/06/16/apples-email- an...](https://mrtechimist.wordpress.com/2020/06/16/apples-email-and- basecamps-new-hey-emails-top-20-features/)

This is probably the lowest skullduggery that Fried & Co have attempted to foist on the unsuspecting public. I'm personally surprised and have always been a fan of their work. Don't know what's going on under the covers over there, but it can't be good.

<comment><USER63> I'm not sure that Apple denying an app into its App Store because that company criticised Apple on one of its marketing pages is justified.

<comment><USER62> It's not "justified". I'm merely pointing out (a) hypocrisy by BaseCamp (and subsequent marketing lies), and (b) the old adage that you don't bite the hand that feeds you.

It might be nice to believe you can snip at a company's products (and in this case, using false claims), and believe it won't affect at all a separate issue (App Store submissions), but that's not the real world.

Sometimes, you attract attention by antics. Maybe Fried and Co. are learning a small lesson about the real world.

Aside from all that, this whining about how Apple is keeping them from profits is a bit nauseating. Their sad product (Hey) is keeping them from profits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Feels like DHH manufacturing controversy.

Deliberately break rules so Apple rejects their code.

So it's a marketing stunt designed to get a product into the front page of Hacker News.

But that would never happen of course... HEY!!

Do you really think DHH is surprised by the commission rules at Apple? Do you really think said bugs aren't deliberate?

DHH is playing everyone folks. But he certainly has an army of fanboys here who downvote all the threads suggesting this is a marketing stunt.

Fake news in the truest sense.

<comment><USER65> It's straight out of the Jobs playbook; "Pick a fight..."

<comment><USER64> DHH has _literally_ articulated this as a marketing strategy in the past.

<comment><USER65> Yes. I know. He has _literally_ articulated the fact that is straight out of Jobs' playbook to. It's _ironic_ that Apple find themselves on the receiving end! And just too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> I don't get the anti-Apple here. The email from Apple posted on Twitter says quite clearly that people can acquire content and subscriptions elsewhere as long as the app continues to offer an in-app purchase option. I don't see the problem here, give people the choice.

<comment><USER67> The anti-apple thing here is, you can't link out to your website for payment.

You literally cannot even inform the user that there is another way for them to pay.

This is shitty. Apple benefits from developers making great apps on their platform, just as developers benefit from being on their platform. It's a symbiotic relationship, but Apple takes up to 30% of your profit which does not feel respectful of what developers are bringing to the table, which is often Apple first, quality apps.

<comment><USER68> This is not totally true.

If you're using, say, Stripe for your payment processing then you can offer the user a choice if they'd pay through Stripe or Apple pay. If you do not have your own payment processor for mobile payments, then you use only Apple pay. If you do, then you have to include Apple as an option.

I've been releasing apps with this in the past few years, it's been a requirement all along.

<comment><USER67> It is totally true for the context of this conversation... Which is, software subscriptions.

No, you cannot use Stripe for software subscriptions. Stripe (non-Apple pay) can only be used for physical goods, or sale of services rendered outside of iOS/MacOS.

In other words, can only be used for non-digital sales. The context of this conversation is the Hey app, which is a software subscription, so no... there is no other way to pay.

<comment><USER68> Yes, I have just figured that out. My experience was for the goods/services delivered outside the app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Maybe they deliberately provoked Apple, so they'd get rejected, so they could write about their outrage, so it'd get picked up by news sites, and they did this for marketing purposes?

Or maybe it really was just accidental, who knows. But it is certainly having that effect, intended or not.

<comment><USER70> This is a weird accusation to make

<comment><USER71> I don't think its that strange of an "accusation". In fact I'd call it a "hypothesis".

DHH is a popular person. He gets people to change their behaviors when he calls them out (see his prior Twitter rants, I can't recall any examples other than Zoom, etc). DHH even admits that he is popular and may be able to get the rules changed for himself, which is probably a big reason he is being vocal - small developers do not have the same platform as a Formula 1 hundred- millionaire who also created RoR.

<comment><USER72> He might be a vocal person online, but I think accusing him of purposefully sabotaging his app's approval process without supporting it with evidence is reaching a bit.

<comment><USER73> Agreed. Certainly fails the Occam's razor test for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> What does "Hey" do? Is it like "Yo"?[1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_%28app%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_%28app%29)

<comment><USER75> It's an email client, with a focus on workflows.

<comment><USER76> It's not just a client, they provide the email service itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> I still don't understand why people like Apple products so much.

I was forced to use a MacBook at my last job for 2 years because the CEO was a Steve Jobs fan. It's a terrible machine. If I had to summarize Apple with just one word, it would be "restrictive". It's like you need a license to do anything, run any program, write any program. It's like you don't even own the damn machine, it owns you.

I understand why some developers may want to stay away from Windows but Apple is not the answer. Linux distros are really quite good these days. I highly recommend the new version of Kubuntu v20.

The defaults are kind of ugly (no idea why they would do that to themselves) but you can customize the theme and it can look amazing. Ubuntu is not bad but Kubuntu was an eye-opener for me in terms of usability and customizability.

<comment><USER78> > I still don't understand why people like Apple products so much.

That's very simple. Most of users aren't professionals and want platform that works out-of-the-box. They don't customize. They don't change anything. They don't want or know how to side-load an app... they are just normal users which are majority of Apple clients. :)

Why so many people have a problem with understanding that professional users (developers, designers, etc) aren't most important, or even better, the only one using Apple hardware?

BTW. And with those users in mind I would love to have more walled gardens everywhere. As they don't care about their tech-savvy part of life, approach like this can minimize their lost from stupid actions.

<comment><USER79> I don't have much of a Mac experience but Linux distro's nowadays are far, far more "just working" than windows, even and specially on their default setups.

At least that's my personal experience.</comment></comment></comment>


From the man who discovered Stuxnet, dire warnings one year later - <AUTHOR> http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2011/0922/From-the-man-who-discovered-Stuxnet-dire-warnings-one-year-later

<comment><USER2> SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisitions, the usual term for industrial control) systems until, at the _least_ , 9/11/01, were not typically designed with security in mind.

Symptoms of problems include the ability to DOS a SCADA network simply by flooding it with packets and the lack of authentication/ encryption embedded in protocols such as IEC 61850 (an increasingly popular SCADA standard).

There are two halves to the problem of hacking a SCADA system.

First, you must be able to exploit the software. E.g., Siemens Step 7. That is standard IT hacking. Not a "problem".

Second, you must be able to exploit the installation. Let me explain a bit more.

In software terms, what you are given to work with is a list of hex values denoting inputs, and then a list of hex values denoting outputs.

So - without knowledge - what you will see is _conceptually_ like this:

        READ 0x1

        READ 0x2

        IF 0x1 + 0x2 > 314159 THEN

          WRITE 0xA, 100

        ENDIF

What do those numbers mean? There's no context until you know what those read/write registers are plugged into. And those could be different for each installation.

The second part isn't always brought out in the Stuxnet discussions. Part of the search for understanding for Stuxnet was decoding how the registers mapped to the installation.

For the interested reader, I refer you to the Symantec white paper. It is of quite high quality and good technical detail. The SCADASEC mailing list contains useful discussion by people involved in the industry, and they really bring out the differences between SCADA security and IT security. And for the really interested reader, I recommend reading up on PLC programming and digging up protocol standards for MODBUS and DNP3.

</comment><comment><USER3> The article might tout the idea of cyberweapons slightly too much, but I think Stuxnet indeed qualifies as one.

I'm somewhat worried about these things. The problem I see is that we are becoming even more and more leveraged/dependent on technology. And these technologies are increasingly interdependent. A successful attack on one technology can potentially bring down entire systems down in unanticipated ways.

The recent power outage in San Diego and nearby areas serves as a good reminder. You don't actively think about power, it is something you take for granted. Only when the power is lost, then you realize how dependent everything is on it; traffic lights stopped, ATMs didn't work, credit and debit cards didn't work, freezers and fridges stopped, and so forth. From modern times to the dark ages in an eye-blink, instant paralysis.

I don't think nuclear power plants as targets are that interesting. Just turning off traffic light system would be enough to bring down and entire US urban area down to its knees.

New networks of complex dependencies are being created all the time. The smartphone boom is going to create one, and people will start relying on the existence of it. If iPhone and Android keep dominating the market it will create more homogenous mass of devices, providing a more consistent attack surface and more potential for widespread damage. I don't see how smartphones could avoid the same problems PCs were/are experiencing. Waiting for the first smartphone "UNIX worm".

Wireless features are getting added to cars. Yet another potential complex network. War-driving could soon get completely new meanings.

</comment><comment><USER4> Regardless of whether copies of Stuxnet or variants of it can be used successfully in the future by "any dumb hacker", Pandora's box has been open, the code and concepts are out there, and it only takes one (dumb hacker(s) - competent or not). The threat is real! even if some believe the author might be "drumming up biz" or there is an 'overdramatization of cyberweapons/cyberwarfare. What gets me is the following: Regardless of Stuxnet in this article or any other past article that has discussed network security, what rings true here and will continue in the foreseeable future is this - "Most engineers are aware of the problem, it's just that they don't get the budget to fix the problem. The risk is just discounted. As long as management doesn't see an immediate threat, there is a tendency to ignore it because it costs money to fix." So, even if there was a holy grail of a security measure, I fear that it will have to take real cyberterrorist attack of some sort to really implement it. There is a measure of complacency by government and businesses regardless of whether copies of Stuxnet is out there or not.

</comment><comment><USER5> Some siemens PLCs have a default superuser password hard coded in to the firmware. Siemens hasn't released an update to remove it.

Control systems should be on separate networks, but even those networks are susceptible to wandering USB keys and contractor laptops.

</comment><comment><USER6> A better title would have been "Computer consultant will say anything to stay relevant and drum up business".

</comment><comment><USER7> I remember reading about how stuxnet works a while ago, and it didn't sound like the kind of thing you could 'drag and drop'. Whoever made it had to know specific things about the hardware being used in Iran, the network there, and machine code for the motors that were affected. Then they had to hide the whole thing in a virus in such a way that it took a while for the experts to figure out what was actually happening and where.

The idea could be used, sure: find some important place that you want to damage in some way. Find out if it has computers that hook into some kind of specialized hardware. Work out how that hardware can be damaged via those computers. Find out how those computers are vulnerable. Write an overly- complicated virus that hides what it's really doing, and set it loose, and hope it makes it all way to those specific computers, and delivers its payload. ...it kinda sounds like a single-use case, really.

More likely, stuxnet is just encouraging people (governments, whatever) to consider attacks that target non-computer run systems. The motors being damaged in Iran, if I understood it correctly, weren't being run by computers, just programmed by them. (I'd be surprised to learn that no one had thought of that before.)

</comment><comment><USER8> Ts ts. Those people who think because they uncovered an _idea_ (which wasnt even their) they also uncovered the possibility for the whole humanity to do a whole new range of stuff. It's not even research material, its idea and concepts. And it's not concepts about physics, its pure 1+1 logic, no magic, no extremely hard to think of ideas. In fact, having read stuxnet I just wondered "wah, wasnt this done since ages anyway"? And most knowledgeable people probably though that too.

<comment><USER9> Attacking industrial systems is not something that 'just any' hacker can do. Not necessarily due to the skill involved, but just because getting access to a system or the software that runs on the system may not be trivial (unlike, say, getting a pirated -- or legit -- copy of Windows).

The gist of this guy's argument seems to be that industrial systems aren't being patched fast enough to plug the holes that stuxnet used. Until these systems are all fully patched, anyone looking at stuxnet can exploit those holes without needing to gain access to the software these systems are running (to find new exploits).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > With Stuxnet as a "blueprint" downloadable from the Internet, he says, "any > dumb hacker" can now figure out how to build and sell cyberweapons to any > hacktivist or terrorist who wants "to put the lights out" in a US city or > "release a toxic gas cloud."

Is this really the case? I'm nothing close to a security specialist, so maybe I'm talking out of my ass. Still, everything I read on the subject said that Stuxnet was especially impressive in that it exploited not one but _several_ previously-unknown OS-level exploits, on top of the embedded systems attacks it used. With these zero-days now discovered and hopefully patched, how much more value does Stuxnet offer?

(Neither of these questions are rhetorical — hopeful that one of our resident experts can fill me in.)

<comment><USER11> To answer that, ask yourself this. If you somehow got access to the root account on the central control computer of a nuclear power plant, could you cause a meltdown? Most likely, the answer is no, because you don't know how to control a nuclear power plant. You can run any command, but you have no idea which command would cause any real-world damage. If you're just doing it for the lulz, you could go for the ever-popular "rm -rf *" and cross your fingers, but if you want to be sure to cause damage, you're going to need some domain- specific knowledge. Not just knowledge about nuclear power plants in general, but also knowledge about how to manipulate the control systems at your specific target nuclear power plant.

In other words, even if you have an easily-exploited attack vector available to you, you still need to know a lot about your target in order to cause damage. Contrast this to guided missiles, which don't really need to know anything about the building that they are blowing up other than its GPS coordinates.

For this reason, I'm skeptical that "any dumb hacker" will ever be capable of causing something like a nuclear meltdown via virus infection.

<comment><USER12> On modern reactors, it would be hard even for the plant operators to cause a meltdown -- there's just too many _passive_ measures in place. You'd probably need to start by walking around the reactor smashing bits of machinery first.

On the other hand, triggering the reactor to automatically shut down would be pretty easy -- and if you shut down all the nuclear reactors in the US for a few weeks, you'll certainly have made a significant impact.

<comment><USER13> I'm reminded of a fairly recent -- or recently released -- demonstration where researchers (in Idaho, IIRC) programmed a large engine/generator to self- destruct. It was then pointed out that latent inventory on such items is practically non-existent and replacement time is several months. I believe that replacement is also increasingly dependent upon China; North America essentially doesn't make the item, or critical components, any more.

Knock out several of those in critical locations, and you start to grind the U.S. economy to a halt.

You don't need to go nuclear. And destroying the engine was a fairly simple task of pushing it well outside its performance envelope.

EDIT: Looks like pnathan already cited this event -- see the last link in this comment:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3035909>

It's a bit older than I remembered. The article is dated September, 2007.

I note incidentally that for one "catastrophic" scenario they describe, with an estimated "cost" of $700 billion, the damages figure now pales in comparison to what the U.S. economy has been through in the last few years. A bit of a lesson of its own regarding the rhetoric that surrounds the actual topic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Security professionals habitually grossly underestimate the negative externalities they wish to impose on others.</comment>


Announcing New AMD EPYC-based Azure Virtual Machines - <AUTHOR> https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-new-amd-epyc-based-azure-virtual-machines/ <comment><USER2> How do they provide those enormous number of cores (80000) ? Are they talking about distributed computing ? If not, how do they connect all the cores to remaining peripherals.

<comment><USER3> It says "For MPI Workloads", meaning they are indeed talking about distributed computing.

The sentence before says the systems are interconnected with 200 gigabit Infiniband.

So they aren't talking about the number of cores in a single system, but rather in a cluster that has a high speed and low latency interconnect.

MPI: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_Passing_Interface](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_Passing_Interface) Infiniband: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfiniBand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfiniBand)

<comment><USER4> 200 gigabit is where PCI Express 4.0 is sorely needed, two such ports need more bandwidth than a PCIe 3.0 x16 slot can provide so they are using two such slots [http://www.mellanox.com/related- docs/prod_adapter_cards/PB_C...](http://www.mellanox.com/related- docs/prod_adapter_cards/PB_ConnectX-6_EN_Card.pdf) look at the top. (I know I linked Ethernet, the bandwidth situation is the same.)

> Socket Direct technology is enabled by a main card housing the ConnectX-6 > and an auxiliary PCIe card bringing in the remaining PCIe lanes. The > ConnectX-6 Socket Direct card is installed into two PCIe x16 slots and > connected using a 350mm long harness

<comment><USER5> Wow, that's really cool! I haven't seen anything like that in a long time (CrossFire & SLI excepted).

How often do companies band together x16 links? What else benefits from it?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Death on demand: has euthanasia gone too far? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/jan/18/death-on-demand-has-euthanasia-gone-too-far-netherlands-assisted-dying <comment><USER2> Forewarning: I'm in the "personal autonomy" camp.

The article (novel?) was o.k., until it got towards the end:

>" _But while some applicants for euthanasia are furious with doctors who turn them down, in practice people are unwilling to take their own lives. Rather than drink the poison or open the drip, 95% of applicants for active life termination in the Netherlands ask a doctor to kill them. In a society that vaunts its rejection of established figures of authority, when it comes to death, everyone asks for Mummy._ "

The author doesn't even address the byproduct of attempting (and failing) suicide, nor do they address the success rates of suicide compared to euthanasia.

Stating that people hide behind the state to perform something that they're unwilling to do themselves is, to me, a myopic statement. In that statement, they're not even addressing the fact that it takes two drugs, which someone couldn't administer themselves (in succession) for it to be successful (medically induced, that is). They also don't address the "surprise" of suicide versus the foreknowledge that euthenasia affords and how the trama of the former is potentially exponentially worse than the latter. Finally, they don't even address the will of seeking the process, what occurs between the request and the action, and how long that takes. It's not as if I could call up a doctor and it happen on the morrow...</comment>


Underwear Startups Have Investors Hot and Bothered - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/25/underwear-startups-have-investors-hot-and-bothered/?ncid=rss&cps=gravity_1462_-7220147108821270012

<comment><USER2> MeUndies sounds great. I'm amazed at the relative quality and price of pants (from Bonobos.com) and shirts (the Micro Modal models from ribbedtee.com) available online relative to the quality of their equivalents in stores.

</comment><comment><USER3> Anyone know if boxers or briefs are equal from a health standpoint or if one is better?</comment>


Clones: If Apple doesn't want to innovate the desktop Mac, it should let others - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/17/apples-future-in-the-desktop-computer-business/ <comment><USER2> I remember the last time Apple had Mac clones. The Mac clones cost less than Apple's Macs and Apple shut it down. Power Computing used PC parts to make their Mac Clones like IDE drives instead of SCSI drives, etc.

There is a Mod-Book project to take Apple Macbooks and upgrade them with touch screens etc. [http://blastar.in/wordpress/2016/10/12/kickstarter-mod- book-...](http://blastar.in/wordpress/2016/10/12/kickstarter-mod-book-modifed- macbook-touch-screen/)

If I was Tim Cook, I'd have Apple make ATX motherboards with Mac BIOS and upgradeable slots and CPU socket and sell them to Mac Clone makers. So they can put in a graphic card and other stuff. Have Apple control the quality of the motherboard and let the cloner add the other parts to make it a full computer.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've found myself thinking this too. I wouldn't suggest they license macOS to all and sundry, but they could work with one or two carefully selected hardware vendors to fill a couple of lower-volume niches: workstations, and workstation-class laptops.

</comment><comment> koga-ninja Some people can afford Rolls and they pay extra for Finish and quality. The Mac Pro is such a device. I Personally don't think you can farm it out and get the Same results.

Competition at the high end of the graphics market is bad since the Amiga went off the market. The Amiga Embarrassed Apple to try harder, but now what.

I personally need a PC because I am studying to be a Trader. I would love to own a Mac Pro and work on this Machine.</comment>


These wonderful Apple employees moonlight at Ride - <AUTHOR> https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/1xiswom6d7wl7wr/Screen%20Shot%202015-04-08%20at%209.59.48%20AM.png?dl=0

<comment><AUTHOR> Ride (Uber for commuting) just launched yesterday. Given the size of their team and funding, I'm surprised that they'd pull something off like stealing an image from Apple's support page and replacing a logo.</comment>


W3C sends password change requests after breach - <AUTHOR> http://www.w3.org/blog/2014/03/w3c-password/ Mail I recieved today:
W3C has discovered unauthorized access to its user database, including retrieval of encrypted passwords. As such W3C is requiring all of our users to change their passwords.
If you have already changed your password in 2014, you may ignore this message.
Please read more at the following article:
http://www.w3.org/blog/2014/03/w3c-password/
Accounts that have not been updated by 2014-05-12 will be disabled.  If you do not see this message until after that deadline, you can recover your account using the recovery system linked from the article above.
[...] <comment><AUTHOR> Mail I received today, 2014-04-29:

W3C has discovered unauthorized access to its user database, including retrieval of encrypted passwords. As such W3C is requiring all of our users to change their passwords.

If you have already changed your password in 2014, you may ignore this message.

Please read more at the following article:

[http://www.w3.org/blog/2014/03/w3c-password/](http://www.w3.org/blog/2014/03/w3c-password/)

Accounts that have not been updated by 2014-05-12 will be disabled. If you do not see this message until after that deadline, you can recover your account using the recovery system linked from the article above.

[...]</comment>


The Best Job Candidates Don't Always Have College Degrees - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/ernest-young-degree-recruitment-hiring-credentialism/406576/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> No degree. Founder and UI/UX Dev (now in Sacramento be previous Bay Area). Six figs. No connections, just hard work.

I'm definitely an outlier. I've yet to meet someone holding it down in the Bay Area with a developers title who didn't have a degree. It's always a look of surprise when asked where I went to college and I respond "I didn't.". Part of me wishes I had, the other part wishes I was less lazy. The ladder in me knows there isn't a thing I can learn in college I couldn't teach myself on my own.

I once asked a genius colleague of mine (also founder and now millionaire at 29) who went to school for biology and wound up a developer if he felt he wasted his time pursuing biology. His response "No, it taught me how to learn.". I really liked that response, obviously it's stuck with me. For many things you need a degree (health fields etc) but for most everything else you need the ability to learn and learn well.

<comment><USER3> It can be done, but it's much harder, at least in my experience. You're 100% right about being an outlier. People who go this route are going to work much harder as their similarly skilled, but degreed colleagues at everything (proving themselves, earning respect, getting raises, having people even listen to them.) Anyone who can go without accruing a mountain of debt _should_ do so unless you're naturally incredibly talented or have Zuck-level support.

My personal experience: [https://medium.com/@opirmusic/why-software- developers-should...](https://medium.com/@opirmusic/why-software-developers- should-still-choose-to-go-to-university-if-someone-else-is- paying-45091d22acc1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Best Job Candidates Don't Always Have College Degrees

Is there anything surprising or interesting about this truism? There are millions of jobs and millions of people without college degrees with infinite combinations of skill sets. Of course you are going to have some jobs that are best executed by some people who don't have a college degree.

<comment><USER5> I'm pretty sure there's an entire generation (or two) of parents who beat into their children's heads that if they didn't get a degree they wouldn't amount to anything. Also, see: credentialism.

So yes, for many people there is a belief that the only jobs for the un- universitied are garbage collection and scrubbing toilets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "great grades and successful founders/technology entrepreneurs have at best a zero correlation"

[http://steveblank.com/2009/04/07/the-good- student/](http://steveblank.com/2009/04/07/the-good-student/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Maybe it's just me, but in discussions like this, I consistently interpret an expectation of naivety in non-college graduates. In practice, I find it's the exact opposite.

If your mentality is to follow Gates' advice of a "much surer path to success" you've already demonstrated weakness.

Many graduates I know did not have a job before college. You don't learn practical job experience in school, so they're left having to figure it out. For example, a lot of my peers aren't comfortable solving problems in their workplace. After they vent and I recommend making changes, most are unwilling to act; they'll make excuses or expect to be fired. Having experiencing a _wide_ variety of "professional" environments myself, I know where to draw the line, and how to stand up for myself.

I also find that expectations of employment differ. That MS title was hard earned, and gets them into interviews at companies with those requirements, so that's where they go. It's expected that you want a salaried job and will ride it (or similar positions in similar companies) to retirement.

Sure, I may one day be the "old dude without a degree who says he can code", but I'm actually preparing to be the dude who no longer codes because he has skills that apply to many industries. Try diversifying your skillset in your cubicle, or exclusively on weekends; from experience, I can say I'm better off without. In the 4+ years you were socializing and studying, I was already living life (actually, I've been working since I was 15-1/2).

</comment><comment><USER8> I think we'll start seeing a trend where students, especially at STEM schools, can come out of high school, do a coding bootcamp, and work as a junior startup dev without college.

That said, the challenge of when they hit the point that algorithms and data structures are important to their software is creation is I think unsolved so far. edX/Coursera/etc. could be a big help.

<comment><USER9> That was pretty common in the '90s dot-com boom, quite easy to get a web-dev or Perl job out of high school (or even while still in high school). However the people who skipped college for those jobs were also (on average) the hardest hit in the downturn, so many went back to college in the early 2000s. Excluding those who cashed out, of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This sums up pretty much nicely. You don't always need a college degree is a fact. But, getting a college degree is useless is an over statement. I have interviewed/spoken to a bunch of bootcamp camp grads who are good at what they do. But, they fail to catch up with other people when anything new is thrown at them(eg., devops stuff to a front end guy). But, if you are a hacker at heart, you dont need any bootcamp or any degree to excel at a job. The best developer I know is a high school dropout who started out as a kernel hacker.

</comment><comment><USER11> More importantly for a business, you can get a lot more bang for your buck. High School grads have much lower pay expectations.

<comment><USER12> It's easy to be cynical (apologies if I'm misreading intentions here) about reduced paychecks. There is one complexity here that generally doesn't get mentioned.

There are two mechanisms by which we get richer. One is by increasing our income. The other is by reducing the prices of the things we buy with it. The former is how we increase our wealth relative to other members of society. The latter is how the society increases its overall standard of wealth.

On one hand each of us wants to get paid well. On the other, the more we get paid the higher the costs of the business we're in and the less of its fruits the society gets to enjoy overall.

This dilemma is particularly acute if you're lucky to be in a business you genuinely care about (a huge and rare privilege). For example, if you work in space industry, your salary and benefits contribute directly to the costs of space exploration. This means that ultimately the more you earn the less space exploration we can do per buck.

Generally, people's pay is a balancing act that should involve both fairness and efficiency.

<comment><USER13> You're argument assumes that all cost is labor which is obviously not true. The higher a percentage of cost that is labor, the better of most people are, since they work. To put it simply, if everyone in the service sector made double, prices wouldn't double. The only people who would suffer are people who make most of their money through capital gains. Even many of them would benefit to have a healthier economy, margins can be replaced by volume. You would also see a spike in prices for limited resources that many can't afford, but innovation usually solves that problem. If you want a good empirical data on this, see the institution of minimum wage. Contrary to the naysayers predictions, there was little inflation and overall, a better economy.

<comment><USER12> The argument doesn't really make assumptions about _how_ you contribute to a business. Investors fighting for higher capital gains also drive up the costs for the business they fund.

Higher ROI is how an investor increases her wealth relative to other members of society. Lower capital gains make the society richer overall.

If you invest your savings in a space business and genuinely care about it, then the return you demand becomes the cost of space exploration. Identical dilemma to that of the worker.

The class warfare between owners of capital and workers is essentially the same mechanics but taken between two specially chosen groups. In general, each individual and each group seeks to increase their share relative to others (whether you call it income or capital gains). Costs going down is how we all get richer as a society (the costs including both paychecks and capital gains).

<comment><USER13> I don't think workers, in the united States at least, are fighting for their share. Marketing efforts by the capital side have rendered the working side a helpless lamb ready for the slaughter. But if a symbiotic relationship becomes parasitic, sometimes the host is destroyed, taking the parasite with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Alt title could read "The Best Job Candidates Sometimes Have College Degrees"

</comment><comment><USER15> Everybody loves the 'kid without a degree who can code'. 5 or 6 jobs later that kid becomes the 'old dude without a degree who says he can code'

<comment><USER16> Unless, in fact, they can. Of course, any career progression requires more than just one trick in your bag. Being able to communicate well, moving from coding into managing, moving from coding to freelancing, getting domain knowledge relevant to your customers (internal or external).

Turns out there are many important qualities that a person can posses that are important and perhaps indispensable, but often a degree ain't one.

(And yes, I am an old guy speaking with first hand experience).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hints of "sour grapes" can be detected in this article.

\- well credentialed candidates are harder to get due to the job market and are expensive -- the grapes are high on the vine.

\- but they are not all they are cracked up to be; and besides it is elitist to be hiring them since they are from affluent backgrounds -- the grapes are sour!

\- hiring them for junior roles is a "terrible approach". (Why? Not explained: probably because they are, doh, _expensive_ for junior roles) -- I didn't even want grapes in the first place; free blackberries grow everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER18> Well corporate HR would disagree with you on that. So good luck getting that job without some great network connection.</comment>