Ask HN: Why are POS systems all POSes? - <AUTHOR> For the last 10, maybe even 15 years, I have been hearing from small business owners about how much their Point-of-Sale system sucks. It seems like a preopsterous situation. How can such a fundamental piece of software--one that is so fundamentally simple in its construction--continue to be a pain point for people?
Is it because POS is not as easy as it seems? Surely someone in the last ten years would have figured it out, though.
Is it because the users don't understand how to use the systems properly? How then have we gone ten years without some startup pitching My First POS, and taken the owner/operator business segment by storm?
Is it because the companies currently in the market are good at getting themselves entrenched with limiting contract terms (my observation has been that most businesses buy POS as a service, not as a product)?
Is it because good developers aren't "wasting their time" with such trivial CRUD apps as POS?
It's just very perplexing. I first encountered the crappy POS meme in highschool, working food service and retail jobs between classes. I had further insight into the ecosystem in my first job out of college--no, we weren't in any way working on the subject, it was just that our favorite lunch spot could never keep their system running. And now, through the course of several interviews with local small business owners, it seems that nothing has changed. <comment><USER3> I worked at one of the bigger POS vendors in the very early 2000s. The primary attribute of these folks seems to be how cheap they are. The 2 groups here would spend 100K a year for a Java Developer and then supply NO tools. The project I was on was still using Borland tools from the early '90s, including the Borland database engine. Debugging was next to impossible, especially when you used the networked "features."

What was really funny was they kept buying other companies to get their POS systems, but they could not manage to get one that worked as well as the old Borland based "thing"...

Java, fail

C#, fail

Modern C++, fail

It was rather amusing, especially after they chased off all the decent, experienced in the field programmers they had that they wouldn't allow to write the new stuff. They kept trying to buy it and failing.

The only thing I've seen worse is all the "video store management" software out there in the days before Blockbuster got big. Mom and Pop video stores were REALLY unwilling to spend any decent money on good software. I'm kinda glad about that as that's what kept me alive in the very early '90s, fixing all those Clipper, Dbase, Paradox and Flex "applications".

<comment><AUTHOR> So basically it's the same reason most software sucks: because most companies suck. Thanks for your insight, I appreciate it.

Years ago, when I was helping out my favorite bar get back on their feet, I had thought it would be a good idea to develop a POS system. I wasn't capable of it at the time, I was just out of college and knew very little about running a project. Nowadays, I've got quite a bit of experience in inventory and ERP systems, but I also understand the market a little better now. For one thing, the people who complain the loudest are often the least willing to pay more for better.

This all got started because my business partner and I were doing some on-the- ground research into what makes a small business owner tick. We have an investor who has a Great Idea that is completely unworkable without a ton of data that these sorts of places are either uncomfortable providing or unwilling to put in the effort of providing.

And one of the constant refrains we heard in our interviews was that these people hated their POS system, knew it was partly their fault for not using it correctly, but didn't have the time or inclination to get into it more. We're talking owners of walk-in wine stores and pet grooming shops. Places where the owner is behind the counter, running the place, or directly managing the staff. They all opened their businesses because the business focus was something they loved, but they ended up spending most of their time wrangling data systems and tax compliance. It's a major frustration point for them and we'd like to do something about it.

Do you have any insights into the types of support contracts that these sort of places are running? I'm considering trying to sell my services as "labor for hire" to help small business owners clean up and figure out how to best use their POS. It's something I could get bootstrapped on right away and I think it would build relationships that could lead to more business opportunities. And it seems to fill the need that most of these owners have, in that they know that their systems are a mess but they don't have the time to do anything about it. But I'm concerned that the typical POS company has their customers locked into a support contract that would not allow a 3rd party access to the system.

<comment><USER3> Check out Sturgeons law... 90% of everything is crap. Some think he was an optimist! :)

You've hit a few nails on the head, especially with the loudest complainers being the least likely to spend money and the unwillingness to expend any effort.

What I noticed with the few clients I visited for the POS vendor was that the owners weren't busy, they were lazy and cheap. If your idea man's idea involves getting people to do anything besides say yes or no on the phone, I wouldn't bother unless you meet face to face with a few people that are really enthusiastic and prove they're willing to make an effort. They will just frustrate you and make you hate life otherwise. This is especially true for any kind of banking or financial business such as mortgage brokers or credit reporting agencies. I have yet to see a group of people less willing to spend money or to try to cheat you out of it. Restaurant and bar owners would be second on my list.

I didn't see much of the support portion of the POS business because the majority of the people were in a different state, but, more than 1/3 of the employees were in the training and support department at this particular company. A support contract was required for any big business simply because the customers wanted a neck to choke when something went wrong. Developers could intuit a fair amount about what was going on with the customers due to the problem tickets and CRM entries we saw.

If not for the support/training revenue I suspect the POS corp I worked for would have been out of business years ago. However, they had some huge customers that just wouldn't buy anything without a support contract. The mom- and-pop customers paid per incident and screamed and hollered the whole time. The large corps are locked into the POS support dept. The mom-and-pops are not, but... I don't think you want to deal with them...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I got into developing POS / retail management solutions in 2004 and founded GoFrugal Technologies. When I started, it did seem like a low hanging fruit, ripe and just waiting to be consumed

Close to 10 years and after engaging with 200,000+ retailers across India and with 20,000+ customers in about 20 different types of retail businesses - <USER2> have started appreciating the complexities of retail

The simple reasons why POS solutions are struggling to catch up fast with the times are 1\. All retailers have the freedom to innovate at the front-end & there are many others who push down innovation at the front-end to the retailers : either because their customers are demanding or because the banks, technology vendors, government and competitors are constantly pushing the retailers to introduce change at the front end 2\. Retailers want to service demand - come what may. The manufacturers continue to innovate on packaging, pricing, promotions etc. and no one waits for the retailer's system to be ready to handle these changes 3\. Retailers have to keep the cost per transaction as low as possible to earn a profit. This, combined with the fact that retail is different every 100 miles, makes it hard to build a universal retail solution

I hope this explains why POS in most cases continues to be pain point for both retailers and consumers

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you mean by "retailers innovate at the front-end"? And what do you mean by "innovate on packing, pricing, and promotions"? Shouldn't the shape of the package or the specific price have no bearing on how the inventory and sales are recorded?

<comment> atom-morgan I may be able to help here since I worked as a data analyst in the grocery world. I believe "retailers innovate at the front end" refers to the store specific details that are created by giving individual stores some freedom. For example, a product may be required to be on display at the front door of a store but store and category managers are given the freedom to choose _which_ item it is. Big football game coming up near a NFL city? Maybe chips and soda.

As for packing, price, and promotions, it does have a bearing on how inventory and sales are recorded. Product packages, prices, and promotions change all the time and while it may be easy to keep track of sales, units sold, etc., the actual storage of this information is much more complex. Retailers need to structure their data in a way that allows analysts to determine how the sales were generated. In addition to knowing Coca-Cola had an increase in sales last month, innovation on packing, price, and promotions lead to technical requirements to know which specific UPC of Coca-Cola, at what specific price point, under what promotion, and at what location in the store drove those sales.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My comments are primarily based on working for a supermarket chain with over 2000 stores and about 30,000 POS terminals. Subsequently, I've worked with some smaller retailers.

First of all, managers and business owners buy these systems. But they don't actually use them. They will sooner listen to the sales guy's pitch than the bitching from the employees. When you pay customer service staff the minimum wage that shows that you don't value them and as a boss, certainly know more than they could possibly know.

I think you comments are based on 2nd generation systems, i.e. ones that are more or less a PC with cash drawer and receipt printer attached. The big manufacturers have cornered the market by claiming that "only they are big enough to take care of your business." Typically the cost of customisation is so high that POS screens, functions are not updated as business changes.

The 3rd generation systems, based on iPads and other tablets are shaking up some segments. Of course, the struggle against the above two biases.

In case your wondering, 1st gen was stand-alone cash registers, whether mechanical or electronic.

In any large business, e.g. a chain, the POS integrates with the ERP systems to optimise the supply chain and distribution functions. This integration, alone, snookers many smaller, newer entrants.

Of course, I think you have hit the nail on the head, it is CRUD, unglamorous and once you confront the customisation and integration issues, a lot of hard work. As Paul Graham would suggest, the hallmarks of a niche to profit from.

</comment><comment><USER6> There's nothing fundamentally simple when you realize that the POS system is just one of the many front-ends for the store's inventory management, sales and cost reporting, barcoding and label printing, purchasing and tax accounting software. If you ever have a chance to help open a new retail store and actually see all the moving parts, you might want to take it, as you'll learn why POS software isn't as simple as it looks, and why the affordable ones are limited to small single-store establishments in specific industries.

Just handling taxes in a piece of software meant to be used in multiple locations can be hideously complex, and that's just 1% of what the system is responsible for. Remember that not only do the tax rates differ from one half of a town to the next, but what items are taxable do too.

<comment><AUTHOR> You make a good point. I guess in the general case it's "not simple". I've built a number of inventory and ERP systems, so it's kind of my wheelhouse now. But yes, such systems aren't necessarily trivial without a rock solid design. I can build a goodish ERP system now because I have experience, but to someone just entering the field it has a lot of good looking corners that turn out to be awful decisions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Do check out Vend (1) who are looking to change this paradigm.

Here are some thoughts.

The POS business is littered with devices that were designed for purpose by giant companies like NCR and IBM. Their primary customers were very large corporate retailers, the cost per unit and for development was prohibitively high and because these were giant corporate IT projects the results were awful for the end users.

At the lower end the retailers got those really basic electronic cash registers (ECRs)with lots of buttons and LCD displays showing numbers only. These were out of Japan mostly and usability was not a priority.

The biggest issue with these ECRs was that they were trying to solve too many end-user requirements, so they all sucked for all but the most simple transactions.

With the PC a bunch of DOS and then windows based retail POs systems emerged - mostly awful usability due to Windows and DOS. The best did made it very efficient for a particular industry. E.g. for service stations their systems were integrated with the pumps in the forecourt and a back office system, all of which likely linked to the oil company. But it all stalled for years until the cloud and iOS based systems came along.

Right now we are in a moment of rapid change, with the end-user experience becoming hugely better for both the customer and the retail assistant. Still plenty to come so watch this space.

(Source 4 years in Mobil Oil, 2 doing payments and POS projects, 2 in the field, and I'm an investor in Vend)

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

<comment><USER6> Vend has an awful lot of stupid bugs, and pretty inept front-line support. Even with reproduction steps and screenshots, they don't seem to understand tickets reporting bugs at all. It can take multiple back-and-forths before they escalate it to someone in dev that _might_ try to fix it.

An example they just fixed after I handed them the bug and the fix -- they handled discounts on a purchase (i.e. a coupon, or F&F discount) by adding a special "Discount" product to the sale. In their database, hidden to the store owner, this "Discount" product was flagged as a taxable item with negative value. If someone wanted to buy a $10 item and handed you a $10 coupon in a state with 7% tax, the register would tell the cashier to give the customer $0.70 in change, and take $0.70 out of the month's tax you owe to the state. There were similar glitches in basic, critical calculations in inventory tracking, cost of goods sold, etc. There were oddities like if you used a barcode scanner, and had mis-typed a barcode when adding a product to inventory and lost a digit, the scanner would still pull up the product via the partial match, and it'd also add sales tax to that item even if it was marked as a non-taxable product (i.e. groceries in a state that doesn't tax them). So someone doing inventory could mess up your sales tax collection on that product for the whole year and it might never be noticed.

It's not a solid product, and the only reason we still use it is its integration with our Shopify store to keep the website inventory updated as items sell out in the retail store.

<comment><USER8> That last line is a serious dealbreaker. We run Lightspeed Pro POS at our two retail locations, and while it is great it still does some things stupid. On the bright side, it does sync with Magento for our website.

<comment><USER9> Is it still written in RealBASIC?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's well known that POS also means "piece of shit".

I'm not sure how open it is for disruption, nor if it really is enough of a pain point to be worth replacing. Google has tried with Google Wallet, but who uses that?

One thing I have seen is that Girl Scouts are using some attachment on an iPhone to take credit cards at cookie sales. I'm not so sure that this would be useful in a restaurant setting or in a checkout process at a department store. It seems to me that these two use cases cover a large fraction of credit card purchases.

<comment><AUTHOR> I though Wallet was more of a payment system, to compete against the likes of PayPal, then a Point-of-Sale system?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Probably because the people who buy the systems aren't the ones using them. Price and feature checklists become the main factors, rather than how suitable the software is for actual use. It's the converse of the point about Apple from that article that's been going around ([http://stratechery.com/2013/clayton-christensen-got- wrong/](http://stratechery.com/2013/clayton-christensen-got-wrong/)).

</comment><comment><USER12> I've been working on a mobile POS for vendors at markets and fairs for the last year or so. I built it mainly so that my wife could keep track of things when selling her stuff at conventions.

I think one problem is that everyone wants something different. I've been contacted by people who run festivals that want very specific functionality. It is hard to build that while keeping a feature set that most other people would find useful.

</comment><comment><USER13> it doesn't have to be a pos! :) [http://www.shopify.com/pos](http://www.shopify.com/pos)

obviously biased, because I work at Shopify. but this is a sweet product, and it works with your online store for inventory tracking, reports, etc.

</comment><comment><USER14> I used to do Tier 4 support for a now-defunct (3rd Largest) grocery store in the US, and NCR has a stranglehold on this market. Every Self-CheckOuT lane with the same voice is probably an unbranded NCR SCOT. I've seen them in Home Depot, Loblaw's/Superstore, and even in some surprising locations (a nursery/greenhouse). Everyone uses the same terminals. It's been ripe for disruption for nearly a decade now.

LemonPOS[1] has been around for ages, is Free Software, and works great. It'd take very little effort to undercut the big guys in this market with a tiny agile startup.

[1] [http://lemonpos.org/](http://lemonpos.org/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Not my company but check out Kounta [http://www.kounta.com/](http://www.kounta.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, I will.</comment></comment>


The Z Weekly: An Awesome Publication for people who make money with the web - <AUTHOR> http://thezweekly.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello Hacker News! My name is Nikhil Vimal and I'm the writer of this newsletter, if you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask!</comment>


Tabs vs. spaces and other holy wars - <AUTHOR> https://wheresvic.gitlab.io/software-dawg/2018-08-01-the-holy-wars-tabs-vs-spaces-et-al.html <comment><USER2> Funny and enjoyable, but I have a serious question about tabs. I would actually like to provoke a religious war here because I'm developing yet another language and am trying to decide on spaces vs. tabs.

I don't mind whitespace-significant languages like Python, but wouldn't tabs be a better choice? Seems like you can easily get lost after a few levels of indentation, and much more to the point, it seems like tabs are superior because a) your IDE can display them with any width, making it easier to follow long passages with deep indentation, and b) they could free up the editor from requiring a mono space font.

Any thoughts?

<comment><USER3> Spaces 100%. Especially in cases with significant whitspace like Python or heredocs etc.

Personally, I don't get nor like the "adjust to taste" tab argument. I routinely look at the same code in multiple editors. Intellij, vim, code reviews, code search tools, git diff output. In the browser and in a terminal.

Don't break my vertical allignment. I don't need it often but when I do I really need it. Functions with long params. Data points in opengl arrays.

One consistent cannonical form. That's where it's at. That's what I want.

<comment><USER4> How would using tabs break your vertical alignment? You'd still get the exact same alignment but instead of pressing space four times, you just press tab once. Most IDEs will either convert tabs to spaces or auto-indent based on the language-specific rules anyway, so I really don't understand this argument either way.

<comment><USER5> Why would you press space four times? I hit tab and my editor does the right thing. Is there a popular editor that lacks this sort of feature?

Edit: it's worth mentioning that this kind of tooling is extremely important, as reducing the issues that drive religious wars is a priceless sort of feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ha ha. I love it; I disagree with every single conclusion! There is no end to the holy wars.

<comment><AUTHOR> Lol, I wrote it as pure satire because I do exactly the opposite for every single conclusion!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> In my highly opinionated...opinion it's far easier to transform a tab into 1 space, 2 spaces, 3 spaces or n spaces than to attempt the reverse for coding while still preserving the underlying indentation.

</comment><comment><USER8> It isn't about saving space. When I ssh into a machine and need to edit a file I use tabs to indent. Those machines usually don't have a vim config deployed and for bash scripts - who cares.

It becomes messed up if you need to edit python files. First check which indendation is used (chances are, that the file was created there, not with an IDE), then use either the tab key (maybe some editor magic makes spaces if spaces are detected for indendation) or space, which makes it more annoying.

</comment><comment><USER9> > _Emacs was initially released in 1976 and Vim came much later with its > initial release in 1991._

Technically true, but so horribly misleading that I must assume it to be intentional.

You could just as well say that " _VI was written in 1976 as a visual version of the older 'ed' and 'ex' editors, while GNU Emacs was first released in 1985._ "

The truth is that _both_ editors have their roots in 1976, got substantial re- writes in the '80s and '90s, respectively, and have been actively developed ever since.

The more important (to me) differing factors are things like:

1\. Do they follow new developments in computer interfaces?

Emacs got its first graphical version in 1994 (1991 if you count XEmacs, 1985 if you count Zmacs), and keeps improving its graphical fidelity to this day by supporting multiple graphical environments on different platforms (Unix X11, Windows, macOS). While Vim technically _has_ GTK support which adds a menu bar and tool bar, nobody uses it in this way since there is no point; in the main window, it is still is a terminal-style application, same as it was in 1976, with the only addition since then being colors. Compare that to what modern Emacs can look like: ([https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/)).

2\. Do they get third-party support with packages, extensions, etc?

Emacs has always been _very_ strong here, and modern Emacs has its own packaging system with an app store-style system built-in. From what little I hear about Vimscript, almost nobody uses it, it is not meant for serious programming, and the developers are unsure if it is worth bothering about.

</comment><comment><USER10> Well, at least the article doesn't take itself too seriously.

Most bikeshed discussions, especially wrt code style, are excuses for guys to trot out some toxic masculinity in the workplace. They aren't telling you to alphabetise your imports to improve the codebase but to start an argument they think they can win. It leads to a hostile environment.

The reason spaces "are winning" is that tabs are the "live and let live" solution (read the code however you like) and spaces are the totalitarian solution -- "My code must look the same on your screen." Totalitarianism is naturally proselytising.

Thankfully the end is in sight. "Auto-formatters" are the "total control" endgame. They are probably a net drag on productivity, but they come with one incredible upside: nobody need ever talk about code style again, making the workplace safer for people who don't want to spend their time arguing about things that don't matter.

</comment><comment> ur-whale If the tab vs. space conversation ever gets settled, the world will be a little more boring.

<comment><USER11> >>> It has even been recently surmised that developers using spaces make more money than those who use tabs.

It's even a little less boring after seeing this. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It is maddening that there is even still a "discussion" happening. Tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment. Didn't even get mentioned in the article. All the pros, zero cons. Enough of this. Enough, enough.

"Use tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment: the superior approach. Code is indented and aligned properly, and indentation is flexible. Use spaces for both indentation and alignment: still fine, but not flexible enough. Use tabs for both indentation and alignment: completely unacceptable, leads to headaches."

Since this _also_ happens every time, if you're currently writing a harebrained reply about "mixing tabs and spaces!!!!", you don't understand what's being discussed and should permanently recuse yourself from the conversation.

<comment><USER13> The problem is that most programmers do not bother to make whitespace visible, so tabs-for-indentation-spaces-for-alignment inevitably leads to a mess of mixed tabs and spaces.

I personally use tabs-for-indentation-spaces-for-alignment in my personal code, but I think I'd lose my mind if I tried to mandate it for a public or team project without a standard code formatter like gofmt.

<comment><USER14> Even though I'd push for tabs-for-indentation-spaces-for-alignment, I agree with your sentiment.

The "both"-camp is divided in two groups: the "don't care"-group and the "strict rules"-group (the former probably being much larger).

There was a Stack Overflow developer survey in 2017 which concluded that space users make more than tab/both users. Would be interesting to see the results when accounting for above difference in the both group.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> All I want is a reasonable standard where I can use a tool to format and enforce it.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's camelCase, not CamelCase.

<comment><USER17> That's lowerCamelCase. CamelCase probably means UpperCamelCase to most people, because it's what Microsoft standardized on long ago and that's what so many people learned first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Gofmt, and the problem is done.

<comment><USER6> But then you have to use Go... :)

<comment><USER19> Or Prettier for JavaScript, or Black for Python, or refmt for ReasonML.

<comment><USER3> Sure, but not everyone uses them. Or uses different formatters. Or different configurations for the formatters.

The key thing for gofmt is that it's universal and community backed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Classic false dichotomy, it's both. Tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment.

</comment><comment><USER9> The only solution is, and has always been, elastic tabstops:

[http://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/](http://nickgravgaard.com/elastic- tabstops/)</comment>


Artificial Stupids - Charlie's Diary - <AUTHOR> http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/07/artificial-stupids.html <comment><USER2> I'd expect better from Charles Stross.

"Superhuman intelligence" is like "Superhuman strength"; in some ways a bulldozer has superhuman strength, and in some ways a pocket calculator has superhuman intelligence.

Computers can play chess better than people today -- there was a day when that was a pipe dream, now it's a reality. We've attained "Skynet" when computers can play "the game of life" against people and win.

The route of simulating a single human intelligence has been overdone by sci- fi writers and others who speculate about the singularity. We'll be able to simulate a statistical model of a person, derived from the output of millions of people, much sooner than that. The "human memome" required to do this already exists in everything we've written about ourselves -- it's a matter of learning how to mine it.

The simulation of human faculties, on the other hand, is a business that's steadily progressing because it's useful. No business really wants to hire thousands of call center workers or expensive legal research aids. If we can simulate human faculties we can replace workers by machines, so it's an entirely practical affair.

I don't care about consciousness, souls or any of that. If a system can perform, if a system can pass, that's good enough. It's good enough for engineering and it's good enough for business.

As for critics of A.I. their main tactic is the conceit of moving the goalposts over time. Years ago, Charles Dreyfus would have said that the ability of humans to beat computers at chess proves that computers are stupid. Now he can point out that this is just simple combinatorial search and is nothing special. Once anything becomes practical, it's no longer magical or A.I -- it's just simple.

I can think of three directions of "superhuman".

One obvious way to improve on human is to be faster... It's clear that this is useful. Another is to have a larger capacity, both in terms of short and long term memory. It's not so clear what the limits are here because a human-like system might not scale well to a larger capacity.

Another way to improve on human is to be better at statistical reasoning. People have certain systematic biases that cause them to make bad decisions. This is particularly obvious because Poker is a good analogy for the "game of life" -- ultimately you've got to make guesses about what you can't see, what will happen in the future, what people think about it, and how they'll react.

So don't laugh because in a few decades, better Bayesians will be taking your job, eating your lunch and hopefully being better stewards of the world than we've been.

</comment><comment><USER3> "[Sci fi] is also crammed with clichés that are superficially plausible but which don't hang together when you look at them too closely."

This seems the most valuable bit of the essay. There are so many things that we "want", until we get them.

Recalls a recent article (anyone have a link? been looking for it) wherein the future of human space travel is deemed nonexistent because lobbing humans to another place is so hard with so few places worth expending that effort for. Do we all want inter-planetary/stellar/galactic space travel? of course we say yes, but faced with expending a lifetime (or a thousand) to get there and burning all of Earth's resources to do it we'd say no.

Closer to home, there are so many products and services we want, yet go nigh unto unused when we shell out hard-earned money for them. Yeah, I want XYZ, but upon acquisition I move right on to acquiring PDQ instead of using XYZ to anywhere close to its full potential. I've got a thousand unread books as a testament to this.

Not quite sure where I'm going with this or why, but his point did seem salient.

<comment><USER2> This isn't the case for A.I.

Better A.I. means we can automate more things and make more profit. You can take that to the bank. It's the kind of thing where you can make a 10% improvement and get 10% extra returns.

Space travel has the issue that a 10% improvement doesn't get you anywhere. It's also bad to conflate travel to earth orbit, the moon, other planets and interstellar travel.

A mission to mars, for instance, is plausible with technology we've got. Difficult, expensive, yes, maybe not worth it, but it could be done.

To go to another star you need to find a planetoid's mass of antimatter -- and that's just the beginning of your trouble.

I was working on a story about an interstellar war and came to the conclusion that, if you want to attack a world around another star, there's no need to put an atomic warhead on your missiles, because the energy of fission or fusion is nothing compared to what it takes to accelerate something to 10% of light speed.</comment></comment>


Billionaire goes rogue, admits policy not schools destroyed middle class - <AUTHOR> https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/billionaire-goes-rogue-admits-public-policy-not-public-schools-destroyed-middle-class.html <comment><USER2> "Billionaire gives opinion on causes of poverty"

I'm not sure what this person is admitting other than than their own opinion. For example, it is _incredibly_ debatable that raising the minimum wage would improve the livelihood of low income workers, as those workers could end up trading underemployment for unemployment.

This just reads like a progressive opinion piece, which is fine, except it postures itself as the truth revealed. I'd downvote it if I could.

<comment><USER3> > Billionaire says something people disagree with

"That's just the ramblings of a greedy, out-of-touch asshole who should be taxed down to 0 to atone for their sins."

> Billionaire says something people agree with

"Our idea is validated! Someone who is very rich and successful concurs!"

<comment><USER4> It's easier to trust someone who's speaking against their own interests.

<comment><USER5> Except he already has his billions and has sold his company. Thus his only 'speaking against his own interest' is estate tax which is easily avoidable with preparation.

<comment><USER4> Let me rephrase, then. It's harder to trust someone who's obviously speaking exclusively _for_ his own interests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The US has too much education. About half of college graduates are doing jobs that don't require a college education. Worse, many of them borrowed to go to college.

<comment><USER7> This. Not every job or career needs a college education. A lot of college tracks, such as a lot of liberal arts, while useful in the general sense have few corresponding career paths with a resumable ROI for all the debt that those paths lead to.

And, what is worse is that in general there is no, or very limited, concept of on job training. Everyone wants experts who can become productive on day one.

<comment><USER8> The amount of time you hear "I dont use anything I learnt in college, its all about experience on the job!" definitely screams "we need to encourage apprenticeship-type learning over college".

<comment><USER7> Yes, exactly, that's what I had kinda meant that a lot of jobs require more apprenticeship type training, than a formal college.

Apprenticeships _might_ also lead to career mobility. Try a job/training, if you don't like it, try something else. In a 4-year college you end up making a commitment where sunk-cost fallacy kinda prevents you from just moving on to something else if things don't work out.

<comment><USER8> Yup. College is often an apprenticeship too (just super expensive) anyway, with how common co-op programs are (which are basically just apprenticeships)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Strawmen go rogue, admit billionaires aren't a secret club with homogeneous viewpoints.

</comment><comment><USER10> Obviously, poor performing public schools don't do anyone any favors. They are filled with apathy from the teachers to the students. Other than that, regardless of what the parents are making, a strong education is a huge contributing factor for upward mobility.

> People who see education as a cure-all have largely ignored the metric most > predictive of a child's educational success: household income.

This is patently untrue and can be seen directly in several poor immigrant populations that have come to the US in the last several decades. Cultures that put an emphasis on education have had the highest social mobility. The only reason household income is 'predictive' is because success typically begets success. But in higher income areas parents are simply more involved - maybe because they can afford to be or because they put an emphasis on education or they know the benefits of an education. This can work just as well for poor students, it's just more difficult.

</comment><comment><USER11> He has been doing this schtick for years: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hanauer&sort=byDate&dateRange=...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hanauer&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)

</comment><comment><USER12> The actual piece is imho more interesting and less opiniated: [https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/educati...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/education- isnt-enough/590611/)

</comment><comment><USER13> I think the venture capitalist conveniently forget that a way to maintain or increase household income......

Is to not let millions of job leave the country in the first place. And preferably not to countries that abuses human rights.

<comment><USER14> Economists would argue the jobs go to where they are more efficiently done. The trouble is, "efficient" means pushing negative externalities onto someone else e.g. pollution, lax labor laws, forced labor. All of them condoned and sometimes actively encourage by the ruling regime. Then again, being forced to work in a sweatshop and having a minimum amount of food is better than not working and starving.

You get my point...</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Live CD virus scan? - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone. I was reading about the recent AV news and I was thinking about my ideal AV product.
A big problem (IMO) with AV software is they run inside a running OS. I've been reading about some of the clever things that some rootkit malware does to hide itself away and the AV has to compete on the field.
What I'd like instead is to be able to boot the machine with a live CD and have it check out the files on the hard disk before any malware gets to run and hide itself away. The software on the CD would have to download the latest AV signatures and start scanning the dormant files without anything getting in the way.
Does such a service exist?
Many thanks. <comment><USER2> In for any advice on this, interested as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> CD's are not typically rewritable, you can put files on them once and that's it. CD-ReWritables do exist, but they require additional drivers/software to be loaded to function- which means loading the OS.

You'll also need the OS loaded for updates via the internet.</comment>


The legend of Benin's fearless female warriors - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180826-the-legend-of-benins-fearless-female-warriors <comment><USER2> The kingdom of Dahomey, modern-day Benin, was the biggest slaving kingdom on the West African coast. Almost 20% of all slaves shipped to the new world from African went through just one port in this tiny kingdom.

When England and France switched to trying to stop the slave trade in the 1800's, Dahomey was the place to go for covert slave purchases. In fact, the last slave ship to US, complete with outrunning warships on the way, was a one way dash from Dahomey.

<comment><USER3> 1\. This has nothing to do with the story.

2\. The Kingdom of Dahomey is not modern-day Benin. In fact, Benin was deliberately renamed from Dahomey (the French had used that name for it as a colony).

3\. It's probably not productive to single out any one African people in the slave trade. What seems to be the truth is that the slave trade was a vicious cycle driven by demand from outside the continent: great world powers would trade military technology for slaves, meaning that most tribe/states in Africa were essentially locked in an arms race to avoid themselves being enslaved. There was slavery in Africa (like basically everywhere else in the world at one point or another) before the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, but the Trans- Atlantic Trade was a _sui generis_ world-historical event, at a whole new scale (by percentage perhaps the largest forced movement in human history) and it wasn't caused by Benin.

<comment><USER4> > the Trans-Atlantic Trade was a sui generis world-historical event, at a > whole new scale (by percentage perhaps the largest forced movement in human > history)

Wrong. The Arab slave trade [1] exceeded the Western one both in scale [2] and in cruelty [3].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_slave_trade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_slave_trade) [2] [https://www.quora.com/Who-did-most-of-the-slave-trade- Europe...](https://www.quora.com/Who-did-most-of-the-slave-trade-Europeans-or- Arabs) [3] [https://www.quora.com/Was-the-Arabic-slave-trade-more- humane...](https://www.quora.com/Was-the-Arabic-slave-trade-more-humane-than- the-Western-one)

<comment><USER5> So it seems. But the aggregate estimates are similar, about 10-20 million slaves. And the estimate for the Arab slave trade covers a much longer period, ~1300 years vs ~400 years for the trans-Atlantic slave trade. So the mean rate for that was correspondingly greater.

<comment><USER6> It is difficult to compare aggregates also because you should take into account population density. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#Past_populati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#Past_population). trans-Atlantic slave trade was very huge (it had an impact on demography). Arab slave trade was already huge and has been lenghty. Both are terrible.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's your favorite talk from 2017? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER3> Rich Hickey, Effective Programs - an examination of the essence of what we do as programmers (for many of us, wirting "situated programs"), and a spirited defense of dynamically typed languages: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V1FtfBDsLU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V1FtfBDsLU)

<comment><USER4> Seconded...good talk!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> On The Turing Completeness of PowerPoint [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNjxe8ShM-8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNjxe8ShM-8)

Compiling C to printable x86, to make an executable research paper [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA_DrBwkiJA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA_DrBwkiJA)

HDR Photography in Microsoft Excel?! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkQJdaGGVM8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkQJdaGGVM8)

Zebras All the Way Down [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE2KDzZaxvE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE2KDzZaxvE)

Solving Layout Problems with CSS Grid and Friends [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XkzpgWoYEI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XkzpgWoYEI)

Console Security - Switch [https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-8941-console_security_- _switch](https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-8941-console_security_-_switch)

Let's move SMM out of firmware and into the kernel [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GEaw4msq6g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GEaw4msq6g)

Bringing Linux back to server boot ROMs with NERF and Heads [https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9056-bringing_linux_back_to_serv...](https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9056-bringing_linux_back_to_server_boot_roms_with_nerf_and_heads)

Sharing the Chisel [https://youtu.be/2C8F7GBRluY?t=11m31s](https://youtu.be/2C8F7GBRluY?t=11m31s) (looks like the actual conference video wasn't released)

</comment><comment><USER6> Not a single talk, but a series: Jordan Peterson's Psychological Significance of the Bible Stories.

As an atheist I found his explanations extremely interesting. Peterson is a brilliant scholar and draws connections between psychology and brain structures, human evolution, and religion.

I don't believe in any trascendental being, but listening to these lectures made me understand better the psychological and moral value of these stories, regardless of belief in the supernatural.

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22J3VaeABQD_IZs7y60I...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22J3VaeABQD_IZs7y60I3lUrrFTzkpat)

<comment><USER7> Isn't Jordan Peterson also famous for being a proponent of racial IQ theories?

I'm really skeptical about IQ in general, but anyone popular with the far right really makes me suspicious.

I'll take a look at the link you provided...But man, there are an awful lot of 1488 types that support this guy. It really makes me question where he is coming from.

<comment><USER8> I usually employ the same rule of thumb (although I don't know who "1488 types" are - my rule of thumb is that if a gamergater is passionately defending an opinion I default to the opposite until I learn more).

But I've made an exception for Peterson. He's not as super left wing as much university staff, sure, but to call him extreme right is very far fetched.

My impression, if this means anything to you, is that his political opinion fits well with that of centrist Christian Democrat parties in Europe (eg Merkel's CDU). That makes him more conservative than me, but because he's also totally brilliant, I don't mind.

I don't know why the alt right likes him, but my guess is that he's a great speaker who presents something like a very moderate version of alt right opinion.

I guess the most extreme thing he did, that he's somewhat infamous for, is refusing to use different singular personal pronouns than "he" and "she". While I think that he was an ass about that, to call someone far right for not wanting to say "ze" in a classroom is a few bridges to far for me.

EDIT: I got 4 downvotes already but really tried to make a balanced argument. Maybe I missed some of his "oeuvre" that would change my mind, maybe I'm outright wrong somewhere? Would appreciate someone pointing it out.

<comment><USER9> Well, the 1488 types and the alt right are mistaken in their support.

They see a professor making headlines because he's vocal about the problems with the alt left. That's all they know and they're assuming that means he's on their side (the alt left also makes this mistake). But that's absolutely not the case and is clear to anyone that actually watches his lectures.

<comment><USER7> "alt left" isn't a thing.

<comment><USER9> I was just using that as short hand. Illiberal Left or Regressive Left are better terms.

(though I should've said SJWs for short since that's what Peterson usually calls them in this context, IIRC)

<comment><USER10> There is no left anymore. There are only different kinds of reactionary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Having just gotten back from 34C3 I'm going to post a few of my favorites from there:

Dude, you broke the Future! [https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future](https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future)

Pointing Fingers at 'The Media' [https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9106-pointing_fingers_at_the_med...](https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9106-pointing_fingers_at_the_media)

Social Cooling - big data's unintended side effect [https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-8797-social_cooling_- _big_data_s...](https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-8797-social_cooling_- _big_data_s_unintended_side_effect)

Full list here: [https://media.ccc.de/c/34c3](https://media.ccc.de/c/34c3)

<comment><USER12> I couple of months ago I found a good TED talk on the same topic as your first link:

We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads [https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dy...](https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dystopia_just_to_make_people_click_on_ads)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> 'On storytelling' by Evan Czaplicki:

[https://www.deconstructconf.com/2017/evan-czaplicki-on- story...](https://www.deconstructconf.com/2017/evan-czaplicki-on-storytelling)

Whether you like Elm or not, Czaplicki is an highly charismatic conceptual thinker and his talks are very relevant.

</comment><comment><USER14> Jessica Kerr's "Shaving the Golden Yak" [1] or "If Coco Chanel Reviewed Elm" [2] by Tereza Sokol.

[1]: [https://www.infoq.com/presentations/easier-software- developm...](https://www.infoq.com/presentations/easier-software- development?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=calendar)

[2]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wiw3YcwGwrU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wiw3YcwGwrU)

<comment><USER15> I'm a big fan of the Chanel talk; it's a neat perspective with a well thought out presentation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> A deep analysis on social bots, fake news, hate speech and filter bubbles on Twitter. This is questions the existence, as well as quality of studies about, the co-called "social bots" (which turned out to either have no influence, or to be real people with "too much" free time):

Michael Kreil: Social Bots, Fake News und Filterblasen

[https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9268-social_bots_fake_news_und_f...](https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9268-social_bots_fake_news_und_filterblasen)

(German talk, but the video contains an audio track with a good English translation.)

</comment><comment><USER17> For better or worse, I spent more time giving talks than watching talks in 2017.

My favorite talk that I watched in 2017 was Durham Goode's talk at Git Merge 2017, concerning scaling Mercurial at Facebook. It's always good to share knowledge about version control and scar difficulties:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?list=PL0lo9MOBetEGRAJzoTCdco_fOK...](https://m.youtube.com/watch?list=PL0lo9MOBetEGRAJzoTCdco_fOKDfhqaOY&v=gOVD- DrUpwQ)

My favorite talk that I gave was at GitHub Universe. I spoke about how Microsoft adopted the Git version control system and - ultimately - <USER2> source:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LXu80xXwFY0](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LXu80xXwFY0)

</comment><comment><USER18> "Making Impossible States Impossible" by Richard Feldman

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcgmSRJHu_8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcgmSRJHu_8)

Really changed how I think about programming.

</comment><comment><USER19> Matt Might's Codemesh 2017 keynote: "Winning the War on Error: Solving Halting Problem, Curing Cancer" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVkHgKCqAcI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVkHgKCqAcI)

<comment><USER20> Matt does a great job of explaining some of the concepts around precision medicine. He also talks about the need for computer scientists to study biology, and the effect it has on field progress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Lisp at the Frontier of Computation, by Robert Smith at Rigetti Computing

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9vRcSAneiw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9vRcSAneiw)

About the application of Lisp on quantum hardware.

</comment><comment><USER22> Ali Rahimi's NIPS 2017 Test of Time award talk.

"Artificial intelligence is not like electricity (quoting Andrew Ng), but alchemy"

[https://youtu.be/Qi1Yry33TQE](https://youtu.be/Qi1Yry33TQE)

</comment><comment><USER23> Maybe not my favorite, but a fun one I wanted to mention anyway:

New Tech Start-Up Bubble [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7vrCpWbmDw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7vrCpWbmDw)

<comment><USER24> Just watched it. Hilarious because it's so true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Has to be this Farnam Street interview with Naval Ravikant about reading, habits, decision-making, mental models, and life. Surprisingly insightful!

[https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2017/02/naval-ravikant- read...](https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2017/02/naval-ravikant-reading- decision-making/)

<comment><USER26> +1. Wonderful tips for optimizing self. Definitely stretches your intellect, with great book references.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Devoxx Poland 2016 - Ted Neward - Why Functional Programming Matters - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hOM5PPzMC8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hOM5PPzMC8)

An amazing introductory video to Functional programming from a hardcore Java developer.

</comment><comment><USER28> One of my favourite talks I watched was "Low Cost Non-Invasive Biomedical Imaging - An Open Electrical Impedance Tomography Project"

[https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-8948-low_cost_non- invasive_biome...](https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-8948-low_cost_non- invasive_biomedical_imaging)

As it presented an interesting technique I'd never heard of before, along with an implementation.

Also I thought the 'Breaking the x86 Instruction Set' talk was extremely clever - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrksBdWcZgQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrksBdWcZgQ)

</comment><comment><USER29> David Runciman: How Democracy Ends

[https://www.talkingpoliticspodcast.com/blog/2017/71-how- demo...](https://www.talkingpoliticspodcast.com/blog/2017/71-how-democracy- ends)

<comment><USER30> I'll watch and read this,thanks, but in the meantime my money is on democracy ending with the automation of military, police, and security operations.

<comment><USER10> My money is on it ending with the automation of propaganda and con artistry at scale.

A small group of people could use AI and social media to virtually sit down with every single person and convince them of something using a detailed micro targeting profile. It would be like diapatching an individual evangelist to work on each of a billion people in parallel.

We saw very primitive and still largely manual versions of this in 2016. When the real thing arrives it will be the hydrogen bomb of persuasion.

This is also what I think an "AI takeover" would look like. Forget about terminators. A superintelligence would find us trivial to con and manipulate. We will just be convinced to do what the AI wants. Skynet will launch words not bombs, but much like the nukes in the Terminator story we are building the infrastructure of our own destruction ahead of time.

<comment><USER31> A true super-human AI would take over without humans realizing anything is happening. If that's true, then it might be that AI is already taking over.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Effective Programs - 10 Years of Clojure - Rich Hickey: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V1FtfBDsLU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V1FtfBDsLU)

</comment><comment><USER33> Tony Seba on Clean Disruption: [https://www.startupsilike.com/blog/emerging- trends-the-futur...](https://www.startupsilike.com/blog/emerging-trends-the- future-of-transportation-and-energy)

<comment><USER34> Highly recommended talk - About the convergence of Li-ion batteries, electric vehicles, self-driving cars, and solar energy over the next decade; and the impact it will have on the future of the electric grid, big oil, and the car industry and related industries (auto insurance, gas stations, parking lots, etc.)

Maybe a bit on the optimistic side? But exciting to consider the possibilities!

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> my favorite were:

\- How the reputation economy is creating data-driven conformity [https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-8797-social_cooling_- _big_data_s...](https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-8797-social_cooling_- _big_data_s_unintended_side_effect)

\- DEF CON 25 (2017) - Weaponizing Machine Learning [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbRx18VZlYA&t=2121s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbRx18VZlYA&t=2121s)

\- BlackHat 2017: Breaking the x86 Instruction Set [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrksBdWcZgQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrksBdWcZgQ)

</comment><comment><USER36> Feross Aboukhadijeh - The Most Annoying Website (aka "The Power of the Web Platform") - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pY9Bfwfj2A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pY9Bfwfj2A)

</comment><comment><USER37> Noam Chomsky on the survival of human civilization. The talk might have actually occurred in 2016.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrE5EZr5ZVY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrE5EZr5ZVY)

</comment><comment><USER38> Bryan Cantrill, Principles of Technology Leadership

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QMGAtxUlAc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QMGAtxUlAc)

</comment><comment><USER39> Erik Rose's Constructive Code Review from PyCon stands out for me as a talk I remember and come back to: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNG1a-- SIlk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNG1a--SIlk)

It's nothing I didn't know intuitively, but it really lays out, with great examples, how to provide feedback accurately while not forgetting about being kind and humble. This is in stark contrast to an attitude I see often that confuses being direct and critical with being hostile or rude. It really deconstructs some of those dynamics in a way I hadn't paid attention to before. Also, it has a great summary of a simplified version of "getting things done" that made it appealing to me.

</comment><comment><USER26> How to Create and Start Successful Revolutions | Ben Horowitz

Saw this in-person and really recommend it. Detailed historical example of revolution and key takeaways for establishing a great culture at your company.

[https://youtu.be/YVVick2kf8c](https://youtu.be/YVVick2kf8c)

[https://www.startupgrind.com/blog/ben-horowitz-on-how-to- cre...](https://www.startupgrind.com/blog/ben-horowitz-on-how-to-create- culture-and-start-successful-revolutions/)

</comment><comment><USER40> Thought Andrew Ng's The State of AI ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKpuX_yzdYs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKpuX_yzdYs)) was a good primer on: data assets, the positive feedback loop, and their value; hallmarks of an "AI company"

</comment><comment><USER41> Nerd Wrangling 101 - a talk on neurodiversity and how tech folks work together: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=728s&v=k-2d5Ggo4i4](https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=728s&v=k-2d5Ggo4i4)

</comment><comment><USER42> "DIY human gene therapy with CRISPR" [http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/diy- human-gene-therapy-wit...](http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/diy-human-gene- therapy-with-crispr/)

"A deep dive into Bitcoin Core v0.15" [http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/gmaxwell-2017-08-28-deep-d...](http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/gmaxwell-2017-08-28-deep- dive-bitcoin-core-v0.15/)

"Advances in block propagation" [http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/gmaxwell-2017-11-27-advanc...](http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/gmaxwell-2017-11-27-advances- in-block-propagation/)

"Discreet log contracts" [http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/discreet-log- contracts/](http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/discreet-log-contracts/)

"Signature aggregation" [http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/bitcoin-core-dev- tech/2017...](http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/bitcoin-core-dev- tech/2017-09-06-signature-aggregation/)

"Programmable organoids" [http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/hgp- write/2017-05-09/organ...](http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/hgp- write/2017-05-09/organoids/)

"Ultra-safe cell line" [http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/hgp- write/2017-05-09/ultra...](http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/hgp- write/2017-05-09/ultrasafe-cell-line/)

"New address type for segwit addresses" [http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/sf- bitcoin-meetup/2017-03-...](http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/sf-bitcoin- meetup/2017-03-29-new-address-type-for-segwit-addresses/)

Bram Cohen on merkle sets and memory management [http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/sf-bitcoin- meetup/2017-07-...](http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/sf-bitcoin- meetup/2017-07-08-bram-cohen-merkle-sets/)

"Making humans a multiplanetary species" [http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/spacex/elon-musk-making- hu...](http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/spacex/elon-musk-making-humans-a- multiplanetary-species/)

<comment><USER43> I second "Making humans a multiplanetary species". Watching Elon Musk give this talk is really interesting. It is painful in delivery but penetrating in content. He also has a knack for the gotcha surprise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> A fun intro to Church Numerals by a charasmatic speaker:

LAMBDA Functions: Powerful And Elegant Abstractions - [https://youtu.be/OLH3L285EiY](https://youtu.be/OLH3L285EiY)

</comment><comment><USER45> It is not my favourite talk, but it is the one I almost happy about discovering:

Andy Wingo's talk "Channels, Concurrency, and Cores: A new Concurrent ML implementation" [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7IcI6sl5oBc](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7IcI6sl5oBc)

Because it made me discover that concurrent programming can actually be nice.

</comment><comment><USER46> * _To Serve The People: Public Interest Technologists._ Matt Mitchell is a hacker, security researcher, operational security trainer, and data journalist who founded & leads CryptoHarlem, impromptu workshops teaching basic cryptography tools to the predominately African American community in upper Manhattan.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Cm3N4Yi3b0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Cm3N4Yi3b0)

* _Stop Rate Limiting! Capacity Management Done Right._ Jon Moore is the Chief Software Architect at Comcast Cable, where he focuses on delivering a core set of scalable, performant, robust software components for the company's varied software product development groups.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m64SWl9bfvk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m64SWl9bfvk)

* _Keeping Time in Real Systems._ This talk will tour the fascinating timekeeping mechanisms used in real systems. We will explore atomic clocks, NTP and GPS through systems that use them, and logical clocks in the context of systems built on logical time.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRvj8PykSc4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRvj8PykSc4)

* _Level Up Your Concurrency Skills With Rust._ This talk will show you how Rust will catch many concurrency errors at compile time.

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

* _Diablo: A Classic Game Postmortem._ Diablo developer David Brevik returns to the GDC stage to give a classic post-mortem on Blizzard's action RPG hit Diablo in this 2016 talk.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc)

* _The Flash Games Postmortem_. In this 2017 GDC talk, Kongregate's John Cooney attempts to encapsulate the immense history of Flash games and how it has shaped the current game industry by giving game developers their first chance to build and publish their games quickly to the web.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65crLKNQR0E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65crLKNQR0E)

* _Siege Battle AI in Total War: Warhammer_. In this 2017 GDC session, Creative Assembly's Andre Arsenault shows the approach used in Total War: Warhammer to create the very specialized high-level AI to guide these massive armies in a way that provides a convincing, epic-scale battle.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHolirTf9CI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHolirTf9CI)

</comment><comment><USER47> CHM Oral Histories

Computer History Museum

Hear the stories from the computing legends themselves with video selections from CHM's oral history collection

[https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQsxaNhYv8daKdGi7s85ubzbW...](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQsxaNhYv8daKdGi7s85ubzbWdTB36-_q)

</comment><comment><USER48> All episodes of How I Built This by Guy Raz on NPR and Masters of Scale by Reid Hoffman. Especially Barry Diller Part I and II on Masters of Scale. Happy New Year 2018! May your projects come to fruition and live long and prosper!

</comment><comment><USER49> Designing a Multi-Language Live Programming Tool With Phoenix and Genstage [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p58sFfgMvdI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p58sFfgMvdI)

</comment><comment><USER50> Raymond Hettinger, Keynote on Concurrency, PyBay 2017 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zinZmE3Ogk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zinZmE3Ogk)

</comment><comment><USER51> KotlinConf 2017 - My Life as a Tech Transfer Monad by Erik Meijer [https://youtu.be/NKeHrApPWlo](https://youtu.be/NKeHrApPWlo)

</comment><comment><USER52> Easily my favorite

[https://youtu.be/TS2der4Ag_s](https://youtu.be/TS2der4Ag_s)</comment>


SafeMarket Alpha Release - <AUTHOR> http://safemarket.github.io <comment><USER2> Looking through the getting started, one of the instructions is to run geth with the following flags. `--rpc --unlock 0 --rpccorsdomain "*"`.

Please be very careful with these two flags as they will allow any malicious javascript on any page you browse to empty your ethereum wallet.

[https://github.com/ethereum/mist/releases/tag/0.3.6](https://github.com/ethereum/mist/releases/tag/0.3.6)

Also, this looks really cool.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for that. I'll update with a warning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> coooooool</comment>


Show HN: My first Startup Try - BestHi.re - <AUTHOR>

I have seen that recruiters and HRs more and more carry about the email addresses of a job seekers.
For example, in one of the articles about this I found: "Most executives said that Hotmail, Yahoo! or AOL email addresses would prevent them from hiring prospective employees..."
That's why I created a BestHi.re: http://besthi.re - a service which will provide to job seekers a good looking and professional email address.
For now only email address is offered, but I have in plan to offer and blogs as well, like something what could help to job seekers without their own domain/blog.
Example: email@example.com as email and john.besthi.re as blog address.
What do you think about the idea itself? <comment><USER2> Such an email-address is pretty much as worthless as gmx or hotmail if everybody is able to create one. Email addresses of well known universities look good because they are hard to get. You have to put some kind of scarcity into your service.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I think you're right. So that the idea for start. I'll try to figure it out what else would be useful for job seekers.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I will really appreciate any comment. For example, would you pay for this email address and blog at this domain, f.e. 5$?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is the clickable link: <http://besthi.re/></comment>


Ask HN: How to sell and idea? - <AUTHOR> First off. If I saw this post, and it wasn't me writing it, my knee-jerk reaction would be to say, "Ideas are nothing, execution is everything", without even reading the whole post. While I truly believe this is true most of the time, don't we all suspect that there are exceptions?
Why do I want to sell this idea instead of doing it? I get my joy in this industry from solving deeply technical problems, and this idea isn't a deeply technical problem at all, but it comes from some pretty specific domain experience that I have.
It's an idea I had from the last company I worked at. I even gave it to them, and we started executing on it right before I left to work on virtualization and network technology at another company. I have found out from people there that they are no longer executing on the idea, and never really tried. My non-compete with them is up in December, and I think that the idea is really worth something, but I don't want to just give it away (I may in a few years time if nothing comes of this post or other attempts to sell it).
I google around every few months to see if anybody is doing this yet, and I honestly can't believe that nobody is doing it, it seems like such obvious, low-hanging fruit, IMO.
Here's the catch. I'm not sure this is a billion dollar idea at all. In fact I kind of suspect that it's not. When I toyed around with doing this idea for a while, I considered it a passive income opportunity that I could have managed on my own (maybe hiring one or two people down the road). I'm fairly certain I could build this project in my spare-time in 6 months to a year, but I just can't justify (to myself) wasting that much time on a problem I don't find interesting (even if it made me 10k/month recurring profit...seriously).
I'm sure this will get voted down, and everyone will bring me to my senses about how you can't sell ideas, but you can't blame a guy for trying :). So how do I do it? <comment><USER2> I don't really understand the negativity. Ideas, like advice, have intrinsic value. People are caught up with the notion of an "idea" (like 'Uber for X') and don't realize OP is discussing a market opportunity. It's very possible OP has an idea that can generate value for an obscure niche that's slow to adapt. This happens all the time - the wheel is constantly being reinvented in different industries and markets and plenty of people make a decent living doing stuff like this.

Anyway, my advice is because everyone is caught up in stigmatizing "ideas", it's likely you will not find an adequate market available to sell your idea or get paid enough for it. You're better off discussing it with people you know. Frame it like "There is an opportunity in market X that is not being pursued, likely because of reason Y. I understand this market/problem very well and could explain it to you in great detail. If you decide to pursue it, I'd like modest [advisor shares/dividends/etc.] in return" or something to that effect.

</comment><comment><USER3> To put it bluntly, you want to "sell an idea" that has no validation, no product, no customers, no reputation, no branding. No one is going to pay for that Idea. That is the honest truth and you know it already.

If you do want to validate the idea, you have to put something together. If you can write code, build a working prototype. Show it a few people.

I will tell you a secret. Ideas are worthless but a working prototype can be worth something. I know a close friend who built a tool and had no clue how to market it BUT he was able to find a buyer for a good amount. Not an actual business yet but he has offered 6 figures for that tool.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you know how he got offers on a prototype?

<comment><USER4> In exits we trust. All others must bring validation.

If you've built, executed and exited then your "idea" is more likely to be trusted. Others have to try harder.

Them that gots is them that gets

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love the sentence "I just can't justify (to myself) wasting that much time on a problem I don't find interesting (even if it made me 10k/month recurring profit..."

If you can't justify to yourself, how can you hope selling such an idea to someone? oh, maybe you are a commercial actor :D

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you're willing to spend a little bit, contract someone to build a site that offers the service and looks good, but only actually allows people to sign up for the future service or something along those lines. If you get people who are willing to sign up, then perhaps you could persuade someone to invest in the business and finish building the actual service via contract with someone else's money? At that point you could maybe leverage some sort of sale/investment where you end up being very hands off? Even if you were going to build it yourself, just making the site to confirm interest would probably be a good move. Reading "The Lean Startup" with a coworker right now. It advocates a lot for experimental validation before investing any engineering effort.

</comment><comment><USER7> To summarize: you have an idea which would take 6-12 months to execute on, and would not generate enough revenue to build a real business around. You want someone to pay you for this idea. Sound right?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not exactly. I think it could be a good business, just not one I'd be interested in running.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There are those who do. Even without patents. They leverage the internet/publicity/rpost etc to deter intellectual theft and also learn who to talk to and how at companies, leaping over those barriers. There's a book reference here I'd like to drop but I don't have it handy.

Few ideas are easily patent protected, plus it's easier to improve execution than the quality of one's ideas - so you're always advised to do what's easier. (First off, at least.)

Note too that "Execution" is often a way of saying "patentable ideas that you can hide instead of patenting them" \- which is to say, trade secrets (always more valuable than patents, not least because they don't expire.) Intel was built on just such an invisible trade secret (akin to annealing) that made their memory (this is pre-cpu days) far more reliable than competitor's. So a lot of those who expound about "execution" actually mean "ideas", just non- public ideas.

The other thing that prioritizing execution says, is that people tend to have part of an idea, and not realize how much more thinking (and further patentable ideas) are necessary to make it work. Having a necessary-but-not- sufficient patent (such as Wang's 2D iron-core memory patent, back in the day) is not as valuable as a necessary-and-sufficient series of patents, or far more complex patent.

Also the system (laws for sale) is tilted so that corporations can appropriate the ideas of individuals, in many ways. They are put in a position to patent- and-execute; and individuals are short-sheeted.

</comment><comment><USER9> The reason we have sayings like "Ideas are worthless, execution is everything" is partly because execution often contains or reveals a great deal more information and unstated assumptions than your nutshell explanation.

There is a great scene in _The Hudsucker Proxy_ where he shows a circle and then a line as his diagram of his idea. This turns out to be the hula hoop and is wildly successful. The scene basically repeats -- drawing of a circle for top view, line for side view -- but the idea is now the frisbee.

Effectively communicating ideas in any kind of meaningful, meaty way is incredibly hard. This is part of why demos are so useful.

To sell an idea you must effectively communicate it. People sell ideas all the time, though perhaps not in the sense you mean. For example, people trying to get funding for a movie routinely have to sell the idea. This is where you get expressions like "it's Uber for X." This is an attempt at getting across a density of information succinctly.

Effectively conveying a dense amount of information in a small package is an art form in its own right. People often pay to have that done or to get help with it. It's a very separate skill from seeing a solution in context because of having done work that exposed you to certain experiences.

</comment><comment><USER10> The best way I can think of to sell an idea is to build it (at least a prototype), prove the idea, and then try to sell it. You aren't going to be able to sell just an idea. You can recruit a partner to work on it with you; you don't have to build it yourself.

If it's not worth this amount of effort, then I don't expect someone will pay you money for an unproven idea that doesn't have enough value to spend your own time on.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a good point. I hadn't thought of doing it bare bones and trying to sell it right away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Put you money where your mouth is. Find someone else that can build it and put them on contract for 6-months, or less given this was only going to be built in spare time.

</comment><comment><USER12> I have one friend who has a lot of ideas and profit from them partnering with small company builders . Sometimes work, sometimes doesn't.

<comment><USER13> What is a small company builder?

<comment><USER12> Company builders are companies or areas within companies spending resources to develop others or own new ideas. The following article talk about them: [https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/16/the-rise-of-company- builde...](https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/16/the-rise-of-company-builders/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How do you know once you prove it can be profitable lots of other people won't jump in an compete driving down the profits.</comment>


Activist Adam Kokesh will run for President to abolish U.S. government - <AUTHOR> http://www.myfoxdc.com/story/22879607/activist-kokesh-will-run-for-president-to-abolish-us-government

<comment><USER2> After repeated and constant abuses of power, the idea of abolishing as many layers of government as possible (ideally all of them) should be seriously debated and is very long overdue.</comment>


Tumblr begins hiding adult content: "This has not been an easy transition" - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90282566/tumblr-begins-hiding-adult-content-this-has-not-been-an-easy-transition <comment><USER3> It must be hard to put on a brave face and put effort into this change as if the site will continue while knowing full well the company is 100% doomed. I wonder if there's _anyone_ at tumblr not looking for another job.

Anyone here work at tumblr? What's the vibe there? Is anyone holding out hope or does everyone agree the writing is on the wall?

</comment><comment><USER4> Couldn't Tumblr just put in more effort to filter and mod their community? The main reason they got removed from Apple store was because of CP that was flagged not removed in a timely manner. Doesn't this also happen to hosting sites such as Reddit and Imgur? how do they handle it better than Tumblr? and why are they still available on Apple Store & Android?

<comment><USER5> My - admittedly - very cynical, and slightly crackpot theory is that tumblr internally knew they had problems with their business model, and either constructed or took the opportunity of the app store failure to - <USER2> publicly - go through a transformation into a "family friendly" brand.

A transformation that could enable pitching investors about entering some new more conservative markets, maybe entice some potential buyer, or give the management team a plausible scapegoat if the site had to shutter - the "I was forced to do" defense.

Cynical as it is, the 180 degree shift from reportedly being very slow at child pornography takedowns to "family friendly" in this timeframe can not easily be explained without some amount of prior intent of some sort. Maybe it's only an opportunistic pivot, or last ditch effort, but it seems wholely too quick given their prior - at least perceived - slow rate of change.

There's a lot if adult content that really _needs_ to be allowed in general media sharing sites as the alternative is sources which oftwn care even less about removing illegal content. Thus sweeping bans as this risks increasing exposure, as we know people _will_ seek out adult content.</comment></comment>


IRS electronic filing system breaks down hours before midnight deadline - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/irs-electronic-filing-system-breaks-down-hours-before-tax-deadline/2018/04/17/4c05ecae-4255-11e8-ad8f-27a8c409298b_story.html <comment><USER2> Official status page, if anyone wants to keep an eye on it: [https://www.marketingexpress.irs.gov/systems- status/system-s...](https://www.marketingexpress.irs.gov/systems- status/system-status-mef/modernized-efile-mef-operational-status)

</comment><comment><USER3> I feel like this is a nothingburger hyped up to induce panic. I filled out my return today, on the last day as always, clicked some buttons, and shat out a return into the ether. The IRS doesn't seem to want it, but HR Block has it and will give it to them eventually. My work here is done, it's time for happy hour.

</comment><comment><USER4> With recent concern about malicious entities in the press, I'll pose this question: "On its own, or was it 'helped'?"

Separately, it's worth noting the following quoted bit of the article. These cuts have included investigators; at the same time, statistics indicate that each additional investigator brings in 10x the cost of their job, in increased "recovered" revenue, i.e. collection of taxes owed.

The IRS isn't "just incompetent". It's been under political and funding attack, for years, now.

 _Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) noted the agency's budget has been repeatedly cut in recent years, which he said he believes could have contributed to the problems.

"While we don't yet know what has caused this systems failure, the lack of Republican funding for the IRS to serve taxpayers will only compound the issue. Americans should not be punished for being unable to file their tax returns or pay their tax bills today," said Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees the IRS.

The IRS has faced steady budget cuts for nearly a decade, with its staff size falling by about 18,000 employees from 2010 to 2017 and a recent report showing it can answer only about 60 percent of calls from tax filers._

</comment><comment><USER5> How do you design a system that is barely used most of the year and then experiences one huge spike only one day? Do they have tons of capacity sitting around most of the year?

<comment><USER6> I ask the same question when I look out at parking lots. Yet there they are; wasting resources, destroying habitats, soaking up heat, and suppressing carbon absorption.

<comment><USER7> At least computing resources can be repurposed more easily. That can be done with parking lots (park-and-rides, carnivals, etc.) but the physical proximity makes that much harder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Paper and postmark. I'm done. Technology sometimes is not the best solution. Just saying.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is one of several reasons why I file on paper.

I caught a glimpse of how the sausages were made once, thanks to family connections. That was enough. It's completely reasonable to assume that the IRS is operating on technology that is at least 5 years out of date, and possibly as much as 40. They have just barely enough resources to serve their overall departmental mandate.

This is only partially on the IRS itself, and also on the politically motivated processes that intentionally underfund it, especially with regard to taxpayer assistance, guidance, or convenience. If not this year, next year, and if not then, call the office of the nearest archdiocese to investigate out who was responsible for the miracle of the unborked servers, and the miracle of the balancing of the surge traffic.

<comment><USER10> You never really explained why you file on paper.

Yes, the IRS has outdated tech', but that within itself isn't really an argument for why you needed to switch to filing on paper after you learned "how the sausages were made." Plus aren't paper filings just typed in by hand, and turned into eFilings anyway? Both go through the same pipeline after a point.

<comment><USER9> I didn't switch. I never started.

Paper filings are converted to electronic records, but they are also scanned, and the images retained for some amount of time before being destroyed. They might also do as much OCR as they are able, and ask a human to verify or correct, rather than do all the data entry by hand.

If the internal digitization system goes down, well, the envelope still has a dated postmark on it. That makes it not my problem. Securing the pipeline between employee workstation and database server is likewise not my problem.

I don't want to explain further, because I don't want to discourage other people from e-filing, and it would contain some assumptions that I cannot verify. And it also contains the personal assumption that I will almost always wait until the last weekend before the filing deadline to even look at a form, because of a procrastination habit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Oddly coincidental because I just spent all last night reading about distributed computing for Uber's payment system.

I can't imagine the government system has more load than Uber.

<comment><USER12> Where did you read about that ?

<comment><USER11> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16852295](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16852295)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Do people affected by this get any consideration if filing today?

<comment><USER10> From the article:

> "If we can't solve it today, we'll figure out a solution," Kautter said. > "Taxpayers would not be penalized because of a technical problem the IRS is > having."

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Oh, great. I'm trying to file today online, though I need to look for a free service and redo all the paperwork because I'm broke and can't afford the filing fee. And now this.

Can't they just announce an extension and give everyone extra time? That wouldn't solve all my problems, but it would take some pressure off.

This is stupid. Just tell people the deadline is extended.

But they aren't likely to do that.

<comment><USER15> If you're unable to afford the filing fee, I'd assume you're not submitting a very complicated form, so while taxes are due today, why should the deadline be extended? It's not as if today was also the first day available for file. Your poor planning does not constitute an emergency on the IRS's part, right?

<comment><USER14> It isn't poor planning.

I'm medically handicapped and I fell in December and hurt myself and basically spent three months in bed, not doing paid work, though I was working on other things to try to raise my income. I'm a woman, so I am barred from the old boys network. I appear to be the only woman to have ever made the leaderboard of Hacker News. No, this does not gain me entree to the old boys club. I still have essentially no professional connections here, though that may be painfully slowly changing.

I have cystic fibrosis. So does my oldest son. Both my sons are ASD. So, there's a whole lot on my plate.

I also am getting well when doctor's claim that cannot be done and that gets me called a lunatic and teller of tall tales. It doesn't lead to anything good.

I was gifted membership to Metafilter by a kind soul. That forum is full of people who like to imagine they are good people making the world a better place. They did nothing but crap on me. They were unwilling to help me figure out how to increase my income.

I've done everything in my power to solve what are supposed to be unsolvable problems and I mostly get kicked in the teeth for it.

But, hey, thanks for taking the time to make swipes at me. Really nice of you to add to my troubles while I sit here with $2 to my name trying to figure out how the hell I will eat for the rest of the month and also dealing with the IRS sword of Damocles today just to add to the fun.

<comment><USER16> > I appear to be the only woman to have ever made the leaderboard of Hacker > News. No, this does not gain me entree to the old boys club. I still have > essentially no professional connections here, though that may be painfully > slowly changing.

The leaderboard, inasmuch as it correlates with any elite group, probably does so more because people who are already in that group are more likely to get onto the leaderboard for a variety of reasons, not because the leaderboard offers entry to that group (whether generally or for men specifically.)

I don't think I'm at all unique in being a man who has been in the leaderboard without ever having any professional connections through HN.

There is definitely a group with professional connections that overlaps with the HN community, including the leaderboard, and there is certainly no small amount of networking that is facilitated by HN contacts with similar interests, but, even before coming considering any potential gender dynamics issues, getting into the leaderboard just isn't a ticket into anything of substance.

<comment><USER14> Your profile has nothing in it. You appear to have no interest in using HN to make those kinds of connections. So no surprise that you don't have that if it isn't a goal of yours.

It is a goal of mine. And when I do the same things the men do, it doesn't get the same results. When men want to pursue something professionally, they routinely say "Email in profile." When I invite someone to take it to email, the most common outcome is they hit on me.

One guy spent some weeks talking to me and pretending to be my friend before mentioning that he was married and needed a shoulder to cry on because his marriage was in the toilet and he was hoping I would be said shoulder to cry on. I gave him about 3 more days of my time to cry on my shoulder, at which point he resumed sleeping with his wife while talking at me like we were lovers, never mind that I told him up front I was not going to be the Other Woman. I cut him loose at that point. The more I think about how he intentionally withheld his marital status, the madder and more used and lied to I feel.

There's a whole lot more backstory here that I am unwilling to comment on here. Suffice it say, I have good reason to believe that if I were male, I would have professional connections here of meaningful value.

If you don't want to use HN to make such connections, cool. But it's aggravating to be constantly told that this is an unrealistic expectation of mine when other people clearly pull it off and then also get told that my gender isn't the problem. If it's not, what is?

<comment><USER16> > When men want to pursue something professionally, they routinely say "Email > in profile." When I invite someone to take it to email, the most common > outcome is they hit on me.

I don't doubt at all that you get people feigning professional interest that turn things that way, and I _do_ think that your gender and the fact that there are sexist, and more particularly sexually exploitive, men here plays a significant role in that.

You absolutely _should not_ have to deal with this, and you have every reason to be upset about it. I suspect—and I want to be clear that I say this by way of explaining a pattern I've observed with this kind of targeted behavior eslewhere and how it tends to be targeted, but not at all to imply any blame on you—that the fact that you tend to be very open about circumstances of intense and urgent financial need and your hopes for professional connections on HN to alleviate that contributes to people who are inclined to they type of exploitation seeing you as a likely target.

I want to emphasize again that this is a problem with the people acting this way toward you, not with your writing.

> But it's aggravating to be constantly told that this is an unrealistic > expectation of mine when other people clearly pull it off and then also get > told that my gender isn't the problem. If it's not, what is?

While I think your expectations as to the general level of success at that here is too high, if I were to take as given the assumption that you are underperforming in that regard based on what would be expexted your leaderboard position and other indicia of prominence in the discussion community, and had to come up with an explanation, my first suspicion would be the fact that your professional focus seems to primarily be neither/technical nor financial nor in a hot application domain for technology, combined with the fact that you don't have a lot of money. Much of the networking at HN seems to center, as one might expect given it's connection to a tech heavy startup accelerator, to connecting people with certain professional focuses with each other and with people with money. (I don't think the attitude you've projected in the community about the issue since you got the impression that your failure to acheive what you expected was due to gender and personal animus helps, either, and there may be a bit of a vicious cycle there.)

But you could really be getting significantly disadvantaged in networking in HN because of your gender. I don't see evidence that would lead me to conclude that, true, but I think I've made the mistake of being insufficiently clear in my reaction against what has seemed to be your repeated implicit argument that your leaderboard position alone combined with your lack of success in that regard was sufficient evidence of exclusion on the basis of gender and that I've given the impression that I am dismissing the possibility that you've been disadvantaged in networking here based on gender. To the extent thst that is the case, it is my error, and I apologize.

<comment><USER14> Thank you for this reply.

 _your repeated implicit argument that your leaderboard position alone_

I am clearly miscommunicating something because my point is not that my (former) position on the leaderboard alone should open doors. My point is that my (former) position on the leaderboard should stand as proxy for community esteem and since I appear to be the highest ranked woman here, why can I not achieve what I am trying to achieve similar to what men at the top of the leaderboard are achieving? The top three people on the leaderboard have very clearly established professional connections here. Why is the top ranked woman so unable to establish the same?

It is also intended in a nutshell to suggest that it looks to me like sexism is a very large factor, because if the seemingly highest ranked female member here can't get a toehold, surely no woman is getting much out of the forum professionally on par with what men are able to achieve if they so desire and set it as a goal.

I apologize if this seems argumentative. In the good news column, I did get my taxes filed for free last night and using different software that asked different questions, I am due a refund instead of owing money. However, that isn't money in hand at the moment, so I am still having a larger than usual crisis.

But I very much appreciate your comment. It is one of the meatiest comments genuinely addressing my issues in this forum that I have ever seen and I expect to find it useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Russians.

<comment><USER18> Trump.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is a bit of a disaster. Not surprising, though. Lots of US government electronic services have gone unmaintained under the Trump admin. The website for servicing defaulted student loans has also been completely broken for months: [https://myeddebt.ed.gov/borrower/](https://myeddebt.ed.gov/borrower/)

<comment><USER20> US government electronic services have gone unmaintained for _decades_ ; I don't think it's fair to blame it on the administration who happens to be in power when things go sideways (see: OPM hack, etc).

I'm not sure the root cause, but there seems to be a long-standing, fundamental distaste for infrastructure maintenance by the US government.

<comment><USER21> It's been 15 months, that's enough time to see results from poor decisions. Sure, he would need to be unusually competent to prevent such issues, but arguably that's a reasonable expectation for a president.

(I say this as a government contractor.) As to root cause for Gov IT issues, the real issue seems to be the government outsourcing so much. It makes many people rich, but outsourcing ends up being both extremely expensive and error prone. This is not purely an issue with the government most private companies face issues when outsourcing IT as it's difficult to get right.

<comment><USER22> Except neither the president nor his close friends pay any taxes, so how would they know anything is broken? /s

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why does the IRS not distribute the tax-filing workload across the whole year? Having everyone trying to complete their taxes on the same day seems wildly inefficient and wasteful.

<comment><USER24> How do you determine when an entity—person or company—needs to file? If the filing date is based on employer, what happens if I work for multiple employers or change jobs? If the filing is date is based on the filing entity, every employer now needs to keep track of my filing date. I got married. Do I need a new filing date, or does my household now need two returns instead of one?

Sure, computers could solve this problem, but the human cost—changing accounting systems, communicating new dates, etc.—is not negligible. A simpler (and probably cheaper) solution might be to update the IRS systems to scale better for the week before and after tax day.

<comment><USER3> Anyone mailing you tax forms in January already has your birthday, so it wouldn't be any more trouble for them to mail you that month.

<comment><USER24> Problem extends beyond mailing forms. Everything linked to the tax year is now broken in this world. FSAs, employer-provided insurance, even general budgeting all have to change. Such changes will have an effect on the economy at the $100M scale, if not $1B. Why? Because the government couldn't rent more server space? Buying a new data center would probably be cheaper than moving away from a single tax day. The proposed treatment is far worse than the disease.</comment></comment></comment></comment>