I Lived Like a Baller for a Month in Venezuela on Just £75 (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/i-lived-like-a-king-for-a-month-in-venezuela-on-100-euros-876 <comment><USER2> Things have changed a lot since this was written in December. I live in Caracas, there's massive national food shortages. Now you can't have 3 meals a day for a month with 100€, and would spend quite some time finding it (on the black market). Last time I saw sugar, it was around 3€ per kilo.

Edit: If you want a realistic picture of how is life today, read this piece, written by a foreign journalist that actually lives there (sadly, most things I see in foreign media is written from outside): [http://bigstory.ap.org/article/7c0464c1dd404aca99458a8a19930...](http://bigstory.ap.org/article/7c0464c1dd404aca99458a8a19930bad/life- line-venezuela-economic-crisis-worsens)

<comment><USER3> Yep, I'm living in Barquisimeto and between me and my wife we are making around $160 per month. We are scraping by.

Plus we've got a 3 month old baby, who luckily is exclusively breastfeeding, because baby formula is practically non-existent.

We had to pool about $60 to buy a sack of sugar in the black market and divide it among a bunch of family members.

Things are starting to look a lot more grim as time passes by and you realize that the government doesn't have the will to fix things and they are not going to go peacefully either. The outcome here is most likely going to be a violent one.

<comment><USER4> There's something I'm not understanding here: both you and the GP are commenting on a food shortage and Sugar is the food that you both mention as being hard to come by. If there is a food shortage shouldn't sugar be the last food you would care about obtaining? Or are basic necessities (rice, etc) readily available and it's only luxuries like sugar that are hard to find?

<comment><USER3> All the basics are hard to come by: rice, flour, milk, toiletries,etc. I'm just commenting about sugar because GP commented on it. I assume because it's one of the items that has just disapeared lately.

I'm actually not really worried about sugar because I barely consume it. We bought the sack of sugar because a cousin of mine used to make ends meet with a small cupcake business she used to make for parties,etc. and now she can't find flour or sugar.

I wrote a comment about this before: if you have enough money you can go out and eat lobster and whatever fancy food you want. The things that are almost impossible to find are basic things most people need to survive like flour, milk, toiletries, medicine,etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In the time before the wall fell most communist countries had an 'official' (ridiculous) and a black market exchange rate much like the one in the article. You were forced to exchange a certain amount of money for every day of your stay at the official rate, if you managed to smuggle just a few extra notes into the country and exchanged those on the black market it would usually translate into 'more money than you can sensibly spend'.

The reason those black markets are so popular is that people living in a country like that far prefer to hold on to some hard currency instead of the local currency which is devaluating so fast that even a few weeks can make a huge difference. Saving the local currency makes no sense and hence the black market materializes.

One person I know paid off a mortgage entered into a few years earlier with a single months pay, rapid inflation creates all kinds of havoc.

</comment><comment><USER6> As a Spanish native speaker who knows Venezuela pretty well I find disturbing to hear you could live well in Venezuela with USD100.

First, unless you are a complete sociopath, just seeing so many people suffering to just buy food(or medicines) is a traumatic experience.

For a doctor to operate you, you need to bring the medicines first!!

Next, you will risking your life in every corner. In some South American countries life is worth nothing, but in Venezuela it is another level. If you are an outsider you have to be very careful. Venezuelan people have gotten used to it and they know subconsciously what not to do, while a European or (North)American can make mistakes easily, and they have too much money.

When Venezuelan people find a robber, they will lynch him, police will come so people do not kill him.

The country is near a civil war. Hugo Chavez created a populist law called "Referendum revocatorio" that if the Government did something against the people, the people could remove it from power. The opposition is trying to use this law, but Maduro opposes it.

Of course the people in power do not want to go out of power by any means, specially when in Venezuela every good job position is occupied by pro-Chavez people, they are "more equal than others" and will lose everything if they pass the law.

Venezuela has a big army, and this army is directly supported by Russia, so given that Venezuela oil reserves are the biggest in the world(albeit bad quality) it is very dangerous as lots of other countries could intervene and create a proxy war.

</comment><comment><USER7> This article is nearly a year old. The living situation in Venezuela, a year later, is much more dire now.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's staggering how quickly things can change. In 2014, Venezuelans were some of the happiest people in the world, and according to Pew happier than the average American [1]

Now it easily tops the Bloomberg misery index for the second year in a row [2]

[1] [http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/10/30/people-in-emerging- marke...](http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/10/30/people-in-emerging-markets- catch-up-to-advanced-economies-in-life-satisfaction/satisfaction-08/)

[2] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-04/these- are-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-04/these-are-the- world-s-most-miserable-economies)

</comment><comment><USER9> This guy seems like a decent writer. Apparently, if I hired him at US rates, he would be wealthy beyond his wildest dreams. Why isn't there more remote work going on?

<comment><USER10> I have a few friends who hired programmers remotely, they had to fly down with cash to pay them, no other way to get them money. Eventually the situation got too dangerous despite the incredible wage arbitrage they were getting by paying in US dollars. (too dangerous for the employees who were getting robbed frequently, and the bosses to carry the cash down there)

<comment><USER11> Did they look into Bitcoin? It seems tailor made for this situation. Immune to hyperinflation, difficult for offline criminals to steal, and difficult for the government to block. There is a Venezuelan Bitcoin exchange SurBitcoin and also LocalBitcoins.com, though I don't know the feasibility of using either right now. But at least the initial payment would be no problem.

<comment><USER12> Depends on the BTC / VEF exchange rate inside the country.

$100 -> .17BTC -> 102 VEF -> $10.25. So you'd lose 90% of the dollar value even at the generous official VEF/USD exchange rate.

[https://surbitcoin.com/#market](https://surbitcoin.com/#market)

<comment><USER3> I've never really looked in to BTC because here you can sell dollars much easier. Although I can see that as a good way to receive dollars for those that do not have any other way.

Right now, $1 = $1004 VEF I see that 1 BTC = $583.79

From localbitcoin.com I see people selling in Venezuela at around 628000.00 VEF / BTC. So the price is the same.

I think what's going on, is they are calculating the price of the dollar at one of the govt rates of 645 VEF per dollar.

That's not realistic. Anyone with dollars in Venezuela is going to sell them at the black market rate of VEF 1000 per dollar.

Of course, the black market rate is illegal here and the government even went so far as blocking the black market rate information websites here. That's their idea of economic policy.

EDIT: Just realized, surbitcoin rate is around BsF 600k per Bitcoin. We use the dot (.) as the thousands separator.

<comment><USER13> If anyone is interested in trying to convert BTC to VEF, I'll be happy to send them enough to make it worthwhile.

ETA: rafaelm, I'll send you $50 worth of bitcoin if you'll post an address :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> That was last year when the crisis could still be attributed to incompetence, mismanagement. The situation has changed considerably since then.

I'm going to call it now: the Venezuela crisis is not incompetence after all. It's the first steps of a highly competent plan to do what several other communist governments did last century: bring about the death of a large percentage of the country's population.

I don't lightly advocate military intervention. I think it's almost always the wrong thing to do. But I'm advocating it now. The communist government of Venezuela needs to be taken down hard and fast, before this turns into full- blown genocide.

<comment><USER15> They don't have a communist government.

<comment><USER16> Although they are probably heading that way if Maduro can get away with it. I still think the food shortages are incompetence rather than design though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> [http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Rich-Eating-Well-in- Ve...](http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Rich-Eating-Well-in-Venezuela- Basque-Executive-Shows-20160530-0001.html)

Rich are blocking food to the poor in attempt to scare them from supporting the Bolivarian Revolution. Youtube videos also show Venezuelan stores hiding food to cause shortage.

<comment><USER3> Yes that's the story as told by the government and the state funded media like Telesur, your source.

They wouldn't say anything about how the food imports are controlled by the military and the government and how they've stolen more than $50 billion, as admitted by Chavez's former economic minister.

<comment><USER17> A lot more sources than Telesur but you have to look beyond Western news media. I hope the Venezuelan military does take control away from the US backed gusanos who are withholding food from the poor in an economic war to sabotage the Bolivarian Revolution. US orchestrated attacks can also be seen with the USAID fake 'Twitter' in Cuba to destabilize the government. ABC News even reported Peace Corps volunteers and a Fulbright scholar were asked by a U.S. Embassy official in Bolivia "to basically spy" on Cubans and Venezuelans in the country, according to the Peace Corps personnel and the Fulbright scholar involved. US interests can be seen with Brazilian vassel elites tied to US, orchestrating the impeachment of Brazil's Dilma Rousseff after NSA spied on Rousseff and discounting the 54 million-plus Brazilians who reelected her. You can see how the West respects Latin America with how Bolivia's Evo Morales had his government plane force landed and he was detained in Vienna. You can also look at how Venezuela's President Chavez, Honduras' President Zelaya, or Haiti's President Aristide were all kidnapped with Washington's blessings. Former covert agent John Stockwell says U.S. has killed 6 million in covert operations in the Third World. All this information does not come out of Telesur, and if you were half honest you would see a pattern here.

<comment><USER3> Why doesn't telesur say anything about the massive corruption of the government officials that have dilapidated more than $50billion dollars as admitted by chavista ex-ministers? Or the fact that most of the former productive lands and industries that were confiscated by Chavez are now broke and don't produce anything?

Look for the cases of Agroisleña, Fama de América, Sidor,the sugar factories all in govt hands, the formerly productive lands in Sur del Lago and a looong line of etceteras. Formerly productive industries that Chavez confiscated, put under supervision of corrupt military command that now don't produce anything.

Look for all the corruption in CADIVI, the agency in charge of the currency exchange that gave out billions of dollars to the military and their buddies The thousands of tons of food imported by the government for PDVAL left to rot in the ports of the country because once the food was bought and imported it didn't matter if it actually got to the stores.

Seriously, it gets tiring when someone that does not have the tiniest idea of what is actually going on in the country brings out the tired old argument that everything is the USA's fault.

<comment><USER17> You want the return of Venezuela to its former status as oil colony and wholly owned subsidiary of the United States. Tired argument? The 4 million dead in Middle East is the fault of the US and the Western allies. One need only look at the conspicuous reappearance of goods in the immediate aftermath of the right wing Unity Roundtable (MUD) victory in the December 2015 elections to see how connected the food supply problems are with political agendas. The oil collapse is an orchestrated assault on oil-producing nations targeted by the US.

<comment><USER3> See, this is where it's evident that you have no clue what you are talking about. There was no reappearance of goods after the MUD won! The government has actually been making fun of this because some of the MUD candidates said they would help the goods reappear once elected.

The shortage situation has been constant and getting worse since last year. I actually live here! I'm not reading about this from some government funded propaganda machine from the comfort of my fully stocked home.

You clearly have no more arguments beyond they tired old "everything us the US fault". I already gave you several examples of the government corruption that led us to this situation and you STILL come back and tell me about the middle east, oil colonies, how it's all a plot by the US, etc?

I should go to the food lines tomorrow and try to explain that to people. I bet it would go down really well with everyone there!

<comment><USER17> Quit your crocodile tears, gusano!

<comment><USER3> Haha your superior argumentative powers sure got me there!

Please, next time try to be better informed before making a fool of yourself.

I understand that the US has a shitty foreign policy, but that doesn't make every "antiimperialist" government the good guys. The world is not black and white.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Curious how people who have family members in Venezula are remitting funds to them? Do they have exchange funds at the official rate or is there ways to send Dollars directly.

This has to be a pretty common occurance.

</comment><comment><USER19> Which country is in a worse situation? Venezuela or Ukraine? It's funny how we see only one been bashed by western media.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think getting murdered would be more of a concern than the low cost of living.

</comment><comment><USER21> If you want to experience living "like a baller" for a low amount of money (for the US), there are many great places to go that are much safer than Venezuela.

<comment><USER22> Do you have any suggestions? I'm living in the US in an expensive city and it'd be cool to take a vacation somewhere much cheaper.

<comment><USER23> come visit Ukraine - Kiev, Lviv, Odessa

<comment><USER21> I was going to suggest Ukraine. Odessa is a lovely and very affordable city to visit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> (2015)</comment>


Ask HN: Does an in-browser neural network have any practical use? - <AUTHOR> I am thinking of starting a small site which will allow users to train and predict locally within a browser. No downloads and training data will stay local and private (never sent to the server). Everything should happen using the local resources.
This web application should allow training data of type JSON or CSV. Perhaps it can also allow streaming from the local file system. I think we can support all types of Feed Forward and Recurrent Neural Networks with this application.
Technically it's all possible but are there any practical uses for such a thing to exist? <comment><USER2> It would be educational.

So far as getting inference done it would be hard to compete with the "big boys" who are trying to get special-purpose hardware into phones and such.

Myself I am through with implementing neural network trainers by hand. If you have to compute all the derivatives by hand sooner or later you are going to drop a factor of 3 on the floor or you will become so afraid of doing that you'll never change anything that will force you to recalculate.

(That's what I get for working on a "deep learning" project that was commercialized just before Tensorflow, PyTorch, etc. got big. C++, SIMD instructions, you name it...)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks @PaulHoule, I agree. Not very keen on competing with the big boys, if something is useful people will use it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> finding out where the user might click next and slapping an ad there

<comment><AUTHOR> Well.. that doesn't really add any value ;-)</comment></comment>


Great collection of UI blogs and resources - <AUTHOR> http://ui.alltop.com/

<comment><USER2> Actually, that is a good collection

</comment><comment><USER3> collection isn't bad, however I'm not sure anyone with that UI of a collection should be telling me about UI...

</comment><comment><USER4> People bash Guy and Alltop a lot, but I've actually found it to be pretty useful.

</comment><comment><USER5> What's Guy? That's the first time i've seen Alltop and I quite like their UI. Supremely simple and easy to understand... and very unique. Difficult to be different whilst maintaining simplicity.

<comment><USER4> <http://www.popurls.com> <http://www.guykawasaki.com></comment></comment>


Experts Are Trying to Make Machines Be "Moral" - <AUTHOR> http://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/just-in/2015-06-08/good-bad-and-robot-experts-are-trying-make-machines-be-moral

<comment><USER2> Oh, brother. The level of naivety behind these kinds of ambitions and speculations would seem impossible if it weren't so commonplace. There's a strange assumption afoot that technology—in this case, AI programming—can go anywhere and solve any problem. Show people an image or movie of what humanoid robots might be like, and their imagination soars. It must be conscious! It must have feelings! It must make moral judgments!

But where in any speck of the universe apart from minds do we see anything like moral feelings? And where in any speck of the universe have we ever seen any indication that minds in the full sense of the word consist entirely of machines or material? Until we understand what conscious minds are we will certainly never create machines that have them. And the assumption that if we just make a machine or program complex enough, a mind will magically pop into being, is amusing science fiction at best and science-become-religion at worst.

"Experts" should stop trying to make machines moral and see if they can make them open my garage door reliably.

<comment><USER3> I agree completely. Not trying to be negative about the whole thing, but it's very weird to expect "morality" from a machine. And even more so to think we could impose a morality on a machine and not have it resent that if it actually reaches that point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Frank Zappa, on a different topic that many people consider evidence of "moral failure", said,

        A drug is not bad. A drug is a chemical compound.
        The problem comes in when people who take drugs
        treat them like a license to behave like an asshole.

Well, before anybody starts accusing the machines of having similar problems, I suggest they remember this paraphrasing of Zappa:

        A robot is not bad. A robot is merely Turing-machine controlled automation.
        The problem comes in when the people programming the automation
        treat their tools like a license to bypass annoying requirements
        or replace locally-controlled decisions with inflexible heuristics.

<comment><USER5> I think the problem is that, even for those who have the right intentions and rigor in mind, there may be decisions that seem clearly handle-able by rules that don't seem overly simplified. There's always the possibility (inevitability?) that even the most careful and conscious of designers will overlook an unintended consequence. This is hardly a revolutionary idea: it essentially boils down to "code has bugs".

That's what this kind of research is designed to do: come up with a framework for understanding when "locally-controlled decisions" are required as opposed to codified rules.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Step one: Define what is moral.

Step Two: No one has ever gotten this far so we don't know what it is.

</comment><comment><USER7> For those arguing that machines are 'morally neutral', there are a few other things to consider:

As already mentioned here, the slogan 'Guns don't kill people, people kill people' is -- in my mind at least -- incredibly shallow. Obviously guns don't (themselves) kill people. Neither do cars themselves drive, planes themselves fly etc.. Even a 'self-driving' car remains dependent on whatever it was programmed to do _by someone_. In the end it is always us, as trivial as this may sound, who fly, drive or kill.

Yet what people don't except as equally trivial is that just as planes have an obvious tendency in their usage to _fly_ \-- and not, for example, swim -- and cars have an obvious tendency to be used for _driving_ , guns have an obvious tendency to be used for _killing_. To compare, say, a gun to a knife, and to state that both can be used for killing, and thus if we were to outlaw guns _we must also outlaw all kitchen knifes_ is really silly. A butter knife is much more likely to be used to prepare breakfast than a gun.

The important question to ask about machines, in my mind, is _if machines themselves have a similar tendency_. Once we use machines, the way we act, and how the world appears to us, seems to change dramatically.

A machine usually only works when it is _automated_ , uses some _resources_ and delivers some _product_. Thus my time, as someone using the machine, is structured by its rhythm. As soon as I buy a machine, such as a car or a computer, I also buy into its needs. I have to be able to buy petrol and electricity, which I am most likely to afford if I have a regular income. Suddenly foreign policy decisions, which have an effect on the oil price, also effect me personally, and I can be swayed politically to vote in my own oil- self-interest.

My employer may come to expect the same of me as of a machine, and I will be forced to consider my own time as a resource. Once everyone's time becomes a resource in production, the nature of interpersonal encounters changes dramatically. Even leisure isn't an exception to this rule, for it is also bought by my previous time-resources, and leisure time is always at the same time time, during which I could also be using my time reasons more efficiently.

If one can speak of an emerging _technological rationality_ , constituted by our use of machines, then this form of thinking fundamentally alters our consciousness. Nature, time and humans become resources to exploit, problems only become worth solving when they are themselves technologically solvable etc..

</comment><comment><USER8> Wow, teaching a robot morals by letting it watch tv seems like the silliest idea. TV would be such a bad source of good moral behaviour, otherwise it wouldn't be good tv.

</comment><comment><USER9> I would settle for s-corps.</comment>


A mysterious grey-hat is patching people's outdated MikroTik routers - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-mysterious-grey-hat-is-patching-peoples-outdated-mikrotik-routers/ <comment><USER4> >But despite adjusting firewall settings for over 100,000 users, Alexey says that only 50 users reached out via Telegram. A few said "thanks," but most were outraged.

Have to wonder if those "outraged" users are ones who would have proactively fixed it themselves, or if they would've let their router happily continue to chug away as part of a botnet.

<comment><USER5> It's an intrusion.

Would you be outraged if you came home one day and there was a plumber fixing your sink? "Oh hi, don't worry about me, just fixing your sink. Let myself in, hope you don't mind"

You didn't even know your sink was leaky let alone called a plumber.

<comment><USER6> Actually I once heard a story of a neighbor who let themselves in when the house was literally flooding and he saved the owner thousands of dollars worth of damage. That's more like what's happening with these patched routers.

I also heard a story of a guy who's house burned down. The neighbor saw it very early and did nothing about it cuz not her problem. The homeowner was devastated.

So yes, if you see incredible destruction going on, it's ok to go fix it.

<comment><USER7> I've heard that in US you could be shot for trespassing. It might be very dangerous to try fixing it.

<comment><USER8> Similarly, unsolicited help with computer infrastructure can land you in jail under CFAA. No good deed goes unpunished.

<comment><USER7> That's why all good deeds must be done anonymous :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This particular effort seems to be a mix of fun, braggadocio, and altruism. Could this sort of thing be organized with a social network and a list of tasks/problems using a tool like Trello or Jira but for solving any problem? The result would be anyone in the world could help/volunteer to fix real problems with free time. Use: 1) Problem is posted 2) Investigated and confirmed to be real 3) Volunteers start to fix and swap solutions 4) Extra people are recruited as necessary 5) Problem is solved and wrapped up. This could be applied from everything from MongoDB security issues ([https://snyk.io/blog/mongodb-hack-and-secure- defaults](https://snyk.io/blog/mongodb-hack-and-secure-defaults)) to cleaning up neighborhood pollution ([http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct- chicago...](http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-chicago-air- quality-testing-met-20171111-story.html)) Thoughts? Does this exist already?

<comment><USER10> Yes... volunteer work already exists. Suggesting that it could be organized through Trello or Jira doesn't really add any revolutionary element. And many volunteer organisations already have planning solutions.

<comment><USER11> Why so negative?

<comment><USER12> This is not at all negative.

Imagine parent telling some underground rebel group that their revolution would be more successful if they organized it with Jira.

Meanwhile, this concern is so far away from the rebels, who are doing just fine with pen and paper, and are more concerned with basic needs like surviving undetected.

People are of course excited by this initiative, and wish to contribute how they know. Except what they have is hammers, and there are no nails to be seen.

It looks like you are helping, but you are only diluting the focus from what's important to what's easy to mindlessly talk about in a forum.

It looks like people are trying to organize how to organize, instead of actually organizing anything. It's like the difference between being a writer and a word processing expert.

<comment><USER13> I think you have a point, but unfortunately I didn't get it from your first comment as well. It read as a pretty negative comment.

It sounds like the point that you are making is reasonable, though, and unfortunately one that I see play out with a lot of FOSS projects as well. I remember a talk one time where a project lead essentially made the point that every new talk is met with a lot of "I'll setup CI for you" and "I'll setup JIRA for you", but that none of the people who say those things end up contributing code or issues.

For some reason there is a natural desire among some to organize the organizing before the thing to be organized really exists.

<comment><USER12> Note: I was not the original poster: his comment simply rang very true to me; "lean" is being a motif in my work, as the complexity of precious time and resource management increases.

Contributions are all well-intentioned, but they cost resources, especially if you're not great at ruthlessly filtering out, or don't want to, for any reason; they generate a lot of heat where this energy can't be used.

Also well-intentioned contributors will set up grandiose structures, with no intention other than "to help", but no actual will to carry the actual work out. This usually turns out a wasteland after a while, which is not so much a problem until you realize you have to support it; or worst, it over-shadows the original, leaner-but-actually-productive intent.

> For some reason there is a natural desire among some to organize the > organizing before the thing to be organized really exists.

I think this is why we have so many engines which have no games written for it :D

<comment><USER13> It is amazing how closely this matches my experiences. I've been on projects where we were forced to accept "gifted" code that was a tremendous difficulty to actual maintain and fix to a maintainable state. Of course, the whole time lots of people wondered why it couldn't just be merged without testing or anything.

It is very easy for software contributions to create lots of friction and your analogy to heat and energy loss is really great, IMO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I remember once, when I had an unpatched computer overrun by hostile viruses that rendered it unusable, wondering if one of the botnet-type viruses that want to take over your computer and use it without being undetected would someday get smart enough to recognize other viruses and automatically remove their competition so that they could continue to silently infect you. Like a biological virus, one that kills the host is an ineffective one - they want to use the hosts resources while not being noticed. I wonder if this is something like that - virus writers starting to get smarter about cleaning up behind them and keeping out competing malware.

<comment><USER15> This has been happening for years, especially in the "botnet community". Either someone takes down someone else's botnet through the same bug and patches it or figures out a bug in the botnet and caps it for themselves (for example, getting ops in the CNC channel). I think Microsoft has even done in cooperation this a few times; it's dubious legal territory.

You can see some historical examples, both recent (Mirai had some viruses that went around closing the bug), as well as further in the past (there's one that escapes me, it must have been around 2010?)

I wish I could cite more, I'm going to spend some time researching this and make a list for myself, it's surprisingly interesting!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This reminded me of last years "BrickerBot" malware [0] by grey-hat The Janit0r / The Doctor who bricked IoT devices with the stated purpose of preventing the same devices from being hacked by botnet-malware, which allegedly puts the whole internet at risk.

[0] [https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/brickerbot- au...](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/brickerbot-author- retires-claiming-to-have-bricked-over-10-million-iot-devices/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Devices at vulnerable routerOS version and not already compromised would not be vulnerable if the firewall was enabled. It's that simple. Not great that these boxes used to ship in this default state and I can _understand_ a home user unfamiliar with what they're dealing with but what reason is there for deploying infrastructure this way at an ISP or hospital or whatever org?

<comment><USER18> I think there's still a lot of blame on Mikrotik for having such bugs in their management service and other daemons. I explicitly opened up the winbox port to be able to remotely manage Mikrotik routers I deploy (I considered their VPN implementations to be an even higher attack surface), as did many other admins it seems.

The winbox protocol supposedly runs over TLS and requires a username/password before anything is possible so I thought it should be safe enough, but through this bug anyone can download any file with no authentication (and the user db was storing passwords in plaintext which certainly didn't help)!

The web server vulnerability, sshd vulnerability, the smbd vulnerability - <USER2> are their fault. Had they used standard, well-tested open source packages there would be no problems, but they had to write their own custom implementations of these protocols for "reasons". I hate to think how many remotely exploitable bugs are lurking in their ipsec implementation.

<comment><USER19> Vulnerabilities are almost unavoidable.

Leaving a management port on a router open to the entire internet is a very bad practice. Would you leave an RDP port open to the world?

If you require remote access, at least restrict it to known management IP addresses.

<comment><USER20> Why is it that vulnerabilities are almost unavoidable? I'm not trying to be a smart-ass; I'm an analyst at an MSP and I'm doing my first pen-test soon. I'm under no illusions that my job title or growing responsibilities make me a security expert (or anywhere near it). Is it because the software stack is just too complex for network programmers to handle? (Not that router OSes are the only pieces of software that have vulnerabilities; and I imagine that you'd say that vulnerabilities are almost unavoidable in general.)

<comment><USER21> I'm not an expert either, so take this with a grain of salt. At the risk of sounding glib, I'd think the biggest cause of this unavoidability is that security professionals have to be "right" (in the sense of plugging every hole) every time, whereas black-hats need to be right (in the sense of finding said vulnerabilities) only once (or a few times depending on the vector, but you get the idea). Being on a Blue Team strikes me as a hard, thankless job, and I'm grateful for the people who volunteer for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Back in college (early 90's) I would run ToneLoc overnight, and wake up to view the results. One time I had a hit, and I ftp'ed into some server on Mindspring's customer IP range.

A quick look at the system told me the root account had no password set. So I tried a telnet and wham - I was in.

A 'who' showed someone else was logged in. So I sent a broadcast message to them saying they need to secure their system better, and logged out.

I had the habit of using an obscure hotmail email to log into FTP servers, and had done that here. I was surprised to see an email from the owner - <USER3> to know how I found his system, etc. He was nice, but I didn't reply.

<comment><USER23> > He was nice, but I didn't reply.

Noooooo. Story started off well and then you tree fiddied me!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Not sure what they mean by "mysterious". He isn't hiding and never was. He posted his photo, name and other personal details in articles about MikroTik on Russian IT blogging platform[1]. His name is Alexey Sopov, 34, from Novosibirsk. Quick search revealed his social network accounts:

[https://fb.com/100005153643926](https://fb.com/100005153643926)

[https://vk.com/lmonoceros](https://vk.com/lmonoceros)

[1] [https://habr.com/post/353530/](https://habr.com/post/353530/)

<comment><USER25> Clickbait?

<comment><USER26> Probably the journalist didn't want to get this guy in trouble for doxxing him.

I'm pretty sure the FBI would love to arrest him by now. Just like MalwareTech.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The very last paragraph kinda makes me feel bad for MikroTik, but I'd like them to add an auto-update feature to their routers. Probably fix all these issues.

<comment><USER4> An "automatic" update that would potentially cause the router to reboot and bring down the network would go over very poorly with customers, even if it happens at 3 AM.

A better solution would be automatically _checking_ for updates, and then sending an e-mail notification to the address associated with the router's owner/sys admin.

I "registered" my router and email address with Netgear about a year ago and I was shocked a few months ago when they actually sent me an e-mail to let me know that a new firmware update was available for my router.

<comment><USER27> > An "automatic" update that would potentially cause the router to reboot and > bring down the network would go over very poorly with customers, even if it > happens at 3 AM.

Maybe the the trigger for the automatic reboot could be more complicated than just a time-based trigger. Something like

        Reboot when
            localtime > 2AM &
            localtime < 5AM &
            traffic averaged over the last 5 min < 5kbs

Basically reboot unless the router detects the network is being used actively.

<comment><USER28> Of course, if you're on vacation and relying on that router to be available for security cameras, an automatic firmware update that results in a bricked router can be more than a little disruptive.

<comment><USER27> It's a tradeoff. You have to balance that negative against the negative of having botnets of millions of never-patched routers.

Automatic updates should be the default, but you should be able to shut them off if you want to make a different tradeoff.

<comment><USER8> Automatic security updates should be the default, all other updates should absolutely _not_. In case of patching routers there isn't much crapware to be upsold, but in general, if we're ever going to develop some code of ethics in this industry, I wish a part of it would be a rule of hard separation between security patches and feature updates, and another rule that the latter should never be done automatically without explicit opt-in.

Yes, it's extra work for developers, but the result of not doing that is the present situation - a lot of users, including a surprisingly large population of non-tech-savvy people, will go out of their way to shut down automatic updates, to avoid having to deal with broken workflows, upselling, ads sneaking in, and forced reboots in the middle of a business presentation or a game (or a surgery).

<comment><USER29> Automatic updates has some of the same issues as telemetry. Windows Update for example has to send information on things like drivers to scan for updates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Reminds me of a black hat I knew in the 90s. He bragged that if he ever gained access to a system, he'd start patching vulnerabilities so others wouldn't gain access and make it obvious the machine had been compromised.

<comment><USER31> I can attest that there was at least one such black hat in the 00's.

One of my IT guy's mom complained about her machine being slow and having "too many pop ups", so he planned to go to her place on the weekend and fix it. She called back a couple of days later and told him not to bother as it was "all fixed now".

o.O

I lent him one of our loaner laptops and he brought in her computer back and put it on our test DMZ to see what was up. Yep, somebody had scrubbed all the malware and "search bars" off the machine and installed a free anti-virus package. The exceptions on the anti-virus made it easy to track down what was happening; it was set to send spam every night between 1am and 7am but otherwise was pristine.

My colleague had to do some serious soul searching before he decided to wipe it instead of just returning it ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> > As for MikroTik, the Latvian company has been one of the most responsive > vendors in terms of security flaws, fixing issues within hours or days, > compared to the months that some other router vendors tend to take. It would > be unfair to blame this situation on them. Patches have been available for > months, but, yet again, it is ISPs and home users who are failing to take > advantage of them.

A system that requires users to opt in to security is not a secure system.

<comment><USER33> OTOH people would scream bloody murder at a router that installed firmware updates and rebooted itself without asking. Just look at the reaction to how Windows 10 handles updates.

<comment><USER34> It's time MT got something like unattended upgrades.

<comment><USER35> It's trivial to script on a mikrotik. Arguably it should be in the default config - most people who know what they're doing will start with a blank slate anyway (system reset configuration nodefaults)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> If only ISPs would start disconnecting negligent customers who continue to use exploited or vulnerable equipment. The incentives are not right. If they did, they'd risk losing a paying customer, if they don't, nothing bad really happens to them. I hate suggesting regulations and fines but it's the only thing end users and ISPs will respond to.

<comment><USER37> Most of this devices are provided by ISPs so it's they who are negligent. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Original post from Alexey at habr.com (russian IT community): [https://habr.com/post/424433/](https://habr.com/post/424433/)

</comment><comment><USER39> Would have been nice if he got around to the router at our office, we got cryptojacked: [https://imgur.com/a/Q7Pmxth](https://imgur.com/a/Q7Pmxth)

</comment><comment><USER40> Some black hats also patch the systems they compromise. Depends on the purpose.

</comment><comment><USER41> Normally HN is not a place for memes, but I feel this is appropriate

[https://m.imgur.com/JxH0lUT?r](https://m.imgur.com/JxH0lUT?r)

</comment><comment><USER42> Just start bricking them. It's a public service to the internet as a whole.

</comment><comment><USER43> Hats off to this guy.

</comment><comment><USER44> I had one once and I can recommend the "MikroTik Security Guide" by Tyler Hart.

It's quite an easy step by step guide.

</comment><comment><USER45> This is hollywood material.

</comment><comment><USER46> Patch me daddy</comment>


Designing Google Maps for Motorbikes - <AUTHOR> https://design.google/library/designing-google-maps-motorbikes/ <comment><USER2> That's very cool.

One time, I decided to just put the phone in my pocket and take my bike to a location. I had the ear buds in my ears, I thought, voice is enough...

Oh my, was I wrong. I ended up missing most turn off in streets due to latency, some crossings made no sense over audio, a total disaster.

So I got a stand to attach the phone to the handle bars... And that works great, for about 20 mins. I live in Australia and the heat of the sun on the phone + google maps using CPU will literally shut off the phone as it reaches 50C+... The phone just turns off on me as I approach the hard-part of the journey... Superb.

So now I just research it before leaving, mentally map it in my mind, look up street view for turn offs... Then I Yolo it all the way. When I finally admit I'm lost, I pull up, bring out the phone and start google maps then...

<comment><USER3> Years ago before a long motorcycle trip I made a nice setup to use google maps while riding for the trip. A custom mount, ran all the charging cables, NFC tag and tasker profile so it knows when it's mounted.

I used it for 3 days before a guy told me to give old fashioned maps a try, and gave me a few state maps. My tank bag has a nice window slot for them, so why not use it in tandem?

Within 2 hours I had totally stopped paying attention to the gps and just went off the map. The next day I didn't even use the gps at all, and ended up using just maps for next 3 weeks riding around the country.

If the signage is good (in the US it's superb, people just don't pay attention to it/understand it) then I have found a regular old maps to be far superior. You can quickly see all info on the map (no dicking around with zoom/scrolling on the touchscreen) and you can adjust your route very easily on the fly.

Seriously, I cannot recommend paper maps enough. Take some time to understand how to read the map (if you're not sure already) and pay attention to road signs. The two integrate beautifully and make getting around easy. If you have a place to put it on your bike, give it a try.

<comment><USER4> I ride motorcycles in cross-Europe trips for fun but prefer the GPS. My GPS will look for small twisty mountain roads with lots of elevation changes and lots of corners. Roads that are only on highly detailed local maps, and I don't want to carry 30 maps on a month long road trip. Road signage is simply not a thing on these roads as they are only used by locals. I can disable highways, B-roads, toll, ferries and on my roadbikes I will disable gravel sections. It will tell me how many kilometers till the next gas-stations along the trip and warn me about speed traps. Not that I speed on purpose, but sometimes you are a couple of kms above the limit.

Especially on sections where I have to change direction every 300 to 500 meters I don't want to deal with reading a map. Voice navigation in my headset and an occasional quick glance at the screen is much safer than fiddling with a paper map.

<comment><USER5> Can you share what app/device you use that has all of those features like specifically picking out fun roads? I'm not aware of that feature on any major nav app.

<comment><USER6> You can try Kurviger -- it uses OpenStreetMap data and chooses "fun" curving routes using the Graphhopper routing engine.

[https://kurviger.de/en](https://kurviger.de/en)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I use it on my motorcycle in the US, but there are some major pain points.

I have a Bluetooth headset in my helmet, so I can hear the directions... which are usually close enough. But you still do get some occasionally confusing voice prompts that - without the screen to glance at - may lead you to a wrong turn.

I do have a handlebar mount I've resorted to on a few occasions, but as others have noted (a) the phone can overheat, (b) subjecting a $500 device to the vibration and chance of falling is not ideal, and (c) I've had the acceleratorometer actions kick in unexpectedly, leading to the phone battery dying faster since it turned the LED flashlight mode on.

That said, I have only one serious complain - the opt-out-of-route-change that they've made the default is a huge issue, and I really wish there was a setting to disable that. If I've gone in and picked between a few potential routes, having it decide a different one is faster and that I'll need to press a button on screen to stay on my preferred heading ends up leaving me off course and/or on the side of the road digging my phone back out.

(And before someone suggests voice commands to fix it... that's not a workable solution. While the helmet cuts down noise, it doesn't eliminate it, and I have enough problems with voice recognition that I leave it permanently disabled.)

<comment><USER8> I have a lot of the same issues. Bluetooth headset turned up to almost max + foam earplugs works reasonably well, as long as I already have a good idea of where I'm going. Handlebar mounts work fairly well, but putting the phone in the sun in Arizona during the summer often leads to it turning off. There's also quite a few reports of phones either flying off mounts or camera lens/focus dying due to the vibration.

In the end, I normally leave the phone in my pocket, make due with voice alerts, and leave a few minutes early so I can safely miss an exit without panic. The last thing you need on a highway filled with texting drivers (completely legal in AZ) is to be distracted and making multi-lane changes at the last second.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> In North America and Europe, it's common for motorcyclists to quickly layout routes when touring using google maps. They (google) have made a UX that makes it ridiculously easy (as compared to something like Garmins Basecamp -which should be used as shiny example of how not to design an UX) The issue is that you cannot directly save the maps in GPX format to upload to your GPS. So thiers a world of work arounds, some easy, some not, to get a KML file into your GPS.

If it supported GPX natively, you would likely capture the entire North American and European touring market in one fell swoop. I'm guessing you (google) never asked which kind of goes against the entire point of this article

</comment><comment><USER10> What would be cool if there was a very simple low power display bluetooth which just displayed an left/right/upp arrow with a number counting down when to turn or stop.

Phones don't really work mounted on a bike, but a simple display could do the job. Sort of how android watch displays an arrow, but using a low power screen.

<comment><USER11> I feel you - I have tried attaching my android watch to the handlebars and functionality wise it's perfect UI for navigating.

However it takes about 10 seconds for the screen to dim to the monochrome power saver mode and then it's impossible to see anything during daylight.

Android wear does not support a permanently on screen all the time and I would totally buy a cheap device like that just for navigating.

<comment><USER12> How about a Pebble? Always on, sunlight visible, cheap. The company is gone but they still work. This is what you can get for navigation: [https://apps.getpebble.com/en_US/application/530a8f36fc62a5e...](https://apps.getpebble.com/en_US/application/530a8f36fc62a5e01100001c)

<comment><USER13> Pebble was _the_ best. Was fun while it lasted. [*]. I'm counting days until my Pebble Time dies and then I'll be off the smartwatch game until something else pops up that's not just a toy or a fitness tracker.

<comment><USER14> I bought a Pebble Time Round after the company went bust at knock-down price and love it. Just waiting for the app/Appstore to die. Still working OK at the moment, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> IMO, this is one of the applications where AR really shines. Having a HUD in your helmet to show this kind of information would be absolutely amazing. There have been attempts, I know, but it doesn't seem like there's anything really consumer-oriented at this point (Skully, for example, was ridiculously expensive - over $1k for a helmet, IIRC. That's plainly out of the realm of a normal helmet purchase).

<comment><USER16> I'm betting there's a fairly easy way to adapt full head helmets for AR.

<comment><USER15> I've looked into it a bit. I don't think "easy" is the right word here. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I remembered that Google invested in Go-Jek, so with this immersive trip and also with the data collected by Go-Jek drivers all around Indonesia, I think they will be able to provide reliable map service for motorbikes.

I used Motorbikes everyday, while in my city it is quite helpful to have Google Maps, sometimes the map just didnt understand about the rules, that this road is one way, that only cars is allowed.

One bad story that I had with Google Maps while riding a motorbike was, Google map decided to reroute itself without me knowing (phone is in my pocket, I only listened the navigation aid), I ended up circling the city back because Google Maps decided that it is the best way to get to my destination. I wasted an hour circling the city before I noticed I was heading back to the direction where I came fron and stopped to check the Google Maps app and noticed it routing me through another routes.

</comment><comment><USER18> And no mention of a high-contrast display mode. Seems like such low-hanging fruit to have a black-and-white mode which would help make the map more legible in direct sunlight, with much larger navigation cues.

</comment><comment><USER19> The public transportation and cycling options will become even more hidden in the app with this addition.

How can Google Maps continue defaulting to car and Uber when asks for directions in ultra-dense cities with great public and cycling infrastructure (like Paris), while Google pretends helping the environment?

Even when the subway directions are 10x cheaper and faster, Google Maps keeps highlighting car directions. Maybe the referral fee that Google gets from Uber (and other "partners") explains it.

<comment><USER20> Actually, Gmaps seems normally fairly decent for cycling, which was my main method of transport.

Only thing is, there are tons of cool cycle routes around, and I'd like to say I prefer those. It needs some safety/effort-based preferences for routing. Like, I'd prefer to ride 2 or 3km more, if it's on a dedicated bike path, rather than ride direct to my destination on busy traffic roads.

<comment><USER21> Especially because momentum is not nearly as free on a bike than on something with a somewhat powerful motor. You can go faster if you don't need to accelerate as much (due to breaking or inclination). I would like a sort of flywheel or so, something able to store energy for a few minutes and dump it about as fast as the traction allows. Even if it has to be manually switched between slow and fast acceleration based on whether conditions with a tool, that'd be fine. And then just give me something for my thumb to work or so that either uses the same setting to decide the breaking force, or allow full control over it. It shouldn't be too hard to do.

And no, an electric motor won't cut it, due to power density. I don't want it to be limited to 500 W or so, I want it to have more than that. And mechanics have much more power density than electromagnetics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Could Google Maps for Motorbikes be configured to route noisy motorbikes away from residential streets? Especially late at night when I'm trying to sleep!

<comment><USER23> There's a common belief among motorcyclists that having loud exhausts help alert other car drivers of their presence, making them more visible on the roads. There are various arguments in favor and against that notion, but if it's getting you to notice them I guess it is better than nothing.

<comment><USER24> I never believed that. I was an avid motorcyclists for decades and spent lots of time around riders of loud pipe bikes. If safety was what drove them to straight pipes, then I would expect those concerns to carry through with the rest of their gear.

<comment><USER22> I read somewhere that statistics actually suggest the opposite - that bikes with loud pipes are more likely to suffer a serious accidents and injury. I suspect that's because the type of bikers that have loud pipes are also the ones riding aggressively, overtaking frequently, weaving between traffic lanes, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Riding in the Netherlands with google maps and a scalaG9x and a android phone in the pocket works pretty okey. The few issues i have is bluetooth not being on continuesly, so as the phone starts giving a new direction, i might miss the first few words, but as i get closer to the exit and the second or third remind goes off, i tend to hear the full message. I am using english phone settings and language settings, and this unfortuatly means that every streetname in Dutch are pronounced in English, which give it a comic tone that sometimes takes a second to wrap my brain around. Other than this, traffic redirects due to congestion works like a charm. I also own a Garmin Zumo 220 which i had mounted on next to the speedo, but since you have to pay for updated maps after a year, this device is now collecting dust in favor of Google.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, having those Dutch street names pronounced in English is so confusing and funny! It would be perfect if you could use your phone in English, but use your local language for navigation. Still haven't found a way to achieve this on my Android phone though :(

<comment><USER27> The App Settings xposed module allows you to change locale (among other settings) per app. I use it to keep Google Maps and Here Maps in Greek while my device locale is English.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> When do I get to use this?! At the moment I'm just "avoiding highways" on my scooter in Austin. Would be cool to see how this translates in the US

</comment><comment><USER29> Who at Google is doing this work for manual and motorized wheelchairs and mobility scooters? Those all require different way finding I hear Brett Heising of brettapproved may be available..

</comment><comment><USER30> I had been riding a lot in mountains in North of Thailand and generally in SE Asia. Mostly small country roads.

Google Maps and also Apple Maps is impossible to use in bright sun when you just stop to check the map and have your rainbans on. The road is beige on dark yellow - the color palette is just wrong and impossible to adjust.

</comment><comment><USER31> Will google maps route the bike riders through their already current de-facto routes such as pedestrian footpaths and other such lanes that are completely abused by motorcyclists?

Slightly off tangent but having been to Jakarta (never again, what an absolutely disgusting slum of a city) the traffic in that city is probably the worst ever (maybe Indian traffic can have it beat)

Even more off tangent but it's crazy how illogical some places can be (from my perspective). In Jakarta all addresses are more or less useless since the house/street numbers are in completely random order (the order they're built I guess) so you have no idea where some building with some particular number resides on a road/street relative to some other building.

Finally a tip to a fellow traveller, if you're asking for a taxi and give them the address and the driver goes to the other drivers to ask about its location the chances are he doesn't have a clue but he'll be very happy to take you for random spin and ask you for money.

<comment><USER32> My hierarchy of travel is uber, hitchhiking, and then if I am absolutely desperate taking a taxi.</comment></comment>


Nobel Prize: Lithium Ion Battery Creators Led a Revolution - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-11/nobel-prize-lithium-ion-battery-creators-led-a-revolution <comment><USER2> There was a lot of hope in the '00's that we'd see another revolution from LIon the way we did from NiMH and NiCD before that, but it just never happened.

Everyone was projecting out electric cars and busses and planes and such based on a similar uptick.

Although, if we're really honest, there's a kind of Moore's Law of battery improvement and it's something like 6% a year, so that's a doubling every 12 years. Every new tech that swamps that performance curve also has extremely high manufacturing costs, poor yields, or both. You could almost predict when (if ever) they would become commercially viable by figuring out where the price/performance lines crossed. If anyone tried to accelerate that crossover point they did it by reducing the performance of the product to make it cheaper to build or more reliable.

For example, thicker membranes reduce specific energy but might be easier or safer to build.

<comment><USER3> Yeah maybe chemical batteries are nearing their limit in terms of technology, at least, the classical concept of the battery; Or maybe we'll discover some new element or something. Who knows;

<comment><USER4> What is the limit? I've heard a ton of different opinions on what it might be.

<comment><USER2> I stopped doing any reading in this space when I stopped trying to invest in any power storage tech, but this is what I recall:

Supercapacitors store electrons directly instead of chemical reactions. They have much much lower capacities at present (per unit volume for certain, per kg is a narrower margin), but you can pump and drain them quickly without damaging them, and hundreds to thousands of times as frequently. But we construct these materials using chemical reactions, so they are far away from their theoretical limits.

Every few years lately, someone tries to blur the lines between battery and capacitor by working on chemistries that can also store electrons. What I can't recall is the degree to which any of those bested LIon in bench-top tests.

What I wonder is if lithography will ever enter into this, how many more features per mm^2 the equipment would have to create to make an equivalent material, and how much cheaper they'd have to get per feature before it were financially feasible.

[Edit to add:] I completely spaced on the fact that people are experimenting with graphene to build supercaps, so we may get closer to that limit relatively sooner than later. Since many commercial supecaps are essentially doped charcoal, this isn't the graphene bandwagon it first might seem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://web.archive.org/web/20191012004755/https://www.bloom...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191012004755/https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-11/nobel- prize-lithium-ion-battery-creators-led-a-revolution)</comment>


The US government was spying on Assange 24/7 - <AUTHOR> https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/09/25/inenglish/1569384196_652151.html?__twitter_impression=true <comment><USER2> These operatives, without diplomatic protection from the USA, will probably go to jail for life.

</comment><comment><USER2> The US government was a fool for thinking it wouldn't get caught.

If a super privacy consious guy is locked in a room for years, and someone wants to deliver a new fire extinguisher, he is sure to check it out in a lot of detail!

</comment><comment><USER2> The stickers on the window were probably actually to _prevent_ spying by other people.

The embassy faces a public street, and anyone could have reflected a laser beam off a window.

</comment><comment><USER3> Isn't surveilling known spies and foreign agents like Assange within the purview of US intelligence activity?</comment>


Apple buys UK-based speech technology startup VocalIQ - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/7146cec2-6920-11e5-a155-02b6f8af6a62.html <comment><USER2> This is an early video of VocalIQ's system (2010) for people interested: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NwuqjUZalU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NwuqjUZalU)

<comment><USER3> This is also an interesting and a much more recent video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XX4wlMQAK8o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XX4wlMQAK8o)

>Blaise Thomson speaking at Playfair Capital's Machine Intelligence 2015 in London.

>Blaise is co-founder and CEO of VocalIQ, the world's first self-learning dialogue API, putting real, natural conversation between people and their devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Paywall. Here's a re/code link:

[http://recode.net/2015/10/02/apple-acquires-u-k-based- speech...](http://recode.net/2015/10/02/apple-acquires-u-k-based-speech- technology-startup-vocaliq/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Another paywall workaround is to use/spoof Google search as your referrer.

In Chrome, for example, install the "Referer Control" extension and add an entry for "ft.com", select the "Custom" referer setting, and paste "[https://www.google.com/"](https://www.google.com/") (without quotes) into the textbox for that entry.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why didn't Google buy them first ? does Google has something similar , externally or in research ?

</comment><comment><USER7> This article is behind a paywall.

<comment><USER8> [https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB4QqQIwAGoVChMIpLKj2NmkyAIVkTWICh35CQRN&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2F7146cec2-6920-11e5-a155-02b6f8af6a62.html&usg=AFQjCNHBTue7qQ6YWz- tSOsnTiILjFPSUA&bvm=bv.104317490,d.cGU)

<comment><USER9> That's behind a paywall, too.

<comment><USER8> Is it for you, or just a quizwall? :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


One Lean Startup Experiment per Week by TriKro - <AUTHOR> https://grasshopperherder.com/one-lean-startup-experiment-per-week/ <comment><USER2> This would be a lot more interesting if the author discussed what he learned from customers, rather than going on about avoiding empty metrics in an article focused on an empty metric.</comment>


Ask HN: Should I focus on one or multiple languages? - <AUTHOR> Should I focus on one language and become really good at it or work in multiple languages and stay mediocre? I am full-stack engineer working in Java/JavaScript but I mostly just make changes to an existing large monolithic codebase. I feel like I am not doing much designing and not really learning a lot. <comment><USER2> > Should I focus on one language and become really good at it or work in > multiple languages and stay mediocre?

Both.

Master one, but learn enough to be able get around with the others. Also, learn _the language_ , not just the tools or the new and shiny things. Tools and frameworks come and go, but the language itself will always progress.

> I feel like I am not doing much designing and not really learning a lot.

Work-related code, especially the monolithic, enterprise-y variants, isn't the best place to try something new. Try contributing to open-source projects. They're always in need of additional hands and move relatively fast enough that new stuff comes out regularly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, both great points!</comment></comment>


Russians Cling To Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94545608

<comment><AUTHOR> "Ms. VALENTINA COSTINA: (Through translator) We are forced to be Ukrainian. I haven't learned the language and I don't want to. I am a Russian. Maybe Russia will take us back somehow."</comment>


Linux creator says Windows, OS X, iOS and Android are all malware - <AUTHOR> https://bgr.com/2015/05/26/ios-android-windows-mac-malware/

<comment><USER2> Calling Stallman "Linux creator" is quite an achievement in ignorance when he explicitly refers to the os as "GNU/Linux" to give GNU credit.

<comment><USER3> Agree. This is the original title, but a better title is "Stallman says Windows, OS X, iOS and Android are all malware"

Also, the article is just a few quotes of The Guardian's article that was submitted a few days ago without too much discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9591059](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9591059) (12 points, 3 days ago, 2 comments )</comment></comment>


Bank That Froze Julian Assange's Bank Account Has Now Been Taken Down By Hackers - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/the-bank-that-froze-julian-assanges-bank-account-has-now-been-taken-down-by-hackers-2010-12 <comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1977647>

</comment><comment><USER3> this is the doing of 4chan, right?</comment>


Ask HN: We're building a visual builder for cloud platforms - <AUTHOR> Hello, my friend and I have been building a visual builder for AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. Think Webflow for AWS. We would like to know whether you'd be interested in such a service?
Take a look at our landing page - https://codelines.dev
With our tool, you'd be able to connect different resources (e.g.: database, cloud functions, storage) on a graphical canvas. Then configure each resource to behave in some predefined way. For example, cloud function can expose its HTTPS endpoint, crop uploaded image and then save it into the storage for the given user.
The way we came to this idea was that we have been creating different projects for the last ~2 months. We noticed that every time we were building almost identical backend solutions with Google Cloud platform. And we were spending literally days building these solutions. <comment><USER2> This is interesting, thanks. I've got a similar side project that involves a TUI ncurses menu to choose and input values which are used to spin up QEMU\KVM instances without using libvert et al.</comment>


Companies worry more about access to software developers than capital - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/06/companies-worry-more-about-access-to-software-developers-than-capital.html <comment><USER3> Curious how articles like these almost never give the most obvious advice to businesses, which is: pay developers more.

Instead, this article for instance advises employers to "increase developer productivity" and "outsource":

> If developers are your company's most constraining resource, the key > question is how to increase their productivity.

"Increasing productivity" typically puts pressure on developers. This is quite surprising: developers are seen as a scarce valuable resource, and in a free market that means they should be rewarded for their rare and hard-won skillset. Instead, the universal advice is to pressure them to be more productive, outsource them, etc.

<comment><USER4> That would work for a single company, but not necessarily the market as a whole... paying developers more wont suddenly add a bunch of skilled developers into the market.

<comment><USER5> Won't it?

There's a whole bunch of smart people right now who won't go into tech because they can make more elsewhere.

Another example is senior engineers who retire because their investment portfolio is large enough, and they don't feel like working hard for another year just to make another $150k. If it was $400k, they might stay. These are the engineers who are the most scarce and at the greatest demand right now.

Another example is turnover. Engineers currently have to job hop every couple of years to get a decent raise. That leads to more waste of engineer time and effort than any single management improvement that can possibly be implemented.

These are just 3 examples off the top of my head.

In every other field, it is obvious that more pay == more and better candidates. Yet somehow engineers are the single exception?

Against any sensible market theory?

<comment><USER6> Other fields also pay well and can draw top talent away from software engineering. Take a look at "US News Best Jobs" and drill down by salary in top paying regions for each job. The information is a roundup of BLS data.

[https://money.usnews.com/careers/best- jobs/rankings/the-100-...](https://money.usnews.com/careers/best- jobs/rankings/the-100-best-jobs)

Some examples:

The top paying market for software developers (the #1 job, apparently) is San Jose, at $133k a year median pay.

Here's the top pay/region for the next few jobs:

#2 Dentist, Peabody MA, $285k/year #3 Physician Asst, Yuba City, $149k/yr (and $138k a year in Santa Rosa CA) #4 Nurse Practitioner, $180k/Yr in Altoona PA ($158k/yr in San Francisco, CA).

A bit further down the list, a registered nurse (#18) earns a median of $138k/yr in San Francisco, CA. Lawyers (#33) make a median of $193k/yr in San Jose (top market)

I think national pay for software developers may be skewed by how many of them work in the valley. When you compare them to what other well educated and skilled professionals earn in those markets, you'll see that their compensation is ok, but nothing notable. There are lots and lots and lots of jobs that pay better, and may offer more fulfilling work.

My point isn't that software developers deserve to make more money. Maybe the deserve to be paid less because their work matters less, but that's hardly a selling point. It's never an apples-to-apples comparison.

But overall, I'd say the market is working just fine. There's no "shortage" of software developers, any more than there's a shortage of any other skilled professional in a high cost area. IN fact, there are probably considerably more software developers at the current price point, because of 1) government and industry PR programs designed to convince young people that they are desperately needed in software, and 2) work visa programs that put Silicon Valley companies in control of who is allowed to work in the US and the conditions under which they are allowed to remain.

In fact, I'd say as long as non-market mechanisms (such as visa programs that allow Facebook to decide that immigrants should be engineers but not florists) are used to suppress wages, we should expect an almost permanent "shortage", as people who have the freedom to be florists (or anything else they might wish to pursue as free people) go into fields where wages and working conditions don't reflect the negotiation power of people who can be deported if they lose their jobs.

<comment><USER7> So where does the idea that developers are highly paid come from? I think it's because very young people can get a six figure job right out of school, or even without a degree. That's pretty rare.

But then it turns out that compensation doesn't scale with experience as quickly as in other fields, and that a lot of people have to switch to management to progress in their careers, so the overall median across all experience levels ends up seeming low.

In general, software development seems like a really good field to get into, but a mediocre one to be in for the long haul.

This same phenomenon underlies our perennial debate about interviewing: it's actually great that you can get an amazing job just by doing some artificial programming puzzles on a whiteboard, but it sucks that after ten years building expertise, with a long string of successful projects under your belt, you have to do artificial programming puzzles on a whiteboard to get a job.

The other fields you mention have the opposite setup. It's quite hard to become a nurse practitioner, but once you're certified, employers pay well and don't constantly question your basic level of competence.

<comment><USER5> > I think it's because very young people can get a six figure job right out of > school, or even without a degree.

DING DING DING!

It was a clever scheme, and it even worked for a while.

"We need a lot of people to study CS, but we don't really want to pay them so much and cut into our fat bonuses. Whatever shall we do?! Oh, let's offer eye- popping entry-level salaries, that will get them to choose the CS major and learn to program. Once they do, they're committed, so we can just freeze their wages indefinitely. What are they going to do, go to medical school at 35?!"

> it sucks that after ten years building expertise, with a long string of > successful projects under your belt, you have to do artificial programming > puzzles on a whiteboard to get a job.

That's an artifact of the unfortunate fact that references are worse than useless in the US.

There's no real way for a new employer to objectively tell how well you performed on a particular project in the past.

Casual references don't work and are typically misleading.

I'll give you an example.

One startup I worked with had two very different developers.

One guy was totally incompetent. Multiple years of "senior" experience on his resume, but couldn't complete a single feature.

However, he was great at socializing, so when he got kicked out, several developers were happy to get on the phone and tell prospective employers how great he was.

Another guy was quiet, socially awkward, and introverted. However, he was among the top 2-3 programmers on the team. Completed some of the most critical parts of the project.

I guarantee that he had a lot more difficulty getting any references. In fact, I guarantee the first guy had a much easier time getting his next job.

Most employers who just speak to both and check references would get the highly inaccurate picture that the first guy was far more crucial and competent than the 2nd.

<comment><USER6> That's true. Is the cost of firing really that high, though? And how good are the tech tests at determining that a software developer will be good at working on a product? It seems to me that you could be great at printing all paths in a linked list of numbers that sum to to sum of a different path in a binary tree, but really not all that good at working on a product.

I know that many companies are so concerned about false positives (hire a bad developer) that they are willing to tolerate a high incidence of false negatives (fail to hire a good developer). That's an odd position for an industry claiming a severe shortage of talent, but there's also a strong case that if you allow too high a rate of false negatives, you can make it so hard to hire a good developer that you end up hiring a bad one. In short, it's more likely that one bad developer will slip through the cracks than a good developer will make it through, if the good developers are a small percentage of the hiring pool and the false negative rate is very high.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Story is a writeup of [https://stripe.com/reports/developer- coefficient-2018](https://stripe.com/reports/developer-coefficient-2018) discussed at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17928067](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17928067)

There's actually very little difference in the surveyed % saying [https://stripe.com/files/reports/the-developer- coefficient.p...](https://stripe.com/files/reports/the-developer- coefficient.pdf#page=3) access to talent (55%), software engineers (53%), and capital (52%). Note immigration requirements (47%) is lowest of the constraints on company growth asked about. I'd say the headline is questionable at best.

</comment><comment><USER9> Developers as a community are currently screaming about a number of things companies can do to steal us away, even for less money:

\- Go full remote

\- Locate offices in reasonable COL US markets (my company has overwhelmingly rejected this one and skipped from NY/SF/Seattle to the developing world).

\- Provide private offices, cubes, team rooms... any kind of workspace other than the in-vogue open floorplan barn.

Companies are _not in their wildest dreams_ going to touch any of those things with a 10-foot pole at scale. Do they not know? Do they think we're lying? Or would they just rather complain than actually solve the problem?

<comment><USER10> In the words of one manager: "I don't believe people are working if I can't see them working"

In the words of another: "Remote means you aren't interested in advancing inside the organization"

<comment><USER11> > Remote means you aren't interested in advancing inside the organization

Do they really want the work done, or do they want to actively encourage inter-office politicking? Not everyone wants to advance, and even in places I've worked where I've _wanted_ to advance, it was made pretty clear that nothing was going to be happening on my time schedule (too many other people who'd "paid their dues" ahead of me already). So... wow - I _was_ interested in 'advancing' but they weren't interested in me advancing. Would have been easier if we'd just... focused on the work, no?

<comment><USER12> One of the biggest lies we tell ourselves is our code will speak for itself. Whether you like it or not, politics is part of work. It's absolutely required for intra-department projects and sometimes even single-department projects, especially in big companies.

<comment><USER11> there's the politics of 'getting ahead' and work for the promotion that "everyone" is after. then there's the politics of ... getting along with coworkers and getting projects done (time mgt, priorities, etc). To me, they're different, and I was speaking mostly of the former.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I saw this headline earlier. My immediate thought was that this doesn't necessarily mean that companies understand the importance of developers. It's just that developers are currently more scarce than capital. Which isn't saying much, because companies have been able to get loans with low interest for many years now, thanks to our central banks.

</comment><comment><USER14> If what the article says is true, it's great that executives are starting to understand the opportunity cost of technical debt.

Too many companies see software development as a menial "cost center" while hypocritically relying on it on a fundamental level for operations.

While I see where they're coming from - the ROI from software developers can be rather opaque for many industries - these companies are often hellbent on hiring as cheaply as possible (in-house junior developers with no experience) and cutting as many corners as they can get away with, all the while accruing massive amounts of technical debt.

<comment><USER5> > If what the article says is true, it's great that executives are starting to > understand the opportunity cost of technical debt.

Nothing in the article implies tat "executives" (or anyone) has gained a better understanding of the cost of technical debt.

This is the main paragraph talking about technical debt:

> And yet, despite being many corporations' most precious resource, developer > talents are all too often squandered. Collectively, companies today lose > upward of $300 billion a year paying down "technical debt," as developers > pour time into maintaining legacy systems or dealing with the ramifications > of bad software.

So the article author says that despite the skyrocketing value of developers, companies generally waste this scarce resource on technical debt and related mismanagement inefficiencies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The world is awash in usable money.

The world is not awash in usable software engineers.

</comment><comment><USER16> As is common, Joel said it all back in 2000:

Whaddaya Mean, You Can't Find Programmers? [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/06/15/whaddaya-mean- you-...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/06/15/whaddaya-mean-you-cant- find-programmers/)

(Repost from five years ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6454140#6455545](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6454140#6455545))

<comment><USER17> I went through a few interviews earlier this year and no one met the standards for environment Joel listed almost 20 years ago. Unless one works from home, that requirement listed is pretty much a lost cause AFAIK.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm afraid I don't agree. I'm more worrying about my job than the companies about anything.

If lose it, I will spend months for finding a new one.

I will send emails with no response.

I will be offered to spend enormous time for multilevel recruitment process, just to be rejected at the end.

I will spend hours making shitty take-home tasks, just to be rejected. Some companies even don't check them when I upload it on a server.

I will be asked terribly complicated white-board questions about forgotten algorithms used in no place. All that just to be offered a job about coding ETLs or adding some Javascript to a website.

All just to get a simple job. It doesn't look like companies are afraid. It rather looks like companies have endless stream of candidates and want to crawl them first, so they could not hire them later.

My last job hunt: 55 resumes sent (I was a perfect fit for 15 positions, not 100% for the rest). 10 companies responded. 5 were interested only about the salary, 4 of them didn't respond, 1 responded with "you wanted too much, we are not negotiating salaries". 2 terribly complicated take-home things (one company didn't event check it before rejecting me). Just 1 job offer, I took it, as I didn't get any other option after 3 months of searching.

It was 2 years ago. I'm looking for a job again... I've sent 20 resumes. Got no answer.

All 55 companies were posting the same job ads for the next months. About 5 of them are doing all the time, and the web is full of opinions how great the companies are.

So generally I feel like I'm rather useless than needed for the companies.

Writing anonymously here is cool :)

<comment><USER19> Yeah, I keep reading about the software developer shortage "crisis", but nothing about the real world seems to reflect it. There's a shortage of the top 1% of software developers ("top" being defined by where you went to college and where else you've worked, not actual programming ability) - <USER2> that's it.

<comment><USER20> I think I might just try to get into a different field. I'm a "recent" grad yet to get my foot in the door, and I'm pretty sure I'm capable of programming... just not of navigating the absurd requirements at every corner and apparent dearth of entry-level openings.

Maybe I'm just underqualified and not that good at all, maybe I'm doing something wrong in my search or I need to move to the valley or something. But thus far all my applications have been a complete waste of time and it seems foolish to continue down this path.

<comment><USER21> There are ways around this. Triplebyte and codefights are good options and finding a recruiter to refer you tends to improve the success rate (you can email me if you need help with any of this).

<comment><USER22> Where can I email you? If you're open to helping others, that is. No email listed in your profile

<comment><USER21> Ah, forgot that it doesn't list the email on the profile. I updated my about page and it should have it now.

Yeah, I'm happy to help everyone!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> If this is _actually_ true, it is easily provable: if companies have more access to capital than developers, then they should pay more to hire better developers, and you should see developer salaries rise. If this does _not_ happen, it just means they are bullshitting: they can't get developers at the current price they are willing to pay.

<comment><USER24> I know engineers at Facebook and Netflix making $500-750k/yr. Does that count?

<comment><USER25> No, because the article is about a survey of executives.

<comment><USER24> The parent comment said, "If it's true that programmers are an undervalued resource then some will be highly paid."

There are many that are highly paid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If the premise of this article is true, we're doing a terrible job organizing ourselves. Individual offices, remote work, ownership of things we make in our free time -- we could have all of this if we used our power effectively.

<comment><USER27> Yes, software engineers are terrible negotiators.

<comment><USER28> Software engineers allowed themselves to be categorised as a cost centre rather than a revenue generating asset.

Costs are to be minimised while those preceived as adding value like sales, marketing, c-level execs get paid accordingly.

In industries that are unionised, collective action gives you the leverage and backup to say enough - but we don't even have an industry body that requires membership like the IEEE or AMA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Companies that complain about lack of talent are generally the ones that refuse to pay competitive salaries. These are also the same ones that want the government to increase visa limitations and import cheaper engineers from overseas.

If there was a true talent shortage you'd see increases in salaries and other methods of compensation.

<comment><USER30> To be fair, competitive salaries are almost absurdly high nowadays.

<comment><USER29> Competitive salaries are just that, competitive. There's no concept of "too high" or "too low", just what the market accepts and will pay for.

Companies love the free market when it benefits them and hate it when it benefits skilled workers.

<comment><USER30> >There's no concept of "too high" or "too low"

Did I say so? I'm not saying it's _too_ high. I'm saying it's absurdly high. If I was saying it was too high I would be arguing that it should be lowered which I obviously would not want.

<comment><USER31> I think most people would interpret "too high" and "absurdly high" to mean reasonably close to the same thing.

That's probably why you're getting downvotes.

<comment><USER30> I mean, I don't think my statement is in any way inaccurate. It's kind of absurd that you can get a job that pays $200k+ total compensation your first year out of college with only a bachelors degree. Some people within the field don't even believe it's possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Not surprising.

Software developers are one of the ultimate forms of throughput multipliers. Get the pixies in the box dancing right, and BOOM! Personnel load decreased!

In a world being driven toward hyperoptimization as fast as she'll go, your developer is your growth source.

If only you could get them to do what you want...

Which is why they like pulling developers from countries where the cultural norm is to shut up and do what you're told as I understand it.

It's also part of the bias towards preferring younger devs. Younger devs tend to be more pliable and "flexible" and don't ask inconvenient questions in emails that can be subpoena'd later.

Always ask questions. YOU have to be the conscience of the industry, if you don"t, no one else will. And even if they do have "another guy" lined up. Be vocal. Make sure your view can't be buried. If it smells, ASK and DIG. Someone very well may not be telling you something.

</comment><comment> village-idiot I mean, all those companies buying back stock could just re-issue it if they need more capital. Creating developers is a significantly slower process.

</comment><comment><USER33> > Collectively, companies today lose upward of $300 billion a year paying down > "technical debt," as developers pour time into maintaining legacy systems or > dealing with the ramifications of bad software.

As a person who had looked intensively for a job in Central Europe in the recent months I can confirm this. Plenty of awful software and stacks. Decade old monoliths in ASP .NET, Visual Basic, pyramidal monstrosities in JAVA, fucking COBOL transactional and registering systems. The only reason they "maintain" these projects is some legal obligation, once the obligation expires the project will be shut down and people will have to look for a job in the year 2020 having experience with Visual Basic. You will have "standups" with "American colleagues" at 7pm your time. It's literally working on carcasses. Good portion of German and Swiss businesses pushing out their rotten carasses over here as well.

</comment><comment><USER34> There was a discussion about the Stripe report itself a few days ago: [https://stripe.com/reports/developer- coefficient-2018](https://stripe.com/reports/developer-coefficient-2018)

<comment><USER35> OP's post and this seem to be telling executives to avoid fixing technical debt. Am I the only one who's reading it that way? Having worked at a company that completely eschewed even fixing basic formatting of legacy code for ten+ years I've seen how this mindset can completely hinder the development process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> As a software engineer with more than a decade of experience I have seen all kind of appalling "management" strategies in a variety of industries. And not so surprisingly the common denominator was that managers in every industry simply cultivate "speed over everything else" culture. Which directly translates into technical debt.

I stopped counting how many "rockstar developers" I have seen rising in their shiny armors, outputting some crap extremely quickly just to see them sailing away with a friendly manager pat on their back, so that half year later a whole team would clean up the mess after them.

</comment><comment><USER37> What usually happens though is that the wrong kind of developers get promoted. They get promoted based on their social skills and ability to sound smart instead of actual technical ability and actual intelligence.

</comment><comment><USER38> I currently make about 24k a year as a part time engineer (which should go up to around 40k if I go full time for this company).

I stay because of other benefits (good health care in Japan, remote work with bimonthly meetings, and most importantly I am doing good work with data that helps people in some way).

I honestly don't think high pay is out there for what I want from a company. This one I work in checks all the boxes, for me. But if I pursue more money, I'd probably be stuck working in some crappy conpany where I'm a number.

<comment><USER39> You said it torgian; I'm looking for a company with Emotional Agility operating according to The Startup Way where people treat each other humanely and perks don't masquerade as strategy. I'd care to know more about your job in Japan if you would be willing to share

<comment><USER40> We should chat. Or you should check out weworkremotely.com.

These companies do exist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Developers and capital are partial substitutes for each other: [https://twitter.com/indy_johar/status/662678550911303680](https://twitter.com/indy_johar/status/662678550911303680)

</comment><comment><USER42> One could establish development offices in places with low taxes compared to California, Seattle, or NYC, saving them significant amounts of $ to avoid salary bloat. Why no one is negotiating on the sorts of deals with city planners surprises me.

</comment><comment><USER43> As some stated in comments, it depends on many factors but mainly some companies mainly startups with good funding starting offering higher than market rate salaries which attract talent not just for money but also for the opportunity to make an impact and definitely fewer legacy systems comparing to well-established companies.

<comment><USER44> That was an incredible run on sentence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Strange.

"A majority of companies say lack of access to software developers is a bigger threat to success than lack of access to capital."

Capital gives access to software developers but software developers don't necessarily give access to capital.

Mr. Will Gaybrick doesn't seem to get his causality right.

"Tech's ultimate success: Software developers are now more valuable to companies than money"

That's just stupid.

"2\. Outsource. Fully embrace the cloud. Not just for storage and compute but for every business function that's not unique to your business"

Custom tooling is one of the most valuable part of having in-house programmers.

It's interesting to read the thoughts of these suits. It explains so much of my everyday troubles at work.

<comment><USER46> I agree, I thought the piece was very odd.

 _" If you're considering buy vs. build, the answer is simple: buy."_

If you're not going to write or implement anything more advanced than "glue these two off-the-shelf systems we bought a year ago together", why are you so concerned about access to software developers?

<comment><USER14> There's a few reasons why: many businesses are in geographic locations where there's not as much software presence, they don't know how to hire correctly, and they don't want to swallow the bitter pill of "software developers cost significantly more than minimum-wage employees".

I've worked with a company where developers were hired to "glue these two off- the-shelf systems we bought a year ago together", but the implementation was laughably poor. From talking to this specific company's executives, I found that they were confused as to why things were always behind or why they were running into so many bugs. They told me that they were having difficulty accessing software engineers and that there was a market shortage.

What they didn't tell me was that their current "software developers" were ex- military operations folks with no actual dev experience, and that they posted on Indeed/LinkedIn but wanted local talent (in NC, not the Bay Area) and only offered $50k/yr salary with no real benefits.

Wanting only local talent (instead of remote) already reduced their available developer pool by 99%, and the terrible salary put the nail in the coffin. But to company executives, all of this only proved that they lacked access to software developers.

<comment> village-idiot Most of the time when business executives talk about "lack of available talent", they usually mean "lack of talent at the price I'm willing to pay".

Everyone's a free market enthusiast until the market says they have to pay more, it turns out.

<comment><USER47> At current prices it's entirely possible that some software businesses are not viable. Saying that out loud (or even admitting it to yourself) is not a great look.

Further, the software industry is such that failures are more common to successes when it comes to software projects. I suspect if that ratio got better or predictability did, we'd see wages rise even more (at least for those predictably successful devs). As it stands you can throw all of the money at the software hiring problem and still be making a terrible gamble on whether you'll get software out of it.

<comment> village-idiot The first point is possible, but given an era of super low taxes and massive stock buybacks, I doubt that many of these places can't afford developers, I bet they just would prefer to use that money elsewhere.

I think your latter point is much closer to the mark.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> > _Unless you 're Amazon or Microsoft, you shouldn't be deploying engineers to > build data centers._

i wonder if the author has heard of Google

> _Including software developers directly in strategic business decisions will > ensure you have the right product road map, the right team and ultimately > the right technology strategy for long-term success_

I would agree that including software developers is necessary -- but is it sufficient? The business and technology landscape are always changing in unpredictable ways. I question whether this can _ensure_ "long-term success"</comment>