As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/26/as-bitcoin-sinks-industry-startups-are-forced-to-cut-back/ <comment><USER2> The most remarkable thing about BTC is diffusion of responsibility. If it was issued and marketed by a single entity the participants would be in hot water by now for violating the Securities and Exchange laws. However here we had one non-affiliated group of bigger miners issuing the coins and another group of volunteer enthusiasts hyping them up. Since the second group was not hired by the first, the first group cannot be held accountable, while the second group has agents too numerous and too small to go after.

This is similar to the housing bubble, where the industry collectively hyped up the "investment" promising huge returns, yet no one was to blame when the music stopped.

Watch out for mo ways to diffuse responsibility, that's where "action" will be. Maybe we can nip it in the bud sooner if all keep an eye out.

<comment><USER3> Preston Byrne pointed out since there is no pyramid, this can't be called a Ponzi scheme. It deserves a new name, the "Nakamoto scheme":

[https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin_ponzi/](https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin_ponzi/)

<comment><USER4> "Scheme" implies a unified/central schemer, though. We can already call it a fad, or a mania (a la tulip mania).

<comment><USER5> It certainly does seem to be a "scheme" but I wonder how it compares to other fiat or gold currency when looked at through a "scheme" lens.

<comment><USER6> Fiat currency generally has some military, militia, or at least a police force and a tax payable in that currency. Gold is somewhat similar historically, though has been abandoned for that purpose in recent decades.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 2018 is the year that we learned that complex social problems can not be solved by technology. From the political weaponization of social media to the collapse of the ICO market we've seen that the techno-utopian dream is largely just that, a dream. Social change takes hard work and the slow building of consensus, not just clever code. We have seen, however, that we can do a lot of damage to the social fabric with poorly thought out technology so I think the era of the unregulated internet is sadly coming to a close. We really have nobody to blame but ourselves.

The next generation of internet startups is going to have to be a lot more savvy about how technology interacts with society.

<comment><USER8> I think that the biggest issue is frankly bullshit. Bullshit in the sense of complete lack of sensitivity to the truth so long as it leads to the outcome they want. Technology isn't at fault here but bullshit is on so many levels it isn't funny.

The stupid internet rumors and social media manipulation? Bullshit because they want to influence people - they don't care if it is true or not. Company valuations? They don't care if it is productive or useful - they just want it to make money which leads to the new Tulip craze. Security theater and claims that they need to spy on everything? Bullshit to justify their positions and cover their asses. It isn't a technology - it is the social black art old as dirt that keeps being used. It causes problems everywhere because it exists on a nearly fractal level.

We see plenty of people blaming tech companies for their problems and calling for regulations? Do they care if it is true or have any idea for specific regulations in mind? And the few that are trotted out turn out to be trivially unworkable or contrary to the given purpose on so many levels like encryption bans. Because it is all bullshit - what they want is to protect their own vested interests and they don't want the truth in the same building of a skyscrapper, much less the same room because they will lose in a discussion of facts.

I would be very skeptical of anyone who claims that we need regulation on the internet - because so far all of the pushers are shoveling more bullshit.

<comment> Joe-Z Indeed. I found GP's comment quite insightful until it suddenly called for regulation on the internet.

Why would that change anything when we just established that not the technology but learned behaviours are the problem?

Maybe 2018 was the year that showed us that we finally need to come to terms with the fact that - yes - there are enough resources for everybody and the people who control the bulk of them still want to treat you as a dumb cog in a machine and we need to cut through all the layers of bullshit they are throwing at us.

<comment><USER7> To be clear - I'd prefer _not_ to see a new wave of regulation online. I'd much rather see the tech industry clean up its own house and fix its own problems. But since the big companies still seem to be dragging their feet on this after all that's happened I'm pretty sure we're about to get dragged kicking and screaming into the sausage factory that is government regulation.

<comment><USER9> The market hates regulation but will happily sell you HIV infected blood, then, when they get regulated they cry bloody murder.

And of course regulatory capture is an issue as well.

It is a hard problem because we're dealing with psychopaths.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What puzzled me is how comes blockchain startups did not sell their crypto for fiat just after their ICOs.

I recommended this to several of my blockchain customers but none of them listened. I dont know if that was motivated by greed or something else.

According to Game theory there is no benefit in not selling the crypto for fiat: if you raise lets say 10million during an ico (typical amount raised 6m ago), there isnt much you can do with 20M (i.e you keep the crypto and it doubles) that you cant do with "just" 10M.

However, if the crypto crashes, and become 5M, you are going to have a hard time explaining to stake holders that 5M just disappeared...

At worst you keep 10pct in crypto if really you want to keep some upside to crypto but thats it

<comment><USER11> What is even involved in finding a buyer for $10mm btc in usd and then getting that usd into a legal/compliant bank account? Sounds non-trivial. It's my understanding from some work I did for a crypto startup that there is approximately zero usd/btc liquidity, the apparent "usd liquidity" and "usd price" last year was actually dominated by tether-btc and tether-eth liquidity. There was not actually a functional usd/btc market at any point, at least not with liquidity necessary to justify a statement like "startup X holds $10m btc" and this whole thing is a bunch of twenty-five year old entrepreneurs learning about macroeconomics the hard way.

<comment><USER12> Circle Trade and Cumberland do OTC trades of large amounts. Nothing is magical about this. [https://www.circle.com/en/trade](https://www.circle.com/en/trade)

<comment><USER11> Sure OTC services exist (I believe Coinbase has one) but I think the whales spending $10m on BTC might have an inkling about buy low and sell high – aka they are decidedly _not_ buying during the period between August 2017 and today, which is exactly the period they would need to be buying _at scale_ for all these startups to unload their disintegrating assets.

<comment><USER13> You are very wrong, OTC markets are very liquid right now.

Also $10 million in BTC isn't very much, you can trade this on the public markets without slipping very much if you really want to.

<comment><USER11> yes of course they are liquid _now_ , and of course you can trade it in crypto-crypto markets, the question is if you can trade it for USD cash money in a real bank account, _eight months ago_

<comment><USER14> There may have been more slippage than your startup was comfortable with, but the OTC market has always been liquid enough for startups to liquidate ETH/BTC from ICOs, even in the middle of the bear market.

<comment><USER11> show us some evidence!

<comment><USER15> What sort of evidence are you looking for? If indeed people were having problems cashing out as you seem to think, this would have been big news. In which case _you_ should be able to find and provide evidence of this occurring. And, if I understand you correctly, you might as well ask for evidence that investors can sell their TSLA stock for cash.

<comment><USER11> hardly anybody was even trying to cash out! As demonstrated by this headline.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> At what price will the Bitcoin death spiral occur? (i.e. when it costs more to produce/handle Bitcoin than the revenue generated, so best move is to just exit the crypto industry).

<comment><USER17> Don't bitcoin costs adjust to a shrinking miner population as well as it adjusts for a growing one?

If so, the answer is never. As people give-up, the costs for the remaining ones reduce so that at some point it's lucrative again.

The interesting question is at what price people will stop speculating on its price and run to an exit? I don't think anybody can answer this one.

<comment><USER18> The difference is that even if the difficulty adjusts, there will be dormant ASICs waiting to be used. If the price lowers enough and enough ASICs are out on the bench, it'll at one point becoming economically beneficial to turn them all on and attack the network rather than having them collect dust and depreciate.

<comment><USER19> People vastly overestimate the profitability of attacking a crypto network.

There are tons and tons of much smaller coins, that can be attacked for very cheap, and yet attacks are still very rare.

IMO, this is because double spends just aren't a very good idea. If you tried to steal money from an exchange, everyone would know it was you doing the attack, and then they wouldn't accept your money in the future, or maybe you'd just go to jail instead.

Also, the network is not static. If there is lots of hashpower sitting unused, maybe that hashpower would turn in to _defend_ against an attack.

More people have something to lose from a successful attack, and thus could be motivated to defend when an attack happens.

<comment><USER18> Haha, then "PoW is for security" is a myth. If you are correct (which is arguable), then you don't need PoW, you just need an elected federation of validators. And validators won't attack because of the counter-incentives you describe.

So either PoW has a security hole related to dormant ASICs or it's useless. Either way it's not a good look.

<comment><USER19> Dormant POW could be as much of a benefit as it is a drawback.

If someone owns 10s of millions of dollars worth of miners that are temporarily turned off, do you think this entity would want an attack to succeed?

No. They'd want to protect their future investment in mining equipment. They might just turn that hashpower back in, if an attack was in progress, and take a temporary loss to fight off a temporary attack.

Even the threat of a big player coming in to prevent an attack would make the risk of attacking way to high.

We saw this happen recently when someone tried to attack the Bitcoin Cash network. Defending miners temporarily turned on their hashpower to stop any attacks. And it worked.

<comment><USER20> > If someone owns 10s of millions of dollars worth of miners that are > temporarily turned off, do you think this entity would want an attack to > succeed?

Well that depends on how much they're holding and how deep they are in the hole at the given time.

> No. They'd want to protect their future investment in mining equipment.

Unless they were in financial trouble and an attack would get them some cash, fast. The sort of financial trouble that can happen when a company invests, say, millions and millions of dollars into now-unprofitable hardware.

<comment><USER19> What I am saying is, that it one "desperate" miner attacks, then 5 other miners, who don't want to lose their investment, will defend.

The network is not static. It doesn't matter if one miner wants to make a quick buck, because the defenders have more to lose, and would spin up defending POW if needed.

<comment><USER20> Until/unless a large player takes this sort of approach, like, say, Bitmain, who have just hit massive financial difficulties.

It absolutely can be in the rational self interest of such players. Relying on other dormant capacity to come up in defence seems fanciful at best.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Ah, the Bloomberg and TechCrunch bottom signals I'm looking for.

<comment><USER22> A year ago, I was explaining to family why crypto was a thing. This year I'm explaining why it crashed and why it's to be avoided. Also, why blockchain and crypto are not the same thing.

There are many who participated in the 2017 speculation that will actively avoid and advise against participation this go around. The bubble popped and it will be many years before we see worthy investments take shape.

<comment><USER23> I think another factor is that we've passed peak uncritical press coverage. Never again will there be as large an influx of media-driven naive optimists who think that the price will only go up.

<comment><USER24> That isn't true, it depends on the whims of the people who determine what those optimists say and write.

<comment><USER23> I am pretty clearly offering an opinion here, so I'm not asserting that it's true. But the naive optimists I'm speaking of here were the greater fools [1] who bought Bitcoin as it was rising. Journalists are generally cynics.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The discussion of blockchain tech on HN is puzzling to me.

On the matter of value: I suspect that if we find ourselves able to send a message back in time two years (when BTC was less than $1,000 USD) and report that the price is now over $3,700, that we'll find this message to be met with an understanding that this is, at least, a validation of the use of blockchain tech as a store of value.

I suspect that if we describe the details of the lightning network in this message and report that transactions are radically faster and cheaper for retail-scale use, that we'll hear cheers about blockchain utility as a currency.

If we describe LivePeer and Fluence and the Origin protocol, if we stream talks from this year's DevCon about the incredible Python tooling that is coming of age and the progress on sharding, proof-of-stake, ring signatures, and zero-knowledge proofs, I'm certain that we'll hear nothing but confidence about the ecosystem and the extensibility of blockchain tech.

If I am permitted to send one of my recent talks[0] back with this message about our progress at NuCypher on developing new cryptographic primitives and cryptological narratives to accompany them, I have no doubt whatsoever that we'll receive back both excitement and gratitude, not on account of our work but because everybody in December of 2017 will be so grateful to know that they're about to be alive during a time when organizations like ours actually have the funding and mission to dust off tech that has sat largely stagnant for the preceding 10-15 years and move it substantially forward.

Yet, look at us HN. Instead of these reactions we're sitting here filled with cynicism and darkness. Why? Where have we misplaced our joy at these developments?

I'll tell you what: let's just pretend that somebody from December of 2021 has posted a message here with similar signs of encouragement. Let's imagine that they've told us about Ethereum 2.0 and Monero coming online. That new turnkey technologies include decentralized access management via NuCypher, buttery transcoding via LivePeer, and fast and flexible decentralized queries via Fluence.

Let's hear in our mind's voice about the _next_ cohort of decentralized tech following these, including fully-homomorphic encryption (perhaps via NuFHE), solutions to several of the open oracle problems, and blockchain use in all sorts of gaming scenarios to ensure fairness of loot boxes and other intra- game economics.

Let's celebrate all the adoption they report to us: medical devices that work without the need for trust in insurance companies, communications infrastructure with far greater robustness and in widespread use to thwart spy apparatuses of despotic governments, sharing frameworks to ensure that media is able to spread throughout the world despite attempts at censorship or outdated notions of "intellectual property."

Please, let's let 2019 be a year when optimism and childlike curiosity are not only permitted in these parts but celebrated like they (largely) were just two years ago when the BTC price was less than 30% what it is today.

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuY9WXK61gY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuY9WXK61gY)

<comment><USER26> You are conflating greed with innovation.

We did not rally optimism and childlike curiosoty from the general public for HTTP or TCP/IP.

You are shilling based on the popular Bitcoin playbook of Quotes and Comments.

If it's really about the technology then people shouldn't care about the USD value of this crapshitcoins era... But no you folks not only took on the technologically inclined people but dragged the unaware general public into the mud took their money and fueled your drug-induced, darkweb fantasies of lambos and Porsches.

Just stop with this bs already .. I really hope SEC comes after everyone of you greedy technobabble mumbo jumbo Signal pump-dump idiots.

<comment><USER27> Not everyone's who's interested in decentralized trustless payment technology is a "shill".

You're dismissing innovation and tarring it with greed.

<comment><USER26> I did intentionally want this to be inflammatory.

ICOs,crapcoins have took money from the general public without any regulation and funneled into shady, dodgy ventures. So yes of course my comments come out to be inflammatory.

<comment><USER28> Please don't do that here. It damages the container regardless of how right you are.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER26> Apologies. Won't do that again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've seen so many local startups that are essentially scams:

March 2018: [https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoin-m...](https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoin- mining-energy-prices-smalltown-feature-217230)

November 2018: [https://www.seattletimes.com/business/washington-bitcoin- pio...](https://www.seattletimes.com/business/washington-bitcoin-pioneer- seeks-chapter-11-protection/)

</comment><comment><USER30> When I first invested in Bitcoin several years back, I tried to imagine ways that it could one day be deterred from becoming increasingly adopted and valuable. Government regulation and hacking were obvious possibilities, but I never considered "death by fragmentation" at the time. I think Bitcoin would be a lot more valuable today if it had not been for the explosion of largely greed-motivated shitcoins (and later ICOs) entering the market.

<comment> black-tea It was the scalability problem that killed Bitcoin and it probably would have happened a lot sooner without the fragmentation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> When you flip the chart upside down, it sunk 300% over 2 years!

</comment><comment><USER32> long time since the last Bitcoin is dead article

<comment><USER16> The lack of attention to crypto as a serious financial instrument is more damning to crypto than an indicator of its success.

<comment><USER33> We'll just file this under "comments that won't age well"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> From a fundamentals perspective, blockchain has a bright future:

lending - [https://dharma.io](https://dharma.io)

derivatives - [https://dydx.exchange](https://dydx.exchange)

forecasting/gambling - [https://www.augur.net](https://www.augur.net)

on-chain "US dollars" \- [https://mkr.tools](https://mkr.tools)

</comment><comment><USER35> Bitcoin seems to be getting real hurt from the lack of hype and bans from big adtech companies (along with all the cryptocurrency stuff as well.)

[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=bitcoin&geo=US](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=bitcoin&geo=US)

</comment><comment><USER36> At least this might provide pressure to reduce the environmental impact of mining, if only to reduce costs.

<comment><USER37> I see this arguments being thrown all the time, but I also like the argument that current infrastructures needed to run "previous-gen" currencies are actually burning way more[1]. While I wait for concrete research to estimate how much energy was wasted in the creation and maintenance process of these, I will abstain from spreading the FUD.

[1]: [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths#Bitcoin_mining_is_a_waste_o...](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths#Bitcoin_mining_is_a_waste_of_energy_and_harmful_for_ecology)

<comment><USER38> That argument looks like it was written 5 or 6 years ago, long before the modern cryptocurrency boom (and the associated rise in large-scale mining, e.g. in China). It hasn't aged well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Funny that crypto is being called industry.

</comment><comment><USER40> Long

</comment><comment><USER41> is anybody really surprised other than people still involved with this blockchain/cryptocurrency nonsense?

The entire bitcoin pump and dump was orchestrated.

<comment><USER23> I think this is a fine case to apply Hanlon's Razor: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor)

Conspiracy was unnecessary.

<comment><USER41> ITS NOT A CONSPIRACY

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-13/professor...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-13/professor- who-rang-vix-alarm-says-tether-used-to-boost-bitcoin)

DOJ is investigating. If you ran an ICO, and you still haven't lawyered up, you are at risk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> by the way, Techcrunch CEO was all in crypto last year

<comment><USER16> Michael Arrington left TechCrunch a long, long time ago.

<comment><USER32> not sooo long ago and why is it relevant? he is still the founder and his actions bear some significance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Wonder how this effects Lykke.com

</comment><comment><USER43> BTC/USD is doing just fine. Nobody who knows anything about anything made any kinds of plans involving $20,000 Bitcoin. At ~$4k, it's still 10x where it was 2 years ago. Anybody remotely involved in BTC from it's actual inception (not the bandwagon shirt-losers of 2017) is filthy stinking rich now.

<comment><USER44> _> Nobody who knows anything about anything made any kinds of plans involving $20,000 Bitcoin._

Except for Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Barclays (see [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-23/wall- stre...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-23/wall-street- quietly-shelves-its-bitcoin-dreams))...

<comment><USER45> What stops GS from replacing their fee-based offerings with a blockchain solution? Could this really be as obvious in hindsight as looking at Sears in the 90s not developing an online catalog?

<comment><USER46> > What stops GS from replacing their fee-based offerings with a blockchain > solution?

What does that sentence even mean? To me this is right up there with "I'll create a GUI interface with Visual Basic and see if I can track an IP address."

<comment><USER45> It literally means what the words say. What stops Goldman Sachs from replacing whatever mechanism they use to process payments with some coin. I would gladly accept the answer 'because it doesn't make sense'. Didn't realize I'd get so much heat for this though.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Setting up a C++ project environment with nix - <AUTHOR> https://blog.galowicz.de/2019/04/17/tutorial_nix_cpp_setup/ <comment><USER2> It looks nice, I never tried Nix and am installing it right now. However, am I wrong in understanding that installing Nix requires super-user privileges [1]? Having a tool that allows you to easily install updated C++ compilers and libraries under your home dir would be far more useful, IMO: I often use HPC clusters with dated C++ compilers, and installing a newer GCC locally is always a PITA.

[1] [https://nixos.org/nix/manual/#sect-single-user- installation](https://nixos.org/nix/manual/#sect-single-user-installation)

<comment><USER3> AFAIK root access is only needed once for setting up the /nix directory during installation.

It is however possible to install nix stuff on systems where you have no root access:

[https://matthewbauer.us/blog/static- nix.html](https://matthewbauer.us/blog/static-nix.html)

(Requirement: namespaces for users)</comment></comment>


Anyone who looks at this code instantly becomes insane - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/raxod502/TerrariaClone/issues/19 <comment><USER2> [https://github.com/raxod502/TerrariaClone/blob/master/src/Te...](https://github.com/raxod502/TerrariaClone/blob/master/src/TerrariaClone.java#L5261)

You may not like it, but this is peak programming. A level of perfection attainable only by undergoing the rite of writing a single if statement with 100+ conditions.

<comment><USER3> I'm a second-year CS student that is still learning in this realm. Is there a general way that most developers would rewrite lines 5261-5284? My assumption is I would look to find some rules I can apply to simplify the code but I'm also aware a CS course is a bit of a bubble and what I've learnt so far might not be the way things are handled in industry.

For example, line 5284 has a 8 inequality operators checking every 4th element (140. 144, 148,...). A single "blocks[1][y][x] % 4 != 0" would remove them all. There also appears to be 3 main segments in that huge block of code (111-118, 119-126, 137-168) which would allow it to be simplified.

A second question: Why is there no comments? Is this common?

<comment><USER4> > A second question: Why is there no comments? Is this common?

Man I remember being this naive once :(

<comment><USER5> My first major project (at an internship) had all the comments on every file (even getters / setters, and it even had getters/setters because someone told me to). Interestingly enough it was a project that had to read static analysis tools' output and combine it into a single report / webapp, so I was very aware of all the output that was reported and all the niggly little things that these tools (think PMD, CPD, FindBugs, etc) pointed out. Including how a getter wasn't commented.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It appears the author is well aware of this issue! From the readme:

"Back when I was first learning to program in Java, I decided to try to make a clone of the excellent PC game Terraria. Of course, I was convinced that my version would have many more features than the official one.

But before I realized how silly that idea was, I produced 11,000 lines of, to date, the most atrocious code I have ever seen in my life. I make it available here mostly as a cautionary tale of what can happen if you don't pay attention to the quality of your code. (Lesson learned, in my case!) Here are some of the highlights..."

</comment><comment><USER7> I wouldn't ever want to work with this code, but there's a level of persistence here that I kind of respect. Sure, the code sucks, but I can't help but feel like I couldn't have written this even if I wanted to. There's usually a point when I'm too deep in a nested conditional to remember all the variables, and that's usually before 23 tabs in.

<comment><USER8> Yeah. This is the code of a very smart person who didn't take the time to make abstractions, either through laziness or naivete. I've seen much more deeply- wrong code that would be much harder to refactor into something maintainable than this would be.

<comment><USER9> Yes, this kind of "naive coding technique" occasionally pops up, and I think it's a good discussion topic, because its mere existence demonstrates that you can get extremely far in terms of delivering features with a minimal amount of abstraction: "sometimes all you need is a function."

Further, that the code probably would not really be hideously miserable for a more experienced coder to refactor(it's just very duplicated) shows that copy- paste is reasonable for deferring some kinds of architectural decisions. It's not what you would bias towards if you have a whole team pounding away at the same file and rapidly evolving it, but as a solo practitioner who wants to get the feature out and put it away for the day, this style is convenient for letting the code as a whole develop some maturity and functionality before it gets refactored with abstraction.

<comment><USER10> Give refactoring this code a go! Its sublimely fun!!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> About 12 years ago I was working at a company in which a developer had recently left, and left behind some code that had a bug in it that needed fixing, the code was processing some XML and I knew a lot about XML so I was called over to look at this code.

The code was actually very simple, it consisted of for loops over a bunch of element nodes in which child nodes had to be compared with child nodes in other element nodes, or in which attribute nodes needed to be compared with other attribute nodes, whenever one of these nodes that needed to be compared with other nodes was found a new for loop would be started to loop over the whole set of nodes once again to find the attribute or element with children that needed to be compared with the currently selected attribute or element. I am describing this so succinctly and clearly for you so that you may experience a deeper understanding of just how succinct and clear the code itself was.

Whenever values where found that matched they were added to an array that was later looped over to get the values to actually doing something with them. They had printed out the oode, it was nearly 100 pages - I was pretty sure I could have done it in less than 2 pages (it was in C# and I sucked at C#), I mean the actual XML that was being analyzed would be less than 5 pages if printed.

After looking at it for a few minutes I announced that it should be rewritten. The other developers wanted to continue on with it to find the bug. I think they had been driven insane.

on edit: by less than 2 pages I mean that it might be more than 1 page but I suppose not 2 full pages.

<comment><USER12> Reminded of a time I took the code of our Data Scientists (2 physicists that "coded". They decided to make their own ORM in Ruby (called "Mondongo") instead of using one available. No wonder, the code was a real mess...

For example, they needed to get a numeric value from a dropdown box that got several text options. The way they did it was:

fieldVal = textField.gsub('text string 1',0).gsub('another string 2',1).gsub('anotherstring3',3).....

and so on with all the options. And in theory they looked for a 0, 1, 2... etc.

Another WTF was that, when we told them we would be upgrading from Ruby 1.8 to 2.0, they told us that they were not sure, because 2.0 did not work that well... As it happens, at some point in the code they were using the .object_id property of a boolean value and testing it == 2 or 0. Well... ruby 2.0 made true.object_id == 20 , so things did not work as expected.

<comment><USER11> I have actually done a similar WTF myself when I had been programming professionally for about a year, I had to do a validation on SOAP requests for some EU project in ASP in 1999-2000 (thankfully only one of the acronyms in that statement are still relevant) and the parameters for doing it had changed a couple days before.

There was a requirement that we had to deliver all validation code in VBScript that would run in the ASP but also should handle possible future changes to the request, and I had examples of all valid possible requests (which as I said had just been changed a couple days before), so I wrote an XSLT that went over all the XML templates and generated a bunch of VBScript if statements and for loops for each possible valid request and if it didn't find it returned an error message that it was invalid.

So anyway based on the theory that I can understand any stupid coding wtf I myself have done - if the wtf code is generated by some other better code I understand why the code is so awful, but if it is handwritten I still don't understand. And my guy handwrote his code. I'm guessing yours too. crazy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It compares favorably to the official Terraria code (decompiled version here): [https://github.com/TheVamp/Terraria-Source- Code/blob/master/...](https://github.com/TheVamp/Terraria-Source- Code/blob/master/Terraria/Item.cs)

Terraria extensively used God objects with hundreds or thousands of properties, and used naive C# serialization for its netcode. This meant that sending the state of a _single object_ would take over 1KB, leading to truly outrageous network requirements for a 2D platformer game, on the order of >100KB/s/player.

<comment><USER14> That's decompiled or automatically generated code, right?

<comment><USER15> The local variable names look like the code was decompiled with ILSpy. All the magic numbers probably (hopefully?) were constants in the original code. The crazy indentation looks like the decompiler just doesn't use "else if". The goto's were just old ILSpy versions being bad at control flow reconstruction.

But neither the C# compiler nor the ILSpy decompiler moves code to different methods/classes (only the JIT does stuff like inlining), so yes it's really a single enormous class handling every possible item in the game via cascading if statements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Honestly the only insane thing is that it's all in one file. Could've also been broken up into more functions (it seems like this person didn't actually want to be using Java), but it's reasonably named and formatted and they did a decent job separating out static data at the top instead of littering it throughout the code.

Oh, and that stream of comments by polytomous. That's... something.

<comment><USER8> This kind of thing in particular is really interesting:

      public static void print(String text) {
        System.out.println(text);
      }

This person cares enough about brevity to make little wrapper functions like this, but at the same time everything is very procedural and monolithic. This gives a vague, weird sense of refined taste, despite some obvious problems with the artifact as a whole.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the programmer came from a C background (where brevity tends to be valued and abstractions tend not to be) and used Java because it's cross-platform.

<comment><USER16> I'd bet they made that function so they had a single place to intervene on text being written, not necessarily for the brevity/aesthetics.

<comment><USER8> Given the extreme lack of abstraction elsewhere, I highly doubt it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > The TerrariaClone.init() method, which is over 1,300 lines long, actually > grew so large that the Java compiler started running out of memory trying to > compile it! The solution? Copy half of the init() code into a new method, > called codeTooLarge(), and call that from init()

I found this in the readme, hilarious (not in a mean way).

<comment><USER5> Modern problems require modern solutions!

Didn't Facebook and other major app developers run into issues with having too many classes for Android's JVM?

<comment><USER18> Oh we had the same kind of issue moving a spring project into lambdas ...

Don't do that kids

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Setting up a game world is notoriously imperative and makes every OOP-minded dev rip out their hair trying to do it how they think it should be done before realizing the truth that, for this kind of problem, ugly and imperative is good.

In my estimation, the sin is the cyclomatic complexity.

</comment><comment><USER20> Item #: SCP-3137

Object Class: Keter

Infohazard, Cognitohazard

Special Containment Procedures: Do not look at this code

<comment><USER21> If it can be contained that easily it is 'Safe', not 'Keter'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I feel like the Java community will step up and refactor this to be as robust as Enterprise Fizz Buzz [1].

[1] - [https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...](https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition)

</comment><comment><USER23> I've seen tons of code, including code at companies famous for rigorous coding-interview processes to weed out weak programmers, that was far _far_ worse than this. For all its bad properties, this code at least doesn't succumb to over-abstraction, obscure control flows or object-lifecycle rules, or desperate attempts to use every possible combination of language features in a (failed) attempt to look smart. Those things will kill readability and maintainability far more effectively than a bit of linearity or bad variable naming.

</comment><comment><USER24> I read Snow Crash; will not click.

<comment><USER25> So what you're saying is that a pattern of printed symbols that you looked at once in the past has permanently affected your response to stimuli?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> So, to avoid people going insane, the code shall be put to refactoring. Each volunteer will only work on a single line of code [0]...

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Funniest_Joke_in_the_World](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Funniest_Joke_in_the_World)

</comment><comment><USER27> I've seen different kinds of comparably atrocious over the years.

This is at least obvious and easy to explain badness... And the lesson was learned. Some people don't learn it or are forced to ignore it all the time by middle management.

(This is how you go grey haired from stress.)

</comment><comment><USER28> I cloned the repo, wrapped it in Maven and sent it to SonarQube.

\- 9.5k lines of code

\- 333 bugs

\- 2 vulnerabilities

\- 6 security hotspots

\- 56 days of technical debt

\- 2172 code smells

\- 0.0% coverage

\- 21.5% duplications

\- 117 duplicated blocks

I might be masochistic enough to try to fix these issues with a merge request.

</comment><comment><USER29> [https://github.com/raxod502/TerrariaClone/blob/master/src/Te...](https://github.com/raxod502/TerrariaClone/blob/master/src/TerrariaClone.java)

</comment><comment><USER30> Doesn't look that bad. Could probably be optimized to run faster. Making a Terraria clone is not easy. If you manage to make it run smoothly and its a decent game, no player will complain about the source code.

</comment><comment><USER31> I feel this way about git itself.

[https://git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net/](https://git-man-page- generator.lokaltog.net/)

</comment><comment><USER32> I'd like to know what age the writer was when they did this + How long they had been programming. Seems like they learned a lot from it.

</comment><comment><USER33> I have a project from last year where I made my own little pokemon game using processingjs. I thought I had some decent knowledge of developing but the code consists of a file with 1900+ lines of code. It's terrible.. Also because I had barely any knowledge of how I should structure code.

</comment><comment><USER34> This is pretty entertaining.

</comment><comment><USER35> sounds like it runs a game-like thing (albeit with a lot of errors), so hey, he shipped something and probably learned a lot

as an aside, i have never seen short used in java code until today after like 10 years

</comment><comment><USER36> I work with worse code than this on a daily basis. In fact, it's worse code than this I'm currently hiding from.

</comment><comment><USER37> The burning question of the day: Did it work?

</comment><comment><USER38> This Radon has a good head on his shoulders.

</comment><comment><USER39> it's unmaintainable, "legacy" code at this point

</comment><comment><USER40> One of the best things are the comments.

</comment><comment> rv-de Can someone ELI5 what's the big deal about that repo?

<comment><USER41> It's absurdly "bad" form taken to such an extreme that it's basically parody (or art).

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> > it does not encourage meaningful / non-ableist dialog with the work

Is it really ableist to think that sanity is objectively better than insanity?

> ins*ne

This is peak wokeness. We can't even spell out the word "insane" for fear of offending someone.

<comment><USER43> Ok, but please don't cherry-pick provocations from other places and bring them in here to get upset about. It's agitating, but not interesting.</comment></comment>


DeepVariant: Highly Accurate Genomes with Deep Neural Networks - <AUTHOR> https://research.googleblog.com/2017/12/deepvariant-highly-accurate-genomes.html <comment><USER2> I implemented a similar model based around the amazing out of core linear learner Vowpal Wabbit. It did pretty well in the Precision FDA challanges despite being developed in two person months. I has the benefit of using fantastically less compute to train than something like deepvariant. ([https://github.com/ekg/hhga](https://github.com/ekg/hhga))

The approach is the right one for small genetic variants. But it will be hard to handle more complex kinds of variation without adapting the alignments to training example synthesis.

I think the field should cool it on calling the results of something like deepvariant "genomes". These are genotypes, not fully sequenced and reconstructed genomes. The evaluations are typically on easy regions and we have no reason to believe that those are the only ones that are important. One important tool to dig into this is syndip, which is a simulated synthetic diploid where the full haplotypes are known. It is a mixture of two haploid human genomes that were de novo sequenced with pacbio technology. ([https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/11/22/223297](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/11/22/223297)). For the curious these haploid human genomes only exist in molar pregnancies, so even this isn't ideal but it is maybe the best resource we have at present.

</comment><comment><USER3> The figures in this paper use pretty deceptive scales. To be clear, DeepVariant is 0.5% better than a tool built in ~2010 (GATK), on DeepVariant's best test.

GATK is still the standard, not because better variant callers don't exist, but because it's more important that everyone uses the same tool for comparisons between studies.

<comment><USER4> That first paragraph is pretty deceptive. They are not comparing against the results from GATK 1.0.

<comment><USER5> I didn't see them mention which version they were using, presumably GATK3. I'm curious to see what it'd look like against GATK4 which is being released in a month.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> very nice but do you think neural networks will also be able to interpret the function of these genotype ?

<comment><USER7> Yes. LIME works really well for this type of problem.

<comment><USER8> What is LIME?

<comment><USER7> LIME: Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations; [https://www.oreilly.com/learning/introduction-to-local- inter...](https://www.oreilly.com/learning/introduction-to-local- interpretable-model-agnostic-explanations-lime)

""Why Should I Trust You?" Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier": [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.04938.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.04938.pdf)

[https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~marcotcr/blog/lime/](https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~marcotcr/blog/lime/)

[https://github.com/marcotcr/lime](https://github.com/marcotcr/lime)

Anytime anyone makes snide HN comments like "oh you can't understand why neural networks make predictions" the correct response should always be "why doesn't LIME work in your specific case".

LIME is being used within the EU to explain credit decisions and fraud detection flagging on neural network based models, which is quite a high bar to regulatory oversight to pass.

<comment><USER8> Hadn't heard of that before, thanks!

In this case, I understood the question to be "will deep learning do a good job predicting the function of/phenotype emerging from individual SNPs" and I don't think model interpretation would help (for starters, the model is trained to predict linkage and doesn't deal with data related to phenotypes).

<comment><USER7> I believe that comment was edited.

Of course the NN won't interprete the results, it will just provide better results.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


EU: Possession/distribution of hacking tools to be made a criminal offence - <AUTHOR> http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/pressroom/content/20120326IPR41843/html/Hacking-IT-systems-to-become-a-criminal-offence <comment><USER3> If you outlaw hacking tools only criminals will have hacking tools.

This would make the EU less safe, since security experts will not be able to know what they're facing or check the security of their own systems against real attacks until they're really being attacked. Another clueless law that does the opposite of what it's supposed to do. Either that or it will be completely ignored.

<comment><USER4> I don't like this logic for guns, because most criminals (especially the less professional street gangs) get guns by stealing them from law abiding people.

I do like this logic for hacking tools, because most criminals make their tools themselves, or get them freely through distribution channels which are impossible to shut down.

If guns could be freely cloned, and sent through the mail for free (in locked boxes which the post office couldn't see into), it would be unbelievably stupid to ban them.

<comment><USER5> I require a source on your claim that most criminals get guns by stealing them from law-abiding people. I guess this might depend upon where you live but I've never heard this claim in the US. Even if it were true, are we saying a law-abiding citizen shouldn't have access to a legal firearm because a criminal might steal it?

I personally don't like any rules of this nature because the major problem becomes who defines what is a "hacking" tool? It's much like how the definition of burglary tools can be so broad that just having duct tape and a screwdriver in your trunk can be considered possessing burglary tools. Just for the sake of slapping another charge onto somebody during an arrest.

<comment><USER6> I think the argument goes, the more weapons out there period the easier it is for people to smuggle them into the hands of criminals.

You can't just build a handgun in your basement; you need a tool and die machine, know-how, etc. In other words, a factory.

If you live in a state where it's relatively easy to buy a handgun and the registration requirements are limited and so on, you're going to find it a lot easier to procure one on the black market than say, here in Canada where you need to take a course and file a report every time you want to take it out of your house.

<comment><USER5> I've always felt the difference in attitudes towards guns in Canada versus the US is more about culture then it is about laws.

<comment><USER7> Culture tends to impact laws, but that wasn't the parent's point.

The general availability of a given product in a given area affects said products availability in said area's black market.

In this case, more guns in circulation = more guns on the black market. This isn't to say that all black market guns originated from the legal (market), but supply does trickle down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is my concern: that the EU will make an exemption for security researchers/white-hat hackers, but only those recognised by a certain qualification or professional body. Governments around the world already mandate professional licenses for many industries, and IT is so critical that it's only a matter of time until we see a 'License to Code'.

<comment><USER8> I'm going to be clear with you; I've lost sleep over this. I _continue_ to lose sleep over this.

The thing is, no matter how much I wish it were so. I don't feel that (and in reality I do not.) I have the financial or political capital to really do anything in the realm of significance about this. I'm not articulating the prior points because I seek pity or want to hear similar views from people who sympathize with my position. I instead would like a simple question answered:

What's the best thing I can do to stop things like this from happening?

<comment><USER6> Well… of course you do. You're a well educated, well informed professional capable of using the internet who is solidly in the middle class. People like you are the core of every group of people seeking change.

What do you do? You form an organization, a lobbying group. Organizations are the base unit of power.

You throw up a website, you get as many like minded people as possible (literally, thousands) to sign up for your mailing list and you badger every single person you can find across the political spectrum on the issue. You write letters to politicians, you write software that makes phone calls, you get people who run companies who would be affected by the issue to give you financial and moral support, and you try to talk directly to every politician or candidate to be a politician on the issue.

Ideally, albeit hard on this weird technocratic issue, you get some mass public outrage on the topic. With some luck, you can go: small company CEO who knows a medium company CEO who hangs out with someone higher up who can have a one on one with people who actually vote on the issue.

The catch is, before this is over it will be a more-than-full-time-job but… it's a startup like any other.

This is how any issue becomes mainstream: there are a bunch of people working round the clock on it. Think about illegal trade unions in Poland in 1978 or gay people going from being beaten indiscriminately by the cops in 1969 to being on the verge of legalizing marriage across the West.

In the meantime, get started by having you and all of your friends write personal letters and call your eurodeputies (not having clicked on TFA I assume that's the body in question).

<comment><USER9> There needs to be some angle that matters for regular people. With Polish strikes it was crashing economy and big regulated prices increase - <USER2> and truth in TV was important, and there were always people in opposition, but bread was the impulse that made the most people go to the strike.

Recent example - ACTA outrage.

There were people alerting public for years about the danger (Piotr Vaglewski comes to mind). Public just ignored them. Then Megaupload was shut down, and suddenly ACTA was everybody business (even thought it wasn't ACTA fault:) )

<comment><USER9> Eh, can't edit, he's name is Piotr Waglowski of course, I always mix it with his nick.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks like the infamous German "Hackerparagraph" §202c StGB. A toothless piece of feel-good legislature since all the tools can also be used for "good" (pen- testing etc.).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafgesetzbuch#.C2.A7_202c:_P...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafgesetzbuch#.C2.A7_202c:_Preparation_of_data_espionage_or_data_interception)

Like most tools (kitchen knifes are the obvious example), intent and actual use is far more important to the law.

To my knowledge, there has not been a single ruling that declared simple possession of e.g. nmap a punishable offence.

Edit: [http://www.gesetze-im- internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stg...](http://www.gesetze-im- internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stgb.html#StGBengl_000P202c) §202c in English

<comment><USER11> What happens is that these charges are used in place of "real" charges when the police want to convict.

For instance, it is in general illegal to possess "burglary tools", with no definition thereof. You might think that that would penalize only people with specialized tools modified for burglary. You would be wrong to think that. An unmodified hammer, screwdriver, wrench, knife or anything like that can be charged as a burglary tool, if the police feel you are a bad person. And yes, people routinely go to prison for possessing a regular unmodified screwdriver. Using it for burglary is not required at all under the law.

It doesn't matter even a tiny bit if the tools can also be used for good.

So when your house gets raided and the police find no actual evidence that you've done anything wrong, but you possess hacking tools, well... if they don't lay any charges that means they were dumb for making the raid in the first place.

<comment><USER12> >people routinely go to prison for possessing a regular unmodified screwdriver

Citation needed.

<comment><USER11> Google, I feel lucky:

[http://www.independentmail.com/news/2012/mar/22/clemson- poli...](http://www.independentmail.com/news/2012/mar/22/clemson-police- charge-man-possession-burglary-tool/)

<comment><USER12> I guess someone will have to follow up and see if he does jail time. He might if he is on probation for car theft, otherwise it seems unlikely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have just done the due diligence and actually contacted the MEP in question's office.

The spokesperson was able to confirm that this issue has been raised already and in the final text there will be explicit provisions that research and testing is still allowed.

<comment><USER3> Then why don't they just make the use of hacking tools for criminal purposes a criminal offence and not the possession and distribution of said tools?

<comment><USER13> I can't judge the MEP's intent, but my best guess is that tobiasu has it right on the money when he says it's "toothless feel-good" stuff.

<comment><USER3> OK. I feel better now thinking it's just a useless law that will change nothing.

<comment><USER14> I don't. Why pass these laws in the first place? I don't like junk in my legal system.

<comment><USER5> Why pass such things? It's just another silly law to allow for applying another charge to someone during the arrest. In several cases you can see that the authorities slap on all kinds of charges in which most of them are eventually dropped. Kind like the throw pasts on the wall theory of law enforcement, something's bound to stick.

Plus it allows them to pick and choose who they arrest in any group when almost everyone in that group is possibly breaking a law they are not aware of.

<comment><USER14> So, totalitarian tactics. Nobody should stand for this, even if it's "toothless".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is really just an example of lawmakers not understanding what they're legislating. "hacking tools" are also known as 'development tools'.

This sort of proposal is only made when completely oblivious about the operation of computers/the Internet/two-side coins.

</comment><comment><USER16> > "No car manufacturer may send a car without a seatbelt into the streets. And > if this happens, the company will be held liable for any damage. These rules > must also apply in the virtual world" she added.

The difference here is _who_ the law applies to. This is more like arresting people with the tools to remove airbags from cars.

True, carrying lock-picking tools is illegal in many places, but the act of picking locks isn't always illegal when performed by a locksmith.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is the sectools list of 'hacking tools':

* <http://sectools.org>

Here's the intersection of that list with what I have installed on my machine:

* Firefox

* Netcat

* Curl

* tcpdump

* Wireshark

* OpenSSH / SSH

* Ping/telnet/dig/traceroute/whois/netstat

* Perl/Python/Ruby

* Google (ha, ok, perhaps not installed on my machine)

* VMware

* OpenSSL

* Firebug

* GDB

<comment><USER18> That was my first thought. Will downloading tcpdump get you in trouble? What if it's "homemade"? Compilers will be next, since the enable the creation of these tools...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Are full details of the "draft law" visible to the public?

From the article:

        The proposal also targets tools used to commit
        offences: the production or sale of devices such as
        computer programs designed for cyber-attacks, or which
        find a computer password by which an information system
        can be accessed, would constitute criminal offences.

Many tools can be used to "find a computer password by which an information system can be accessed". For example a browser's view source function could expose passwords in a (really insecure) site.

Depending on how the law is worded, tools like curl, wget (or even telnet) could be defined as hacking tools.

<comment><USER20> Plus it is going to be illegal to produce them. What are you going to do? Remove my C compiler? Only allow visual basic?

<comment><USER21> I'm afraid VB will be the first one to go. It's gotten too much attention because of people using it to create GUI interfaces to track IP addresses :D

<comment><USER20> (I realise that you are joking)

Won't matter. As long as one language exist, one can write a compiler for any other language in that language. Hopefully something other than Maelbolge will be the surviving language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's things like this seatbelt comparison that leave me scratching my head about politicians sometimes. How can you even argue with people who lack the most basic appreciation of the issue at hand?

</comment><comment><USER23> I started R'ing TFA and thought the title of the post was just editorialising, until I got to this:

"The proposal also targets tools used to commit offences: the production or sale of devices such as computer programs designed for cyber-attacks, or which find a computer password by which an information system can be accessed, would constitute criminal offences."

I've known numerous sysadmins who regularly run a password cracker over their login database, so that they can warn people who have weak passwords. This helps out the individuals concerned and increases the overall security of the system, yet it looks like this would become a criminal offence as a result of this bill.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra I can totally imagine a court in e.g. some backcountry town in the middle of nowhere declaring some standard utility bundled with Ubuntu a "hacking tool", and immediately every linux user in EU is a criminal.

</comment><comment><USER24> <sarcasm>That should really improve security!</sarcasm>

Explanation: Obviously black hats will continue to do as before. White hats not being able to analyze threats though will be a serious problem. It's not sufficient to claim that special licenses will be given to worthy white hat operations with the proper certifications, protocols and willingness to bow to the man since nearly all vulnerability reports come from small operations and private parties that will be off the radar. These folks will simply stop.

</comment><comment><USER21> Banning software, seriously?

I get that most of them obviously have a very limited competency in regards to technology in general (seatbelts?), but they do have advisors who should know better. What is next on the agenda? Banning BitTorrent/p2p clients, media players, cd/dvd ripping software, video/audio capture software to fight piracy?

<comment><USER25> Quite possibly, if they don't get burned on this one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I guess my timing was off when I first submitted this two days ago at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3787597> I'll repost here the links from my comment there:

HN discussion from last year on this subject: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2654346>

Blog posts with some more analysis and links to draft reports / amendments:

[http://blog.c22.cc/2012/03/29/eu-legislation-digging- below-t...](http://blog.c22.cc/2012/03/29/eu-legislation-digging-below-the- fud-line/)

[http://blog.c22.cc/2012/03/29/eu-legislation-digging- below-t...](http://blog.c22.cc/2012/03/29/eu-legislation-digging-below-the- fud-line-cont/)

</comment><comment><USER27> "No car manufacturer may send a car without a seatbelt into the streets. And if this happens, the company will be held liable for any damage."

I don't see the resemblance between that and this:

"Cyber attacks on IT systems would become a criminal offence" :|

</comment><comment><USER28> What does this mean for the future of distros such as Backtrack Linux? Could anybody comment. It's still unclear as to what exactly they refer to by hacking tools. Such things were always a two-edged knife.

</comment><comment><USER29> So every single computer owner will be a criminal?

</comment><comment><USER30> > [...] computer programs [...] which find a computer password by which an > information system can be accessed, would constitute criminal offences.

So, possessing 'net use' and 'ssh' now criminal offense in EU? Oh wait, so do all password recovering tools! One better never forget passwords or risk be prosecuted.

</comment><comment><USER31> we are governed by idiots.

</comment><comment><USER32> Nonsense. As such tools cannot be used to find and patch vulnerabilities. And even if banned, real hackers can code such apps themselves, while sysadmins are not that skilled and will be stuck with no weapons at all.

<comment><USER33> Weapons?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Where does it state in the article that possession of hacking tools is made a criminal offence?

</comment><comment><USER35> What about double-use tools, like network diagnostics and the likes?

<comment><USER36> What about your brain, the best hacking tool?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> So possesion of a knife should also be a criminal offence...

</comment><comment><USER38> So Notepad++ and Vi/Vim will be outlawed now then?

</comment><comment><USER39> propaganda, fear, technical ignorance, prevention-mania and centralistic tendencies lead to such legisation. i'm ashamed to be a eu citizen.</comment>


Creators need better community tools. Circle wants to fill the gap - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/10/circle-community-tools-for-creators/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm not the creator but read the article and it looks pretty great.

Does anyone know of public communities using it that are worth checking out?</comment>


The Forest - Short film for discussion. - <AUTHOR> http://www.huesforalice.com/the-forest/

<comment><AUTHOR> I found this film to be very thought-provoking when considered in the light of hacking. Thoughts anyone or am I the only one?</comment>


Hall of API shame: Boolean trap (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://ariya.ofilabs.com/2011/08/hall-of-api-shame-boolean-trap.html

<comment><USER2> This is by far the number one API design anti-pattern in terms of how widespread it is. It's like bad kerning: once you've seen it, it's everywhere, and nobody seems to notice.

It usually results from writing code with a short-sighted focus on achieving some bespoke functionality in the least possible time. Somebody wants to disable a piece of behaviour in a function, they know where the code is, they wrap it in an if statement and throw another optional boolean parameter onto the pile.

It's symptomatic of functions, methods or subroutines that are _too long_. Functions should do one thing at one level of abstraction, and the very possibility of a boolean parameter means that your function is doing at least two things.

</comment><comment><USER3> Boolean parameter can be useful (for DRY-ness, etc.), but to prevent any misunderstandings, I almost always introduce descriptive constants in such cases:

      const bool SOMETHING = false;
      const bool OTHERTHING = true;

and use them strictly for such parameter.

When there is a default parameter value, sometimes even only one constant can be enough (for non-default variant description).</comment>


Do deals site work for software? - <AUTHOR>

Without mentioning my software here is the story of my experience with a recent promotion at a daily deals website for software.
I recently launched my software and have been making on average 1 sale per day. The price is around $100.
I have not done any heavy marketing yet and still improving the software so I am thinking what if I can sell my software at a lower price point, will it attract more users?
So I went to this deals website and found through previous testimonials that the best way to gain more if you could price it around $20
So cutting the long story, I decided to do the deal promo at 80% discount and the deals website takes 50% of the revenue. So for every sale I make $10.
Since the deal was only for a day I thought of experimenting.
The deal went live @12 in the midnight. By the morning I woke up, I had 10 orders in my inbox.
Since then every hour sent around 2-3 orders. By the end of the deal time, I ended up with a total of around 30 orders.
Now let us crunch the numbers.
My total profit on 30 orders = $300
My total profit on average on a regular day = $100
That seems a good decision right?
Let us talk about the support time.
It took around 6 hours of my total day time (if you add up all the time) to monitor the deals page for customers asking questions and sending registration codes. Yes there were lots and lots of questions from users and I was readily answering them.
so if I value my time at all and put it at $50/hr then the cost is around $300 worth of support time.
being self employed and working solely on the software gives me the liberty to tweak my hourly rate to zero and make me feel good about the deal or raise it higher and make me feel bad about it.
But the deal thing provided lot of insight. - At low price point the software sells like fire - Users really want the software - Hopefully they will talk to their colleagues and buy more licenses
- Generate more traction
Next time, may be I will do the deal at a little higher price point and see how it goes. <comment><USER2> Here's my take: you want to do something like this for software (indeed, any business) only if you have a way to follow up and tap that customer for future promotions.

Do you have some additional software you could pitch him after he's made the purchase? Are you getting his email for your autoresponder?

These are important questions to ask. Otherwise you are just devaluing your own product by selling it at such a steep drop.

Say, if you were running a small bakery, then you might be willing to sell your wares for less because of the word of mouth publicity that a few extra visitors from beyond your usual customer base could buy.

If you are selling software, you want to do it if you have different stuff to sell and want to use a daily deal as a gateway to lure in customers and pitch them other products after the sale has been made. Say, you are Adobe and you want to sell Photoshop. You do so by promoting Illustrator at a steep discount, then telling them about Photoshop at the checkout stage or emailing the customers about it. Then, it can work out as a good deal. Otherwise, not a very good idea.</comment>


Show HN: Hashtagtee.me – A weekend attempt at passive income - <AUTHOR> http://hashtagtee.me

<comment><USER2> From the About page:

 _We use the highest quality shirts and deliver them with the most affordable pricing._

Does this imply that the $25 price is the lowest possible point at which the OP can attain reasonable margins? If so, they really need to reevaluate their infrastructure, as $25 for a text-only tee shirt is very, very high, and the OP is likely being ripped off by their suppliers.

Given the price, I have doubts about the willingness of potential customers to purchase shirts of this sort. The precedent for comparable services like Teespring and even for individual shirt vendors seems to be $10 to $20, substantially lower than what the OP is charging.

Other than the pricing, I'm not entirely sure whether hashtags would make suitable shirts. Hashtags tend to be highly ephemeral, and most cease to be relevant within a few days. Most people keep shirts for years, and thus would be likely be wearing these shirts for a period far longer than the life of the hashtag. It's a novel idea, but at the end of the day it's trying to turn what are highly transient cultural artifacts into something permanent.

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem with teespring and the likes are that they have an MOQ that most people don't want to commit to.

As for hashtags and being irrelevant in a few minutes/days/weeks, I'd argue that a shirt that says "#GoBlue" will always be somewhat relevant. But hey, we'll see! More a fun project than anything else.

<comment><USER3> The MOQ is a drag but it serves a purpose: you can use a higher quality printing process (screen printing) which has most of the cost in the setup. Personally have not found too many Direct to Garment (what most one off shirts are printed with) printers that I was happy with in terms of consistent quality. Trust me, it would make my life so much easier if I could print quality one offs.

You may be better off doing each hashtag as a short term campaign, maybe Teespring has an API?

Love your idea though! Think you should consider different color shirts: when we did black shirts in our tshirt subscription, people complained that they already have too many black shirts in their closet and wanted something different.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Automate that shit son. Use Shirts.io and grab trending tags from Twitter, and display them, even tweet about them when a new trending tag hits, also allow users to enter their own hashtags... I'd buy one right now if I could input my own hashtag.

<comment><AUTHOR> who is to say I'm not using shirts.io already ;) and that "add a hashtag" feature is in the works...

<comment><USER4> Atta boy. Now chop chop so I can order a shirt for an event on the 23rd.

<comment><AUTHOR> What're ya lookin for?

<comment><USER4> #FFFFFF

Just kidding, not 100% sure yet.

<comment><USER5> >#FFFFFF

Would #FFFFFF on a white tee just be a blank tee? ;)

<comment><USER4> Not sure, I just know the display shirts are black, haha.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Google "order a tshirt with your text", first hit that came up was for example this - [http://www.spreadshirt.com/design-your-own-t- shirt-C59](http://www.spreadshirt.com/design-your-own-t-shirt-C59)

Type in what ever #tag you want, $13.90

I bet with little more googlefu there's some cheaper places out there.

</comment><comment><USER7> #toomanychoices

have a shirt of the day, pick it from the Twitter trending list, lather, rinse, repeat.

Holy crap, I like this simplification so much I might go build it myself...

<comment><AUTHOR> dig the idea

<comment><USER8> Have you ever the MobStub Facebook ads? They choose one item a day people really like/need (iPhone chargers for cheap) and feature it daily. Do something similar for your biz. Love the concept btw - saying this as a person experienced in the hashtag space (check my profile).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If your volume price on 1 off shirts is $12.99-14 on shirts.io, I honestly think you'd get 5-10x the volume at $20 flat price vs 25, 20 is closer to impulse buy range than $25.

<comment><USER3> This is good advice. We saw the same thing with our subscription and one off tshirt sales.

<comment><USER10> can you share some numbers? did you gauge demand price elasticity ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What is your marketing strategy - other than the initial launch on Hacker News?

I'm curious how other people market their passive income apps. I'm doubly curious because I've got my own t-shirt passive income app that I've been working on for a couple weekends now.

EDIT: I just realized you are (wisely) tweeting out each shirt to the appropriate hashtag. So the marketing is essentially baked in. Nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Twitter twitter twitter :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'd consider springing for a hashtagtee if the price was circa $10.

</comment><comment><USER13> $25 for a shirt I could print at Zazzle for less?

No thanks.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't understand hash tags and I don't understand why someone would want them on a shirt. Is this best understood by immersing myself in the twitter culture? I don't get it from the outside. The main place I see hash tags is where networks will display them with a TV show. Aside from that, I don't understand how people come up with them and how they are used other than searching and linking?

For example, #SalmonCat (a TV shirt on the home page) apparently refers to some tv show called Sam and Cat? Googling that reveals it's the 17th episode that aired today. If I loved the show enough, would I go buy a shirt with the hash tag on it? [http://hashtagtee.me/products/salmoncat- shirt](http://hashtagtee.me/products/salmoncat-shirt)

I am admittedly not one of the 230 million+ twitter users.

<comment><USER15> If you've used facebook recently you'd know they've also added hashtags, their main purpose (and the way twitter started using them originally) is to connect your posts to a topic.

I've also seen it used (and have used it myself) as a way to kinda add a punchline to a post that didn't have or need one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have made a t-shirt generator ([http://sonarcore.com](http://sonarcore.com)) in a similar attempt at a passive income. It took me much longer than a weekend to build but anyway. I'm very anxious to wait to see how your project goes :)

</comment><comment><USER17> I think the trick is going to be either: 1) finding hashtags with enough people desiring them so that you can order in bulk OR 2) finding a production method that is cheap/efficient enough that you can print 1 or 2 shirts without breaking the bank

I wonder if you could do something like threadless did, where people vote for the "best hashtag" with their wallet, saying they would buy one if you produced the lot.

Not bad for a weekend project though! Props to you!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> With all due respect to your work, somehow I never understood the "t-shirt" startup idea. We live in a world where there are many problems to tackle in health, science, government and politics, yet I've seen dozens of attempts at these t-shirt startups.

I do not mean to discredit your work, that being said.

<comment><USER19> Probably because the OP was able to create this in a weekend or less in hopes of generating some passive income. That really doesn't compare to any problem (trivial or otherwise) in the areas you mentioned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If you make your blog a place where we can be updated about how your business are going in real time, it ll retain and grow your traffic and build a great comunnity around

Good reference: [http://groovehq.com/blog](http://groovehq.com/blog)

</comment><comment><USER10> Very nice. Good luck!

I would hide the hello world post from your blog :) Also, not sure what message it sends out when you write it runs from your basement.. perhaps it will hurt conversion.

</comment><comment><USER21> You could also use the Twitter API to get hashtags trending in the user's location and create shirts based on those hashtags.

<comment><AUTHOR> To be in version 2.0 for suuuure

<comment><USER22> CNN did this several years ago with headlines.

[http://37signals.com/svn/posts/985-custom-cnn-t- shirts](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/985-custom-cnn-t-shirts)

[http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/cnn-promo- tu...](http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/cnn-promo-turns- headlines-t-shirts-95587)

[http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/business/media/09cnn.html?...](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/business/media/09cnn.html?_r=0)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Sorry for the offtopic, but it's such a pleasure to see #Pacers on the 1st position.

</comment><comment><USER24> Holy crap, I thought somebody had submitted my Hashtagify.me without telling me :)

</comment><comment><USER25> Nice, who are you sourcing your t-shirts from? Good luck.

<comment><USER26> Yes, and that's your biggest risk.

Tried a niche, online T shop with a friend years ago (before Spreadshirt existed). We worked with a local T shop at first but their minimums were a drag. A big T shop in a lower income town about 100 miles from us (we were in Santa Monica) agreed to waive minimums and do drop shipping.

Problem ended up being quality we or the shop couldn't consistently control. It was great for weeks, then bad for a batch, then good again.

Returns and re-shipping costs due to low quality finally killed us.

<comment><USER27> What was the biggest take away from that experience?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> not bad for a weekend project!

<comment><USER29> Seems that some people have longer weekends than others ;-)</comment></comment>


Squatting set to become a criminal offence in the UK - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-19429936 <comment><USER2> Headline is wrong. Squatting is already illegal in Scotland.</comment>


What would you ask from the creators of the very first PC virus? - <AUTHOR> http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002087.html

<comment><USER2> Why not just call them up?

<http://ftp.brain.net.pk/corp/aboutus.php></comment>


Ask HN: Why don't computer keyboards have a 'forwardspace' and a backspace char - <AUTHOR> I understand the history of the backspace and delete keys, but it strikes me as odd and inefficient that keyboards (especially software based ones) do not have a dedicated key that can remove to the right of the cursor as well: a 'forwardspace' key if you will. Has any major OS vendor / hardware keyboard manufacturer attempted this? Was it part of keyboards before the QWERTY adoption? (note: the insert/overwrite would be similar but not functionally the same as this proposal because a forwardspace and backspace would be 'equals', at lesst in terms of names and prominence on a keyboard.<p>And how do backspace characters work in right-to-left languages like Arabic, Japanese, etc. <comment><USER2> My take: That's what the spacebar is. Originally the backspace key did the inverse. This probably worked a lot more like what we think of as "overwrite" mode on early terminals.

The "delete" character is something else entirely. It seems to have been invented to wipe (literally "delete") a position on a paper tape, for example. That's the reason its character code is all ones (in the seven bit code of the time). The ones were holes, and you could "delete" any other character (a mix of holes and not-holes) by punching a hole in every position.

A lot of the rest is just historical accident.

</comment><comment><USER3> Because keyboards have the most design inertia of all computer hardware products. The one thing that keyboard makers are loathe to experiment with is the keys. That's why keyboards in 2018 still have a gigantic CAPSLOCK key when it is almost never used. Also why in the age of prosumer hardware you don't see keyboards for programmers with dedicated programming IDE keys, such as a single key to compile. No matter how innovative (or retro) manufacturers in keyboard manufacture nobody wants to experiment with the actual key options that people press.

<comment><USER2> Theory has it that real typists actually _do_ use the CAPSLOCK key. They seem to be rather rare, though.

<comment><USER4> Meh; I do freelance copy-editing and transcription, and I never use it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The delete the character "before" the cursor; I'm not sure I understand the question. RTL languages still have forward and back, they're just RTL: it's still a backspace.

Re the larger question: historical. Never seen anybody with anything like it.

I'm not sure I'd use it very much; usually my mistakes are things I've just typed.

When they're not, I have to put my cursor near the error anyway, and if I'm doing that, I either put it in the right spot to backspace, or I'm performing larger-than-single-character-scale edits anyway).

</comment><comment><USER5> The lack of dedicated key is probably an artifact of the typewriter origins of the keyboard, where the paper moves under the cursor as you type, and it's somewhere between difficult and nonsensical to move forwards rather than backwards through existing text.

FWIW, Fn-delete works as forward-delete on Mac.

</comment><comment><USER6> > but it strikes me as odd and inefficient that keyboards (especially software > based ones) do not have a dedicated key that can remove to the right of the > cursor as well:

Isn't this the delete key?

<comment><USER4> Yes, but not all keyboards have it (e.g., Apple) and you have to combo to get DEL.

<comment><USER7> So is this a question on why don't Apple keyboards have a DEL key?

<comment><USER4> They do--they don't have a backspace key. But they mean backspace.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Camera+ turned down acquisition offers and says no to VC money - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/08/camera-plus-turns-2-says-eff-the-vcs/

<comment><USER2> _Will the failure of the Facebook IPO change the climate here going forward? Possibly. But it doesn't matter . . . we didn't build this company with the intention to flip it. We're in it for the long-haul and we're committed to building a real business that makes great apps, not on selling-out._

The strongest position any founder can hold. It doesn't mean you can't consider and even take short-term options for funding or acquisition. It means you need not take them unless you can do so on your own terms. Entrepreneurs have come a long way in this most recent decade in being able to do rapid company development - historically, the scale at which this is happening is quite dramatic - but some things never change: to succeed, develop a sound business model and be very careful not to get yourself overextended financially in the process of building it out. Doing that is no guarantee of success but it is a sure-fire way to limit your risks of failure.

</comment><comment><USER3> This whole scene reminds me so much of the record business of yore.

The bit about VCs swooping in with just enough money to keep you alive and not really giving much of a rip about your creative endeavors and as soon as it looks like you might not be a million dollar baby dropping you like a hot potato.

"punk and indie developers". I really like that.

<comment><USER4> I read an article or comment somewhere that compared making a startup to making a band. There really are a lot of parallels.

<comment><USER5> Well, a band essentially is a start-up business. Although funding etc. works a little differently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It seems to make sense to run the numbers here:

8 million sold $1 apps, less 30% to app stores, that's $5.6m. If all 17 people on the about page took $100k salaries for the full two years (which they probably haven't, they've likely grown to this size from a lower number over the two years), that leaves $2.2m for running costs and profit. Besides that, they have 7 other apps in their portfolio which must be expected to provide some revenue.

In other words, what would they possibly do with more cash?

<comment><USER7> $2.2MM is probably peanuts compared to what they would have made in an acquisition, you'd have to figure that any acquisition price would be far north of $8MM. I'm perversely glad they didn't take it, it's great to see people really dedicated to actually starting a viable business, but frankly I'm surprised. I'd like to think I'd make the same choice but I'm not sure, especially if I were the founder. Still, kudos to them.

<comment><USER6> See the chart here: [http://blog.asmartbear.com/wp-content/ss- images/lifestyle-ve...](http://blog.asmartbear.com/wp-content/ss- images/lifestyle-versus-cash-in-bank.png) from <http://blog.asmartbear.com/rich-vs-king-sold-company.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love seeing stories like this. Too often VC funding or cashing out are seen as the primary measure of startup success, rather than building a successful business.

</comment><comment><USER7> Great story, and it's a shame that this attitude is so unusual. I guess the success stories from bootstrapping don't get the press, so maybe it's not so unusual after all. Still, it's a nice counterpoint to the usual VC-is-the- endgoal idea.

</comment><comment><USER9> if you have a product thats selling so well, is growing organically, and is already build...why would you ever consider outside funding?

<comment><USER10> We seldom acknowledge it but I think the truth of the matter is that a lot of people become entrepreneurs because they want the recognition, the fame and the status.

As silly as it is, taking VC money gives you that in a way that is much harder to achieve with actual tangible success. You might be killing it with your product but carefully explaining your company metrics to someone over dinner is seldom more impactful than saying you took $10M from Andreeson-Horrowitz.

This is not entirely unreasonable as most people realise they are unable to judge the success or otherwise of early stage companies (even VCs struggle). Telling someone you were invested in by a great VC tells them that someone who knows their stuff things you're great. It's a marquee endorsement.

If you'd asked me whether I wanted the status I'd have always said yes. At the same time though I never acknowledged it in my life-calculations. I always wondered why I gambled on a big outcome when I knew a smaller outcome would (financially speaking) make me very, very happy. I doubt there are many people who can point to the happiness bump from the second $30M.

Acknowledging that recognition was one of my goals made it all of a sudden easier to rationalise decisions that, while optimal for my investors were actually totally sub-optimal for my personal financial utility. One of those decisions may well be having investors in the first place.

<comment><USER11> This is a really interesting point. To give an example, one of my friends in that scene thinks that 37signals is probably "not doing that well." I can only guess this is because they aren't raising tons of VC and having their name plastered all over TC.

<comment><USER12> Your friend is simply wrong. I think buying a house in italy and commissioning a custom super car is evidence that he doesn't know what he is talking about.

[http://www.autoblog.com/2010/09/07/pagani-zonda-hh- commissio...](http://www.autoblog.com/2010/09/07/pagani-zonda-hh-commissioner- revealed-as-30-year-old-chicago-sof/)

<comment><USER13> That means DHH is doing well, and has little to do with 37signals.

<comment><USER14> _Sorry to post this here, but jsprinkles' profile is empty._

@jsprinkles: do you have a blog or website? Really enjoyed your xip.io comments (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4082017>) and would like to keep up with your adventures. On a related note, it would be nice if HN had RSS feeds for specific user submissions and comments.

<comment><USER13> I prefer to stay semi-anonymous, but a few people know who I am (it wouldn't be rocket science to deduce). When I posted under my real name folks I did not know would come up to me at conferences and argue with me about things I had said on Hacker News. People tend to get offended by my remarks because I disagree with a lot of this culture, so it's also easier to just keep that separate from my career.

Thank you for the kind words.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I never understood this whole rush to sell your business. When I build something I become emotionally invested in it and I wouldn't sell unless I started hating my product or not believing in it any more.

There should be a clear motivation behind selling something you care about (well, if you ever cared about your product in the first place, that is), not because techcrunch or VCs tell you it's the right thing to do.

</comment><comment><USER16> I suspect Apple will add in filters feature into Camera and Photos app in iOS 6. This might impact some income for Camera+ app.

</comment><comment><USER17> Perhaps they can take the money and invest in iPad version of the app. iPad is the next thing after iPhone and it is shame that I have to use such app in iPhone compatibility mode.

But reading from the story seems like taking money from those kind of investors isn't such a good idea going forward.

2c

</comment><comment><USER18> Actually should not accept investments from any one, but the says "f*ck the VCs" is unethical.</comment>


Hugh MacLeod on career prospects - <AUTHOR> http://gapingvoid.com/2009/11/08/fat-dumb-happy/ <comment><USER2> In China, if you are one-in-a-million skilled at your endeavor of choice, there are _still_ a thousand people better at it than you. Ditto with India.

I had a facts-of-life conversation with myself prior to entering college on how good of a computer programmer I am (decent, but not the best) and what my competitive situation would look like next to 100,000 Indians graduating every year (not so great). That is when I decided to double major in a language. Playing the Venn diagram game, the circle of people who are better programmers than me is pretty big, the circle of people who speak better Japanese than I do is pretty big, but the intersection of those two circles is pretty freaking small.

I really suggest that everyone play the Venn diagram game for themselves. And, no, "speaks English kinda good" and "has a college degree" is no longer enough to cut it. Find yourself a niche and be at or near the top of the skill curve in it. (I rush to add, for my fellow ArtSci graduates, that it helps if the niche has _cough_ economic value. Nobody says you can't be the world's leading expert on traditional Louisianan pottery, but that may end up being your hobby rather than your day job.)

P.S. "Can program way out of paper bag" INTERSECT "marketing skills" results in a _disgustingly_ small set. This is great news for small businessmen!

<comment><USER3> If I'm a one-in-a-million programmer in a population with one billion people (which I assume is what you were getting at), to have a thousand people better than me would assume that 100% of that population are programmers. They are not. Say for arguments sake that 5% of the Chinese population are professional programmers, then if I'm one in a million then I have around 50 other people on my level in the entire country.

On the other hand if my entire gimmick is "I'm a decent programmer but I can speak Japanese!" and you limit yourself to that market then the reality is that your opportunities are drastically smaller than even "American programmer who is self-qualified with good experience, solid skills and good work ethic looking for a 9-5 job in America."

<comment><USER4> Your numbers are more precise than Patio's, but I think they miss the bigger point he is trying to make: distinguish yourself from the crowd, find a niche.

To your second point, he also does emphasize that you need to create a _marketable_ niche. Programmers who speak Japanese would be very valuable, iff there aren't a lot of Japanese speakers who can program.

<comment><USER3> I got the point, I just don't agree that it's essential or even all that effective to become niche. In fact I can think of many examples were becoming niche will hurt you in the long term - I mean, hey, my niche used to be Perl :)

Which I guess is my point - if you're a programmer and looking to add a language to your toolkit, surely a programming language would be the better choice?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "And in the back of my mind, I'm thinking the same is starting to happen to white collar guys more and more, as well. But it's not quite out in the open yet. Society's not quite ready to have that conversation."

This. I wonder how long it's going to take until we're allowed to talk about this. It's pretty clear that five years ago if you graduated from an Ivy but you weren't that smart, you could still get a pretty good job. But today these people are mostly unemployed because they aren't willing to take a menial job, and the thing is that it looks like they'll never get offered anything better than a menial job. How big does this class of people have to get before this is officially a 'thing'?

<comment><USER6> Well, pretty big, because it has to override all the signals sent from the actors that wish to perpetuate the status quo, such as the Ivy League schools themselves, who are not interested in admitting that their education has lost value. This, plus social inertia, is delaying recognition of this new social status.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Am I the only one who feels that having to _actually try_ to get a good job straight out of uni should be the norm rather than the exception?

College is not training for a job. It's something you should do because you want to learn. If you go to university because you want a job, you're a fool. There's no conceivable reason why simply "having a degree" (or, for the blue- collar example, being alive) should be a guarantee of a "good job".

I didn't graduate all that long ago, from a top university, and yet I had to actually struggle to get my first job (graduating right after 9/11 and being a foreign student didn't help). I don't see that as abnormal, though. What's so terrible about a little struggling? It's not like any of these so-called thousandists are struggling to feed themselves. Does anyone really want to just waltz out of college into a boring, reasonably paid job for the rest of their life? I find it hard to empathise with anyone whose aspirations in life stop there.

Sorry for the slightly incoherent rant, but this sort of thing (which I think they call "an overgrown sense of entitlement") bugs me. Nothing's guaranteed in this world, not even that you'll have a fair shot. Compared to most of human history, these are fantastic times we live in, where almost everyone is at least given the opportunity to do something with their life. Stop bitching and get on with making the most of your life!

<comment><USER8> > If you go to university because you want a job, you're a fool.

Even if that's what your elders had been telling you all your life? I'm not saying it's their fault either; after all it worked for them [1], so it made sense to pass on a working theory. I just don't think it's apt to label a young person foolish just because they listened to the (flawed) wisdom of the more experienced.

[1] I'm speaking only of the U.S. Baby Boomer generation like my parents, since that's all I'm qualified to speak of.

<comment><USER9> Yes. If you listen to what everyone is telling you without evaluating it for yourself, you are indeed a fool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend of mine. I was ranting to him how I didn't feel good enough in any single pursuit and was upset at having so many hobbies and side-interests diluting my ability to be much better at any one thing. He basically told me: "Well, no one has the exact same set of skills that you do and being diverse in training is a virtue. Plus, even if there is someone better than you at everything you do, that person's really fucking busy right now, so there's still a lot of work to do"

</comment><comment><USER11> Doesn't the idea that there are thirty million piano-playing Chinese children imply that there is also a massive impending expansion in total addressible worldwide market?

The era of the 6-figure starting salary for MBA's may be drawing to a close (though it is not, as my little sister will tell you, for law school grads), but the forces that demolished Big Auto are specific and concrete; no similar force applies to "white collar" in general.

<comment><USER12> "Doesn't the idea that there are thirty million piano-playing Chinese children imply that there is also a massive impending expansion in total addressible worldwide market?"

How many top piano players do you really need in the world? Especially a world where music is so easy to reproduce and distribute. When it comes to cello players, there's only one YoYo Ma - how many other notable cello players can you name?

"though it is not, as my little sister will tell you, for law school grads"

Your little sister may want to rethink that. There was an article in the local paper here a few weeks back about how recent college grads are having a tough time finding work. One of the people profiled graduated from a fairly well respected local law school back in the Spring and has yet to find anything. She said that she and many of her former classmates are now on food stamps.

<comment><USER9> The idea of 30 million piano-playing Chinese isn't important because we need piano players. It's important because the fact that someone can take piano lessons implies a certain level of economic status beyond day-to-day survival. It implies a growing middle and upper class. Those implications lead to the conclusion of much larger markets, which leads to the idea of more wealth creation resulting from people filling those markets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> That is a powerful post. This is the HN moment. The HN community can play a critical role in shaping the next decade.

Personally, as scary as the coming years may be, I've been expecting them, and am excited.</comment>


NSA has VPNs in Vulcan death grip–no, really, that's what they call it - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/12/nsa-has-vpns-in-vulcan-death-grip-no-really-thats-what-they-call-it/

<comment><USER2> The suggestion that SSH is compromised is pretty sobering. I didn't consider that.</comment>