After the Gold Rush - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/28/even-peter-thiel-has-got-soul/ <comment><USER2> There is truth here, but remember that the age of the intelligent networked machine is just beginning.

Look at the YC classes. They are very different from 2005. You can't get rich making a site like reddit today. YC is going international, with X for Y country businesses.

I was talking to a friend with a startup in Indonesia. In Asia its like 1998.

I think we are just at the end of the easy social/mobile revolution in the West and on the cusp of the next robotics/AI/IoT revolution.

And the same process that created cheap and easy tools for software, the same process that dropped the cost of starting a SaaS business 10x will happen for robotics/ai/IoT.

Its already relatively cheap and easy to prototype and fabricate things like low power bluetooth wearables.

Computers have just gotten tiny, low power, wireless and cheap enough to be disposable. These devices are about to be everywhere.

This is not the end of the tech startup gold rush. It's time to learn AI and hardware prototyping.

<comment><USER3> "the age of the intelligent networked machine is just beginning"

This sounds like pure denial. You don't want to face a painful truth, so you create a rationalization. But your sentence could be applied to dozens of other maturing industries, and your sentence would be wrong in every case:

In the 1880s: "There are thousands of oil reserves that no one has discovered yet, therefore the field remains wide open to innovators who want to take a risk on a new field."

And yet, after 1880s, the industry consolidated into a single behemoth. Even as late as the early 21st century, wildcatters could still make some money off a hard to reach patch, if prices were high enough. That didn't change the fact that all the big profits were held by a few near monopoly powers.

In the 1880s: "Much of the country can not yet be reached by train, so this industry is wide open to innovators who want to build new lines."

And yet the train industry consolidated after 1880.

1920s: "In automobiles, there are still vast innovations to be made to make brakes reliable, and someone needs to invent an automatic starter, since hand crakes are now dangerous, given the growing size of the engines. And an automatic transmission would be an amazing breakthrough, if anyone can figure out how to do it. The space is wide open for innovators who can solve any of the many problems that remain in the auto industry."

But the auto industry consolidated from that point forward.

In the 1980s: "The CPU is a new idea and the path forward for processors is still wide open to innovation."

And yet, Motorola was founded in 1928, Digital Equipment Corporation in 1957, Intel in 1968 and AMD was founded in 1969. The dominant powers for computer processors started a long time ago, the field consolidated when much was still unknown about the ideal strategy for processors.

There are industries that clearly have not yet emerged as stable entities with a clear path forward. Genetic engineering is an obvious one. But the software industry is clearly much more consolidated than it was in the past.

<comment><USER2> The train, the automobile, and the microprocessor were all harbingers of exponentially increasing wealth and opportunity. Each technology lowered the cost of starting and running businesses, as well as giant ancillary businesses and markets.

The microprocessor preceded the gold rush we're eulogizing here.

They all spawned brand new ecosystems that created entirely new opportunities for entrepreneurs to create wealth. The train even unified some nation states that didn't exist.

<comment><USER3> It's possible that you did not understand the original article. Or perhaps you did not read it. When you write:

"Each technology lowered the cost of starting and running businesses"

No, not in those industries. When an industry consolidates, the cost of the starting a new business in that industry skyrockets. Eventually it becomes impossible to start a new company in that industry. That clearly happened for trains and automobiles, microprocessors, and certainly now for Internet companies.

This is a pat re-statement of a tired cliche:

"They all spawned brand new ecosystems that created entirely new opportunities for entrepreneurs to create wealth."

There will probably be economic growth in the future. I mentioned one obvious industry that is still forming: genetic engineering. That doesn't change the fact that the gold rush has come to an end for Internet startups.

Here you are changing the subject:

"The train even unified some nation states that didn't exist."

I come back to my original diagnosis: Your comment sounds like pure denial. You don't want to face a painful truth, so you create a rationalization.

<comment><USER2> Pretty sure this is troll feeding but in case you're sincere:

I didn't say cost was lowered in the "train" industry. Cost was lowered in the milk industry. Because after the train people didn't have to keep cows in urban areas to have fresh milk.

Your diagnosis is wrong. I've spent the last year focused on internet connected hardware, immersing myself in all the amazingly powerful new tools that just got cheap and open source.

The things I've made, the possibilities, the wonder of designing something on a screen and having it manifest itself in the world, so you can hold it and it comes alive right in front of you. The next evolution of internet techology is going to be so much better than CRUD apps ever were.

Adopt a broader view of internet startups friend and you will see the internet is just the communication/coordination channel for our cybernetic future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As someone who has worked at Google for a few years, I can't agree with the author's characterization of tech behemoths. While they have embraced the start-up mode of doing things for some new projects and are very free with their investing, their core business is everything you'd expect from a big business.

I'm not sure it's possible to grow as large as Google, Apple or Facebook and remain agile. The product and organization gains too much inertia on its own. Even if you have a brilliant idea for improving the product there are hundreds of people you need to convince, months worth of meetings and reams of design docs required.

The big companies may be innovating on the edges, but their established products are all ripe for disruption.

Of course, if you look too disruptive they'll probably just buy you with their mountain of cash.

<comment><USER5> "Of course, if you look too disruptive they'll probably just buy you with their mountain of cash."

Woe! :P

<comment><USER6> Unless they decline the offer, like Facebook did and Google did and almost every current big company did at some point. If you are wildly successful there WILL be that option in front of you at some point.

<comment><USER7> Who offered to acquire google?

<comment><USER8> Google offered themselves to Excite, also Yahoo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> TechCrunch, the over confident tabloid reporters of hype who only a few weeks ago were all breathless about 'unicorns', are now swinging the pendulum to the other extreme. I'm in the bay area and there is a new realism for sure, but the idea that low buck entrepreneurialism is 'over' is absurd.

Most of the current wave of tech's origins are in the Web 2.0 'read/write' web that came after the dot com pump and dump funding fiasco...twitter et al grew out of the ashes of the last vc and wall street debacle. we are a similar inflection point IMO, where honest innovation will be more important than megabuck funding fests...

<comment><USER10> I think you're right. Most of what we read in media is the latest hype. Unicorns were hype and covered to no end. This weeks hype is the end times of tech.

There's no middle ground in most of the news I read. Imo, the markets are tightening up forcing companies at all stages to cut their budgets and/or generate revenue.

Tighter markets and harder conditions does not equate to the stagnation of tech. They are not the same. In fact, constraints lead to greater innovation.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I think it leads to the winner being the company with the best product rather than the company that pulled in the most VC funding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's somewhat clear that were headed for a bit of a downturn, but this article reeks of the "everything that could be invented has been invented" fallacy.

<comment><USER13> I think it is also kind of missing that you can't easily draw parallels with the past here, as the field we are mostly talking about – software making, I think – is the first(?) modern big industry field where the means of production are in the hand of the workers. You can't easily compete with car companies, cause most of us won't have the means to even produce a prototype. But nothing is stopping someone capable enough from building his own OS, for example. And yeah, then we come to the forces of design and market share, but still – this is fairly new and distinct.

<comment><USER14> There is lack of freely available hardware on which said os to run - a lot of companies try to be your gatekeepers.

The golden days like in the 90-s everything is PC, you can run whatever you want on PC are still somewhere ahead of us with mobile and IoT.

<comment><USER15> Mobile app stores are owned by two tech giants. Expect more and more stories like [https://medium.com/@joshliptzin/this-is-how-google-kills- you...](https://medium.com/@joshliptzin/this-is-how-google-kills-your- app-c1abad30eb25)

<comment><USER14> I have a feeling that these tech giants are up for Standard Oil/ Bell surprise in the medium future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Oh no you have to do something new to get rich.

There's still plenty of money, talent, and success out there for new, good ideas. It being hard to fund the same old thing again and again is more of a feature than a bug.

And the argument about the last few YC classes - it takes years to see who the stars are. I remember seeing one of the founders of Stripe speak when they were in YC. It wasn't clear they were going anywhere. What they were doing was cool, but there wasn't exactly lots of hype about it. Their success only looks obvious in hindsight.

</comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash It's not startups that are losing their luster, it's tech-for-tech's-sake companies. Now that we pretty much have everything we need to be connected, we have to look beyond technology and to the strongest fulcrum of society: culture.

Culture companies are the future. When you can get anything anywhere, the brand matters far more than the product. Anyone can make a burger or a pizza, so why are McDonalds and Pizza Hut crushing it across the globe, especially in China?

We're already seeing this with news. Traditional media companies are struggling to adapt while media outlets with personality like Vice (and Slate, and Quartz) are doing better than ever.

When all the gold is mined, when all the tech is made, the only thing that's left is to sell yourself.

<comment><USER17> I agree with you that brands will grow even more important.

Though, all tech has not been made yet - I suspect tech is taking a short time-out right now before the next big disruptions are enabled by:

* VR (cinema, anyone? could even make some 3d printing obsolete)

* order-of-magnitude faster mobile internet

* cheap(er) robotics

* abundant energy supply thanks to fusion or <insert yet unknown source>; also, perhaps break-through battery tech?

* self-driving cars (obvious, but I think that in itself will enable a lot of disruptions, like cheap grocery delivery)

* cheap(er) drones (= flying cars eventually?)

<comment> rm_-rf_slash Clarification: tech as in tech for this computational generation (i.e. Smartphones). Pretty much everything there has been done, and it won't be until new platforms that exist (like drones and VR like you mentioned) that interesting things will be made.

That being said, such shifts do not often treat incumbents well. Microsoft dominated the PC market in the 90s and early 00s, but their smartphone/tablet is barely a footnote in the market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> He said: "Today's tech behemoths aren't the lumbering giants of yesteryear. They are leaner and meaner and more competitive precisely because they have co-opted the same technologies startups used to attack them."

But this is far from true with the huge entrenched healthcare tech companies. Many of them haven't even begun to employ the newer software technologies. I'm down the street from the largest medical center in the world and numerous doctors and nurses encourage me all the time with their complaints about the major tech players in the industry. SV has barely scratched the surface of what could be improved and I look forward to seeing many more entrepreneurs join us in this $3 trillion industry.

<comment><USER19> The problem with the medical and biological fields is: you generally need expensive equipment. Also, you will need expensive certification.

This is something that wasn't the case for software, so I guess this is also why this goldrush was so much different than anything else we've seen before.

<comment><USER20> A similar problem is where the medical and software industries butt heads. The Software industry likes to take risks and move quickly. It embraces failure. Medicine avoids risk and moves methodically because of that pesky Hippocratic Oath. Failure is often a life and death situation.

My father is a physician. So we've had lots of conversations about this problem. I also here all of his complaints about software. Especially EMR (Electronic Medical Record) systems.

<comment><USER19> I have a friend whose family doctor developed his own Electronic Medical Record system :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I like to scan these articles for numbers before reading. If I don't see any, I exit out.

If you're going to talk about financial/economic phenomena please at least conduct a modicum of quantitative research and give us some concrete data to discuss, not just opinions in a void.

<comment><USER22> There's maybe one small number observation, I m not sure if it's correct as there maybe high growth YC companies which will soon pass those 3/4.

"In 2011, Y Combinator's poster-child alumni were — already — AirBNB, Dropbox, and Stripe. Can you think of any Y Combinator companies from the last five years as well-positioned today as those Big Three were then? Maybe Instacart, if their unit economics work. That's it."

<comment><USER23> That observation has a huge amount of hindsight bias. AirBnB was founded in 2006, DropBox was founded in 2007, and Stripe was founded in 2010. What did the ideal startup look like in 2007? It was one of:

"A social network for X, like Facebook"

"A social news site for X, like Digg"

"A way to massively improve your e-mail experience, like GMail"

In other words, people always chase the massive startup that got popular about 3 years previously. This article is pretty much on-time if it's holding up AirBNB, DropBox, and Stripe - those are the massive startups that got popular about 3-4 years ago.

But in 2007, these were most decidedly _not_ the hot industries to go into. Hotels were a done deal: Hilton, Marriott, Holiday Inn, and others chains owned it, and who would think a tiny team could take them on? Filesharing was an incredibly crowded market with 20-30 players, and in any case, if it got popular Google was going to crush them with Google Drive. PayPal owned payments; everybody knew it was a regulated industry with strong network effects, so why bother to compete?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Maybe the "gold rush" is over. But there's still a heck of a lot of gold to mine. We're not even _close_ to the point where there is no more valuable software to be written (and sold).

</comment><comment><USER25> No the _social_ gold rush is gone. Everybody who wishes to get online is online already with _something_ and you have displace that.

And "gold rush" is a good term--"land grab" might be better. The fact that the "disruptive" companies are all now skirting or outright flouting the law shows that the easy land is taken.

If it's highly profitable, it's either illegal or difficult. Easy and profitable means that, even if you're first, the horde is inbound.

Those of us with real products that can't simply be done with 4 20-year-olds and a dog in Ukraine? We're chugging along, thanks.

Yeah, raising money is getting _really_ annoying, but, if we can't, we'll bootstrap. Funny that, bootstrapping is an option when people pay you money.

And, do remember, the people who made all the money in the gold rush weren't the miners, it was the people who sold shovels and alcohol.

<comment><USER26> > And, do remember, the people who made all the money in the gold rush weren't > the miners, it was the people who sold shovels and alcohol.

Ssssh, don't give away the secret. ;)

Actually, startups designed to sell to other startups will fail too when the whole thing collapses like a stack of cards...

Enter Mandrill, which recently found its conversion funnel so ineffective that they suddenly shut the entire system down.

<comment><USER7> Is that what happened to Mandrill? I've read a coherent explanation of what's going on there and why, but I'd love to.

<comment><USER26> Well the official answer was "this change isn't driven by profit–it's about aligning our culture and core competencies with our core customers' needs. There are many people who use Mandrill as a (free) utilitarian infrastructure service, who are not our core customers, and who deserve to use a company that's better set up for that in the long run." [https://blog.mailchimp.com/important-changes-to- mandrill/#co...](https://blog.mailchimp.com/important-changes-to- mandrill/#comment-3356313)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Then[1] and Now[2]

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/09/technology/09silicon.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/09/technology/09silicon.html)

[2] [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/22/technology/caution- rebuffe...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/22/technology/caution-rebuffed- unicorns-and-other-start-ups-fixate-on-rainbows.html?_r=0)

<comment><USER28> I am not sure of what to infer from these.

In the end, the entire macroeconomic background is different.

<comment><USER27> Even in 2008, there was a lot of denial about the impact of the downturn on Silicon Valley.

"And they assert that they are not feeling anything like the pain that followed the collapse of the dot-com bubble, which led to big job losses, an exodus of talent, a plunging commercial real estate market and a significant drop in investment in start-up companies."

<comment><USER11> Denial? Isn't their statement true that the impact of 2008 on Silicon Valley was not as bad as the dot com crash?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Interesting article but I think it has a critical flaw — not all startups are in the consumer space. Of course, there's not going to be another Facebook for the next couple years at least, but another Stripe — maybe?

</comment><comment><USER30> It's funny because the means through which big business tech companies have "co-opted the same technologies startups used to attack them" is through buying said startups. So no, I don't think it's all over.

You can't type on a keyboard and make an automobile factory that can compete with the big car companies, but in software, you pretty much can. It's a pretty chaotic market for this reason even if there are big dogs.

<comment><USER31> It's not over. Big business [anything] companies become slower with each new process and bozo explosion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> So, tl;dr version: The dark ages of the tech industry are finally over. Everyone, rejoice, it's a brand new day.

Stop working on your social network. Stop trying to simultaneously pick the lowest hanging fruit while going after the biggest pile of cash.

Go after problems that matter, rather than gizmos that might get a lot of users, or "eyeballs".

</comment><comment><USER33> All of these claims are true in any market, but we ignore them during booms because fundraising is easier (and de-risks our startup involvement). The only novelty in this article is a return to honesty.

</comment><comment><USER34> "If you are building something which is genuinely extraordinary, that's always the right answer."

The gold rush is never over for extraordinary companies.

</comment><comment><USER15> I agree with this article overall, especially re: Google, but I do not agree about Facebook. Most American users 13-25 do not use Facebook anymore.

Facebook will either have to work out a business model that makes it profitable to frequently buy WhatsApps/Instagrams and then Snapchats/Telegrams/etc or they will end too.

<comment><USER35> I agree. I ask myself this question; "If <x> was to disappear tomorrow, what would happen?"

The answer for Facebook and me, is nothing. If Google disappeared tomorrow, I would be hurting for many services I probably take for granted. I suspect if Facebook disappeared tomorrow, most people's lives would not _materially_ change for the worse. Perhaps they would even change for the better.

<comment><USER36> I think a lot of people would be better off without Twitter.

<comment><USER15> I think twtr stock symbol may not exist by 2018 actually

<comment><USER37> If you really believe that then put money into it.

<comment><USER15> It's hard to short for such a long time, nearly impossible. Common shorts and puts are short term instruments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I've gotta say as someone who is not actively developing full time, most of the comments in here read like people in denial. It doesn't really matter what anyone's opinion is, or what any of us say though - the future will bring what it brings. That said I hedged my bets a couple years ago against the tech world's macro economic future and culture.

</comment><comment><USER39> > Over in The Information, the Lessins argue that "the period where tech > startups can readily disrupt larger tech companies is ending for a simple > reason: Today's tech behemoths aren't the lumbering giants of yesteryear. > They are leaner and meaner and more competitive precisely because they have > co-opted the same technologies startups used to attack them"

I disagree. I am reminded of the comparison of the prisoner and the warden, where the warden [behemoth] has his whole life to think about whereas the prisoner [startup] is only thinking of escape [way to get a leg up on the behemoth]. The difference is that many people see the behemoth with no _obvious_ weaknesses and give up; but if they had the same weaknesses they exploited, that would be too easy wouldn't it?

</comment><comment><USER40> > Over in The Information, the Lessins argue that "the period where tech > startups can readily disrupt larger tech companies is ending for a simple > reason: Today's tech behemoths aren't the lumbering giants of yesteryear. > They are leaner and meaner and more competitive precisely because they have > co-opted the same technologies startups used to attack them" and so "until > there is another fundamental technology disruption, the window of > opportunity for startups is limited to more traditional markets with less > competitive players."

Oh, come on. Where there are BigCos, there is inherent bureaucracy slowing them down. Creating a startup gives founder engineers the opportunity to massively create wealth in a way that BigCo simply does not incentivize.

</comment><comment><USER41> After the technopolies will come the decentralized technologies like the block chain etc. Then we will eventually get a common platform built on things like an AST format (e.g. web assembly) with a semantic module registry allowing for creating interfaces across programming languages to integrate and evolve the decentralized tech. Then we will get into competing smart contracts and localized systems that limit company size and regulate social interaction via the technology. Then we will have superintelligent hybrid systems with features we can't anticipate now.

</comment><comment><USER42> Consumer may be entering a trough but the industrial internet is rising. Social and enterprise SaaS are highly saturated, but these become tools for the next generation of companies. The next wave of technology is characterized by technology that senses and interacts with its environment and this will drive tremendous innovation in the industrial internet (agtech, manufacturing, construction, etc). As these technologies mature, become less expensive and more ubiquitous, we'll see startups start diffusing back into the consumer space and the cycle will repeat again.

</comment><comment><USER43> Ctrl-f, thiel, not found. Why the slug?

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm glad I built a profitable business before taking any investment. Seems like I'll have a little better leverage going forward.

</comment><comment><USER45> I bet you he's wrong and I intend to prove it.

</comment><comment><USER46> Now that TC announced it, it's official people! Time to close shop, pack your bags and leave.

Startup gold-rush is anything but over. Tell me this: if not into startups, where will the money go to find possible returns? Negative interest rates, oil price can't find the bottom and stocks aren't really going anywhere either. So where will this money go?

<comment><USER47> > Now that TC announced it, it's official people! Time to close shop, pack > your bags and leave.

I had the same thought - TC is pretty much an eye-roll-and-move-on for me at this point.

However...

> Tell me this: if not into startups, where will the money go to find possible > returns? Negative interest rates, oil price can't find the bottom and stocks > aren't really going anywhere either. So where will this money go?

I think that the point here isn't that entrepreneurship is suddenly dead, but rather that

> [the big players] have co-opted the same technologies startups used to > attack them" and so "until there is another fundamental technology > disruption, the window of opportunity for startups is limited to more > traditional markets with less competitive players."

The various *AAS models may be coming to the end of their usefulness as a disruptive media, but there's plenty of "fundamental technology disruption" ahead: mesh networking, crypto-blockchains, embedded, VR, and on and on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> This is mostly true but it sounds a bit too gloomy.

<comment><USER49> Agreed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I disagree with the authors premise that there can only be 2-3 behemoths. Has he not been paying attention to how kids use mobile apps these days? No one is locked in to a single ecosystem like they used to be.

People use gchat, Facebook, Instagram, snapchat, whatsapp, and iMessage simultaneously, for distinct purposes. And all of their friends do too.

As long as the app present value, kids these days have no problems switching back and forth between apps, meaning they can get hundreds of millions or billions of users too.

<comment><USER41> Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp. The only app on your list that isn't controlled by a giant company is Snapchat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> The gold rush is over because everyone who wants a PC has a PC. -2005ish

<comment><USER52> The hardware hasn't really gotten significantly better in the last 10 years to get people on the upgrade treadmill again. Phones are on that curve now, but eventually they are going to top out too, and your iPhone 10 won't be that significant an upgrade from your iPhone 9.

<comment><USER53> I guess it depends how you measure getting better. If you're just looking at Mhz then maybe I can understand.

For me, 10 years ago I had to use a desktop to achieve much of anything. These days I have the power of my desktop except it weighs 2.65 pounds, wireless transfer speeds up to 1300 Mbit/s, has a 13.3in 3200x1800 touch screen, 256GB drive I can read and write much faster than my 3ware RAID0 setup I had back then. Its the size of an actual notebook and runs all day long without getting plugged into anything. Not to mention it only cost me $750 bucks compared to at least twice that for my old desktops.

For me, it feels like things have improved fairly significantly.

<comment><USER52> We're sort of out on one end of the bell-curve, really. For Joe Blow, average computer user, email and Word and YouTube works on their decade old hardware. Unless you're a gamer, there's not a lot of call to have the latest and greatest - and you can still run a lot of stuff on lower settings on old hardware. Long-lived console generations and the paucity of PC-first development have kept the minimum specs on even AAA titles pretty low.

For instance, my parents are happy as clams using a G4 Macbook and a second- hand HP Pavilion laptop</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Russian diplomats' curious obsession with poetry - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russian-diplomats-have-a-curious-obsession-with-poetry/2016/04/01/c0c26d4e-f688-11e5-958d-d038dac6e718_story.html <comment><USER2> Well Russians like their literature, poetry specifically more than say Americans. These people are also well educated and read, so no surprise they like it.

They also probably like chess, and ballet as well ( if we are doing stereotypes ...)</comment>


Falling Out of Love (W/ Your Company) - <AUTHOR> http://founderdating.com/falling-out-of-love-w-my-company/ The first-hand account from founder of Manpacks about why he walked away from the company as they were starting to take off. <comment><USER2> The perfect V-day article. :)</comment>


Tooling.Report - <AUTHOR> https://bundlers.tooling.report/ <comment><USER2> I'm impressed by how well Rollup does in this report.</comment>


Git and github  are not change management tools (rewriting history in git) - <AUTHOR> http://mikemainguy.blogspot.com/2011/08/git-and-github-not-change-mangement.html <comment><USER2> The author is misguided about (1) the technical details behind Git (all commits are hashed, so if you cryptographically sign a particular commit tag, it will definitely point to that commit and its attendant history), as well as (2) the obvious/non-obviousness of a rewritten history (if upstream rebases, it's really obvious.)

<comment><AUTHOR> You're absolutely right, that was kinda the point of the article. I've run across quite a few people who think git is "distributed svn" and the gap between these two tools is much bigger than most appreciate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> So, in summary:

"A hammer can be used for the following things:

1\. To drive nails into another material

2\. To 'hammer out' dents in sufficiently soft materials

3\. As a weapon

4\. As a doorstop

5\. etc.

Because some people only use it to do (1) and (3), it isn't a tool for (2)."

P.S. I know the author acknowledges this in his own comment on the article.

</comment><comment><USER4> You can ammend history in any repository, but all other repositories still have the original state. Hence, someone who tries to tamper with git history in such a way can't do it undetectably. It will be blatently obvious to all that the history has been rewritten, and all other copies of the repositories will contain the original history.

If you _are_ going to use git in a centralized way, I suggest you use Gerrit. In addition to providing code review functionality, Gerrit also gives user authentication and you per-user access controls. This allows you to restrict what a user can do when he pushes, so that he can only update a branch (i.e., push new content), and not delete a branch or do a "force push" (which is what you would need to do if you want to replace a branch with entirely new content).

It's also possible to customize Gerrit to only allow a user to push changes that he or she wrote herself, which will give you a much more strict audit trail. And you can set these access control parameters on a per-branch basis, so you could allow the release manager to push new changes onto the vendor branch, but all changes to the production branch must be committed by the person submitting the change, and go through code review.

So the basic take-away from the article is (a) git is a distributed SCM, not a centralized SCM; and if you want to use git in a centralized SCM fashion, don't do it incompetently --- instead you should use Gerrit, which is designed as a wrapper to Git so it can a secure, auditable, centralized repository.

<comment><USER5> I use Gerrit at work and I do not recommend it to anyone. It's a half-assed tool that essentially turns Git into something that's worse than tarballs, diff+patch and an e-mailing list. The Gerrit UI is horrible, it can handle only one patch changes (worse than pull requests) and every time you upload a new patch, all your previous review comments are hidden with the old version of the patch.

Gerrit (and Android's repo) are based on cherry-picking and rebasing, not branching and merging. They will turn your history into a mess in any non- trivial setting. It also doesn't support Git submodule trees.

What the original article author wants is some kind of security. Git's way of doing that is GPG signatures.

My advice: if you have a choice, do NOT use Gerrit for anything. GitHub is gazillion times better.

(note: we might not be using the latest version of Gerrit, however it's so bad that I don't think a new version will help)

<comment><USER4> I've been regularly sending patch series to Gerrit, and it works fine. If you're not seeing the previous review comments that's because either (a) you're not adding the Change-ID: lines, or (b) you haven't tried diff'ing against the previous version of the patch (in which case the review comments will be clearly visible). Also, the review comments show up in e-mail, of course.

It's true that Android uses a lot of cherry-picking and rebasing, but that's because they have to support a large number of releases. That's a development process choice that the Android folks have made --- but it's not fundamental to Gerrit.

At least the modern versions of Gerrit have a lot of configuration options, some of which can be set on a per-user basis (via ACL settings). It's certainly not perfect, but it is actively being developed, and it is getting better...

<comment><USER5> The problem is that when I upload a new patch set for a change that already exists, all the review comments I had on the previous patch set are "lost". Also finding the differences between two patches in a change is difficult.

What I'd really want to do in this situation is to have a feature branch where I push another commit for review. The difference is clearly visible and I can get new review comments without losing the old ones. This works very well with Git and GitHub.

<comment><USER6> That's exactly how we use gerrit. The most recent change in our gerrit install is on its sixth revision:

       http://review.couchbase.org/8560

I pulled this one arbitrarily, it just happened to be the top. It's got a dependency and they change together. It works flawlessly and almost entirely transparently as long as you have a Change-Id (for which there's a simple hook to generate).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A good article for the git initiate, but I could do without the sensational headline.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you don't like this behaviour, you can set a git repository to reject non- fast-forward pushes to it. Run:

        git config receive.denyNonFastForwards true

This will permit branches to only go in a forward direction.

</comment><comment><USER9> With apologies to Doug Gwyn -

GIT was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.

<comment><USER10> Call it Git or git but please not GIT :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Pointless article about user error.

</comment><comment><USER12> Great read, thanks!</comment>


Hubot, "the hardest working GitHubber" - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/10/the-most-important-startups-hardest-worker-isnt-a-person/ <comment><USER2> If pieces of software count as workers, I guess there are at least a dozen of harder-working more-vital workers at github.

So as long as I personify a piece of software, it too can become the subject of worthless press articles?

<comment><USER3> Where I work at, Sir Jenkins receives more praise, scorn, veneration and sacrilegious remarks than any traditional religious figure.

<comment><USER4> Same here. We love to hate jenkins.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Aha, chatbots!

Brings back my days on IRC.

<comment><USER6> Everything old on IRC is new again.

I read an article about Slack that praised their speed of integrating feedback and iterating with the following example: "the Slack team quickly identified small changes that had a big impact: Within the list of channels, they added fields for a description and the number of people using that channel."

<comment><USER7> One time I asked why, since cgroups and the pattern of container based deployment had been popular for a decade before Docker started, that containers are so popular right now. We ultimately decided that someone constructing a really easy to use suite of tools around the concept was the reason it has all this love and growth.

Not that I totally disagree, but, signing up for Slack is easier than using NickServ for the average person. There's a bunch of features that make HipChat, Slack, Hall et al easier to use than IRC, especially for someone who doesn't want to learn anything new.

Just worth thinking about...

<comment><USER6> Replacing RSS with walled-gardens solutions from Internet Bigcos is another example.

In general I agree that ease-of-use is a big factor. Having said that, I was witness to decidedly non-technical teens in a mid-size town quite happily using mIRC in 2004, so maybe we're not giving people quite enough credit. If you tell people something is hard to use they'll believe you.

The real lesson is to look into what has been done and worked before and see how it can be improved if you're looking for "new" ideas and businesses.

<comment><USER8> My friend's mom used irc in the 90's / early 2000's for dating chatrooms. IRC can be plugged into the browser and embedded into applications seamlessly.

In contrast, I've never even heard of all the things mentioned above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love the tech, but hate how heroku-centric it all is. If you want to spin up your own hubot+heaven instance somewhere not-heroku, glhf.

<comment><USER10> [https://github.com/listenrightmeow/dbot](https://github.com/listenrightmeow/dbot)

[http://pgarbe.github.io/blog/2015/03/24/how-to-run-hubot- in-...](http://pgarbe.github.io/blog/2015/03/24/how-to-run-hubot-in-docker-on- aws-ec2-container-services-part-1/)

There are a couple articles/repos out there with detailed steps on running Hubot on AWS. While the ease and simplicity of deploying Hubot outside of Heroku is not a tenth as easy, there are a couple of options out there.

<comment><USER9> I guess I'm lazy and want an apt-get/yum/brew recipe. What if I have to install it on iron behind a corporate firewall?

<comment><USER11> Then you just follow the installation instructions on your iron behind your corporate firewall: [https://hubot.github.com/docs/](https://hubot.github.com/docs/)

My team controls our hubots on iron behind a firewall with hubot-control, which can also create hubots for you too: [https://github.com/spajus/hubot- control](https://github.com/spajus/hubot-control)

<comment><USER9> Right, but then you need some kind of deployment adaptor to do something useful (like deploying apps) -- Heaven's the recommended one, but

> _Heaven is a rails app that was designed to be hosted on heroku._ > [https://github.com/atmos/heaven/blob/master/doc/installation...](https://github.com/atmos/heaven/blob/master/doc/installation.md)

Now we've got dependencies on node, npm, ruby, rails, heroku, some datastore, a queue for hubot, whatever your _actual_ builder is (capistrano/chef/whatever) etc etc.

Right now I do all this with Jenkins+bash scripts. Inelegant and not as robust as I'd prefer, but so simple. I could just use a Jenkins adaptor for hubot, but then what's the point? I want locking environments, advanced permissions, and so forth.

I'm mostly complaining because I'm dying to implement chatops (mostly for slack-based deployments) but the information is really light, or the tools are too environment-specific, and I don't have people to bounce ideas/questions off of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> /askforraise 10%</comment>


Ask HN: Good Hackathon Prizes - <AUTHOR>

We're bored with doing shiny iDevices or similar, and want to give away something more interesting.<p>What are some of the coolest hackathon prizes you've seen/thought of? <comment><USER2> In my opinion, there are three major tiers of gifts:

1\. Things that I want but could not have done before

These would be experiences or collectors items. Having lunch with Linus or PG would be examples of this category; items like a box of AirBnB's ObamaO's.

2\. Things that I want and could get myself

For this one, there are two sub-categories: A. relevant B. shiny.

A. For a hackathon like photohackday, give away cameras. For something like hackforchange, hire exec to do community service for me or donate an OLPC under my name.

B. Give me something shiny. Galaxy Nexus, Kindle (though these are hard to split among a group). Money also works though a bit awkward (unless it's a big sum).

3\. Things I don't want

I know you think your service is super awesome, but please don't just give me a pro account. Most of the times, I don't use it and therefore it's value to me is 0. Give it away with something else. (nb: dropbox space, on the other hand, would be valuable)

</comment><comment><USER3> Personally, I'd love any of the following: Arduino, Amarino, Hackable RC Helicopter, Kickstarter funding. Basically gifts as platforms to hack more.

Other is allowing these hacks to be shown to people whom we respect and get feedback. Eg: "What does Jack Dorsey think about my bit coin hack."

<comment><USER4> So I'm insanely fond of these cheapo RC helicopters. Syma S107Gs etc.

What about a hackathon ABOUT those helicopters? Everyone gets helicopters, there's lots of parts, and the winner does something cool?

<comment><USER5> wow, interesting. how hackable are they?

<comment><USER4> They are pretty simplistic. Haven't tried to understand them.

One problem is that they are infrared and not radio.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> At <http://crowdhack.crowdconf.com/> the winner got a nepalese knife <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kukri>.

I really wanted to win that.

<comment><USER7> Glad to know about Khukuri being gifted in SF CrowdHack - i'm from Kathmandu, Nepal. There are other popular items from Nepal like Wooden/Brass Baghchal boards, Buddha statue from Lumbini, Mt. Everest souvenir, Pokhara scenery, Himalaya Range Scenery souvenir that'd be great gift to anyone who knows or somehow heard about Nepal :)

Hope you could win one :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hackers are magpies; we like shiny things.

In lieu of that though, how about about PC parts? A sweet GPU/mobo/PSU would be awesome.

Mechanical keyboards; good earphones etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> I want a 3D printer, as a Prize.</comment>


Understanding Extreme Numbers - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/-how-to-understand-extreme-numbers <comment><USER2> This is not just an academic idea for programmers, it is something that you will need to understand to get to the highest levels of engineering. In my career, I have cared about how many nanoseconds an operation takes, and I have optimized processes that required several hours to run. That's 9 orders of magnitude down from one second, and if for convenience we go with my hours- long process taking 10000 seconds (2.78 hours), that's four orders of magnitude up.

Obviously, there are people with far more experience than I on the upside; if you work with a process that will run on a 10,000 (CPU) node cluster that will run for 1,000,000 seconds (11.6 days) that's 10 orders of magnitude up from 1CPU for 1sec... and they're actually still quite likely to care about nanosecond level performance, too! Which means that someone working in this situation is spanning _19 orders of magnitude_ in their day-to-day work.

19 orders of magnitude down from 1 meter is about five orders of magnitude smaller than a hydrogen atom. 19 orders of magnitude up from one meter is about 1000 light-years. It's a pretty big span.

There are not a lot of engineering disciplines, or really, disciplines in general, where spanning this many orders of magnitude in a single job is possible. When it comes time to start optimizing things, you need to know where you stand in the world to make correct decisions: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4087280/approximate- cost...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4087280/approximate-cost-to- access-various-caches-and-main-memory/4087315#4087315)

<comment><USER3> Two that have stuck with me:

A nanosecond is about a foot. A pico second is the size of a flake of pepper.

Adm. Grace Hopper gave me a nanosecond back in high school, and had a pack of picoseconds at the talk. (But didn't give them away. too small)

<comment><USER4> That's extra helpful because these units are approximately the speed of light. Light travels a foot in one nanosecond, and it also traverses the width of a (small, ~.01 inch) pepper flake in a picosecond.

When I think about light travelling one foot in a nanosecond, it suddenly puts CPU speeds into proportion for me -- CPUs are now routinely clocking 3-4 cycles per light-foot! A foot is a long way in CPU die lengths, but it's surprising to think about how close CPU's are actually getting to the speed of light already.

<comment><USER5> I remember reading (clear back in the late 1970s, in Datamation magazine) how much fun IBM was having trying to make 2 mainframe CPUs operate coherently with sub-nanosecond clock speeds, when the two CPUs were several feet apart. Just from a speed-of-light perspective, the problem is obvious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > That means they correctly distinguish between numbers within the millions or > billions, but assume that "million," "billion," and "trillion" are equally > spaced on a number line.

Maybe normal people are good at log scales! Our number system makes log_10 pretty natural, and our naming system makes log_1000 somewhat automatic.

I think it's only fair to point out that log scales are how scientists and engineers understand extreme numbers; nobody really has an "intuitive" understanding of 10^36 or Graham's number.

I can feel this myself; it's easy to think of 1 million as a thousand squared and feel like it's tractable, it's easy to think of a billion as a thousand cubed and feel like it's relatively small. But when I actually plot or visualize that many things, especially if the individuals have variation, I can see that thinking of it in exponents of a thousand is misleading, and that it's hard to get any sense of how many individuals are there and of the complexity of variations and sub-groups that are possible.

</comment><comment> d--b > But about 35 percent of people in the study used what the authors call a > "segmented linear heuristic." That means they correctly distinguish between > numbers within the millions or billions, but assume that "million," > "billion," and "trillion" are equally spaced on a number line.

That kind of logarithmic thinking is a reason why I believe people don't react more strongly when they hear that Jeff Bezos is worth 100 billion dollars.

The wealth of the super rich is so astronomical that people can't make sense of it. It doesn't help to say he's 100,000 times a millionaire, because even if we more or less know how wealthy a millionaire is, we can't imagine what _multiplied_ by 100,000 means.

</comment><comment><USER6> Background: I used to be an physicist (PhD) and graduated as an engineer (applied physics). I also actively promote science with children. I am interested in the interpretation of numbers and quantities for many years.

I do not like this article because it fails to

\- show that we do not "feel" numbers larger than a few

\- and that we have a tendency to think in orders of magnitude (5, a few, lots, plenty of many).

To start with: "many treated 980 million and 2 billion as nearly identical". They were right, 980 million (0.98 billion) is nearly identical to 2 billion when you look at orders of magnitude.

Missing this fact is one of the big problems we have at school, namely the incapacity to estimate. We fetish exact numbers (3.14) instead of telling that pi is 3, pi squared is 10 and g is 10. This way, children can understand orders of magnitude and we do not end with (real case when I was teaching) a skydiver who lands at 573.426625432423 km/h. I cannot deny that the answer is precise to the upth-st digit.

Quantities such as "a million" do not make sense outside of the context. In context they just become a number, not a quantity. For instance what is the size of a hair multiplied by a million? Or a glass? I have no idea. Sure, I can estimate that a glass is 5 cm = 5 x 10^-2 m, which makes it 5 x 10^-2 x 10^6 = 5 x 10^4 m. 50 km. But I had no idea before because I don't know what "a million times" means outside of the numbers.

We are good at estimating small orders of magnitude (from experience, not more than 3) and that's all. The rest is calculus and this is easy. But also detached from reality, a scientist does not ponder on 10^9. This is jst 10^9, a number.

</comment><comment><USER7> Not claiming to be exceptional, just noting that a perspective I developed seems less common than I expected...

I think I've just had a cognitive bias of my own revealed, and found a source of confusion in conversation... I guess I've been sucking up any and all science that interests me since I could read, I have no trouble perceiving scale differences... Planck's constant, universe-scale light-year measurements, Ackermann function values, they are all on a very long and flexible scale of powers of ten, and that whole scale is mostly intuitive. I sometimes even convert everyday numbers into E notation so I know I'm scaling things right.

</comment><comment><USER8> Thanks to existence of the short and long scales I have no idea what people mean when they say "a billion" or something like that today in the globalized Internet-connected world. Please avoid using such ambiguous words at all costs, use scientific notation instead.

<comment><USER9> Aside from my mother, who died 18 years ago, I know no-one else who uses billion meaning 10^12 (long scale, as you point out). I grew up, and still live, in the UK.

I'd be very interested to know if anyone here uses long scale, or knows anyone who does. Is it still in common usage anywhere?

<comment><USER10> We here in Germany - and according to Wikipedia most countries in continental Europe - use the long scale. But when I switch to English I also switch to the short scale, I can not remember to have ever encountered the long scale in English in the wild.

<comment><USER9> Thanks. Obviously I didn't read the Wikipedia entry properly. I must say I'm surprised. I had no idea that these terms were still equivocal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I suggest the article is missing a key point.

> Of course, our ancient human ancestors didn't live among billions of people, > or incur trillions of dollars of debt. The orders of magnitude in their > immediate surroundings were limited to what they could experience firsthand.

A square kilometer might have a billion trees. With how many leaves? One person's year might have a billion heartbeats. A pre-industrial farmer might tend a million plants per year. A sack of rice might have a million grains.

> It's not surprising that we can intuitively visualize a 6-inch or 6-mile > distance,

Asking people how tall a skyscraper is, I get answers like "a mile?". And even for horizontal miles, who is this "we" who can "intuitively visualize" miles - people who drive?

> Things that are so far removed from our daily experience [...] are > inherently hard to understand,

People are regularly innumerate and clueless about things that _are_ part of their daily experience. Far remove is not a necessary condition. Nor is it a sufficient one - experience need not be direct. How often do kids see real horses? Or elephants? Or dinosaurs?

So I suggest the article is missing a key point.

Large quantities, large differences in scale, are inherent in the universe. It's what makes estimation and approximation possible. People simplify with units, landmarks and anchors, and rules of thumb. With experience and stories. But education, and press, leave people largely innumerate, making almost no effort to teach the needed landmarks. In science, and history, and civics, and finance. The main exceptions being a few units of time, and of currency, which are taught down to K.

Think of those little lists in introductory physics. For some measure (eg, Volts), here are a few values. Usually poorly chosen. And _never_ built upon, into a feel for reasonable values.

And then we get science folks saying nanometers are _unimaginably_ small. And journalists that a trillion dollars is unimaginably large.

Yes, people are largely innumerate. But we collectively make almost no effort to change that.

[http://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/](http://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/) started not from the movement to teach introductory biology more quantitatively, but out a graduate student's realization that they had no quantitative feel for their own field. A characterization repeatedly made by physicists about their own doctoral candidates. How many people here recognize a Newton-meter of torque, as being the reopening a 2L soda bottle?

So a takeaway shouldn't be researchers doing something novel, to address a new modern problem. But rather their getting around to doing something long known and established, to address a long standing problem. A problem long, pervasively, unnecessarily, and abjectly neglected.

<comment><USER12> > A square kilometer might have a billion trees.

There are 1 million square meters in a square kilometer, so having a billion would require 1000 trees per square meter.

> One person's year might have a billion heartbeats.

A person's heart beats around once per second, and there are only around 3 * 10^7 seconds per year. That's far from a billion (10^9).

<comment><USER11> Excellent. Thank you for the belay. Yes, that should have been "million trees" (order 1 tree/m^2 for pine forest; though orchard is order 0.1), and "a person's life" respectively.

Meta: failure mode on both was switching/editing between several candidate examples in place, and not checking that the final edit was consistent. Including a sketch of the calculation is one way to make this less likely.</comment></comment></comment>


Pi-Top: Raspberry Pi Laptop Shell - <AUTHOR> http://pi-top.com/ <comment><USER2> $300 seems _outrageously_ expensive for something like this.

$300 is enough for a chromebook, an arduino (or a raspberry pi!), and a boatload of motors and servos and things that they're going to enjoy learning to program with.

This thing doesn't even look like it exposes the GPIO pins. So, really, it's a $300 for a pretty low end arm linux machine.

Pi-top people: if you're reading this, I'm sorry if that sounds overly harsh. The thing you've created is a really nice looking, and is definitely something I would love to buy a stack of an put in my hackerspace, but at that price point, I can't justify it. It isn't that I don't like what you've done, it's that I do like what you've done, I just think it is overpriced.

<comment><USER3> $300 is enough for an actual computer.

<comment><USER4> Indeed, it's enough for a cheap notebook plus a Raspberry Pi, connected together via a remote desktop connection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It just seems expensive to me. I know R&D costs money and it comes with an educational operating system, but the website doesn't really sell me on why it's worth $300 as opposed to $200 (a price point at which I would buy two for my niece and nephew).

For $300 I can buy an inexpensive laptop with a lot more computing power, find a free educational Linux distro, and teach my niece and nephew how to install it. Is plugging a few components together in the pi-top worth $100?

<comment><USER6> From the website for the pi-TopCEED:

>$134.99 with Raspberry pi...$99.99 without Raspberry pi.<<

<comment><USER5> I'm referring to the laptop version. I guess the battery, hinges, keyboard, and trackpad fetch a premium. I don't think the CEED is as appealing as the laptop version (which is probably why it is priced competitively).

Yes, the CEED would still make a great educational tool, but if the child doesn't use it; it's worthless. My niece and nephew aren't that young any more, so I have a feeling that the only way they would use it, is if the pi- tops were in laptop-form.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have one of these. It's gray, the GPIO is used for LCD backlight control and battery monitoring, some of the GPIO is exposed on the logic board for other uses, the display connects via the HDMI port, the keyboard and mouse via USB, the GPIO scripts are written in python and moveable to your own OS install, the keyboard is mushy mushy mushy, but I like the trackpad, and I don't use the provided pi-top OS as I encountered a number of issues even logging in on the release version.

It's a decent piece of hobby hardware and I should be able to swap in something like a Odroid-C1+ in the future.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if this uses GPIO display. I learned the hard way you don't get any sort of graphics acceleration on the pi unless you go through the actual hdmi port.

</comment><comment><USER9> Related, from a couple days ago, the "NexDock": [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11117880](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11117880)

</comment><comment><USER10> I can think of at least 69 computers I would rather spend $300 on before a raspberry pi(top)

</comment><comment><USER11> I like this idea a lot. I can't stand the color. Why acid green?

<comment><USER12> They also have gray.

<comment><USER11> Ah, you're right! I wish they would have made this clearer.</comment></comment></comment>


2055: Part I – Get That Hologram Out of My Face - <AUTHOR> https://noahstarr.com/rambling-digressions/get-that-hologram <comment><AUTHOR> A short story about how new technologies (automatic breakfast maker, self- driving cars, mirror entertainment system) will impact your day-to-day life.</comment>


Ask HN: Computer Forensics - <AUTHOR>

Hey all. I've worked in network infrastructure for a few years, and went back to school to finish up a cs degree. I felt a bit burned out when I left my job, mainly because of boredom... For example, a whole day could be about fixing a connectivity issue in some department or essentially getting their phones and other equipment to work... I know, every job can get repetitive and boring eventually, but I also wanted to work on something that had more substance if you know what I mean...<p>Well, I am really interested in Computer Forensics, and hope to move in this direction upon finishing my degree. Is anyone currently work in this field that can give some pointers as to how I can get started? I'd also love to hear "a day in the life" story if you have any. At the moment I'm researching computer forensic certifications to attain, but any additional info is much appreciated; thanks. <comment><USER2> Your previous day job of "making things work" implies you might have a talent for learning and understanding "how things work." If so, this talent will serve you well in Computer Forensics, Reverse Engineering, Security Auditing, and many other related fields. Heck, it will even serve you very well in countless unrelated fields.

You should state what you mean by the phrase "Computer Forensics" and what you expect such a job to entail?

Without knowing your definition and expectations it's very difficult to give you a good direct answer. Some of the stuff I've done professionally qualifies as "Computer Forensics" (by some definitions), but I'm certainly not an expert in the entire field.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I shouldn've been more specific; I forgot the phrase encompasses a pretty broad range of jobs. Well right now, I'm mostly interested in working in a lab analyzing confiscated equipment for some contractor that does such work for police or whomever to get started. Malware analysis is pretty interesting as well; though I'm not trying to start there.

<comment><USER2> It seems I wasn't clear... Do you want to work at the physical hardware level, or the software level, or betwixt, or between, or other?

There's a big discrepancy in skill sets between knowing how to drive a SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope), knowing how to drive test equipment (signal analysis), knowing how to drive a disassembler (binary analysis), knowing how to drive a text editor (manual source code analysis), and knowing how to drive the "typical" industry tools (automated source code analysis, fuzzing, disk inspection, case management, ...). On top of all that, there's also knowing legal requirements and procedure (evidence handling) as well as proper cost and feasibility estimation ("is it possible?" "is it worth it?").

The most fundamental basis for all of these related fields is knowing how to write code, preferably in a whole lot of different programming languages. You need to know the high level languages used in applications and services. You need to know the common "systems" languages like C and C++. You need to know the low level assembly languages very well, preferably for multiple architectures. You may or may not need to go even lower down to knowing microcode. You may or may not need to know firmware engineering and reverse engineering. You may or may not need to know a good deal about hardware engineering and reverse engineering.

There are even people who work at the materials sciences levels, and yes, they're beautifully fun and spooky to work with because they actually can answer questions like, "Was this ATM system board frozen with liquid nitrogen?" --Similar fun is true for the signal analysis folks.

As you've probably guessed by now, there's a lot of heavy engineering and sciences involved, as well as a bit of art, so you'll need a nearly masochistic dedication to constantly learning. You might find books helpful to get you started in various topics, but you'll do most of your learning hands- on and on your own. The people who are "truly great" in various fields and topics are at least partially, if not completely, self-taught.

Pick an area of interest, and dive into it. Learn to do your own research, and learn to find the research of others. The two things to keep in mind are, (1) all of the areas of interest are inter-related, and (2) there is significant competition between security/assessment vendors. The competition can often make finding the research of others nearly impossible. This is especially true for the malware analysis and security auditing industries where many tools and techniques are considered trade secrets.

Even if you are an amazing generalist with both depth and breadth in your skills, you will still most likely still specialize to some degree. The useful skill and knowledge of any single person has limits, so you'll need to know how to work well with others, many of whom are amazingly talented in their own right, if not absolutely brilliant. If you can remain content, helpful and useful while knowing you might be the dumbest guy in the room, then there is hope for you.

The technical challenges of forensics and related work are endless and very rewarding, but there is a little known and very damaging emotional toll extracted from you. Every day you at work you must stare at evil. Seriously. You need to stare at the results of truly wicked people committing viciously brutal crimes against other human beings.

You will become jaded.

If you fail to maintain some hope in the general goodness of humanity, you will become bitter.

If you become really good at your job, you will have learned to think like the bad guys... and anyone who recognizes your skills will consider you "spooky" to some degree, even if you're one of the good guys. The absolute nicest and most honorable "good guys" in the various fields are also frighteningly talented.

Becoming jaded, or worse, bitter, and always being suspect due to your demonstrated skills tends to be a rather high price tag for a career. --This is really the very first thing you should learn.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, that was an incredibly insightful reply. It would probably be easier for me to gain entry via the software aspect, however I'm leaning towards the hardware aspect as you described above. So, to give a solid answer to your question above, I'd choose "between" (or even just hardware). Books on this subject matter seem relatively obscure though. Perhaps I shouldn't look for "forensics" books, but rather just detailed books on some of these devices and how they work.

Your explanation of the emotional toll taken is especially insightful and makes me even more intrigued. Admittedly though, I didn't think people working in computer forensics would witness or have to work on situations involving brutal or violent crimes; not that it would deter me from pursuing the career. I imagined it mostly comprised of corporate crimes. I did read about people having to deal with things like "snuff films" or child pornography; I can imagine people becoming jaded and having a cynical outlook on humanity after working on things like that.

<comment><USER2> It seems you already realize your degree in CS will not prepare you for electrical engineering and analysis of hardware. On the bright side, your CS degree will (should) provide a good knowledge of fundamental logic, mathematics and algorithm design, so it is _always_ helpful. For example, you may be required to write code to automate electronic test equipment to gather results on a piece of hardware you're scrutinizing, and then, of course, you'll need to write even more code to analyze the result datum.

If you really want to specialize in hardware forensics, getting an EE degree, or even a minor, will be very beneficial. Personally, I never bothered to get an EE degree, and the gaps in my EE knowledge are something I stumble over far more regularly than I'd like to admit. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a single autodidact that is a good electrical engineer. The only exception would possibly be Bob Davis of IEEE fame but only with a caveat; he simply skipped a 4-year EE degree and went straight for a masters (MSEE). ;-)

I do not mean to offend you but if you believe "corporate crime" is somehow victimless, then you are naive and you are in for a very rude awakening. It is a very common misconception so don't be too embarrassed by your oversight. I had the very same misconception when I started.

Always remember that you are dealing with real crimes, real victims, and real criminals. The manner in which you respond (incidence response) and the manner in which you handle the situation (evidence handling) can either make or break the case against the perpetrator. You will often be working directly with law enforcement, or even be a law enforcement professional yourself.

Like any law enforcement professional, you will be running a risk to both yourself and your family. Criminals are dangerous.

I strongly encourage you to take the time to talk to officers and agents about their careers. Even an every-day "street cop" can teach you far more about the crimes they must face than you might ever want to know. As mentioned before, the first thing you need to learn is whether or not forensics is the kind of career you really want, but the second thing you need to learn is whether or not you are actually cut out for the job...

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/01/csi- google-w...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/01/csi-google- winning-murder-convictions-with-search-engine-data.ars)

That's just a recent headline I read yesterday, and even though it's murder, it's tame by comparison to some of the crimes you will face with in forensics. Even if you have the dedication to acquire all the needed technical skills, you may not have the required personality and fortitude to do the work.

The third thing you should learn is proper incident response and evidence handling. When you know enough to avoid the mistakes destroying the case of the prosecution, then you can potentially do technical volunteer work with a branch of your local law enforcement. Be prepared for law enforcement to do background and reference checks on you, even as a volunteer. Law enforcement always needs technical help, and volunteering is a good way to get the experience needed to ascertain if you're fit for the job. Talk to your local police department, FBI, Secret Service and most of all, District Attorney offices.

The uber elite world of rainbows and ponies regularly depicted by famous computer "security" folks fails entirely the moment you mention the f-word (forensics). It might come as a surprise, but I do not mean to discourage you. Instead, I'm encouraging you to make an informed and intentional decision.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well thanks for the encouragement; this is really only increasing my enthusiasm. I never meant to say that corporate crimes are victimless in any way, but that I was under the impression that computer forensics had a relatively low involvement with "brutal crimes" as you described in your post before last, and a significant involvement with white collar crimes. Of course, there are exceptions just as that interesting story you linked; but admittedly I know very little about this as I've never worked in this field myself nor do I personally know anyone that has. Sometimes people's expectations are far from the reality of a thing, like some students first realization of what computer science really is. I take no offense at all.

Speaking of that story you linked, I was wondering how they knew it was him who made those search queries, perhaps they somehow found out where she was during the time the searches where made. When I finished reading it though, I didn't find myself disagreeing with the verdict --especially considering the evidence of suffocation. Seems a bit unlikely she'd be able to fake that.

I never knew the agencies you named were so accepting to volunteers. I would have thought they would act suspicious of people volunteering --especially for a line of work that carries such a gloomy stigma (what kind of person would want to do this work and why?). So, thanks for the heads up, and I will definitely look into that.

It sounds as if you fall into the "between" category yourself. Do you find one (software vs hardware) more enjoyable than the other?

<comment><USER2> > I was wondering how they knew it was him who made those search queries

It seems you didn't read page #2 of the article which discusses the timing analysis of the evidence.

Tsk Tsk Tsk ;-)

> especially for a line of work that carries such a gloomy stigma

It is doing very good and very important work. It is doing the right thing. It is benefiting society. It is making a difference. It is preforming service. The fact that it happens to be far more difficult than most would ever imagine only makes it that much more important. Though it can be a very tough job at times, it is also very rewarding, even if you're just a lowly "volunteer" doing the time consuming menial tasks.

If you consider it gloomy and depressing, it will be.

If you consider it rewarding and gratifying, it will be (well, at least most of the time).

The choice is yours.

> what kind of person would want to do this work and why?

Ask street cops. Ask detectives. Ask FBI/SS agents. Ask district attorneys. ...

One of my favorite people on the planet to talk to is a retired detective from the deep South. He spent 40 years on the force, but even now, he still does volunteer work. He's a self-proclaimed "techtard" but some of the work he does is actually quite technical. We got to be friends because I helped him with understanding tech, and he helped me with understanding everything else. I definitely got the better half of that deal. --The amount I've learned from him over the years simply cannot be measured.

> I never knew the agencies you named were so accepting to volunteers.

They are not very accepting of volunteers, and there are tons of rules regarding volunteers, so it can be a real hassle for them. The thing is, if they know you are truly interested in pursuing a career in some aspect of law enforcement, then they understand your situation all too well. At one point in their life, they were in the exact same situation.

> I would have thought they would act suspicious of people volunteering

Yes. They will be suspicious and more importantly, they _should_ be suspicious. You must anticipate their reaction. Make it exceedingly easy for them to do whatever background and reference checks they deem necessary. Be helpful, be honest, and be patient. It will take time.

You need to be OK with always being under greater scrutiny than others. It happens if you're a volunteer. Even if you are fully vetted, it happens a whole lot more if you prove yourself to be "frighteningly talented" in some technical discipline. Needless to say, it doesn't take much to frighten non- technical people. If you happen to extremely good at something, even your technical peers will at least think, if not directly say, "I'm really glad he's one of the good guys."

I'm definitely tired, and probably rambling. My email address is in my profile if you'd prefer to continue this off-site.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Early Alzheimer's Gene Is a Curse for Families, a Gift for Science - happy-go-lucky http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/12/27/506720771/early-alzheimer-s-gene-spells-tragedy-for-patients-opportunity-for-science <comment><AUTHOR> There's a family in Columbia with a genetic mutation too:

[https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28514-conquistador- br...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28514-conquistador-brought- early-onset-alzheimers-to-colombian-town/)

There's a weird light discovery that may be helpful in treating alzheimer's.

[http://news.mit.edu/2016/visual-stimulation-treatment- alzhei...](http://news.mit.edu/2016/visual-stimulation-treatment- alzheimer-1207)

<comment><USER2> Great Radiolab podcast about the MIT discovery -- [http://www.radiolab.org/story/bringing-gamma- back/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/bringing-gamma-back/)

<comment><USER3> That was a good podcast, but I was frustrated that they hadn't even tried it yet on humans, as it seemed such a simple experiment. They said they will do it next, but I'd have preferred they waited a few months and then reported it (even if it didn't work on humans).

<comment><USER4> Well, as far as I can tell, the result only demonstrated a reduction of amyloid plaque in the visual cortex, so an experiment on humans wouldn't really work (you have to kill the subjects and inspect their brains for the current experiment).

<comment><AUTHOR> if you listen to the podcast, you'll realize that you don't need to do that.

<comment><USER4> I did... how would you measure the effectiveness of the strobe in humans?

<comment><USER3> Memory tests, just like with the mice?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My grandmother died of early Alzheimer's and I really don't know whether to get tested or not. It's more than likely genetic but how do you live knowing if it turns out I have the gene.

<comment><USER6> You can still take steps to mitigate it, which are probably all considered good advice anyway: [https://www.alz.org/research/science/alzheimers_prevention_a...](https://www.alz.org/research/science/alzheimers_prevention_and_risk.asp)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If anybody is interested:

Phase 3 Study of Aducanumab (BIIB037) in Early Alzheimer's Disease [https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/study/NCT02477800?show_l...](https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/study/NCT02477800?show_locs=Y#locn)

</comment><comment><USER8> Is there a way for people with rare genes to get in contact with researchers? I've always wondered.

<comment><USER9> I wonder how researchers feel or consider "cold call volunteers". I imagine that on one hand they are grateful but on the other hand mustn't compromise their study; the middle must be some form of personal heartbreak and professional clarity.</comment></comment>