Why work has failed us: Because no one can afford to retire anymore - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90227154/why-work-has-failed-us-because-no-one-can-afford-to-retire-anymore <comment><USER2> C'mooon

> The IRA won't make anyone rich. A calculator on the site estimates that if > you're 22 years old and making $14 an hour–saving around $120 a month–you > could end up with around $230,000 by the time you're 65

1\. $14 / hour? The median household (yes, I know, household, but wait) income is the highest it's been since at least 1985 [1] at $59k/year. So $14 is definitely a bit lower than "normal".

2\. Saving $120/month on that salary is saving just 5%! Nobody is suggesting saving 5% is appropriate. 10% is the bare minimum anyone recommends. Doing that, an IRA at 65 would be worth > $763,000, enough to spend $30k each year for the rest of their lives.

Standard statement I feel like I always need to make: this is in no way a defense of our economic system. We absolutely need to raise taxes on the highest earners. We probably need a wealth tax as well. But we middle classers need to cool it with the defeatist attitudes. The poor have it hard. We, for the most part, do not. We spend too much and save too little. If you've got a car loan, eat anything but rice and beans, drink anything but water, have cable tv, a > $30/month cell phone bill, and complain about being broke, you've got some very obvious improvements you can make to get out of that dilemma.

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

<comment><USER3> Fixed costs have gotten too high, and these prices are inelastic. I think the only way to fix it is wage inflation across the board.

<comment><USER4> > I think the only way to fix it is wage inflation across the board.

And to convince people to spending so much.

The new iPhones will be announced next week. How many will buy a $1000 phone yet not have $1000 saved for any kind of emergency?

<comment><USER5> Yes, exactly.

Also: How do those "FIRE" millenials manage to retire at 30? By living WELL below their means. It's no a lifestyle for everybody, but it demonstrates that money skills can be learned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _If you turn 65 in 2040 or 2050 or 2060_

Some historical perspective: My understanding is that when Social Security was created, the average life expectancy was 67. So offering it for people age 65 was intended as providing for people in _extreme old age_ who had probably worked physically hard their entire lives and were pretty beat up.

I'm not saying we don't have genuine problems here, but this article is bellyaching about, basically, a golden era when the world was relatively briefly unusually comfortable and acting like that was the norm throughout all of history. The reality is that money per se only became common place something like 300 years or so ago. So the very concept of _retirement_ and _saving for retirement_ is relatively new.

This makes it a little hard for me to take this article seriously, so I confess to not reading it in full. Some of the things it gets right: Pensions are going out of style precisely because people are living longer, so pensions wind up being financially unsustainable.

Given that people are living a whole lot longer and are generally in better health at 70 these days than 65 used to be, it isn't really some huge hand- wringing drama that older Americans need to continue working. Instead, it is evidence of how successful we have been in some sense.

This is a good problem to have. We need to make adjustments to the system, but people living longer and this requiring cultural adjustments isn't some giant tragedy.

Retirement for, say, two decades or whatever is hardly some historical and long standing human norm. It's really rather out of touch with reality to act like it ever was.

<comment><USER7> _Some historical perspective: My understanding is that when Social Security was created, the average life expectancy was 67._

While this is true, I think it's a misleading statistic. The relevant figure, it seems to me, is not life expectancy at birth, but life expectancy at age 65 (because the latter determines social security outlay). In the 1930s, a 65 year old could expect to live for about 12 more years, while in 2010, life expectancy was about 18 years. That's a considerably smaller increase than life expectancy at birth during that time.

[https://www.ssa.gov/oact/NOTES/as116/as116_V.html](https://www.ssa.gov/oact/NOTES/as116/as116_V.html)

<comment><USER8> Yes, but a lot more working-age adults today make it to 65 than 100 years ago, which is a relevant statistic. Previously you could count on a bigger portion of workers dying before reaching retirement, so you had a smaller pool of retirees to take care of. Today practically every worker makes it to retirement age.

<comment><USER7> I don't have the exact actuarial data (nor the expertise to convert into numbers), but eyeballing figure 5 here: [https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/NOTES/as120/LifeTables_Body.html](https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/NOTES/as120/LifeTables_Body.html)

It appears that in 1950, a 20 year old had about a 73% chance of living to 65. In 2000, that likelihood was about 83%. A nice improvement, to be sure, but not an enormous increase.

(My point being that if somebody dies before ever paying into SS, they make no difference to the accounting one way or the other, and a lot of the change in life expectancy was indeed based on reducing mortality at younger ages).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My Vanguard 401k home page has this helpful notice in the dead center of the page:

"We think you need $7,840 more per month."

Sure... That makes two of us. I guess it's extrapolating my current salary out and how much I'll need to save to live with the same income after I retire. That's not going to happen.

Here's a helpful article to see how far behind you are in your retirement: [https://smartasset.com/retirement/average-401k-balance-by- ag...](https://smartasset.com/retirement/average-401k-balance-by-age)

I'm 46, so I should have about 3x my annual salary in savings (I don't) and be putting in 8% of my salary into a 401k.

I'm going to go back to not thinking about this now like I usually do, as there's little I can do about it.

<comment><USER10> According to the article you linked, based on your age (I'm in the same cohort), the average 401k is worth $91,000. Are you not contributing at all to your 401k? Did you get a late start, or have some hardship that required you to break into the 401k (divorce in my case)?

I've never heard the 3x annual salary in savings, but that also seems super extreme. Assume a salary of $100K per year... No one I know has ~ $300K in their savings. Maybe they have equity in their house, or other equity assets that get them to that sort of number on paper, but I've never heard of someone in our age group (40-50) just having $300K liquid in a bank account.

<comment><USER11> The 3x the article states means total retirement savings. 401k included. I really hope you know more than a few people with 300k in 401k if they earn 100k/year.

<comment><USER10> Ah, I was confused by the parent post, I thought we were discussing 401k and "savings" as separate things.

I'm not sure what others have saved in theirs, but in my case, it was more like $200,000 in my 401k when I got divorced at age 40. I didn't always earn the same income as I do now, and also had times where I have needed to decrease my contributions, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's interesting that while people claim they can't afford to retire, more than half of the population begins collecting Social Security in the US at age 62 ([https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-people-who-claim- socia...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-people-who-claim-social- security-early-often-live-to-regret-it-2018-09-04)) when those on disability are included.

<comment><USER13> I have no facts at my disposal, but I'm left to ponder how many of those early collectors do so because they are under-employed, unable to find work, suffer disabilities, perhaps are no longer physically able to do the work for which they were trained, or other causes such that it is a practical decision on their part, recognizing that they have no other form of stable income.

<comment><USER14> In poor, rural counties? It's the entire social safety net: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/local/2017/06/02/generatio...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/local/2017/06/02/generations- disabled/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.79fb0c15d4a1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Per [https://www.valuepenguin.com/average-credit-card- debt#income...](https://www.valuepenguin.com/average-credit-card-debt#income;) the lower income earners in the US have almost 10% of their income in credit card debt. Per [https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/fact- shee...](https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/fact- sheets/2016/01/payday-loan-facts-and-the-cfpbs-impact) 12 million people spend $9 billion in payday loan fees and people spend billions of dollars each year playing the lottery. Poor financial decisions and money management is definitely playing a role in this as well.

We really need to include suggestions for adding programs and laws for encouraging saving, removing predatory lending, and incentivizing responsible spending in articles like these. There is too much focus on consumer spending and not enough on household stability and having money in the bank for emergencies.

</comment><comment><USER16> In Australia the official retirement age when you can start to receive a pension (or access your own retirement money without penalties) was recently moved up to 67.

The new Prime Minister just announced he won't raise it to 70, which was on the table. I think it's clear that's just a sign of things to come.

<comment><USER17> What is lost in the discussion of retirement ages being bumped is that life expectancy has grown by two decades since the retirement age was introduced in the USA in 1935 [0][1][2]. The retirement age was originally past the point where most people died.

[0]: [https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/how- ret...](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/how-retirement- was-invented/381802/)

[1]: [http://www.demog.berkeley.edu/~andrew/1918/figure2.html](http://www.demog.berkeley.edu/~andrew/1918/figure2.html)

[2]: [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNLE00INUSA](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNLE00INUSA)

I don't personally understand the expectation that average people be economically sustainable while jobless for two decades+. It makes sense to me to slowly increase the retirement age.

<comment><USER18> I know several people (i.e. 3 of my grandparents) who lived jobless that long or longer. At least half of their retirement years, they were physically and mentally incapable of holding their previous jobs, or even the most menial unskilled jobs.

One had half his body paralyzed by a stroke, and you couldn't really tell how much understanding he had of the world around him when he was alert. The other two had forms of alzheimer's that, eventually, left them occasionally speaking czech instead of english (they moved to the USA as children) and not recognizing their own children. The first sign they needed full-time care was when we caught one of them overdosing on ibuprofin- get a headache, take some, forget, take more, repeat. That, and leaving the gas stove on for hours.

I fully agree that the retirement age should start increasing, but there's definitely a point of diminishing returns. We may be living longer as a whole, but our physiology hasn't caught up enough to trust that those extra years can be spent making economically valuable contributions to society.

<comment><USER17> Agreed, I think that in health cases, there can't be an expectation for people to work. In a better world, our society as a whole would have better end of life support for when people are of ill health.

But, not everybody's mind slips. I'm hopeful that we will have better preventative measures for Alzheimer's and other mind or body crippling diseases soon. I do recall seeing some good news on the Alzheimer's front in the last year.

My first article mentions what you said: past a certain point, it may be more detrimental for some to work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The war on the middle-class continues:

\- Nimbys—scarce expensive housing

\- Higher-education costs skyrocketing.

\- Negative wage growth for positions without degree requirements.

\- Article mentions no more pensions.

Article subject not entirely unexpected. :-/

</comment><comment><USER4> Work hasn't failed us. Consumerism has. Stop buying brands. Stop buying Starbucks. Stop eating out. Stop buying the newest phone. Don't buy a fancy Macbook if you don't have a use case for one. Stop buying too much car. Stop trading resources for lifestyle.

A 25 year old who only puts $300 into a reasonable retirement fund each month will have over $1M at retirement age.

<comment><USER20> What's a reasonable retirement fund to you? (asking out of ignorance, not sarcasm or anything)

<comment><USER4> Varies - how much will you spend in retirement and what do you expect for a return? You need to factor in inflation, since $1 today buys more today than it will when you retire.

[https://www.nerdwallet.com/investing/retirement- calculator](https://www.nerdwallet.com/investing/retirement-calculator) is a good calculator for this. (though I'm not a fan of its spending assumptions - if in retirement you have paid for houses and cars you definitely will be spending far less than today)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Plenty of people can afford to retire, but they spend money like fools and then wonder why they don't have any. Read The Millionaire Next Door or listen to Dave Ramsey and you'll quickly learn that you can save plenty on a low income or go broke on a high income. Savings, income, and wealth building are in fact three distinct and also interrelated things.

<comment><USER22> You're getting downvoted because it's a message people dont want to hear.

We have advanced our standard of living, but haven't kept up our standard of responsibility. Our parents/grandparents didnt have videogame consoles, laptops, phones, coffee besides cheap store drip, meals out more than 1x per month, tattoos, anything from a spa etc. All of those were likely dumped into home equity (owning your home was the predecessor to diversified assets in retirement savings).

Another thing that hasn't helped is the government has been printing money like crazy, playing a mind game that means even though you make 2x when you started your career, you might actually be really earning less. For example, my earnings have gone up about 6x across my career, but my rent has gone up 10x...

<comment><USER23> > Our parents/grandparents didnt have videogame consoles, laptops, phones, > coffee besides cheap store drip, meals out more than 1x per month, tattoos, > anything from a spa etc.

They also didn't have six figure student loan debt, and their housing costs were not 50-75% of their salary. Video games and cell phones are small potatoes—-not what is keeping the current generation financially insecure, but they are visible "luxuries" that Baby Boomers can point to and try to shame people over.

<comment><USER24> > and their housing costs were not 50-75% of their salary

But our grandparents did predominately live in rural areas. You can still live quite affordably in rural areas now. Most people just aren't happy with that lifestyle anymore.

Additionally, the majority of our grandparents didn't own their homes. If the majority of us were okay with renting like our grandparents were, you wouldn't see the irrational behaviour of buying at any cost that pushes the market beyond what is sensible (i.e. paying 75% of salary for no reason).

<comment><USER25> The opportunities to make a living in rural areas aren't really there any more. Unless you mean to move to a rural area when you retire.

<comment><USER26> Unless you're very physically fit, rural work will break you in old age.

Good luck retiring to a farm. Even better luck getting health care there.

<comment><USER24> Does one need to be more physically fit to be a developer in a rural area (I know of several places hiring) as opposed to the big city? In fact, the data suggests that city dwellers are statistically more fit as they are more likely to walk everywhere, while rural people are more likely to drive to their desk job.

Agricultural work can be available in rural areas, but even in the most agriculturally productive areas, makes up a small portion of the workforce. The age where the majority of the population are farmers is long gone. Even within the agricultural sector, a lot of the work is in front of a desk.

<comment><USER23> There are far fewer development (or other white collar, low physical effort) opportunities in rural areas. If remote work ever gains significant traction, this would be a viable way to save housing expense.

<comment><USER24> _> There are far fewer development (or other white collar, low physical effort) opportunities in rural areas._

In my foolish youth I once tried to maintain two development jobs at the same time. That turned out to be a really big mistake. With that in hindsight, I really have to question why people are worried about how much opportunity there is. Maybe you are better than me and can handle two jobs without issue, but three? How many jobs do you really need? One available opportunity is all I will ever need again.

<comment><USER23> As someone who's been through two major tech downturns so far and found myself scrambling without a job on several occasions, that seems like a risky strategy. I've been in situations where, without exaggeration, nobody local was hiring. When there's only one tech employer within 100 miles, a sudden job change means moving your family, possibly to a different state. In employment hubs, you're less at risk of this.

<comment><USER24> I also went through both of those downturns while working in a rural area. The first time, which was early in my career, I voluntarily left one job to join another during it all. I found no issues with the job market at that time. I have found that, in general, tech jobs are often easier to come by in rural areas as tech professionals prefer to not live in such places, leaving no competition for what jobs are available.

The second time, later in my career, I did find myself without work, but with the substantial savings I was able to accumulate thanks to a low cost of living, I didn't even bother to look for another job. I essentially took a couple of months of vacation during the worst of it and then employers started knocking on my door again when things started to turn around.

I am sure another downturn will come again, and if that means having to move, so be it. I also have no qualms about working in other industries. I'm especially fond of the agriculture industry, which is convenient for me. But, as you well know, having a tech career for long enough to have gone through those two downturns, we're getting into the position that we could start to seriously think about retiring when that time comes. While the average career may not have that luxury, you can save _a lot_ of money with a high tech income.

The risk seems overblown to me. If the worst case scenario is having to move back to where you came, that's not a very big risk. You will be there even if you stay put.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It seems to me work gave us exactly what we wanted. My parents both swear to work until they die. They seem to have conflated work with a sense of personal value. In doing so, they agreed to give up the kinds of niceties that would allow them to retire early, including pensions, 401k's and livable wages. All to earn just enough to pay the monthly financing bills.

Now it's up to subsequent generations to get the calculus back on track.

<comment><USER28> People used to retire by having a few kids who would take care of them.

I prefer shrinking our population, especially as developing countries are rapidly growing.

<comment><USER29> That won't really help the pension issue–pensions are held up by the expectation of a large working-age population to support current retirees.

FWIW, I think people tend to overstate the risks of overpopulation; the Earth could support 10x the current population with a comfortable standard of living, if space and energy usage per person was reduced (which could be helped along by increased urbanization, among other things).

<comment><USER30> Human biomass displaces other species.

It is no coincidence that the human population has doubled sine 1970...while the number of wild (non-domesticated) animals has halved.

So sure, we might be able to support 80 billion (!!) humans...but with a correspondingly devastating loss of biodiversity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> In other news, the NYT writes about how to retire a millionaire in your 30's:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/01/style/fire-financial- inde...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/01/style/fire-financial-independence- retire-early.html)

</comment><comment><USER32> Ultimately it has nothing to do with being able to afford but rather people are increasingly bad with their finances. The high majority of America today is in debt at will and much rather use a card over hard cash. Savings? Ha..nope. It's all the rage to have a nicer house, car, possessions than to be financially safe. It's not work that has failed people, it's the parents that failed to teach their children how to conduct themselves in a fiscally responsible way.

</comment><comment><USER33> The better question is, how many Americans are there who cannot afford to save for retirement due to student debt?

</comment><comment><USER34> no millennials expect to see a dime of social security income (whether or not this is justified is another question), nor do they have any plans to retire because the prospect of having enough money to do so is simply unrealistic for them.

i am not the only one that has put their income, expenses, and savings rate into one of those "financial independence" calculators ([http://mustachecalc.com/#/calcs/time-to- fi](http://mustachecalc.com/#/calcs/time-to-fi)). i found that my predicted retirement age was in my 130s if i was willing to settle for a very modest retirement with a lower standard of living than i currently have.

that's right: i'm roughly 100 years from having enough money to retire, even if i save perfectly diligently every single month from now until then, which is extremely unlikely. it doesn't even make sense to plan for because i won't live that long; the calculation doesn't include anything along the lines of medical debt which is sure to accrue in old age if not sooner. the calculator may or may not be accurate to the decade, but it's accurate to the half- century in any event. if it's inaccurate by a half century in my favor, that still puts me as retiring in my late 80s -- hardly much more to look forward to.

i am always harping on the same thing: 6.5% interest rate student loans, rising rent, rising living costs, lower income, rising healthcare costs, shrinking benefits, and no social safety net to speak of have totally devastated the economic prospects of a generation.

the first plans to be thrown out the window during economic insecurity are the ones which are farthest away timewise. most people haven't had a chance to even plan that far in the first place. by the time they have accumulated enough resources to start saving some each month, they may be forced to take care of their then-elderly parents, or, alternatively, their children -- which most people can't afford anyway. so much for building up savings.

to be clear, it isn't "work" that has failed us. it's capitalism.

<comment><USER35> Gonna insert my anecdata here.

"no millennials" is just wrong. I'm a millennial (Though just barely, born in '82), and I fully expect to retire by 67, possibly by 65, and if markets do well, maybe even 62, and I didn't even begin saving for retirement until 3 years ago.

I always question how many millennials complaining about student loan debt either didn't actually finish their degree, or they got a degree that doesn't lead to gainful employment due to lack of research before choosing a major, or they let themselves be bullshitted by some university's marketing and wayyyyy overpaid for their degree.

Certainly millennials have the deck stacked against them, but with proper planning, they can be successful.

<comment><USER36> > they got a degree that doesn't lead to gainful employment due to lack of > research before choosing a major, or they let themselves be bullshitted by > some university's marketing and wayyyyy overpaid for their degree.

Correct. But this happens because not everyone is privileged enough to get good advice. The vast majority of 18 year olds know nothing, they've seen none of the world, and can only rely on the little knowledge they've acquired up to that point in their life. Lots of people go into college thinking "gee 100k loan, 50k loan, will be fine when I graduate and get a job."

Capitalism is a system in which risk takers are rewarded / punished based on how their risky moves pan out. Unfortunately that means people with safety nets / more leeway to take risks (more wealthy) get more dice rolls and thus increase their wealth, vs if you're poor, you either stay poor, or in many cases if you look at what society's advice has been it's "go to college, a college degree means you'll make so much more money and even at the cost of $200k in debt will be worth it" <\-- there's often no nuance like what field of study that gets incorporated into this common advice.

It's one thing to say "capitalism is how things fall naturally." It's another to say "this is perfect and how it should work and nothing's broken, everyone gets their just desserts, capitalism is the only way, move along." I'm not saying that this is actually what you're trying to convey, but the anecdote you inserted here definitely rings of this (common) sentiment.

> Certainly millennials have the deck stacked against them, but with proper > planning, they can be successful.

This is pretty bleak. A chance at success is true in any system. That the deck is stacked is the only salient point.

I'll see your anecdote and raise you one more: talk to a few people who are the first to get college degrees in their family. I suspect you'll find that the vast majority of their parents offered no or even counter-productive advice when it comes to what field to study, or that it matters. Especially if the school they ended up at is one like Harvard/Stanford; there's some pretty good writing about what it's like to be very poor at those schools.

The gap is widening between rich and poor, straight-up capitalism exacerbates those effects, and I don't think it's easy to argue that's a good thing.

<comment><USER35> > The vast majority of 18 year olds know nothing, they've seen none of the > world, and can only rely on the little knowledge they've acquired up to that > point in their life.

Which is why IMO, we should stop pushing 18 year olds into college. Let them work a full-time job somewhere and live outside of their parents' place for a few years go get a feel for the real world.

> society's advice has been it's "go to college, a college degree means you'll > make so much more money and even at the cost of $200k in debt will be worth > it"

Society sucks and definitely needs to stop saying that kind of BS.

> It's one thing to say "capitalism is how things fall naturally." It's > another to say "this is perfect and how it should work and nothing's broken, > everyone gets their just desserts, capitalism is the only way, move along." > I'm not saying that this is actually what you're trying to convey, but the > anecdote you inserted here definitely rings of this (common) sentiment.

I have a friend that's constantly sharing stuff from /r/LateStageCapitalism and it makes me roll my eyes.

IMO, Capitalism is a necessary evil to encourage innovation and reward hard work. The problem is that it also leads to abuse of workers, blaming the poor for being poor, worship of money, idolization of the rich, and most annoyingly, the idea that everyone that is rich is rich because they worked hard, and not because they inherited wealth. At the very least, people frequently don't acknowledge that many wealthy CEOs that built their company from their garage still started wealthy and had access to the funding to get an Ivy League education plus their own money to kickstart their company. Bill Gates's dad was a lawyer, his mom served on the board of directors at a bank, and he went to a private school as a child and then to Harvard. To say he pulled himself up by his bootstraps would be highly misleading. Trump even said he got a loan from his father for $1mill to start his businesses, and some of his followers STILL think he's a self-made man. But I've digressed...

The TL;DR is that capitalism sucks, but it sucks less than the alternatives.

> talk to a few people who are the first to get college degrees in their > family.

That would be myself.

I like to think I can truly call myself self-made. I moved out of my parent's place when I was 21 with mostly nothing but a full-time job in retail. I paid for my rent, my apartment deposit, all my furniture/appliances, and my PC. My parents gave me nothing. I had been a huge slacker in high school and didn't even have my diploma. When I was 27 (2009), I decided I was done working a low-wage job, got my GED, and started going to college. 4 1/2 years later, spring of 2014, I had a Bachelor's in Computer Science and $43,000 in student loan debt. I got a job as a software engineer a few weeks after graduation, and about two years ago, moved to a job in application security. I own a house, a respectable car, and I take nice vacations. I'm the quintessential middle class now.

Other than a couple thousand dollars in Pell grants and my student loans over the course of the time I was in college, I have never received financial assistance from anyone. I've never been on SNAP/food stamps/etc.

And yet I try to have empathy for those that are in such dire straights that pulling themselves out is next to impossible. I recognize that the apartment I lived in when I first started going to college in 2009 was $650/month, but is now $950/month, while wages haven't kept up. I recognize that many retail and fast food businesses often avoid hiring people full-time, so the poor end up needing to work two jobs with unpredictable hours to pay the bills. I could go on.

> The gap is widening between rich and poor, straight-up capitalism > exacerbates those effects, and I don't think it's easy to argue that's a > good thing.

I absolutely agree 100%. The gap is widening and it's a terrible thing. But I feel that some millennials are using it as a scapegoat when they made their own bad choices, like going to an out-of-state university for an art degree.

<comment><USER36> > The TL;DR is that capitalism sucks, but it sucks less than the alternatives.

This sentiment makes two mistakes. The first is that it implies capitalism is only a whole framework and can't be treated as a function to be applied piecewise in a larger system. The second is that "no alternatives are as good." This is like saying C++ is the best programming language; it certainly has its merits, but can totally be used in conjunction with other languages and programming language research doesn't just sit still; new compositions of ideas are constantly coming and we can learn from the mistakes of poorly designed systems to build better ones.

<comment><USER35> To be fair, it's a TL;DR. The debate is certainly far more intricate than that. In this overly-simplified context, "capitalism" is being treated in a bit of a binary nature, with "communism" (or perhaps traditional socialism, i.e., not Bernie Sander's brand of democratic socialism) being the alternative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I've been so poor my calculated net per month was minus $1000 for about 16 years while supporting a family. I worked and saved my way out of it and know that the inability to save for the vast majority of people is just bullshit. Its an inability to sacrifice and "suffer" in a consumerist society. They won't make their own coffee or cook their own food or give up cable or Netflix or their cell phone or fix their own plumbing or grow their own food, spend their free time learning and studying, etc ad naseum. I'll be the first to argue the root of the problem is the rampant abuse of workers rights and wages by our capitalist overlords but the reality is that, baring some medical catostrophy in the USA, it can be done with hard work and sacrifice. Most aren't willing to do it and though I agree they shouldn't have to, reality states otherwise.

<comment><USER37> Downvotes are cool but counter-arguments are more convincing.

<comment><USER38> Wait there are downvotes on HN?

<comment><USER35> Yes, but you have to have at least 501 karma to be able to downvote. Until then, the arrow never appears.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> No one? Buying a larger house than you can afford tomorrow sucks away from real investments. The honest truth on home ownership would help everyone but real estate agents.</comment>


Phrack SEIZED SITE - <AUTHOR> http://www.phrack.org/ <comment><USER2> Remember what day it is, folks. If it seems a little early, consider Tokyo.

</comment><comment><USER3> If they wanted it to look more real, they should point their DNS at 18.104.22.168

</comment><comment><USER4> Is this an early April fools joke?</comment>


How I Would Succeed If I Started With Nothing - <AUTHOR> http://hackthesystem.com/blog/starting-from-the-bottom-a-tactical-guide/

<comment><USER2> Wow --- this is my article! Thanks for submitting!</comment>


Ask HN: Which method/algorithm do you use to securely hash password in PHP? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Since PHP 5.5, the answer has been:

        $hash = password_hash($password, PASSWORD_BCRYPT)

and

        password_verify($password, $hash)

These are a part of the PHP standard library and should be available in any PHP installation >= 5.5: [https://secure.php.net/manual/en/function.password- hash.php](https://secure.php.net/manual/en/function.password-hash.php)

If you're stuck with an older version of PHP, you should try to upgrade it. If you really really can't, the answer gets more complicated, but you can still store and compare a bcrypt'd hash.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Bcrypt / SHA256 / SHA512 / Scrypt are all fine.

Don't forget to salt.

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you :)</comment></comment>


Plagiarism Inc. - <AUTHOR> http://www.citypages.com/2010-06-30/news/plagiarism-inc/1 <comment><USER2> No one seems to have pointed out that, strictly speaking, this isn't plagiarism, unless, of course, some of this moron's writers actually do plagiarize the essays they send him.</comment>


Stripe is testing cash advances - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/24/stripe-advance-cash/ <comment><USER2> I wish they'd fix the 7 days transfers in the EU. I don't get how the service can be so bad here and yet stacking layers of iteration and evolving elsewhere.</comment>


What we offer is simple, yet very effective.  - <AUTHOR> http://startuplift.com/submit-your-startup/

<comment><USER2> I'll bite. The pricing seems kinda weird... $80? Okay, that's fine... what is the sites traffic like? What kind of people frequent there? What kind of marketing do you do? How much traffic will I get on the first day/week/month?

Iif I'm going to spend $80, I want that to be the best damn 80 bucks I ever spent.</comment>


Splendid Bacon: Simple Project Management for Hackers, built in 48 hours - <AUTHOR> http://splendidbacon.com <comment><USER3> Looks very clean and beautiful.

Feedback on your branding - maybe everyone in your social circle eats bacon and it's cool and loves it, but the name will probably be an emotional level turnoff to vegetarians, Jews who eat kosher, and Muslims who eat halal, or people who otherwise don't eat pork. Something to think about before you really get rolling, because you might potentially have an unnecessarily hard time breaking through to those groups of people.

Disclaimer: I've got kind of a weird diet - I don't eat mammals (chicken, poultry, fish okay - beef, pork, venison, no). The name kind of has a mild yuck factor to me, which I'd get over if the tools were valuable enough, but I'd hesitate at least a half-second to recommend it to, say, my Jewish friends.

<comment><USER4> I disagree about the branding. It's simple, it's awesome, it's a somewhat of a hacker cliche (in a post-Why The Lucky Stiff world). If anyone is "offended" by this, those are probably not the kind of religious nutjobs you want hanging around on your site anyway. People, stop it with the appeasement and stand for something!

Disclaimer: on a moral level, I can totally understand why you don't eat mammals. That's an awesome personal choice I can sympathize with. However, the name is still great.

<comment><USER5> Couldn't say it better myself: <http://xkcd.com/137/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks really cool, and is designed beautifully. The only thing is that it id kind of featureless to be really useful for managing projects (read: even though I love the concept and execution, I wouldn't pay to use it yet). I do think that the design is beautiful and will probably make an excellent company dashboard on a big screen in the office. Add more project management tools, if you guys can merge help desk ticketing, bug ticketing, and to-do lists in a easy to use package I'm sold.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback!

First, this app is 48 hours old so we didn't have too much time to build features. We'll likely introduce new stuff later on.

Second, this tool is actually more for project portfolio management than project management per se. The goal is to let teams use the tools that they like for ticketing, bug reports, etc. and focus more on scheduling, resourcing and overview of the projects in an organization.

Currently we have GitHub integration with commit messages updating the project activity stream. We have plans to introduce other integrations like this.

<comment><USER6> Yeah I figured as much, I just wanted to tell you what I thought it was missing, not complain about the lack of features.

Anyways it seems as if you guys want to only focus on the overview of the project management side and not on the task management side or collaboration side, which in my book is OK because most products make a mess of those things when done in tandem.

If you want to focus on only that for now my advice is to implement milestones first (you said you wanted to focus on scheduling and this is the cornerstone of scheduling IMO) and change the timeline to have less thick bars and emphasize milestones instead of project beginnings and endings (though this should be shown also off course), and figure out which direction you plan to take... collaboration angle, the task based angle, the "I only need a Gantt chart" oldschool project management angle, etc.

Overall I feel you guys have gotten the design idea quite nicely of what the needs in simple project management are, you just need to decide which type of project manager you're going to market to.

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent insights, thanks! These points will definitely be discussed in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yet another project management service? I'm amazed out how often these pop-up promising that they are the now "simplest" project management solution. Where's the differentiation? Other than the UI and a couple custom fields, these are no different than Basecamp, Producteev, GoPlan, etc. etc...

With that said, I think it looks and functions great. Very user-friendly. Would I use it? Probably not. My team seems to hate every simple project management website service. The ultimate project management service is to integrate something within the current workflow, which does not involve a separate website nor does it involve creating tasks, etc. I'm just stating the problem, but unfortunately I don't have a solution. I just find it fascinating that there are SO many project management services, but none work for our team.

The ideal solution would HAVE to have smartphone apps for major platforms, and gmail integration. Heck, it doesn't even need to have a website frontend.

<comment><USER8> _I just find it fascinating that there are SO many project management services, but none work for our team._

That's why there are so many. I bet that is what each developer was thinking when they came up with their product.

<comment><USER7> Completely agree, but we aren't about to develop our own. I just find it interesting that there isn't a solution to fits even most people's needs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Acunote (<http://www.acunote.com/promo>) is still better (which I'll admit is kinda an unfair comparison, given this was made in only 48 hours). Managing an agile backlog is possible in acunote. And it is free for up to 7 users (startups will be able to go a long way before having to pay).

Also acunote makes sure you don't have to reload the page most of the time (even though Splendid's reload is very fast). I'd really recommend competitors to borrow from it.

<comment><USER10>
        > Acunote is still better.

To be fair, I suspect Acunote may be just a _little_ bit older than 48 hours old. ;) Splendid Bacon looks pretty awesome considering.

<comment><USER11> The first 95% of any app is always the easy bit. It's that last 5% that takes years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I also loved the demo. I particularly liked the fresh database every time.

I suggest that you run a background process that always ensures you have say 5 demo databases 'ready to go' so you can dish them out with no delay when a user clicks on the evaluate link. The speed of that first click really is essential.

Also, you could come up with some clever hacks to share the caching for the default dashboards. Until a user makes a modification, they are essentially on a static site which has huge advantages for you under load. If you could automatically bake the site into pure HTML and switch over to a real version on the first modification that might be a big speed win when you get dug or slashdotted.

Then again, it could be a premature optimisation. Well done. Very slick.

Consider making your login page (<http://splendidbacon.com/users/sign_in>) expand into a sign up page rather than making them separate.

Finally, there should be an easy way to convert the demo account into a real trial account. There could be a big button to do it in the header, or the account button could be re-labeled TRIAL or FREE ACCOUNT and could lead to a form that allowed conversion from demo to real. Right now I can't do this conversion because I don't know the password for the demo account.

Keep the prices low, you have a naturally viral product here (people pulling other people in). You might want to engineer in features that draw in the dev shop's clients too (bug tracker, public project dashboards, etc)

<comment><USER13> Excellent points! We didn't have that much time to do the demo data creation so we're going to do it on background when we get back our code ownership from Rails Rumble :)

Also we didn't have time to do any caching, but it's a good way to learn the bottle necks :D

Thanks for the great feedback! Much appreciated!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm the designer for this app, it's great the people find it interesting and pleasing. I try write some more detailed post about the process but here are few pointers:

* We've been talking about this kind of project portfolio / dashboard app for our company quite a while.

* I worked on the concept and the first sketches to my notebook like week before while attending some rather boring keynote presentation. Took photos with my iPhone and send it to the team.

* We had couple of 30min planning sessions on Tue and Fri where we scoped app and what features it should have.

* On Friday afternoon I sketched couple of iterations of the views to paper, so everyone would know what to expect. Also I had the style of the design pretty imagined in my head (I wanted it dark and fancy, and definitely there's inspiration from Cultured Code). Like previously linked, if you like to know I work, I gave a lecture on the subject last week: [http://www.slideshare.net/karrisaarinen/just-design-it-an-ap...](http://www.slideshare.net/karrisaarinen/just-design-it-an-approach-to-web-app-design))

* On Saturday I started about 8 hours late(since I didn't want to wake up too early :-) and I had Photoshop comps of all the main views ready after 7 hours(including couple of iterations each). Key to this was to reuse elements and use layer styles as much as possible

* Before and right after that we started implementing the UI. We choose JQuery, 960.gs, Haml, SASS and Pictos icon-font the frontend. I tried to do as much I could with css so I could reuse it, and SASS was really helpful because you could define and include complex styles elements with a oneliner.

* The app backend was mostly ready Saturday evening as we planned, so when others left on 11pm, I stayed for other 3 hours and implemented the dashboard and some other views.

* We used most the Sunday to polishing the views and the app, and I designed and implement the frontpage on the afternoon.

* On like 10-11pm while other guys where fiddling with the deployment I made a iOS icon and some other small tweaks.

* Sunday 11pm the first deployment went through, we had some problems with Pictos, Firefox and emails but those were solved pretty quickly.

* Then We opened the champange bottle <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8355/deployed.jpg> and it's was done which was really good feeling. After 16 hours the whole team is still really stoked about the app and the feedback. BIG THANKS TO YOU ALL :)

<comment><USER15> I just wanted to say thanks. It seems like you tested the app out on the iPad. If you didn't, it sure seemed like it. I first visited the app on mine, and was happy to see it fit like a native app. Highly encouraging. Good work.

<comment><USER13> Thank you! We didn't have time to actually test it on iPad, but we were happy to see it somewhat working on it :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Firstly: I think you've done a great job for 48 hours. That's an awesome inspiration.

Secondly: what is the purpose of the random characters (e.g. %, 2) on the front page and elsewhere? I found the characters on the front page to be somewhat unbalanced, especially the comma. Once I tried the demo, I thought they might be indicating keyboard shortcuts, but nothing happened (firefox 3.0, crunchbang linux). I'm not sure if they're not working, or if I just don't understand the joke or something, but that was my biggest issue. It seemed a bit unprofessional -- not that it _is_ (seriously, 48 hours? awesome!), but that's what I saw.

I hope this helps you, and thanks for sharing this with us!

<comment><USER17> Glad you like it!

I'm sorry to hear that the site doesn't render properly on Firefox 3.0. We are using @font-face and the Pictos icon set for the icons, and only newer browsers support it.

Here's what it actually looks like: <http://skitch.com/jcxplorer/d5hdh/splendid-bacon>

<comment><USER16> Ah, that's much better. Cool!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Very nice. Looks heavily inspired by Cultured Code's dashboard (<http://culturedcode.com/status/>).

<comment><USER19> Indeed it does. Almost _too_ heavily..

<comment><USER13> It's certainly inspired by them. We love Cultured Code and their products!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Personally I don't see much value in it, but it looks awesome and I guess if you add more features it might be useful to give clients updates.

Best part - the automatic demo account, great job on that. That is by far the easiest way to understand how something is going work and I wish all apps had that feature.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad to hear you liked it, especially the demo account. We wanted to try making the discovery part very easy with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I really dig the simplicity of it. It's the first time I managed to fully understand a presumably minimalistic project management service in under a minute. I feel comfortable sharing this with friends and fellow students without fearing that I have to explain everything.

I would love to be able to embed images and code, though. A service like present.ly stands out better in this regard. At the moment, I don't know how well I would use it in a CS study group without at least a <code> tag.

<comment><USER13> Embedding and especially code formatting are excellent ideas! Thanks for pointing those out! I'll push them forward myself

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is great - we've been looking for a scheduling app to replace an Excel sheet that we've been using, and this is close to what I had in my head.

One thing we'd happily pay for would be the ability to have finer grained resourcing. So instead of just saying who is working on what project, say precisely when they are working on it.

The goal would be for every person in my team to look at this in the morning to see what they need to work on that day or week.

Is this something you had planned?

Great start for 2 days work though!

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the feedback! I'm not sure how fine grained it'll be, but I promise we'll think hard how to do resourcing "properly".

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Nice! It seems easy enough to use and the design is downright gorgeous.

What are your plans for this? I could definitely see myself paying for this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the compliments!

Due to the excellent feedback we've received, we are planning on commercializing this soon.

<comment><USER24> So, can you teach us something about the design process? I too found it very pleasing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Our designer @karrisaarinen gave a lecture about web app design just last week and his slides of that talk are up at [http://www.slideshare.net/karrisaarinen/just-design-it-an- ap...](http://www.slideshare.net/karrisaarinen/just-design-it-an-approach-to- web-app-design)

<comment><USER24> This was very helpful, thanks a lot!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Full disclosure: I was on the team who built this.

I really love how this turned out.

<comment><USER26> Man, i'm already using it. I love the simplicity

<comment><USER25> Glad to hear it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Textmate 2 joke was a nice touch : )

<comment><USER13> Great to hear you liked it! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Incredible for a freelancer like me!

I just hope all this positive feedback doesn't result in crazy-ass pricing :)

<comment><USER29> I'm liking it a lot, as well. We'll see if my other team members want to use it tomorrow at the office. We actually use an intranet tool that we build for clients for project management at work, but I'm not convinced that it manages a software development project well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great to hear you like it! We'd love to hear your team's thoughts on the application.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Seems cool. I like the dashboard design. Mind telling us what technology stack you chose to use?

<comment><USER25> It's a pretty basic Rails stack. We did for this year's Rails Rumble, so we've listed all the gems and libraries on our team page: [http://r10.railsrumble.com/teams/kiskonians-dancing-in- lab-c...](http://r10.railsrumble.com/teams/kiskonians-dancing-in-lab-coats)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Looks very beautiful. Almost like Yammer that's centered around projects only. Do you plan to add more features, or just want it to be a project status updater? For what it's worth, I find many project management tools confusing; always seems like they take too many steps to just get your tasks in there and updated. Still, at least a to-do list under each project would be useful.

What are your pricing plans? An installable, roll-your-own-server option would be cool...

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the kind words! We do have some plans, but we really need to gather feedback and then decide what's the roadmap.

Firewall version has been planned, but we had no time to think about the pricing yet. I'm sure we need some sleep before that :)

<comment><USER31> I'm sure! :) Still, amazing work for 48 hours. How large was your team?

<comment><USER17> It was developed by a team of 4. Happy to know you like it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Lovely app - very pretty. As someone who writes only mathematical code, I cannot imagine the effort I would have to put in to get something so shiny!

I started with a few projects and I have a couple of feature requests: show the latest status update in the project dashboard and maybe consider an RSS feed for each project?

I also couldn't figure out what the little person silhouette at the bottom of each project in the dashboard was for?

<comment><USER13> Thank you!

We've have thought about RSS feeds, but we pretty much run out of time with that :)

Little person silhouette is just a marker. We'll have person filters for projects at some point. Also if you see "-" next to the silhouette there are no people in the project (you can add them by opening the project and clicking "Edit").

<comment><USER32> Using ff 3.6.10 on a mac, I always get the (-) marker next to the silhouette without any names associated there. However, there are people attached to the project when I click on the project itself...that's why I was confused - <USER2> expected to see the people, but didn't!

I guess that'll get ironed out in testing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Beautiful app.

It would be cool if you could assign an arbitrary numeric value to a "post" and display a running total. For example, set the value of a post to 4 and ask the team members to check in twice a day.

This gives you a rough idea of the time spent so far (and perhaps time remaining) without any additional effort on the part of the team and lets you dial-in the granularity on the human side of things.

<comment><USER13> That's an interesting idea! We'll think about it! Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Everybody else has given the feedback I would. But I can't help but re-give the praise, amazing achievement for 48 hours.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! We're humbled by the very positive response.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Great looking app. I'm having trouble adding users to a project after it has been created, using chrome 6.0. Later, it would also be useful to add users without an account via email invites from within a project to people that don't have an account yet.

<comment><USER13> Thank you for your feedback! I'm running Chrome 6.0 too and adding users seems to work for me. I'll try to investigate this!

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I assume I missed something obvious: how can I add a task and an estimate duration ?

Or isn't it possible ?

<comment><USER13> We don't have tasks at the moment :(

<comment><USER36> No worries - I'm just asking :)

So does the app allow to share status between people working on a project and see a timeline of projects ?

<comment><USER13> Yes and also some details about the project. We also have Github integration so you can see recent commits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> "And it uses dark colors."

Much prefer white on black to vice versa. Great design and very usable!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback! Glad you like the dark theme.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Great work! Only thing is I'd have something on the top left to go back to the front page. It took me a little while to find the home icon on the top right.

Is the gantt chart from a UI library, or created from scratch?

<comment><USER13> Thanks! It's true that the dropdown menu is not really optimal at the moment. We'll work on that!

The timeline was created from scratch since there wasn't any solution out there that was good enough for us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I can't sign up from the 'try the demo' link. I tried changing my demo account, but it wouldn't let me (the existing password was blank, it complained).

After a while I figured out I needed to logout and sign up again.

<comment><USER13> Sorry about that. We didn't have enough time to polish the demo -> real account switch.

<comment><USER39> Cheers! Just a heads up :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Just testing it out on Android, everything I tried seemed to work perfectly. Great design and CSS work :)

Perhaps some sorting & filtering options on the dashboard? An 'overdue, current and complete tabs?

<comment><USER13> Thank you for your comments and feedback! We're glad that it works on Android too :) Didn't really have time to test it on it.

Yes there needs to be some kind of sorting/filtering if you many projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Really great job for a weekend project - visual design is very slick. Look forward to seeing it a bit more feature-complete. Would love to use something like this with my team.

<comment><USER25> Great to hear that you like it. We certainly have plans to add some features to it, especially better integration with more external services (bug trackers, etc.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Is there a way to "complete" a project? Am I missing something?

<comment><USER25> Currently no, in the future we'll probably add the "completed" state, or something similar...

<comment><USER43> Which is what I love about smart development. People worry so much about features, scalability et al that they end up never building anything!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I immediately converted the Why the Lucky Stiff chunky bacon melody to your app's name after seeing that it was part of the Rails Rumble.

</comment><comment><USER44> This a pretty awesome project for 48 hours! And reading through the comments, I love that you're replying to so many. Keep it up :)

<comment><USER17> I've been up for about 24 hours now, and even though I was exhausted from all the coding, I'm feeling great now!

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Saw this on Forrst earlier today and I'm still loving it. Great to see your project is getting so much attention. It deserves it.

<comment><USER13> Thanks! We're really glad you like it! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Nice, but still not as feature rich as <http://www.timetableapp.com/>

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the feedback! Will take a closer look, but it seems to solve a different problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> This is perfect. With my team of 3 there couldn't be an easier way to do this. Thanks for this. Also killer design.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We have small teams ourselves and we created this based on what we need. Great to hear that it'll be useful for others, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Splendid Bacon in simple words is "Splendid". Keep up the good work and make it awesomer! Totally loving it!

<comment><USER13> Thanks! :D Also bacon is splendid!

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Played around with it for a bit. Are you considering any to do list functions?

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe not right now. Lot of people, us included, want manage their todos in Things or similar todo app.

However, we need to think this through.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> nice application. however, i did not get a 'welcome to splendidbacon' email.

As trivial as it might be, i think the welcome email does what 'thanks for coming' does in offline stores

<comment><USER13> Good point! We'll add that when the Rails Rumble lockout is over! Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Amazing, for something built in 48 hours. Very slick!

<comment><USER13> Thanks!! We're glad you liked it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I cannot easily find a portal on your website to submit feedback and support tickets.

You may wish to add a CSV export feature for me, and some nice metrics/graphic reporting in other charts.

Besides that, I'm switching to this from toggl.com right now.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for your feedback! We can be contacted at email@example.com</comment></comment>


A Raspberry Pi pentesting suite - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pwnieexpress/Raspberry-Pwn

<comment><USER2> Working in infosec, I definitely see these mini, low power machines having a major impact (relatively). I've already seen one of our pentest auditors bring a plug computer to a meeting, plug it in while no one was looking, and present the results at the end of the day.

Having something like this that you can connect to wifi on battery and just drop in the bushes outside the building really changes the game of network/information security.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not seeing it handerling a reinstall or any break upon partial install (power cut perhaps). But this is for a audience that should know how to easily fix that and if they can't then they should not be playing with such tools. So in that, it's almost perfect.

Alas no Pi to play with myself yet, soon. But until then if there is no netcat or nmap I'm going to cry, but i've not realy done much infosec for what is in the IT industry a long time.</comment>


Ask HN: Ways to use machine learning in banking risk? - <AUTHOR> Trying to think of ways you could use exisiting machine learning techniques on a system-wide scale or individual bank level for the banking industry. Any ideas? <comment><USER2> Are you talking about risk of fraud, risk of credit default or anything else? Either way there are already quite a few companies doing this at very large scale, which shouldn't discourage you - just means that you can find some good resources if you dig deep enough.

<comment><AUTHOR> I meant starting moreso with what they have on their books. Predicting problematic positions, only a small scale or on large scale. Or some sort of learning using this clean and well-defined data.

<comment><USER2> > Predicting problematic positions

This is a problem for finance, not banking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> No idea how many data points you'd need in order to get a reasonably good model but the task at hand would be pretty daunting. After all you need to consider individual risk posed by employees all the way up to systemic and political. On the other hand if successful you'd hit a home run.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I guess I would focus on the base case of using it on the options, fixed income, etc that the bank has position information on (x100000000 positions). Just because all that data is clean.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Check out this paper for ideas: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.05840.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.05840.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> Anomaly detection for credit card fraud is a big problem.</comment>


A Criminal Underworld of Child Abuse, Part 2 [audio] - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/podcasts/the-daily/child-sex-abuse.html <comment><AUTHOR> > It is. And in fact, it's one of the main reasons we chose this line of > reporting. The issue of child sexual abuse imagery really brings the privacy > issue to a head, because we're forced with these very, very stark decisions > that we're discussing here right now. Which is that, is it more important to > encrypt the communications on a platform where it's well known that children > interact with adults? Is it worth it to encrypt those communications to > protect people's privacy when we know what the ramifications for children > are?

I am interested in this question. As a cryptography enthusiast, I don't these these issues are black and white, one could imagine using ideas like zero- knowledge proofs (which, in this case, might just amount of sharing hashes of images and videos or slightly more intricate techniques like fuzzy hashes used by, for example, VirusTotal) to prevent spread of CSAM while protecting privacy.</comment>


SQLite Turns 20 - <AUTHOR> https://www.sqlite.org/src/thisdayinhistory?today=2020-05-29 <comment><USER2> There was a considerable SQLite thread less than a week ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23281994](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23281994).

</comment><comment><USER3> I use SQLite frequently, often without thinking about it, but every once in a while I stand back and reflect on what an amazing piece of software it is. An RDBMS without a standalone database engine, delivering rock-solid performance, through exceptional code quality.

It scales unexpectedly well with large data sets, and the performance is way beyond what you would expect from a library (as opposed to a 'real' database).

Hats off to the developers for creating and maintaining this amazing software.

<comment><USER4> The code quality of SQLite is often understated to a hilarious degree. The project has _four_ independent test harnesses totally 644x as many lines of test code as there is actual code, with the final test count in the _millions_. This includes the things most of us do, fuzz tests, regression tests, performance tests, as well as out of memory tests, IO failure tests, _power loss tests_ , and more.

Of course, it's also easy to forget that the original application of SQLite was guiding missiles, so it _has_ to work. Well, at least from the operator's perspective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of the notable aspects of SQLite as a open source project is being open source but not open-contribution. drh put it in public domain, and doesn't accept outside contributions to prevent it from being contaminated in any way. In an open source landscape where bazaar seems to have mostly won, SQLite remains one of the (last?) cathedral strongholds, and serves as a good reminder to aggressive contributors that open source maintainers don't have to accept or even consider their PRs.

[https://sqlite.org/copyright.html](https://sqlite.org/copyright.html)

<comment><USER6> Has there been much agitation for (or serious attempts at) forking SQLite? That's probably the real test of the stewardship of an open source project.

<comment><USER7> Nothing springs to mind, as of yet.

However, with the very latest release series (3.32.x), one of the pieces ("SQLITE_HAS_CODEC") used by third party encryption libraries (eg SQLCipher, various others) was removed without notice.

[https://sqlite.org/forum/forumpost/a48e4672da](https://sqlite.org/forum/forumpost/a48e4672da)

There _does_ seem to be a way forward, via reimplementing the encryption as a SQLite VFS. If that didn't exist though, then some kind of forking would be on the cards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> SQLite is a much younger project than I thought it was. Given the ubiquity, and capabilities that it provides, it's impressive. On the other hand, Linux and Python are 29 years old.

Postgres, in its current form is ~23 years old. It started in the 1980s.

<comment><USER9> I'm also surprised — it feels both like a long time and yet not that long at all. SQLite felt like it had been around forever when Rails adopted it to make development environments simpler, and I remember finding it easy to use when writing iPhone apps for the first time. It was remarkably stable at an early age, it seems.

I still think it's a shame we never got SQLite into the browser because every browser implemented the same backend and therefore "it wasn't a standard" — [https://www.w3.org/TR/webdatabase/](https://www.w3.org/TR/webdatabase/) (note the box in red) Chrome still supports it, but not in "modern" places like web workers: [https://caniuse.com/#feat=sql- storage](https://caniuse.com/#feat=sql-storage)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Literally the only criticisms I have is that sqlite is actually dynamically typed, not statically as you would expect! The schema only defines a field's "recommended" type.

The documentation is very explicit about that[1], but it might still come unexpected, be forgotten, or, worst of all, cause problems that manifest much much later than if they would have at insertion. I remember one particular very ugly episode of that.

But that is all. As a whole, sqlite is amazing, rock solid, amazingly documented, and my immediate go-to if I need a (serverless) database. I don't remember encountering a bug, in mission-critical software.

<comment><USER11> I find the type system unique compared to other RDBMS systems but I too wish that constraint integrity was enforced by the engine. I don't want to give up on variant types (call them ANY types) as they can solve some interesting problems that fall in the flexible schema space but I don't want to go through hoops to constrain something like a fixed length binary column to hold a UUID.

I understand the historical reason; it allows for almost any flavor of SQL to behave as expected. SQLite is often used in a developer sandbox to work on a copy of an existing enterprise SQL engine. A workbench SQL if you will.

As mentioned in last week's SQLite thread, it doesn't have a storage type for datetime. I also miss exact NUMERIC(p,s) types but I don't want to expand the storage classes, I just wish the Domain/Type constraints could be optionally enforced in a simple way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I heard the creator Richard Hipp speak at a conference a few years back and I absolutely loved listening to him . He is humble and seems a bit of a throwback compared to Silicon Valley tech moguls . May the genius and simplicity of SQLite shine on .

<comment><USER13> I quite liked The Changelog's interview with him too: [https://changelog.com/podcast/201](https://changelog.com/podcast/201)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Where can you use SQLite?

Embedded Systems: Yes

Raspberry Pi : Yes

Mobile Apps. : Yes

Desktop Apps : Yes

Browsers : No

Servers : Yes

Supercomputers : Yes

<comment><USER15> You can thank Mozilla and Microsoft for that. They had the swing votes on that issue - [https://nolanlawson.com/2014/04/26/web-sql-database-in- memor...](https://nolanlawson.com/2014/04/26/web-sql-database-in-memoriam/)

<comment><USER14> That was a brilliant read!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Has anybody used Sqlite in a server side, production level capacity....

I know it works great on embeded cases, but how about server side with a decent user load?

<comment><USER17> SQLite is for use cases where a dedicated DB is overkill/impossible. Considering the limitations it has, it probably isn't usable for most production DBs.

<comment><USER18> Not true. [https://blog.expensify.com/2018/01/08/scaling-sqlite- to-4m-q...](https://blog.expensify.com/2018/01/08/scaling-sqlite-to-4m-qps-on- a-single-server/)

<comment><USER17> Some of the limitations make it a no-go for me at least [0]

[0] [https://www.sqlite.org/omitted.html](https://www.sqlite.org/omitted.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I always love reading the comments section of an SQLite post to hear about all of the incredibly unique ways people are using it.

</comment><comment><USER20> While doing small project sqlite is a very good tool. Thanks to sqlite team for making such a great software.

</comment><comment><USER21> I believe the SQLite license is one of the greatest contributions in technology. Hope to see it on something game changing one day.

<comment><USER22> They have pages on this.

[https://www.sqlite.org/famous.html](https://www.sqlite.org/famous.html)

[https://www.sqlite.org/mostdeployed.html](https://www.sqlite.org/mostdeployed.html)

<comment><USER23> I love how they have a cute logo for the Flame malware nestled between Facebook and GE.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Again I love SQLite! [https://github.com/zubairq/pilot](https://github.com/zubairq/pilot) Would not be possible without it! Why? SQLite works on the server, in Electron (barely), and purely client side on the browser, and is fast!

</comment><comment><USER25> Cool to see a well-loved, gold standard of an open source project reach a milestone like this. That said, the few cherry picked commits on that page were not particularly interesting (atleast to me, not a db expert by any means), and the color coding is inscrutable.

<comment><USER26> It's hard to guess what's sort of curiosity was leading you, but there's a mirror (unofficial, yet reasonably current) on GitHub.

<comment><USER25> I didn't understand your reply at first, and then it dawned on me that the linked page wasn't handwritten to celebrate the milestone (which is what i thought at first), but rather just today's version of a programmatically generated "today in history" type page. Ignore my misguided complaints :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I just checked and I have been using it since 2003...

</comment><comment><USER28> What a noble piece of software.

</comment><comment><USER29> I would be proud to make something a hundredth as useful and prevalent as SQLite.</comment>


Dad fighting gender 'transition' of 7 y/o son speaks out right before gag order - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ily46yZzsA <comment><USER2> Thanks. I was looking for more info on this extremely strange case. It's hard to find after the gag order.</comment>


Run your own LXD demo server - <AUTHOR> https://stgraber.org/2017/03/05/run-your-own-lxd-demo-server/ <comment><AUTHOR> This offers a way to create lightweight machine containers and expose them to the Web as web-based terminals.

I can see a few opportunities to build projects on such a set up.</comment>


Ask HN: Wealthy Saudi oligarchs in pre-1980s not knowing to fill cars with gas? - <AUTHOR> I remember reading an article about a guy who worked for a major car manufacturer. He went to Saudi Arabia on behalf of his company to investigate why the cars of Saudi oil oligarchs kept breaking down.
It turns out, they were simply running out of gas and the owners did not know they needed to fill them up with gas.
Would anyone happen to know any publications where this was mentioned? <comment><USER2> Sounds more like an urban legend

"Isn't there an old tale about the Arab who bought a car from [Israeli, Crusader, Imperialist, American Satan, etc.] and when it ran out of gas, he abandoned it as broken and sold it back to the seller, who repeated the trick with the next Sheik? So many nasty stereotypes in that one" [http://www.curbsideclassic.com/blog/so-whats-your- favorite-a...](http://www.curbsideclassic.com/blog/so-whats-your-favorite- automotive-mythurban-legend/)</comment>


Thank you for calling tech support, now please die (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/07/thank-you-for-calling-tech-support-now-please-die/ <comment><USER2> > we weren't graded purely on call completion time... basing an employee's > performance evaluation on how quickly they get people off the phone is a > toxic way to measure work

And yet, it's unfortunately how all too many of these outfits have continued to run their businesses. Being spared this particular indignity was a major privilege.

> phone monkeys such as myself reached a state of "burnout" in no more than > eighteen months... I hated the job and needed to quit before I hurt myself

Sadly, a great many of us essentially felt trapped in our positions for quite a bit longer. Never enough available time/energy to pursue greater things when we had bills to pay, and always insufficient meaningful experience to parlay into anything better.

> I'd take a minimum wage job doing manual labor over slapping that headset > down over my head again

After way too many years, I finally crossed this bridge. I would prefer janitorial work or being a rideshare driver, and have (gladly) done both since leaving tech support.

> support, I'd rapidly found out, isn't fulfilling or exciting—it's a never- > ending grind that wears down even the most optimistic and helpful souls... a > Sisyphean torment.

This sums it all up in a nutshell. It would be nice to see the whole thing reformed into a ramp for more rewarding work of different kinds, but in our current 'disposable employee' culture, I don't see it happening any time soon. In the mean time, lives are being destroyed and tremendous amounts of potential are being squandered. I can only hope a few people in charge of such operations might read this and think about ways things can be improved.

</comment><comment><USER3> As a customer, the late 90s were the absolutely most frustrating time to deal with computer customer support. In virtually every case, it was obvious that the customer support person was simply reading from a support database that the company hadn't bothered to put on the web yet, and yet to get these answers it was necessary to let the operator, who generally had no tech knowlege, walk you through a long script of repeating obvious steps until finally you would get to step 50 in their script that said "if you get error 87AB with an nvidia graphics driver, you must frazz the foo in the bios settings", which is all I wanted in the first place.

Gateway was one of the worst, since they generally had OEM versions of hardware that required special driver settings that were completely undocumented. Since this type of thing is generally online now, I honestly don't think I've called customer support for any personal product in over 15 years.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think I'm the only person in the planet that enjoys doing tech support. I just _love_ it. You get to talk to real customers and fix real problems. Most of the time the fixes are easy so you get quick wins. Callers are be delighted to speak with someone technically competent who doesn't put them on hold forever and all the other crap you usually expect from tech support.

If only I could make a decent living doing tech support I would totally make that my career.

<comment><USER5> My first job was doing tech support for an early dial up ISP, and it was not for me. On the other hand, in an environment with a corporate desk job where co-workers would come by and ask me questions, it was basically as you say, enjoyable to solve real problems, as opposed to my main job of working on things for clients that you could never interface with directly.

Whether helping people is fun depends a lot on how civilized they are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _" Yep," he'd say on mute, with a customer's sad voice droning on in both our ears. "Once you get the new ticket open, it's tab three times to get to the description field, and if you need to get into Internet Explorer it's control- escape, I, enter, then alt-tab back. I'm the fastest tech on the floor here because I never take my hands off the keyboard. If you're smart, you'll be like me."_

Sounds like my kinda guy!

<comment><USER7> Control-escape is equivalent to the Windows key; alt-escape is the shortcut that cycles quickly between recently used applications without showing the small bar in the middle, like alt-tab does.

The mega combo is ctrl-alt-tab (or altgr-tab for the international keyboard aficionados) which gives you the application switcher bar, and lets you navigate with the arrow keys without holding down any other keys.

<comment><USER8> Windows key + tab too

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I spent some years at Convergys. And definitely recognize many of the procedures and idiocies described in that article, even though it was in a different country. It's easy to forget how large the call centre business really is.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's a really entertaining read for me, but I can't place my finger on why exactly. I think crappy jobs are a great plot device in any story though since so many people have that shared experience. The ending is so satisfying to me.

<comment><USER11> You enjoyed it because the author is a great writer. I felt the same way you did. It's impressive how the story telling was so engaging while the topic is so mundane. I could see this being made into a cult-classic movie a la Office Space.

<comment><USER12> Article author here, though I'm a few days late to the party. Thank you for the kind words :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I kept waiting for the tech support call where someone said "Thank you for calling tech support, now please die" but it never happened. Even so, this was a really enjoyable read.

</comment><comment><USER13> I thought safe mode on windows 98 was also F8. I thought F8 has been the go-to key to get a list of boot options after POST.

<comment><USER14> Both F8 and CTRL work for Windows 98.

But it probably didn't matter what he answered in their two-question interview.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Are there call centers for iPhone tech support or only F2F at Apple Stores? How have the problems changed compared to PCs?

<comment><USER16> Apple don't maintain contact centres per se; instead, in the US have a fleet of teleworking contact employees who handle calls, online chats, etc.

From what I hear it's a pretty good gig, minus dealing with the public.

<comment><USER17> " _From what I hear it 's a pretty good gig, minus dealing with the public._"

It's a pretty good gig, if you don't count the actual gig?

My experience with tech support doesn't involve phones, fortunately. I got some exercise crawling around under people's desks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Replace Houston with Redmond and this is almost exactly the story of my 2nd IT job - as a BPOS tech in the late 2000s. BPOS was basically Microsoft Online beta.

They had a group of 8 of us shadowing people on both sides of the aisle. It was like a shadow village - hidden village of the phone.

</comment><comment><USER19> Today I learned about the Houston tunnel system.</comment>


My frustration with the auto industry - <AUTHOR> http://kevinchau.me/my-frustration-with-the-auto-industry

<comment><USER2> I don't understand - whats wrong with the Prius ? It's kinda crappy in NY winters but you can deal with it if your a good driver. Get's great gas mileage and isn't bad looking... You said yourself, Toyota has solved the direct injection carbon buildup - ??

Mines pushing almost 90k miles. My next car will be an SUV simply because I do a lot of DIY around the house and buying 6 60lb bags of concrete at a time kinds sucks but Home Depot is all of 3 miles from my house, so I deal...</comment>