New 50-metre deep crater opens up in Arctic tundra - <AUTHOR> http://siberiantimes.com/other/others/news/giant-new-50-metre-deep-crater-opens-up-in-arctic-tundra/ <comment><USER2> I hope this is not the first sign of the clathrate gun going off.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis)

<comment><USER3> The Clathrate Gun hypothesis is not plausible. Recent research basically disproves it.

<comment><USER4> Link?

<comment><USER3> The "Current Outlook" section of the Wikipedia article gives a reasonable overview of the literature. This reddit thread has additional links: [https://www.reddit.com/r/climatechange/comments/fv5oyh/has_t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/climatechange/comments/fv5oyh/has_the_clathrate_gun_hypothesis_been_debunked/)

<comment><USER5> Is this subreddit reliable? A cursory read of the comments left me with the impression that human-caused climate change is no big deal, and that makes me wary regarding whether other claims from there are to be counted upon.

<comment><USER6> The links are often fine, but the sub in my experience is not. The head moderator also moderates /r/climateskeptics and there is a significant overlap between the two subreddits' userbases. This wouldn't be a problem necessarily but many of these users argue in bad faith and derail the discourse on the sub.

<comment><USER5> This seems like a common climate denial tactic. I'm seeing it in my home country as well. Lots of truly bad-faith skeptic contributions to climate change forums on Facebook, made by people who obviously don't care about science or evidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reminds me of Siberia's "Doorway to the Underwolrd" (Batagaika crater).

So am I understanding correctly that this is basically a popped methane bubble that had formed inside the permafrost? I wonder what the greenhouse gas impact of this was.

<comment><USER8> Basically nothing. It seems like a lot of methane, but on a global scale it's a drop in the bucket.

However, it's a sign of melting permafrost on a wide scale that is releasing methane, and that does have an impact which will get more pronounced.

Because methane is more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2, there's a risk of a runaway feedback cycle melting more permafrost and releasing more greenhouse gases. And that's not thinking about the colossal amounts of frozen methane on the sea floor which is quite sensitive to temperature changes. We're playing with fire here, sorta literally.

<comment><USER9> It's indicative of the change. Between the methane from permafrost and gas hydrates we are looking at having a bad time for a long time here on Earth.

<comment><USER10> It might be dismissed as hyperbole but we are looking at extinction and not just a "bad time". Granted, it will take quite some time, generations even, to reach that severity but we are well on the trajectory to get there.

It's horrifying to think about the escalating crises of global ecosystems. In a world, where too many people can't even be bothered to wear a mask during an ongoing pandemic I have zero confidence in preventing an extinction level disaster where the truly severe consequences aren't felt for another 2 generations. Some people just do not care if it doesn't directly affect them right this very second.

It's sociopathy on another scale.

<comment><USER11> We're not facing extinction yet and this sort-of alarmism is actually unhelpful. I too thought for a while that we're facing extinction but we're not there yet, I found this helpful to read: [http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2020/08/denial...](http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2020/08/denial- and-alarmism-in-the-near-term-extinction-and-collapse-debate)

I do think, however, that we're living in a "golden age" and that it will come to an end somewhat abruptly. Many people will probably die but we're not going to go extinct.

I share your concern regarding the inability of so many people (at least in the USA) to perform the simple task of wearing a mask for communal good. It does not bode well for community engagement on totally revamping people's lifestyles to help mitigate climate change (I can imagine the foaming at the mouth that would occur with many people around where I live - Austin - if the government instituted a gasoline car buyback program in exchange for hybrids, as a simple example.)

<comment><USER12> But if you think about it, MOST people DO wear masks -- and to mitigate climate change, the strategy is not to convince everyone to voluntarily change their behavior, it's to price in the externalities, changing incentives, and let the behavior changes naturally flow from that. That just takes a small group of dedicated individuals, and a pretty decent majority of Americans already support climate legislation (our representatives are kinda lagging behind in that department).

Imagine if we had a way to magically make everything more expensive to people who don't wear masks :)

Also, even if everyone were willing to make the necessary changes voluntarily, I wouldn't have much confidence in our ability to accurately calculate which actions have the most impact on our climate footprint, without involving market mechanisms in some way. We'd probably focus on stuff that feels important over stuff that's mundane but actually has a much bigger impact. As an example, I'm kinda thinking of people who do that "zero-waste" thing (refers to landfill waste), which is fine, but you can live "zero waste" and still have a pretty substantial climate footprint, and vice-versa.

<comment><USER11> It seems you were downvoted for reasons I don't understand but I think your comment is important.

I agree that aligning economic incentives is a good (and probably the only?) way to steer hordes of people in directions that will either help or harm the "community".

I'm not actually sure whether most people are or aren't wearing masks. While driving out to camp in the desert, stops to get gas provided (very limited anecdata) that people generally don't care at all about mask wearing. Which is why I think it was the right move where I live to force businesses to deny service to people not wearing masks but these people tend to only do it in settings where they become pariahs if they don't (so they're only doing it to conform, which is better than not at all). e.g. in some places, the people running the place don't even care so therefore it goes unenforced (if not procedurally, definitely not socially).

I also agree with your concern about our/my/your ability to accurately estimate anything of importance. But this isn't a good reason alone for not encouraging thinking and care about these things, even if it means reeducation later on (harm reduction as opposed to some form of "getting it perfect", which is exceedingly hard).

However there is one important point: moving people cognitively towards thinking about these issues in a moral framework of care and purity is probably better than not, even if it means slightly more carbon output due to higher calorie consumption because of bicycle riding instead of driving a car (e.g. I support a carbon tax much more now than I did before I got rid of my car, it wasn't a cause mind you but it certainly co-occurred with my beginning to care more about the sanctity of our natural environment).

So, I agree with you generally, but we shouldn't fall into the trap of thinking only in terms of economic or technological solutions because not focusing on the social domain can have consequences (read: conservatives now becoming science deniers and buying gas guzzling trucks to stick it to the libs, for example).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The entire Yamal peninsula is densely dotted with round ponds and lakes, some even kilometres wide. Is this the same mechanism that has shaped the entire landscape?

[https://email@example.com...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,70.6358768,38983m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x449055f4f8dea577:0x8ae223c41688bebf!8m2!3d70!4d69.9999999)

<comment><USER14> A lot of these appear to be kettle lakes made by the melting of dead ice blocks [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettle_(landform)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettle_\(landform\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I remember writing these up for NBC when a new set appeared in 2014. Those articles did traffic like you wouldn't believe, and the Siberian Times was on it back then too. I believe the conclusion from experts at the time was that it was natural gas trapped in the permafrost being released by global warming.

</comment><comment><USER16> How/why is it such an incredibly "clean" and round hole?

<comment><USER17> Why are bubbles round?

<comment><USER18> Bubbles are round because of air pressure. But that doesn't really apply to large holes in the ground. The ground is a lot more difficult to move than a thin soap film is. Most caves aren't round. Most mountains aren't round, and when they are, it's for different reasons.

<comment><USER19> tundra is peat

peat of made of decaying moss

moss is permeable like a sponge

sponges can hold stuff

stuff can change state with changes in temp/pressure

stuff in a new state can occupy increased volume

increased volume can cause increased pressure

increasing pressure increases temperature

changing the state of more stuff ...

(wavefront) path of least resistance contains most square inches with least circumference

<comment><USER20> HN's formatting engine requires two newlines between paragraphs.

That way you can separate points and make them more readable (punctuation also helps).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I find it amazing that there's something called "The Siberian Times" and that it's in English.

<comment><USER22> So I've been desultorily following [https://www.youtube.com/c/Murzilki/videos](https://www.youtube.com/c/Murzilki/videos) for overview, [https://www.aif.ru](https://www.aif.ru) for depth, and [https://ria.ru](https://ria.ru) for the official line. Any russophones have better suggestions?

<comment><USER23> FYI aif is owned by government of Moscow. If you want more independent Russian media here are some of them:

[https://meduza.io/](https://meduza.io/) \- also has an English version.

[https://theins.ru/](https://theins.ru/) \- these are the ones who deanonymized Salisbury poisoners.

[https://zona.media/](https://zona.media/) \- focuses on the judicial, law enforcement and penal system. A lot of very dark and depressing news.

[https://www.proekt.media/](https://www.proekt.media/) \- rare but deep investigations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> So do these things explode — they're just in the middle of nowhere, so no one notices — or does the "roof" of the bubble just collapse? If they exploded, there would presumably be significant seismic activity and you'd probably expect to see debris around the crater, but they're very clean.

<comment><USER25> The subtitle of the article:

> Blocks of soil and ice thrown hundreds of metres from epicentre of the > funnel at the Yamal peninsula.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> One of the pictures in the article shows the ground swelling outwards, presumably before it bursts.

Could these be detected by Remote Sensing images from satellites, assuming they would be taking pictures of the tundra at high enough resolution and frequency.

</comment><comment><USER27> The surface of the swelling pingo before the methane bubble pops looks like a giant loaf of freshly baked bread.

</comment><comment><USER26> Does this happen in the rest of the Arctic tundra too? Northern Canada, Alaska, and the rest of Siberia?

Or has it just been missed?

</comment><comment><USER28> Good thing things we are all totally focused on COVID-19 and the election I guess ?

<comment><USER29> It's not like the current ruling party would change anything accounting for this news even if we didn't have covid or election.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I hold out hope that eventually there will be widespread buy in to combating climate change before it's too late. But it seems that we need obvious impending doom for everyone before people stop voting for right wing politicians.

<comment><USER31> I think our experience with Covid-19 has revealed any such hope to be 100% unwarranted. At least in the US, "that's China, it won't happen here", "that's Italy, it won't happen here", "that's New York, it won't happen here", "that's California, it won't happen here" attitude.. and it even circled back on itself, when it did happen in many "heres" and the attitude became "it won't happen again".

I'm not speaking of those who weigh the consequences of lockdowns or debate the viral reproductivity. I mean the people who outright deny what is happening right in front of their faces. Those who have easy access to good information, and ignore it in order to seek out bad information.

There's just no way something such as climate change, which is much more abstract, will get that kind of buy in from this kind of populace. Even if you got everyone to agree on it, we'd hear the familiar debate; "we shouldn't be forced to cut our emissions until country Y does it first". And conversely, "why does our poor country have to suffer from these restrictive limits when the rich world profited off their pollution for decades?"

<comment><USER32> Not to mention a huge percentage of people simply saying "it's not happening" despite all evidence

<comment><USER33> These people are the really weird ones to me. They think they are more experts than the people who have studied this stuff for years. I don't understand the arrogance.

<comment><USER32> They attribute it to malice, not ignorance.

The people I see speaking about this believe either there is no virus, or it's overblown- and most or all of the deaths are either misattributed car accidents and natural cause deaths, or made up from whole cloth. Doctors and hospitals are supposedly being compensated to falsely report deaths as having been caused by COVID.

Obviously there are not large numbers of misattributed deaths or hospital conspiracies. This mirrors the theory held by basically the same people that climate change is just something used to push a political agenda and that scientists fake the data for grant money.

<comment><USER34> > scientists fake the data for grant money

This one's the weirdest. If I had climate science credentials and wanted to cash in I'd be shilling for oil companies. Like that old Tom Lehrer joke about a doctor who specialized in diseases of the rich.

<comment><USER33> Well, never let it be said that conspiracy theories go with Occam's Razor, they can get really convoluted. Like the jump from Gates wanting to inject everyone with vaccines to Gates wanting to inject everyone with vaccines and chips so that he can control the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It begins

</comment><comment><USER36> Global warming at it again

<comment><USER37> Move along, nothing to see here.

How many more scary warning signs will we need to see before taking climate change seriously?

<comment><USER38> I don't think this is the warning sign. This is the consequence happening.

<comment><USER37> Well, so much the worse then. This stuff is happening _right in front of us_ and we're still doing ~nothing about it.

<comment><USER39> It's worse than nothing. Even the people who supposedly take this seriously don't understand how much trouble we are in. When I've talk to people who 'believe' in climate change they still think that it's the increase in CO2 emissions that's the problem, not that CO2 emissions exist.

The atmosphere is like a clogged toilet, you can do your business it in only two or three times before you end up with a mess everywhere. And even if you only use it once going into the bathroom will be unpleasant. Right now it's like a family of 5 is arguing at breakfast if they can use it whenever they feel like it, or only once a day.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills listening to people argue if we should limit our emissions to 90s level by 2050. We should be at zero now, and working on CO2 extraction from the atmosphere if we want to have a planet that can sustain industrial civilization in a century.

Playing around with renewables and batteries completely misses the point. We need fission power plants yesterday and going full steam ahead on hot fusion plants today. Even if we build nothing but Chernobyl style plants and one blows up every two weeks, we will still kill fewer people in the long term than if we continue the way we are now, and that's with the rosiest renewable power projections that ignore things like base load.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Mother Earth is farting!

<comment><USER41> Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've been doing it repeatedly, and we're trying for something different here.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Is the surface of the earth boiling or getting blisters? Either way. Creepy.

<comment><USER43> Events similar to this are fairly common in the Earth's crust. This definitely isn't the first time that some noxious fumes rose up from the Earth's interior. I bet this is how a lot of lakes in the northern hemisphere were formed

<comment><USER44> Nope, glaciers. Baikal is an exception, because it is formed in the rift of two tectonic plates.

The current crater is possible because the tundra is lots of frozen mud with gas in it. Gets warm, bubbles form, gas goes out. Edit: The gas is the result of biomass decaying. The cold had stopped the process for thousands of years but when the environment gets warmer, the bacteria activates and resumes the process.</comment></comment></comment>


DC Gov Builds Amazing Open Gov Dashboard - <AUTHOR> http://www.sunlightlabs.com/blog/2010/dc-government-builds-amazing-open-gov-dashboard/

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately the interface is incredibly obtuse. It took me ages to figure out that you access data by clicking on someone's face. Some good ideas here which have been a bit marred by the need to kiss the narcissistic butts of a bunch of bureaucrats.</comment>


A Review of the Neural History of Natural Language Processing - <AUTHOR> http://blog.aylien.com/a-review-of-the-recent-history-of-natural-language-processing/ <comment><USER2> This is a great article. One big thing NLP lacks (soon enough, lacked) over computer vision is its own version of ImageNet and other similar off the shelf models that can be fit to different domains. Many NLP models are brittle due to the disparity between tasks and problem domains. My BiLSTM-CRF model for NER would require retraining on a completely different set of labels in order to run inference on other tasks.

Elmo embeddings are especially interesting. Dynamic Bernoulli embeddings also deserve a mention. [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.08052.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.08052.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> For those who don't know, this article is by Sebastian Ruder, who has a great blog [1]. His posts are often pretty deep dives of a particular area of interest within Natural Language Processing. A favorite of mine from last year gave a summary of the state-of-the-art in "Word Embeddings" [2], which I would recommend for anyone interested in the field.

[1] [http://ruder.io/#open](http://ruder.io/#open)

[2] [http://ruder.io/word-embeddings-2017/](http://ruder.io/word- embeddings-2017/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Great summary. I was really surprised when I went to the NACL conference in 2016 and most of the NLP papers were deep learning papers. I don't believe that deep learning models will get us anywhere near to AGI but on the other hand, I think we are just getting started to explore how far deep learning will get us. If I told myself in 2016 what I would be doing at work in 2018 using RNNs and GANs, I would not have believed it. It seems like surprising breakthroughs occur on at least a weekly basis now.

</comment><comment><USER5> Nice article. Bad pop-over.</comment>


Handling The Venture Capitalist Cold Call - <AUTHOR> http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/22920/Chumps-vs-Checks-Handling-The-Venture-Capitalist-Cold-Call.aspx?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+onstartups+(OnStartups)

<comment><USER2> Look up the contact's name on the website. Find out if they are actually a General Partner (can make investments.) A lot of the time the people that reach out are analysts, who likely have no investing power.</comment>


SSLStrip is now available - <AUTHOR> http://www.thoughtcrime.org/software/sslstrip/index.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Discussed on HN before: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=487028></comment>


Creating hollow knight using Unity - <AUTHOR> https://unity.com/madewith/hollow-knight <comment><AUTHOR> Particularly liked the 2d layering section that sheds light into why the stages in this game are quite breathtaking</comment>


Google Suggests changing your name, I suggest google is out of touch with tech. - <AUTHOR> http://adamdomoney.posterous.com/google-suggests-changing-your-name-i-suggest

<comment><USER2> Image search? You won't even need to go that far. Just put the person's current name into Google, and let it suggest, "Did you mean [previous name]?"

<comment><AUTHOR> Should have thought of that one.

And in the future changing your name will result in a "Did you mean [previous name]?" link on google name search's.

Kudos to you

</comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell What was the exact quote please? Including the surrounding conversation...

I find it strange that people keep writing about what he said, without writing what he actually said, including the context...

</comment><comment><USER3> danah boyd has a great post on this: [http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/08/16/name- ch...](http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/08/16/name-changes- reputation.html)

Summary: "First, it completely contradicts historical legal trajectories where name changes have become increasingly more difficult. Second, it fails to account for the tensions between positive and negative reputation. Third, it would be so exceedingly ineffective as to be just outright absurd."

She provides strong evidence for all of these.

</comment><comment><USER4> As I see it, Eric's suggestion was indeed quite ridiculous, but the problem itself is not. Your digital past can really backfire or harm your future chances in life.

[Maybe the people screening candidates based on their past need to stop and think about the things they did as a teenager.]

Maybe yes, but what if they will not stop doing such screening? The the problem Eric tried to solve still remains.

<comment><USER5> Then they might miss some great candidates and be crushed by the company that had better screening. The former will only pick candidates from the pool of full of people with perfect past, the latter from the pool of people with "acceptable" pasts (i.e. minor offences ok, major ones like murder not ok).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The solution to image search is plastic surgery, of course.

</comment><comment><USER7> Google's founders certainly weren't concerned with their collegiate life being permanent record.

<http://digg.com/tech_news/First_Google_Site_> points at [http://web.archive.org/web/20021030152640/www- db.stanford.ed...](http://web.archive.org/web/20021030152640/www- db.stanford.edu/~sergey/photos/drag96.jpg) (Sergey Brin)

</comment><comment><USER8> They're not only out of touch with tech, they're out of touch with society as well. Changing your name is not without social stigma.

</comment><comment><USER9> It is pretty ridiculous in the form presented. It certainly doesn't scale. Having said that, there are sometimes sensible options around changing what most people search for.

Marriage is an obvious example. But even if you are just applying for a job, if you use a different version if your name, the search results can be very different. Compare the results for "will critchlow" and "william critchlow".

<comment><AUTHOR> But now add in a few more pieces of information. Like the city, state, country. And the type of job they are applying for. Also roughly age, previous jobs, any information listed on their resume.

By itself I agree its meaningless, but when combined with the other pieces of information the potential employer has access to it is very revealing.

<comment><USER9> Oh. Don't get me wrong, you can still dig in and find stuff, but as a simple separation of work and non-work (especially if some stuff about me did rank for both versions), it can be easier than other options.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There needs to be some kind of NoFollow attribute for 'social objects.'

</comment><comment><USER11> I would like to see Eric Schmidt trying it himself.

</comment><comment><USER12> Eric Schmidt's comments are being taken out of context. His statements were a warning that unless young people particularly start taking their online privacy seriously, they may be left with no recourse for erasing their online past, short of some extreme measure like changing their name. But he was not "suggesting" to change one's name - rather, he was warning about the dangers of diminished online privacy.

<comment><USER13> Unless you have a distinctive name, and the internet gets a lot better at remembering over the long term, there's still nothing to worry about.

Try finding anything from 10 years ago or for anyone named Smith, Jones, Taylor, or Patel. I'll bet that doesn't improve in the next ten years either.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Papercups Support for React Native/Expo - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/papercups-io/chat-widget-native <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everybody!

Last week we launched on HN ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24133719](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24133719)) and got a lot of great feedback from the community :) (here's our main repo: [https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups](https://github.com/papercups- io/papercups))

One thing that stood out was the request for React Native/Expo support, so we decided to hack together a working version of our chat component in RN so that people could start playing around with it!

Here's the repo: [https://github.com/papercups-io/chat-widget- native](https://github.com/papercups-io/chat-widget-native)

And here's a demo: [https://snack.expo.io/@reichertjalex/papercups](https://snack.expo.io/@reichertjalex/papercups)

(I'm kind of a React Native noob, so any feedback or contributors would be great :P)

<comment><USER2> It's really impressive that you listened to the community and turned it around so quick. Great job, I can't wait to use it on my next project!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wowow love the fast turnaround. Remember the comments about this just last week. Great job team!

<comment><USER4> Agreed! Exciting to see this project progress

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks guys!</comment></comment></comment>


Theft: A History of Music - <AUTHOR> https://law.duke.edu/musiccomic/ <comment><USER2> This was a very enjoyable and creative read.

I'm not criticizing this in any way, but it would have been even better had it covered the history of music beyond that of the western hemisphere. Other cultures have had enough written history and written music [0] for what could be some fascinating stories on music and distribution/remixing.

0: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#In_various_co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#In_various_countries)

<comment><USER3> My current favorite music is the music of the western Sahara desert (mostly but not all Tuareg). Northern Mali and Niger have the hottest music scene in the world today, imho. And it's very much a function of cross-cultural remixing.

Tuareg culture is ancient, pre-Islamic, and it has a long and beautiful tradition of music and poetry, which falls along gender lines. Traditionally, women played most music, while men wrote poetry in the lovely Tamasheq language. But when guitars, radios, and recordings arrived in the 1960s/1970s, the instrument had no role in the traditions, and they could make something new. The poetry fused with the rhythms, while the new wave of guitarists dug into Dire Straits and Santana along with their own traditions. The results are astounding - deep, soulful, melodic, improvisational.

Check out Tinariwen and Bombino for the hottest bands in the scene (again imho). If you dig them, keep digging, there's a lot more where that came from. And due to civil war and other problems at home, a lot of the musicians tour relentlessly in the West. I see a half-dozen Tuareg concerts a year!

<comment><USER4> Niger has unbelievably great music. Recently picked up a copy of " Etran De L'Aïr - No. 1" (2014) and it's fantastic. "Azna De L'Ader" (late 70's) is a fantastic find as well - super rhythmic acid rock bursting with energy and passion and completely original. These are just a couple artists from that region I'm into lately and this stuff is as fresh to me as when I discovered punk rock in the early 1990's.

Quite a bit different from the things you're suggesting showing that there's a huge range of sound coming from that region and there has been for a long time, however not documented in the West.

Sahel Sounds is an imprint that has been putting out a ton of great stuff for a few years now.

<comment><USER3> Sahel Sounds is a fantastic label. One of my favorite albums recently has been their "Music from Saharan Cellphones", basically a sampler of recordings floating around from mostly-unknown bands. One thing that struck me was how much drum machine there was on that album, relative to the more rock-oriented Tuareg desert blues bands, which are driven by acoustic percussion, whether djembe or calabash or a western drum kit. It's like some of the sounds of Euro dance music are getting in to the new stuff, much like how classic rock influenced the older generation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This reminds me of Pete Frame's Rock and Roll Family Trees.

[https://familyofrock.net/](https://familyofrock.net/)

Different idea, but a cousin nonetheless.

<comment><USER6> Forgot I have a copy of that, need to go dig it up; found lots of new music to listen to thanks to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> One of the co-authors, James Boyle, has a freely available book about the public domain.

[http://thepublicdomain.org/thepublicdomain1.pdf](http://thepublicdomain.org/thepublicdomain1.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER8> I read this book a while ago about the history of Jamaican Dancehall music. I highly recommend it. It goes into a ton of history both about music and politics in Jamaica from the 50's to present day and is an amazing read if such things interest you.

[https://www.amazon.ca/Dancehall-Rise-Jamaican- Culture/dp/095...](https://www.amazon.ca/Dancehall-Rise-Jamaican- Culture/dp/0957260083#productDescription_secondary_view_div_1534966054434)

Jamaican music in general is the perfect example of music theft giving rise to a whole new style of music. Ska music was created by Jamaican musicians trying to imitate swing and jazz music from America. From there it developed into rocksteady and reggae. At the time Jamaica had no copyright laws so songs were freely sampled and remixed back even back then. Most modern dancehall music still has it's roots in old baselines and melodies written back then. Because of the poverty in Jamaica, a lot of songs were remade and updated over and over again with different singers or musicians.

Hip hop was influenced by Jamaican dancehall brought over by people immigrating to new York and other cities from Jamaica. In the 80's dancehall tunes started sampling from hip hop tracks and a bunch of bands like Sublime took reggae songs and redid them. Every single one of Sublimes songs is a reimagining of either some some reggae, punk rock or old rock song. The downside to this is a lot of talented artists ended up dying broke despite having a bunch of hit songs. Producers who could afford equipment ended up owning the rights to a lot of the music and the artists tended not to be paid properly. Some of them eventually managed to get royalties if they became famous enough that big record companies took interest but for the most part they all lost money they should have been paid.

Now today there's dancehall and reggae festivals all over the world. Some of the biggest ones happen in Europe and Asia. Even Japan has a reggaeband dancehall subculture.

Reggae in general is a pretty cool, I don't want to say genre because there's so many different genres within reggae music, branch of music I guess. So much of it was made in so many different styles, sometimes dozens of different versions of the same song were produced. There's really a ton of music to discover.

</comment><comment><USER9> Reminded me of the Logicomix: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logicomix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logicomix)

<comment><USER10> Logicomix is one of the best graphic novels I have read recently. Excellent use of the medium, and very well researched.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is reminding me of "The Lick":

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lick_(music)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lick_\(music\))

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krDxhnaKD7Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krDxhnaKD7Q)

<comment><USER12> and that, in turn, reminds me of The Most Important 6 Second Drum Loop

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac)

and Raiding the 20th Century

[http://www.djfood.org/raiding-the-20th-century- is-10-years-o...](http://www.djfood.org/raiding-the-20th-century-is-10-years- old)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is exciting. I'd love to see the topic addressed in the same way for food, as well as music!

<comment><USER13> In the past it was called 'fusion'. Today it's called 'cultural appropriation'

[https://twitter.com/hashtag/jerkgate](https://twitter.com/hashtag/jerkgate)

<comment><USER3> Cultural appropriation is a complicated subject. It's grossly oversimplified by both sides.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A great book on the recent history of music piracy and the advent of the MP3 is How Music Got Free:

[https://www.amazon.com/How-Music-Got-Free- Obsession/dp/01431...](https://www.amazon.com/How-Music-Got-Free- Obsession/dp/0143109340)</comment>


Ask HN: Breaking into low-level programming work with o a CS degree? - <AUTHOR> *Title should say "...without a CS degree"
When I attended college, I was undecided for a year and a half. Then I majored in Design and my career took a less artsy path as I was more drawn to making websites. I took my own "personal bootcamp"- read books and tutorials on web programming.
I now have several years of experience as a web developer, but I fear that I would pigeonhole myself in websites and mobile apps (not really interested in that) if I never have an engineering-based background. Especially because there are several fields in low-level programming I'd like to go into that emphasize math and engineering.
My first hunch was to read books on low level programing and brush up CS theory and then apply to entry level or internships (if possible) as a "self made student"- an analogue to a college student taking undergraduate classes.
But I fear that my made up credentials might not matter. This doesn't fare well for people that change their minds about their career.
As another caveat, I'm unemployed. I have all the time in the world but living like a broke college student because I've used up my severance and emergency savings. So I'm broke as a college student, but without the internship opportunities of a college student. Worst of both worlds.
I don't know if I'm asking for the impossible but I want to get at least a grip of where I should even begin looking for a trial of low-level programming work. Any ideas of where to start?
I want to make it clear I am not looking for work at Google or Facebook. AMD, ARM and NVIDIA are more my speed. Since I can't get an internship at a place like this then something as "internship-like" as possible. Something that gives you a chance to try something you haven't done before committing to a full time job. <comment><USER2> I've had a 30-year career as a sysadmin and developer, and I don't have a CS degree (or even a highschool diploma). Most of the people I've worked with at Fortune 500 companies don't have CS degrees. If you think you know enough to do a job, apply for it and be honest. Don't lie about your credentials. If you have no related job experience, you can build an online portfolio by contributing to open source projects, or highlighting your own solo endeavors. Get a GitHub presence, start a tech blog, make a portfolio site to showcase what you can do.

The quick and easy way to get a job is to go to an immersive code school crash-course. I have a lot of misgivings about the quality of candidates they tend to produce, but I've seen enough good people come out of them that I don't dismiss them. I've hired plenty of people with no other CS background and no related job experience. They're expensive, but the payoff is huge if it gets you a job. Some of them are free until you start working. App Academy specifically operates this way, and produces strong candidates (they have a competitive application/vetting process).

<comment><AUTHOR> I have a Github but it's mostly web dev projects. In your career, what projects have you seen that would impress semiconductor companies?

And as far as immersive code schools go, I haven't seen any bootcamps that focus on low-level programming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > _AMD, ARM and NVIDIA are more my speed._

An important question to ask yourself is: what do you envision yourself doing at companies like these?

> _Since I can 't get an internship at a place like this then something as > "internship-like" as possible._

AFAIK, there isn't any such thing. Unlike web jobs, where demand is (for the moment) so high that even less experienced people have at least some chance of being considered, systems programming jobs more or less require you to know your stuff up-front because most of the abstractions that web or app programmers take for granted simply don't exist at the systems programming level.

</comment><comment><USER4> Build a side project. You're more likely to get hired if you have a portfolio of work to showcase, rather than a CS degree.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you recommend I look at engineering students' portfolios online for ideas? If I assume that is what helps them get co-ops at Intel and whatnot.</comment></comment>


Remote Employees Shouldn't Be Paid Less Based on Geography - <AUTHOR> https://www.helpscout.com/blog/remote-employee-compensation/ <comment><USER2> Hot topic nowadays. I have also given it a lot of thought but couldn't come to any conclusion.

It's true, living in SF/NYC and India, you will have a significant difference in monthly expenditures. But does it make sense to pay differently to persons who bring the same value to the company just because they are living in different locations?

IMO if you are a fully remote company, it shouldn't make any difference. People can choose to work from wherever they are and should get paid equally. If you have an office and hire a remote worker, it would make sense if you are paying lower to remote workers working from countries with lower wages.

<comment><USER3> A clear example is GitLab: they proclaim themselves full remote, but they pay salaries based on location.

Why an Engineer in SF can earn $200K / year, while you'll earn less than half of you live in Buenos Aires?

What about performance? Is the SF Engineer better than the BA one?

Having this huge paygaps based on location is bogus

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I had GitLab on my mind when I wrote my comment. I do think it's unfair for a fully remote company but they have their reasons. Its unfortunate developers with the same skill set can have a massive gap in salary because they live in different locations even though they bring same value to the company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd love to agree, but speaking globally - if they had physical offices in India and in San Fran, they'd be paid based on the market value for the location.

So the same probably goes for remote work.</comment>


Dear first world dev, I am going to live your nightmare - <AUTHOR> http://channikhabra.github.io/2014/02/26/i-have-decided-to-do-a-job-where-they-will-exploit-shit-out-of-me/ <comment><USER6> I was in your shoes 10 years ago. Even worse, I was in Ludhiana (Punjab) where I couldn't even find another web developer.

Getting out of such nightmare in India is a lot easier India than developed countries. You just need to make more money than salary of your job to get out it; which is about $100 at this point for you. In Silicon Valley and NYC, developers need to make $5,000 to pay bills. $500 is considered a decent salary for a first job in India; here are few ways to make $500 / month.

1) Freelancing: You can find better gigs on job boards like [http://jobs.wordpress.net](http://jobs.wordpress.net) and [https://groups.drupal.org/jobs](https://groups.drupal.org/jobs)

I run a startup ([http://www.ranksignals.com](http://www.ranksignals.com)), we could hire you for a freelance job if you are interested. My contact info is on my profile.

2) Blogging: Start a blog and promote it, you need about 5,000+ page views per day to make $500 a month.

3) Sell small plugins & themes on ThemeForest and CodeCanyon. You can make a lot more than $500, there are developers grossing over $100,000 per month.

If you want to get a full time job, don't work at a body shop. Work at a product or ecommerce startup, they offer higher pay and better experience. Companies like FlipKart are offering 10 lacs/year salary to new developers.

<comment><USER7> You definitely don't need $5000/mo. to pay bills in NYC, except maybe if you're trying to raise a family on your salary alone in a fancy neighborhood. I live very well on $2000/mo., and could easily cut that without excessive sacrifice by moving to a less happening neighborhood with a bit longer commute than my current 35 minutes (say: parts of Jersey City; Sunset Park or Ditmas Park, Brooklyn; Jackson Heights, Queens; Inwood, Manhattan; Riverdale, Bronx; Stapleton, Staten Island) and cooking more of my own food.

<comment><USER6> If your salary is $5,000; you get about $3,000 to $3,500 in pocket after taxes, health insurance, social security and other deductions.

I live quite far from NYC in White Plains, rent for 1 bedroom apartment here is $2400.

PS. I am sure there are people surviving for $500 a month in NYC, but that is not the lifestyle most developers desire when they have job offers for $80,000 to $120,000. In fact, most developers I've met say they want to make $10,000 per month to quit their job.

<comment><USER8> No doubt, I'm sure the IRS would love to know how he lives in NYC on $2k gross...

<comment><USER9> $2k/month is $24,000/year, at which income the IRS does not take nearly as much. According to the IRS calculator, he would be paying $1,628 in income tax. Add in payroll tax and that's $3308 total. So his after-tax income is not far off from $2k at $1724/month.

Assuming he has roommates, his rent and other fixed costs will be less than $1k, so he will be ok, if rather Bohemian.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wrong. Wrong not as in you are lying, but wrong as in - it does not have to be the case. I would strongly advise the OP not to join...

* Less pay (< $100 month) - totally off, recently I had an offer from a startup in Chandigarh for a very competitive salary - close to $2000 a month (pm me if you want the recruiter's email id).

* PHP projects - There a lot of vacancies for python, ruby, nodejs and angularjs jobs, either you need experience or you should have decent projects in your github repo.

* 48 hours - might be possible, but does not have to be the case

* Joining for a team - Joining a sweatshop for working with a team from whom you can learn is __Stupid__ - Chances of finding someone with proper skills in a sweatshop is close to zero.

* Bond with 2 months pay - Firstly it is illegal, but, yes I do know that sweatshops do have this practice. Avoid it at all costs. Or you can simply not pay them, as there is no way they can enforce the bond (legally). But this is a huge red flag. A proper company does not ask for that - period.

* 0 friends - where do you live? There are PG accommodations available brimming with social life (with individual accommodation - it is not always a shared thing). I currently live in one - and it is awesome.

* Change your life in 9 months - by working in a sweatshop? Not going to happen, you will instead be stuck in a pathetic project which ruins your career prospects further.

* Move to Delhi/NCR region - it is close to CH, and not as far as B'lore/Chennai/Hyderabad, and you have globally respected brands here.

<comment><USER11> It's nice to hear that not all devs in Chandigarh are stuck in a bad situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Bro, send me an email. I might be able to help you out, provided you stop flaking.

If you are able to get shit done, I might be able to exploit you in a more pleasant and productive manner than some odesk bodyshop for similar wages - <USER2> bond and no hard feelings when you quit for something better in 2 months.

Do you have a github or other code portfolio? (If not, build one.)

And get the heck out of Chandigarh. Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, pick one. There are Hackathons here in Pune and companies who will pay you well over 6000rs/month provided you actually get shit done.

<comment><USER13> > And get the heck out of Chandigarh.

So sad! I was rooting for OP for being a techie in Chandi. I was born in Chandigarh and although I emigrated within a few years of being born, I'll always consider that city a home of mine. I'd really like to do something to support its fledgling tech scene. I've committed myself to the idea of moving to Chandigarh to bootstrap my startup when I decide to go at it alone.

I would love for OP to stay in Chandigarh, but I honestly can't say that's a sensible move at this point in time.

<comment><USER14> I was thinking of moving back to Punjab to work on my startup for a bit - <USER3> Chandigarh at the top of my list of places to set up. Is the tech scene really that bad out there or has the OP just been unlucky?

<comment><USER15> Hi, I can confirm that, I had a similar experience. 7k training and 15k when hired and there were few who were not even paid any stipend and was under training for more then 6 months.

But, there is always a "but". I have met a few good developers too with whom I enjoyed my time working before leaving the job.

<comment><USER14> Hi. Hmm - good to know, thanks for the insider view.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Things are very bad in my city. There is no any kind of active community of > computer enthusiasts; be it some Linux Users Group or something similar.

Start one! Seriously- no jive. _Be that change that you want_. It may be that your affinity is not to be a developer--- you may actually be an organizer of people! Try it! You can do it for free! Make announcements! Start by meeting once every two weeks in the evening and teach people everything you know! You will make connections! You will be tapped to work with others. You will grow along with those around you. The people you help will see your strengths and send better opportunities your way. Trust me, you will see.

Seriously, start it up. It is within you to do it and it is free and fun! Find a library or a park or someone's living room or a restaurant. Even if it's just one computer, gather a flock.

</comment><comment><USER17> Charanjit, I'm from Chandigarh too. I can completely understand what you are feeling since I'm completely aware of the situation. Luckily I was doing quite well myself while I graduated (last year) and didn't need to work for any such company.

I'm working in a startup now where our major focus is on doing quality work using modern tech. We deal with clients directly and not through websites like oDesk. Great to see that you have worked with backbone etc. Would you like to catchup some time for tech discussion? I have few friends who do that regurlay at weekends. Mail me at firstname.lastname@example.com :)

</comment><comment><USER18> You are looking for discipline in the wrong place.

I thought I could find it in the military, I was wrong.

I thought leaving the military and subjecting myself to the cold reality of the free market would force me to develop it. I was wrong.

I thought starting a company would make me focus. I was wrong.

Finally, with no other options left, I entered corporate America. Having a large, nasty ongoing project, clear motivation to keep working on it, and the latitude to implement my own approach was all I needed to start making real progress on my own inner quest for productivity.

In retrospect, it was not the last thing that I did that finally "did the trick." It was the combination of everything I'd done. There weren't any magic tricks, no way to skip the years of paying dues. There's no way to force it, even if you throw yourself into the ultimate sink-or-swim environment, if you aren't ready for that particular experience, you'll either sink, or you'll swim, but find that swimming doesn't mean what you think it means.

Your current course of action will not have the intended result. What will happen is that you'll get burned out. Then you'll have nothing to show for it but the experience. You'll take that experience to your next big push and build on it. And so on and so forth.

At some point, all of that accumulated experience will drive out some small success. Might take three years, probably will be closer to 8-10. Then the game will change, you'll have mastered productivity and now you're playing a management game rather than a survival one.

You're lucky in that you're driven to make this transition, most career techs aren't, they stay at the level of survival their entire lives.

<comment><USER19> I'm glad you have the voice of experience to put behind my thoughts. When I read the story the motivation made sense, but my fear for the author is that working in such a body shop will destroy his love of programming which is a pretty disastrous thing to happen to one's career path in today's world.

<comment><USER18> If it does, then he really doesn't have a love of programming. Which isn't the end of the world.

I wouldn't be too worried about losing career steam. There are plenty of things for a person who can code but doesn't have a passion for it to do. In fact, there are probably many more roles a person like this can take than someone who just wants to code all the time. And they can be a lot more lucrative.

Burnout is probably going to be a good thing. Some people need to be forced to consider alternative career paths and skills to develop. Burnout will definitely do that. The new direction will ultimately prove to be valuable later on, but you won't realize it in the moment.

<comment><USER20> What would you recommend? Note that the guy obviously is introvert (even _I_ can usual ...cough... often find people to hang out with in new places), so administrating people/projects might be out.

<comment><USER18> Impossible to make a recommendation without knowing him. Most talented people find a good way through their twenties and he definitely presents as talented.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm not sure why OP thinks this is going to be a good idea. The kind of projects he'll get to work on will almost always be the usual Odesk "clone XYZ in $X" tripe. Also, the sort of company he's talking about is unlikely to have senior developers experienced enough to mentor him (from what I know about these companies.) Working on an open source project instead would be much more constructive and would get him engaged with experienced developers who could teach him a thing or two. If he's still a student (and it looks like he is) GSoC might be a great way to get started with this.

Also, I would avoid Odesk like the plague. Build up a portfolio (open source works as well) and connect with people on HN.

<comment><USER22> I did some projects from both oDesk and HN. They were quite similar. oDesk projects I've chosen were more interesting but quite short and HN jobs were longer but not so great as you would expect from HN.

<comment><USER23> What's HN in this context?

<comment><USER22> Hacker news monthly job topics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Thanks for the insight into the world of ODesk 'Agencies', you've confirmed for me what my hunch was all along.

Recently I put a Django Ecommerce site job there for $10k USD and you won't believe how many phone calls/emails/linkedin requests I received from 'Agencies' primarily in India/Pakistan but some from Eastern Europe as well promising me the world for my $10k.

When you have to sift through all of this the cookie cutter scripts everything becomes apparent and you realise it's a thin veil of bullshit, the product managers (middlemen) that call you up in reality have a team of very lowly paid junior devs who are incapable of doing the project. (Evidenced by me asking some moderately difficult technical/architectural questions) And very few have a track record of getting shit done and delivering. I would never hire an 'dev agency' via Odesk after this experience, it's too hard to sort the good from the bad as an employer in a 1st world country.

I ended up interviewing freelancers only and liked what I saw/heard - <USER4> thought the freelancers on ODesk were of quite a high standard actually. Ended up hiring a fairly senior engineer for the project. If he pulls through I will offer him ongoing work for $2-$3k a month.

</comment><comment><USER25> _I get bored like after 20 minutes of playing with anything. I've tried as many techniques as I could in 2 years to discipline myself._

You learn discipline by sticking with something despite wanting to jump to something else.

</comment><comment><USER26> > I can do it myself sitting at home, I've done a couple projects, but it was > not fun.

No you can't, obviously. You just said it. For one, you don't enjoy it.

What you need to learn is that straight programming isn't a valuable skill by itself. You already know this because you wrote an article about it. You need to be able to tie your programming skills with other skills such as selling yourself as the person to get the job done. Once you get the job, you need to be able to ship it.

There are programming skills that are valuable in isolation. If you are a world expert on a certain domain which lacks talent, then that's valuable. But that's not really isolation, that's tying your programming skills with a certain specialty.

Take a look at the model you are working under. There is a whole spectrum of jobs from good to crap. On Odesk, there are a sprinkling of good and a lot of crap. I imagine the company employing you is saying yes to every job that comes their way. They probably don't get good jobs, so it's all crap. They get crap jobs which pay crap and of course you are going to get a small slice of a crap pie.

Why take a job just because it's there? Okay, you laid out a bunch of reasons but you still hate it. I would probably hate working on crap jobs also. People worked for Steve Jobs because the guy was... well... Steve Jobs. Why are you working for people who are trying to compete on the worst model in web development, the race to the bottom in pricing?

If you know good developers, then maybe you could start your own development shop and get those developers to work for you. If you hate the work but you can get jobs, then maybe do the selling and have the other developers do the work.

Or maybe you could come up with your own projects and monetize them.

You just have to hustle, just like everyone else does. You can't just write code and expect the world to come to you. Get out there and make things happen.

Edit: In other words, quit whining. ;)

Edit: Edit: I could write a book on this subject. The above is just an attempt at an off the cuff capture. There are a ton of threads on HN which are hugely valuable on bringing the bacon as a developer. Just look around, it's more productive than ranting about your situation.

Clearly the person you are working for is trying to take a "this is how everything is done here" approach to running a dev shop and hiring developers. It's the same in the Philippines. Everyone works 10 hour days, 6 days a week and within a certain band of salary. I suppose the U.S. is like that to some degree. We have the 9 to 5 and 40 hour weeks.

Disruption in your case would be pretty easy. If the company has decent employees, then you could scoop them all up.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for advice. I'll try to quit whining once I get a hold of myself. And I love programming. The problem is I don't or can't stick with one thing. I have many projects hanging. I thought trying to do a regular job will help and gave interviews in several local companies. Since I have not graduated yet, despite my portfolio most of them offered me to do work for 3 to 6 months for free and then a similar package. One of them even offered me to do paid training with them before they "think" about hiring me. The company I am joining now were the most generous of all I met. Thing I wanted to whine about was the trend of exploitation that's going on in the city, but I think it turned out to look like me whining about the job. I am actually kind of excited as I will have to learn many things which I would not have touched otherwise. And yes I have plans for my own development shop. I will do it once I have enough confidence.

<comment><USER27> It was very interesting reading your story.

I am trying to get a freelance webdesign/developer career going, but I am quickly learning that doing freelance projects is much more about getting clients, managing clients, and making sure they are happy than it is about programming, design or development skills.

Anyways, I hope you new job goes well and good luck!

<comment><USER28> This can be restated for almost every business there is. It's why sales guys are paid so well.

<comment><USER29> My thoughts as well. 'Division of labor' \- not everyone can be a great salesman and a great programmer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I am from India. And worked for over a year on oDesk. I think it's painting the whole industry with a very wide brush. Personally know people in Delhi/Mumbai making very comfortable salary.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm in the same situation as OP, only the location is different (East Europe). I've been at it for 5 months already but I'm on verge of quitting every week since I started. The only thing that stops me from doing it is fear of not being able to make similar amount of money monthly to able to pay bills and rent. I've been trying to work on something on the side but the job leaves me exhausted and the only thing I can do in the evenings and weekends is sleep.

I wouldn't recommend it to anyone - we use terrible tech(php and ftp), I haven't learned anything new in months, only taught my (senior) coworkers some tips to work even faster. I'd write more about it but my break is over.

<comment><USER23> Why do you work so hard? Slack off a bit more, and have more energy left over for your projects that will make you grow.

What do you have to lose?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> He sounds like he wants to be a self-sacrificing martyr hero for coding. What's the point of all this? Are we supposed to hail him as a "one true coder" for willing to do this? Is this a competition about who can take the most pain? It's so pointless.

<comment><USER15> you have watched too many episodes. he just need some help and some direction in the right path.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> _I will be working 48 hours a week (excluding break; mon-sat 10 am to 7 pm) for less than $100 per month._

Move.

<comment><USER34> I just want to clarify that this is nowhere close to the average salary a dev earns in India (a decent developer can make anywhere between $400/mo to $3000/mo). I'm not sure what company he's working for but it sounds like a real sweatshop. You can find better gigs even in Chandigarh (it's not known for IT that much..), but for that - you probably need to be better at what you do, or maybe you need to learn how to sell yourself better.

<comment><USER10> Exactly, and in India $2000 a month goes a long way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Here's the perspective from a first world client.

We contracted with Delhi dev shop and were paying about $8000 Australian dollars per month for the equivalent of 3 developers (mix of backend devs full time, and on call front end dev, designer, tester)

I think our junior dev was charged out at $1300 per month so if using standard agency markup of 100% her salary would've been around $650 per month (~26000 rupees per month).

The manager was also always complaining that new recruits kept increasing their demands each year.

So it's strange that there's such a difference in salaries between 2 cities so close by. If it was true then I'd expect programmers to move to Delhi.

</comment><comment><USER36> If you think you are good at coding, why not get into any of the top IT (by employees) companies. I know they are recruiting the lowest of the bottom barrel. Why not join them and make a decent pay and a career while meeting some experienced people who actually know stuff.

I think it's impossible for anyone even just barely decent in programming to get a job in India. I have seen people get into Motorola while searching for jobs like nomads. They were not from premier or even well known institutes. What you are subjecting yourself to is incomprehensible based on your objectives.

</comment><comment><USER37> I think overseas development will only be competitive when they start producing products for themselves. The main reason off-shoring fails is because of culture and communication differences.

(I'm not a world traveler, so disregard the next remarks if you have better insight than me.)

I noticed while working with chinese developers they were terrified to tell me they were having a problem with a task I assigned. They also had no problems passing extremely poorly designed code in order to meet a deadline. It didn't even have to work, the understanding was, you just have to turn something in before the deadline. I had a developer that couldn't get writes to the database working consistently. So he wrote them to a file on disk... I guess that was good enough.

Working with Indian developers is a much more mixed experience. Aside from them interrupting you constantly, which I cannot stand, some of their attitudes were downright laughable. "I have 5 years experience, which is about 10 American years experience" one guy told me as he explained that it would be better to write their own messaging layer instead of my selection of ActiveMQ.

Anyway, if Twitter/Google/whatever was based in India or China, I imagine the leaders would know how to use their labor effectively to produce competitive companies. I don't see American companies ever using overseas labor effectively. The cultures are just inherently incompatible for working on a subjective task like software development.

</comment><comment><USER38> It's hard to tell from just a single blog post, but one thing that strikes me is how focused you are on computers and computer work. It sounds to me like you don't do anything else. Have you considered getting a hobby? Perhaps music, dance, photography, sports, or something else that gets you out of the house and meeting people besides computer stuff? It sounds to me like you're burning yourself out by focusing so acutely on only computer stuff.

</comment><comment><USER39> Now that is plain exploitation indeed. I live nearby and am about to graduate. I am going to a good company but they have 2 year bond.

I've been working from home for 3-4 years part time and I think my little bits of experience can help you:

1\. When It comes to discipline, it is very hard! What I have been doing is measuring everything. I got Rescue Time subscription and now, every minute on the computer is measured! If I don't have a productivity score of 60+ by the end of the day, I know that things need to change. After that, it takes a lot of self control.

2\. For networking, online relations can help a lot. Remote teams are great to work with. I have a small group of 3-4 people, all at different places but they help in making sure that I don't get bored and am accountable for what I do!

3\. All you need to network is one good friend who is also a networker. I went to a small web development firm for internship and now I'm friends with the COO there. He's helped me with contacts. Some of my relatives are also in IT industry, so there's some help.

9 months is quite a long time and I'm sure some part in this decision is social pressure (I earn good enough while doing studies as well, but everyone around pushes me to get "experience" in big firms!)

</comment><comment> super-serial I feel exactly the same as you about working from home... except I live in the US. About 7 years ago I quit my .NET programming job. I got that job right after I graduated college. For the 3 years I was there I did great work. I kept getting bonuses and raises for shipping products. And I saved up some money, cashed in my 401k, and quit.

Since then I've never been able to be productive. I tried contract work here and there but I've never had the self-discipline. Actually I've made less money in the last 7 years combined from programming than 1 month at my real job. Think about that... I haven't made $5K from programming over these last 7 years.

Of course I needed money so I started working part-time jobs. I currently work 24 hours a week for near minimum-wage, often having to shovel snow in sub-zero temperatures. I thought the worse I suffer the more I'll get motivated to do work at home. That has not happened. I have nothing to show for these last 7 years except half-completed projects and a free productivity extension that 5,000 people use - but obviously does not work for me.

So maybe getting a job is the right thing for you. If you can't work from home, you can't work from home. You'll have to accept the best terms you can find, and if that's $100/mon then that may be your only option.

As for me... I would rather die than get a programming job. I'm as defiant as ever. I love programming, but I only love programming my own ideas. Even the thought of programming for someone else makes me feel physically ill (like throwing up). So either I make it as an Indie developer or I die as a janitor. Your post made me realize I should feel lucky that I have the option to be a janitor for $10/hr. You don't even have that option.

<comment><USER40> Why did you cashed in your 401k

<comment> super-serial Retirement was 40 years away, and I was confident that I'd start making some serious money with one of my ideas. Actually I'm still optimistic about that.

In startup terms I thought it would give me more runway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I think it goes both ways. Our company Agile Media Lab is in Chandigarh and we are having a lot of difficulty to find highly qualified resources. We normally do around 100 interviews for each hire and we still have several positions open we still can't fill. We do pay at the top of the market.

Currently we are trying to bring in talent from Delhi and Bangalore.

You can email me at firstname.lastname@example.com if you are interested.

</comment><comment><USER42> Just don't give up man - keep pushing to expand your comfort level.

Discipline is something that can be learned, that's why they teach it so much in the military.

Difference here is you have to force yourself through the pain once you want it bad enough. It will be worth it.

</comment><comment><USER43> Many Indians get exposed to computers at a later age, often not good at computer and programming concepts, their exposure is low.

Think of this initial job as internship, but after a year when they know their stuff and can clear technical interviews and with better communications skills the pay package increases significantly.

when people switch to more reputed companies in earlier years the hikes they get is between 50-100% . for first 5-7 years the hike is abut 30% by the time these people will settle in large indian or multinational companies.

</comment><comment><USER44> I totally empathize with his positions. I've worked in a couple of niche markets for years and felt stifled by geographic isolation as well as my lack of experience working like most people do – in a team, with a boss or manager guiding your actions. I too have suffered from a lack of focus and self- confidence. I've thought of getting various sorts of jobs using my skills, but on the other hand I know that I truly value the freedom of working for myself and I would miss it.

</comment><comment><USER45> Send me an email, I have a job for you in your city for much better salary in much better terms ( no bonds) and no body shop.

<comment><USER23> You should include your email address in your profile, if you want OP to contact you.

<comment><USER45> Done

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> We run two startup coworking spaces in Delhi, so not too far away. I don't know how tied you are to Chandigarh, but I can introduce you to a few startups that are looking for devs. Even if you can't move, shoot me an email, we regularly get requests for contract/remote work.

</comment><comment><USER47> I think it's a pessimistic approach to discipline. You could just learn to meditate [0].

[0] : [http://www.siyli.org/take-the-course/siy- curriculum/](http://www.siyli.org/take-the-course/siy-curriculum/) (a free course on meditation)

<comment><USER48> How would that help?

<comment><USER47> Better _understanding of self_ (emotional/motivational factors). Loneliness would turn into _solitudeness_. Better _attention span_.

<comment><USER17> Please stop with the trolling if you can't actually understand the problem. Meditation doesn't solve every problem in life.

<comment><USER47> It doesn't, it's not a silver bullet but it can help a lot. And my answer was based on my experience (with some variables similar to OP such as working alone on multiple web projects (unfinished), INTP/introvert etc).

BTW, based on the fact that your account is ~few hours old, I think you might be the one trolling[1] (or meta-trolling, more accurately) here :-)

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(Internet)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_\(Internet\))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Oh FFS ! This really hit a nerve and I'm gonna rant. I absolutely hate Indian kids these days who bitch and moan about how tough it is to do awesome shit and get a decent enough pay for it, in a place like ...ehe ...Chandigarh ! Chirst !! Just grow the eff up !! Here are some facts that this guy might want to think about:

a. Today, India has way more internet penetration than even 10 years ago and it also cheap enough to afford a home connection. Yes, even in a place like Chandigarh !! </sarcasm>. Though the average so called 'broadband' access it still far from what might be available in developed nations, programmers these days can at least do a quick google _while_ they are working on something, instead of having to batch all of the querying do be done from a cybercafe. That is what we went through.

b. Having to work at a sweatshop, putting in the hours doing grunt work, earning peanuts and knowing that you could do better hasn't changed much from the way I remember it ...oh wait, hell yeah it has ! These days, you will at least have a computer to yourself. You will at least have comfortable chairs. You won't be working shifts and they at least will be paying you (I refuse to believe the $100 bit) as opposed to slaving it out, while it's being called 'training' (worse still, you have to pay them for the opportunity). That is what went through.

c. They don't have LUGs, Hackathons or any sort of local mailing lists ...oh geez, why the f __* not !??! I 'll tell you why ? 'cos people like this guy will bitch and moan about it all the time but will not take the initiative to just start one up themself. Indian programmers, (most of them, tbh) expect that things where they can just go to and learn just 'exist'. It's a small percentage of people who would think -- "here is this thing that I already know and I can share, let me do that with another person. It would be a very happy pleasant coincidence if the other person knows and can share something that I don't already know".

Come on man, start up a LUG, organize a hackathon, visit the computer lab in your local college and speak to that __girl __who appears to be frantically coding on a lab computer because her parents think getting a computer for her at home would be a waste of money ...and anyways, it 's not like she needs any more education !!

d. ....I could go on, but I just realized the source of these sort of bitch- and-moan posts, as I write this. The sense of entitlement that youngsters in India have these days.

You know what buddy, you can't address people who just happen to be in a better place than you as 'first world dev' just because you happen to live in India. Being 'First World' anything is about a state of mind where your own personal issues are greater than other peoples, with the irony that the issues come from a sense of entitlement. Take a long hard look at your life and think about why you ought to be entitled to the things that you think you ought to be.

rant done.

<comment><USER50> Heh, at first I was sympathetic to OP, but I find that I agree with you a lot. My problem isn't that OP isn't proactive enough to start a meetup himself, but that he readily admits that he "got bored after 20 minutes".

Honestly, if you get bored after 20 minutes, programming isn't for you. In this job, there are days when you churn out one feature after another, and days when you spend the whole time staring at the monitor wondering how to fix that bug. And guess what OP? That happens to _everyone_ , regardless of location or place of work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Godspeed, I can understand your desire for the presence of others of like mind in order to be in the right frame of mind to work.

Just be aware that you could do the same thing in the US (or anywhere else, really) and make exponentially more money.

<comment><USER23> He's not gonna get a visa for the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Meanwhile, somewhere in Western Europe, someone gets made redundant.

<comment><USER53> Not necessarily, some of the projects outsourced at third world rates only exist because the rates are so low. For example, I have a friend who toyed with the idea of making money in the app store - it costed him only about $100 to have a simple app done by an Indian developer, which was acceptable for him; I'm pretty sure having to spend 5-10x more for a western developer would be too much of a risk for him.

As for the cases where people in the west are actually made redundant - <USER5> west has ruthlessly exploited its colonies for a couple centuries and now, thanks to free trade, it is allowing for some balancing in the global economy, which means both poor countries getting richer and some people in rich countries being worse off. I'd say that in the grand scale of things it's justice, and long overdue.

<comment><USER52> I find myself quite conflicted as I agree with everything you say, but I am also one of the unfortunate people who's career is suffering due to rampant off-shoring.

<comment><USER53> I agree, irregardless of the big picture, that is always sad on an individual level.

BTW I think the way to at least partially combat outsourcing in rich countries is through agreeing to work for lower wages (which would still be higher than national average, I'm not advocating becoming working poor). Arguably, that's what's already happening, and that's one of the reasons why programmers don't earn nearly as much as some of the other professionals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> That's thoroughly depressing. What does $100 a month translate to in terms of cost of living?

<comment><USER6> Rent for a studio apartment in his city is around $200, it is $300 to $500 in bigger cities like Delhi and Mumbai.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I have a small AI group on skype with similar interests. Add my skype: Switch336

</comment><comment><USER56> who cares. maybe if '3rd world' devs actually produced better code and contributed to community (more than just joining IRC, asking for help, then leaving without saying thanks), they might be able to make a better name for themselves and in turn be able to bargain for better conditions.

</comment><comment><USER57> Is HN a blog plateform?

<comment><USER42> No but it is a community where sometimes we share our relevant experiences. It's sometimes a lesson to be learned, sometimes cathartic, and sometimes an opportunity to see our humanity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I am 100% sure, you are just exaggerating the salary figure.</comment>


Parallel ray tracing benchmark for functional programming languages - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/athas/raytracers <comment><USER2> These are the most interesting bits for me:

 _> Rust is the fastest CPU language. This is not terribly surprising, as it has a mature compiler, and its default behaviour of unboxing everything is exactly what you need for this program.

> What is not visible from the above table is that most of the implementations > were significantly slower in their original formulation. Only Futhark, MPL, > and Rust are essentially unchanged from their first straightforward > implementation. For the others, most of the performance comes down to > various low-level tweaks, in particular avoiding boxing and allocations. > This is not exactly unexpected, but I still find it sad that when it comes > to performance in functional languages, we must think about the compiler > more than we think about the language._

<comment><USER3> There is so much performance left on the table by strongly typed functional languages when it comes to optimization.

Unfortunately, it seems most functional languages are built on infrastructure that was intended for procedural languages (Rust->llvm, F#->.Net, Scala->JVM, etc.) . This means that by the time that infrastructure starts working on the code, it has already been stripped of its most valuable inferential assets: the resolved types, the statically determined immutability, etc..

Rust is the first language I've seen that is trying to do something about it. I think the idea is that MIR is an intermediate language that still retains type information, after lifetimes have been resolved. Using this, they can implement better analysis and preoptimize code before it hits LLVMs optimizers.

<comment><USER4> > _Unfortunately, it seems most functional languages are built on > infrastructure that was intended for procedural languages_

But what about Haskell and Scheme? They're the first two languages that come to mind when I think functional.

I think all those other languages are built on existing infrastructures like .Net or JVM because infrastructure is one of the biggest barriers for any language. I'd love to see a general purpose platform designed for functional languages, but I don't even know what that would look like.

<comment><USER5> Well, haskell has the problem of lazyness being the default execution model, which doesn't really help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is an interesting benchmark comparing parallel functional programming languages, including Rust, Parallel OCaml and MPL. MPL is "a parallelism- oriented fork of MLton for Standard ML" which is described as being "definitely the star" (see also [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~swestric/20/popl- disentangled.pdf](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~swestric/20/popl-disentangled.pdf)). This benchmark was inspired by Jon Harrop's ray tracer benchmark ([https://www.ffconsultancy.com/languages/ray_tracer/index.htm...](https://www.ffconsultancy.com/languages/ray_tracer/index.html)).

<comment><USER6> Having optimised the Multicore OCaml implementation, this benchmark benefits heavily from inlining and unboxing. MLton style aggressive inlining and unboxing is the way to go here. MPL builds on MLton and it works out great!

Multicore OCaml compiler doesn't yet use the new flambda2 optimisation passes. We witnessed good improvements with flambda2 on stock OCaml on the tight loops in this program; the compiler was doing all the right things. It seemed not worthwhile to continue with hand optimising the implementation leading to non- idiomatic FP code. We hope to get back to this once flambda2 Passes are integrated with Multicore OCaml compiler.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The CPU and the von Neumann architecture itself is procedural. High level code is mapped to assembly code, which is then mapped to binary machine code.

Given that, then higher level languages are merely another layer of abstraction. C is procedural, and while it can be functionally separated, it still maps down to assembly, and then to machine code.

Same goes for Lisp, or Haskell, or any other functional language. It still follows the chain down, and maps to assembly and machine code.

Given that, then what is the ability for a purely functional language, like Haskell, or whatnot, to utilize the full feature of today's multi-core CPUs?

For example, a common functional approach, is to use a map() function, and apply a specific function, against a set of data. Say, you have a list of 1000 strings, and you want to capitalize it all, and return the new list of all capitalized strings. Then, you'd have another function called upper() that will apply to each element in that list.

So, your function call might look something like:

      capped_list = map( upper, my_list )

And your return data, capped_list, will contain the list of all strings, capitalized. Simple enough.

So, the question is, do functional languages automatically have the ability to take this instruction, and spread the data over multiple cores, or multiple processors, in order to return the final answer, in a faster or more efficient process than a regular procedural language?

<comment><USER8> [https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/ParallelMap.html](https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/ParallelMap.html)

[https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Parallelize.html](https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Parallelize.html)

Yes. _waits for the Wolfram hate_

<comment><USER9> > Yes

I think you mean no. It's not automatic, you have to tell the language to use parallel constructs.

And as others have said, this is probably the right approach. At least if it's not taking runtime information into account.

What is very good about this approach (and Rayon does something similar for Rust), is that the code transformation between sequential and parallel constructs is so small. The closer one can come to writing idiomatic code then tweaking it slightly for high performance, the better.

Apologies if this answer isn't hate-y enough. I'll try harder next time.

<comment><USER8> If you wrap your entire program block in Parallelize, it becomes automatic. Let's not be too pedantic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Now, debug the same programs at runtime. :)</comment>


Epigrams in Programming - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html <comment><USER2> Liked this one. "If you have a procedure with ten parameters, you probably missed some"

<comment><USER2> Also added in stack overflow.. [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9369934/epigrams-in- progr...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9369934/epigrams-in-programming)</comment></comment>


PHP-Bypass-Disable-Functions - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/irsl/php-bypass-disable-functions <comment><USER2> So this should be possible to avoid via `open_basedir`. Or apparmor / selinux.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Interestingly, OpenBSD is unaffected because it does not have a procfs anymore.</comment>