Startup Company Form: LLC or S-Corp? Which is easier and which is better? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Ordinarily a startup should be a C corp. It's cheaper to be an LLC, but if you plan to succeed, you may as well do things right from the start.

With an LLC profits don't get taxed twice like in a regular corporation. So it makes sense to be an LLC if you expect to have substantial profits, but don't expect to grant options, sell shares, or get bought. Consulting firms and law partnerships are often LLCs. YC is an LLC.

<comment><USER3> The big reason why C corps are preferable is because S corporation shareholders can only be people -- not other businesses, like VC firms. (S corps also can't issue preferred stock.) An S corporation can't take venture capital without first reverting back to C corp status. But an S corporation can save a lot of money on taxes.

But although many of our businesses _want_ venture capital, most are unlikely to get it. In fact, I'd hazard a guess that more tech startups will have income than will have external corporate funders. (This usually happens when the founders need some money, so they put their original idea on hold and do some consulting for a while. Eventually they're doing exclusively consulting, because it pays well, or at least it pays off quickly.) By that point, you're probably unlikely to remember the tax consequences and switch to an S corp.

Why not start out as an S corp, and switch to a C corp iff you acquire VC or sell preferred stock?

<comment><USER2> The startups we've seeded are more likely to get funding than to consult on the side. When they do consult on the side they do it as individuals, not as the company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> VCs want to invest into a C-corp because it allows them to have a flexible share structure so if you're seeking VC money, C-corp will be a must. But, in the mean time, you CAN use S-corp since it is easy to set up and gives you some protections. S-corp can be easily converted into a C-corp (a single supplemental form!). LLC is not as easy to convert to a C-corp and paperwork is fairly complex and will cost you several K.

Thing to note about S-corps is that all founders _MUST_ be American citizens.

<comment><USER5> .. or resident aliens. <http://www.irs.gov/instructions/i2553/ch01.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Dharmesh Shah wrote about this recently: <http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/1303/Startup-101-Should-You-Form- An-Inc-or-LLC.aspx>

<comment><USER7> From the article: "My personal practice has been to create an LLC (they are simple, avoid double taxation and still support multiple classes of stock if needed). If and when the time comes to convert the LLC to a C-corp, the process is not that difficult. Whatever costs you would incur in the conversion process, I think are offset by the upside you get during the time that you can benefit from being an LLC. An LLC can be setup for a few hundred dollars and likely meets the needs of most early-stage entrepreneurs."

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> To me the answer is simple: If you are looking to be VC or angel funded yet are just starting out then you should save the money and start an LLC. If you don't plan on VC funding then stick w/ an S Corp.

In 1999 we had an LLC and we converted it to a C Corp just before we acquired funding in 2000. This time around I'm a partner in an S Corp and am self- funding it. If my current situation changes, as someone already mentioned, it will be easy to change over to a C Corp.

</comment><comment><USER9> What exactly is the reporting/paperwork required for a C-corp (which people mention as more overhead than LLC)?

<comment><USER10> I don't see it as a big deal but C corps require Board of Director meetings, Shareholder meetings, corporate minutes and corporate resolutions. From what I read, LLCs don't require these things but you may want to do them if your LLC involves more than a few people.

LLC taxes probably aren't much different than corporate taxes. Calculating profit is the hard part and you have to do that in both cases.

Creating an LLC is often just a little bit of paperwork, just like a corporation. It may vary, depending on your state. Since you only do it one time, anyway, the burden in terms of creation paperwork isn't usually significant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> if you take money from investors they will require you to be a C-Corp. If this path is in your plans, it is probably easiest to start off this way.

<comment><USER12> I went for a Delaware C-Corp. Costed me $300 to incorporate + 30 in annual fees, so far for the first year. This was a relatively large expense for me so let's hope it was worth it.

<comment><USER13> You should be able to get your annual fees down below $300 - it should only be about 1/2 that

<comment><USER12> edit: you are correct.

<comment><USER13> Maybe I'm wrong, but I read the page above differently from you. The $200 fee applies to LLCs, Limited Partnerships or General Partnerships.

You're a C-Class Corp right? Therefore you pay the corporate franchise tax. If you go to the link on the page entitled "Franchise Taxes Here": <http://corp.delaware.gov/frtaxcalc.shtml>

it tells you what it should be. Your fee will vary depending upon how many shares you have outstanding, but I'm guessing you have less than 3,000 therefore it will be $35.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> An LLC has less overhead, from what I understand, but maybe there are buyout/VC implications? What do most startups do these days?

<comment><USER14> We went for a California LLC after doing a few weeks of research. It is the easiest structure we could find with the least expense. We don't know what the future funding implications are for it though.

<comment><USER15> I heard that a LLC can be converted to a Corp when you get funded. I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not 100% sure about it.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Rich client platform recommendation - <AUTHOR> I'm out of touch with modern desktop tech and want some suggestions for a data navigator app I want to build.<p>Long ago I had looked into Eclipse RCP, Netbeans, Adobe AIR, and JavaFX. Today we might use Electron or maybe something Qt-like. I'm looking for cross-platform (web optional) with some UI elements or window management and some light graphics like icons that open to tables or such. I fast edit/test cycle is very important. Prefer static language envs but ok with js-like if framework/tooling adds a lot. <comment><USER2> Sounds like Electron might be the ticket for what you're describing. [https://electronjs.org/](https://electronjs.org/)

</comment><comment><USER3> In addition to Qt/QML, you might want to look at Xojo: [https://www.xojo.com/](https://www.xojo.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's quite interesting--didn't know about this. Just reading up about it now. It evolved from REALbasic circa '98 into a cross-platform environment. Not sure I'd go this route for this project but quite interesting.</comment></comment>


Accused of Harming Bees, Bayer Researches a Different Culprit - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/12/business/energy-environment/accused-of-harming-bees-bayer-researches-a-different-culprit.html?_r=0

<comment><USER2> This story is dead and buried, but, for what it's worth, EconTalk last week had a really fascinating interview with a honeybee economist (<\-- thing that exists!).

Turns out:

* Practically 100% of US honeybees are domesticated; wild honeybees were wiped out in the late 80s by mites.

* Honeybees aren't native to the US; I'm not sure if I heard this right, but it may be that none of the social bees are.

* Colony collapse is largely a phenomenon observed during overwintering. Some 15% of domesticated colonies fail over the winter. CCD seems to have upped this figure to 30%.

* If CCD is causing problems for professional beekeepers, those problems don't seem to be reflected in the economy. The price of queen bees (raised by specialized apiarists to help other beekeepers split colonies) hasn't changed. The price of pollination services --- mostly for the California almond crop, which is fed by beekeepers from around the country --- hasn't changed significantly either, with the possible exception of a small spike in pollination fees at the peak of almond pollination season.

It's hard to reconcile what the economist reported with the alarmism surrounding colony collapse.

<comment><USER3> I enjoyed "The Bee Keeper's Lament" \- this book covers the domestic US honey bee industry. Super interesting, especially the description of how hives are trucked all around based on crop pollination needs.

You are correct that honeybees are a non-native species in North America. Sounds like the EconTalk you mention covered the topics in the book as well. I'll give it a listen. Thanks for posting about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Paywall... please summarize.

<comment><USER5> Bayer manufactures a pesticide that many qualified people believe is very harmful to bees. Bayer has sunk a lot of money into trying to prove it is instead a parasite that is causing the oft-reported hive-deaths.

<comment><USER6> Bayer also manufactures anti-mite products, which has led some critics to point out that Bayer would profit mightily from mites being the cause of colony collapse.</comment></comment></comment>


Héctor García-Molina has passed away - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9ctor_Garc%C3%ADa-Molina <comment><USER2> Do you have a better source? The last edit on that Wikipedia page was made by an anonymous editor and just adds "Died 2019" without any citation. As someone who used to know him many years ago, I'd rather not see him declared dead without more definitive information.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I've also just learned from a Stanford CS professor friend of mine and haven't found other sources. But it's sadly true from what it looks like.

<comment><AUTHOR> A couple other DB professor friends of mine have also confirmed.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the information. He was a prof of mine a long time ago, and I found him to be inspiring. I'm sorry to hear of his untimely death.

<comment><USER3> You can now see an official mention at [https://inmemory.stanford.edu/](https://inmemory.stanford.edu/)

"Hector Garcia-Molina, the Leonard Bosack and Sandy K. Lerner Professor in Engineering, Emeritus, and professor emeritus of computer science and of electrical engineering, distinguished for his work in distributed computing systems, digital libraries and database systems, died Nov. 26."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone know of any events happening to celebrate his life?</comment>


Working with web developers in India: why, whom, and how - <AUTHOR> http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/biz/working-with-web-developers-in-india-why-whom-and-how

<comment><USER3> Disclaimer: I'm an Indian and I've worked on offshore developments years ago. I work in product development now and there's no way in hell I'm going back to outsourced projects but I'll admit to some bias.

Outsourcing works. Most reputable outsourcing companies are looking for long- term relationships and they are usually _very_ serious about feedback and customer satisfaction. However, like anything else, it takes work and research. You wouldn't hire a single developer without rigorous interviews and even so it would take a while before he/she was up to speed. How then can you expect there to be no overhead with the 5-10 outsourced developers?

I've personally worked on projects for Yahoo (US and UK) and Merck and my experience was that the biggest problems were always at the beginning - <USER2> they usually were communication problems.

What I'm saying is successful outsourced projects tend to work things out as the teams adjust to each other. In _no_ case will it work if you just throw some documents at each other - there needs to be face-to-face and key people need to know each other in any team. The payoff is, of course, the work then continues at a much lower cost.

Outsourcing may not be for everyone, but it does work well in a lot of cases. Just my two cents.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've heard nothing but negative experiences from those who outsourced to India, or anywhere remote for that matter. Could it be that the author is so gun-ho about it because he has a consulting outfit in New Delhi?

<comment><USER5> I think it mostly boils down to bad hiring decisions. People -- mostly nonprogramming managers -- said "hey, these guys are just as good and only cost a third as much" and hired more or less indiscriminately. (As with any other group of people, some Indians are smart, some less so. Some are passionate about what they do; others view it as just a job.) So they ended up with some guys who were indeed as good at one third of the price, and many more who weren't. They got the same result, of course, as what they'd get hiring indiscriminately in wealthier countries. I don't think companies with good hiring cultures have these problems, in India or anywhere else.

There are other problems with outsourcing to somewhere far away (which India is for many people): people will have stay up late or start very early to attend meetings, language can be an issue, and matters that are simple but take a few rounds of communication can end up taking days to resolve.

Those problems can all be managed with smart leadership, but when that's lacking, it's easier to point fingers at people with little chance of fairly defending themselves.

<comment><USER6> Here's how it works: Joe Manager goes to Silicon Valley and sees all these incredibly talented Indian engineers and thinks _wow, I gots to hire me some of them_.

What he fails to understand is that an Indian entrepreneur in Silicon Valley is not really representative of Indians as a whole, any more than a pro athlete is representative of the fitness of the average American, or a Hollywood A-lister is representative of how the average person looks.

In fact the quality of engineer you will get outsourcing to India is _lower_ than the average, because the most talented engineers (in any country) aren't really interested in working for huge companies on other people's dull corporate applications. They're busy working on their own startups or at least for small companies doing interesting work, whether in India or in the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I worked for a company that was given a free 1 month trial of 1 dev guy out of india. We had a custom PHP framework (<http://www.sinapse.org/>), and he jumped in and started pumping out code pretty quick. When you looked at his pages, he was "accomplishing" his tasks, but his code was so inconsistent and completely outside the framework (it was all one-off-spaghetti-code-hell), so at the end of the month we had to throw everything out. We didn't outsource again.

<comment><USER8> talk of anecdotal evidence

<comment><USER9> Indeed. There are bad coders everywhere. The problem with outsourcing is generic: you're hiring consultants, not hackers. There are "good" consultants out there, but even the best of them are basically bean counters.

And no doubt there are plenty of great Indian hackers out there, but they're not on the consulting market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In many respects the developer masses in India go through more rigour than the developer masses in many countries like UK/US, essentially due to the increased competition and overall standards in general in technical education there.

However, even in India developers/firms have been gearing towards work in markets other than enterprise Java and .NET for a long time now, as the competition becomes stronger all around in those fields and first mover advantage has generally been lost/taken by the early players.

Many realise the niches (such as bespoke RoR/Python/other work for smaller clients and individuals) remains largely untapped and profitable. We will soon see more impact by smaller independant Indian firms in these areas and as tech startups in general.

<comment><USER11> It's hard to get good data, but I've read the opposite - that educational standards for engineers may be much higher in the US than in India and China.

Here's a link to a business week article by Vivek Wadhwa, a prof at Duke:

[http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/dec2005/sb20051...](http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/dec2005/sb20051212_623922.htm)

and another by Pete Engardio on a related topic...

[http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/dec2005/nf200512...](http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/dec2005/nf20051223_7594_db039.htm)

Btw, none of this is meant to knock the top tier, such as the IIT schools, which are excellent But we're talking about the "masses" here...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> We've had... I'd call it a moderate success with Ukraine and now things are getting better and better.

The reason why it works for us is because we've pretty much trained those guys from the beginning to work a certain way: they didn't do outsourcing before (servicing local market) and they haven't worked with anyone else but us.

So yes, it can be done and it does help enormously, especially if founder(s) cannot afford to code full time.

</comment><comment><USER13> This article has some good advice on the 'how' part of working with Indian software developers. Regarding the 'whom' part, really it is the same as everywhere, find good developers.

I happen to know the Indian folks whom the author got on board his firm. They actually are 'very' good, and i guess that is the primary reason why the author is so happy at having it all figured out.

The point that is a bit off the mark in the article is:

      Because of the fairly fluid and competitive labor market in the IT world in India right now,
      many Indian employers don't allow their developers to blog or make contributions to open-source,
      for fear of losing them to competitors who might contact them directly

I am yet to hear of any employers here not allowing open source contributions per se. I guess one of the reasons for not having as many open source contributions/technical blogs from India (sadly) is that most of the business is still 'services' and people are jammed up with unrealistic schedules (committed by their firms). Also majority of the work is Java/.NET enterprisey stuff that is not too encouraging for the people to put more efforts back in to 'that' ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER14> how much should i pay to a web designer based in india? how much to a php developer?

<comment><USER15> they should pay you

<comment><USER16> I would like to see if you can publish this statement in context on <http://iden.tify.us> :)

<comment><USER15> I wouldn't, becuase i was joking, and after the massive downmod i figured i'd rather not muddy up the conversation more by trying to explain myself.

this was a joke... about how people outsource their work to other countries because they are too cheap to pay for developers in their own countries. sorry i forgot that the internet was serious business all the time.

i apologize to anyone if you took offense to it</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Bugs vs. Mistakes - <AUTHOR>

As a developer do you think there is any difference between Bugs and Mistakes?
Also, how do you justify being paid to create code that has bugs in it... and then being paid to fix them?
A client has asked me this and I'm interested to hear your response. All answers welcome! <comment><USER2> "NASA has managed to write bug free code at a rate of about $1000/line. If you'd prefer to work that way, we can."

The simple fact is that it's cheaper to get it approximately right and fix bugs as they come up then to guarantee no bugs in the beginning.

</comment><comment><USER3> It depends on how you choose to define both, really.

In my mind, there is no difference, but there are different categories of "bugs".

1\. The first the "mistake". In that there is universal agreement that a piece of code does x yet it does y. These are usually trivial and often picked up either prior to ship or in initial testing phases, whatever that may be. In order words as long as you are competent, you will catch and fix 90% of these.

2\. The second is where the result does not match the intended result. There are two sub-classes of this bug. a) The spec/directive/customer request is not properly followed, or interpreted in a way that is incorrect. b) The spec/directive/customer request does not exist for a specific component. c) The spec/directive/customer request is incorrectly defined or invalid within the business context.

This second class is where there are more opinions than stars in the sky, and it's also where we differ from building houses and such. Interpreting a customer's intent and desire (even if the customer is you) and translating that into a functional program is one of the most difficult parts of being a programmer.

</comment><comment><USER4> In my opinion, bugs are identified after mistakes are made.

Mistakes are items that are not clearly defined as a requirement to the client and use cases identified. If your code passes the documented requirement and use cases supplied, then it is a mistake. Further requirements analysis should have been conducted by the client. Mistakes happen as the set of requirements and use cases become very interrelated to make a complex solution.

A bug would be not thoroughly testing the code to pass all identified requirements and use cases.

The dilemma I have previously run into is the balance between client happiness and my own. If you endlessly do free work for the client, they may come to expect it. If you do not, future work may be lost. My opinion would be to go over requirement docs and statements of work with a fine tooth comb, line-by- line. Any holes, plug them. Any questions, clarify them. Make sure the client knows which party owns which set of risks. You should not take 100% of the risk when maybe the client can spend more time identify requirements.

</comment><comment><USER5> In my opinion a "bug" is when you complete the project based on the client's requirements/spec and a piece does not work as intended. On the other hand, a "mistake" is when you miss or do something not defined in the client's requirements/spec that causes the application/site to function contrary to the client's wishes.

Based on these definitions, the charge for a "bug" is covered by the client, while a "mistake" would be absorbed by you.

There is one disclaimer here, mistakes can results in bugs. If you were unaware of this issue at the onset then you are partly responsible for the bug in a sense. In this case you may choose to offset some of the cost for fixing the issue.

The key to determining where "bugs" and "mistakes" fall is in having a clear requirement/spec document ahead of time. Each party should understand where their responsibility lies and who assumes the risk.

</comment><comment><USER6> I look at them as the same thing. In either case there is a modification that is going to take place to correct the issue. To error is human and in 17 years of software development I have never come across a project that didn't have both mistakes and bugs in it.</comment>


Ask HN: Should you update an iOS app for just 1 minor bug? - good-citizen

We found a very small bug in our iOS app. Is it worth notifying all your users to download the new version or wait for the next time you are releasing a feature? that is, our next scheduled release might be months and months away. <comment><AUTHOR> Update. It shows you give a crap and can help your rankings.

<comment><USER2> Sorry, I don't quite understand your point.

If it's very trivial, I shall wait for later release. Appstore display "customer review" for current version first, then all version. This means updating will flush out the customers review and rating for current version.

<comment><AUTHOR> A steady stream of updates, all things being equal, helps your apps visibility etc. One for instance...Every time you update a bunch of sites that scape the app store publish that your app was updated and drive a bit of traffic etc.

<comment> good-citizen that's a really good point I didn't think of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Software Marketing 101...

"We just released a major update to our industry leading <app name here> app. It's addressed some of the security issues caused by the heartbleed bug and <whatever scare tactic you want to use here>."

I hope you planted some ad code in there to make you some extra bucks...</comment>


Quantifying The Value Of A College Degree (By Major) - <AUTHOR> http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/01/05/quantifying-the-value-of-a-college-degree-by-major/ <comment><AUTHOR> Folks have told me on HN several times they wanted to hear about some number crunching/SEO work/etc that I did regarding the worth of particular college degrees. I just got the OK from my client to share results, so here you go.

Search tool: <http://www.onlinedegrees.org/calculator/> Summary article: [http://www.onlinedegrees.org/calculator/salary/engineering-d...](http://www.onlinedegrees.org/calculator/salary/engineering- degrees-pay-best)

Short version: get an engineering degree.

The client has generously permitted me to talk about the business case for this project in broad strokes, and I think it is potentially very interesting for the average HNer startup. The general gist is that the government has terabytes of very interesting data and very limited resources for publicizing it. The NYT knows this and they totally kill it by turning CSV files of population statistics into compelling, actionable presentations that tell a story. _You can do this, too_.

With a little creativity, 1 GB of Bureau of Labor Statistics data becomes several hundred pages of rather interesting content for the client's niche. Google doesn't particularly love raw data in terms of rankings, though, so the graphs got beefed up a bit with content written by TextBroker writers, stock photos, and the like.

The business goal is that eventually most of these pages will rank for, e.g., [computer science degree average salary], and that some portion of searchers will request an application packet through the website. The CPA for that is between $10 and $100 (I'm not familiar with exactly how it is set).

This project took a few thousand dollars of outsourced work plus the equivalent of about three weeks of full time work from myself. The client and I anticipate that it will be very successful for them.

You can do something fairly similar for your startup -- I've never seen one that can't combine engineering expertise plus writing to generate fairly compelling content at scale, and the SEO gains for it are _considerable_. I recommend trying it.

<comment><USER2> This is fascinating and I want to respond on two levels - technical/SEO and moral/emotional. I consulted for the main competitor to these guys until a few months ago so I can speak only generally but I know the subject with some authority.

1\. Anyone reading this post is not the target market for this. The real target market are the suckers that they can convince to take out $40,000 in unforgivable government student loans when they enroll at University of Phoenix. Your client is a vehicle for UofP to find these people. It's a very lucrative business for both companies BUT IT IS FOR MOST OF THEIR CLIENTS A SCAM. The people they need are low-income, not tech-savvy, and IRONICALLY, not savvy about the true value of the degree that Online Degrees is selling.

2\. Please read the reviews (for instance for Ashford University) [http://www.guidetoonlineschools.com/online- reviews/ashford-u...](http://www.guidetoonlineschools.com/online- reviews/ashford-university) and note that, with rare exceptions, the only positive reviewers are sock puppets.

3\. Yet one of the things I don't get is how there could be so many bad reviews and yet people keep signing up. Unfortunately it's probably _because_ of content like this, where the "value" of the degree is shown as "millions of dollars" and not "a slightly higher than minimum wage job (that is not much better than the one i had before) with $40,000 of debt I can't escape even in bankruptcy". I'm NOT exaggerating - please watch the Frontline special on these schools - <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/view/>

4\. I don't want to pick on you. It's a massive US Government federal student loan subsidy system - handing out essentially free money - that makes this system such a mess and makes the prospective students $30-50k "marks" for the "schools". I personally couldn't take direct part in it anymore but I don't begrudge anyone because it's a system that's broken, some small % of students find it valuable, and these adults are not being forced to go to these schools.

Putting emotion aside for a second and talking about the SEO:

1\. The SEO technique you're describing - take public data, build it out with cheaply hired content, and stock photos, is great. That works well and everyone serious (particularly this space, because there is so much data) is doing similar stuff to stay at the top.

2\. HNers doing SEO should note that you always have two target markets when you build content - SEO content for people who will backlink to and tweet about that content, and content for the actual users of the site. People looking for an online degree or buying insurance don't tweet and blog (with no-nofollowed links) about it - so you need to put content that SOMEONE ELSE will write about. That doesn't mean the people who link to that content may ever consider using the products your site is selling.

In technology often those two groups are the same; in almost every other area of the web, they're not. Tech guys often don't realize this because their only experience with online content is reading HN and TechCrunch and they see all the consumers of the site's main content tweeting about it. _But when was the last time you tweeted about your car insurance?_

3\. In my SEO consulting, every project is surprisingly, 80% technology and about 20% content. Tech guys are building systems to make massive creation of "useful" content possible, writers are getting paid small amounts to crank out the articles. This trend is accelerating, which ironically makes it a great time for a tech person to be in SEO - the opportunities to crunch data are only growing.

<comment><USER3> I've watched that particular Frontline special before, and I must say, as a current college undergrad, it is eyeopening. Although, I must applaud the University of Phoenix investor, Michael K. Clifford. He is at least doing some form of philanthropy with all the money he's is making from for profit universities.

I wish I had a mentor of some sort as a teenager, who would have convinced me to attend a public institution or a junior college first, which would ultimately lower my student loan debt. I was suckered in by all my advisers and and the media that the only way to succeed is going to college.

I'm currently going to be somewhere in the ball park of $100,000 in debt after my 5 year BSIS degree at Drexel University in Philadelphia. I do not even live on campus; I commute from my childhood home. All I've had after 4 years there is horrible professors and teaching assistants from another planet. I wanted to learn how to program and create things, but all that I've learned is that I could have received a better education from my local public library.

<comment><USER4> _I could have received a better education from my local public library._

\- How'd you like them apples? Sorry couldn't resist some good will punning.

Anyways, I've always said (even when I was in high-school) that I'd just get a bachelors degree from the most reputable University I can afford without going into debt. These days I'm still missing one year of a Financial Engineering degree, but I'm earning almost twice (and quite a bit more in some cases) what most of my high-school graduating classmates are making after getting their Bachelors and Masters, and I just took a new job paying 22% more with an awful lot of benefits as a Lead UX/Systems Developer (yeah I have a weird mix of responsibilities, but they're exactly the responsibilities I wanted to have, as I quite enjoy both sides of the equation) for a big software company in my country. Take in account that I went to a recognized private school, so you could say my classmates where predestined to at least make a modest living without having to resort to flipping burgers at McDonalds.

So there. I learnt everything I know by reading, programming, and designing on my own. I was able to secure my first job pretty easily (I was 19 at the time) since I was one of the three persons out of a pool of 85 people who passed a simple test for a job working for a company that made shopping cart and merchant software. They hired me because even though the other two had degrees, I had done significantly better than they had on the test and trust me, I wasn't/am not a genius or anything or that sort.

I guess my point is that a degree is a must have because it's a great thing to fall back on if you ever need it and it can help your formation and tune your thought process, but it is by no means a silver bullet for actually achieving a great education nor does it make it a given that you'll do better in the job market. Make sure you learn what you need to learn, regardless of where you learn it, and make sure that you really learn to sell yourself instead of letting a piece of paper dictate how you do in life.

Oh and by the way... bachelor degrees are so passe this days. If you want offers based on your degrees more then your proven experience, opt for a masters degree as fast as you can.

<comment><USER5> And as a vision of the future, Germans often don't leave university until after 30...

<comment> barry-cotter True but misleading. Germany has some of the lowest university enrolment figures in the EU. There are a couple of reasons for this but the most important are

1\. They stream early (10 years old) and savagely. Only those who go to grammar school (Gymnasium) are eligible to go to a classic university. That's less than 40% of the population.

2\. They have an absolutely excellent apprenticeship system. All businesses pay taxes to their local Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and these coordinate training at a state and national level. Apprenticeships last 2-3 years, you spend a third to a half of your time at a trade school and the rest working for your employer.

<comment><USER6> I love the German system. Here in Canada half my friends got absolutely _nothing_ out of grades 9 through 12. The one non-university geared guy that actually made something out of his life noted that working hard at "applied" (here applied means "dumb" rather than actually applicable) courses was a waste of time because all he really needed was to graduate. He ended up working 40 hours a week during high school. Only now am I finally catching up with his net worth. Compounding interest is really working in his favour and he should be retired at 50 or 55 if he keeps it up.

Also, he is earning about 50% more than his other "applied" friends because his years of experience put him into middle management, rather than front line. Anyways, streaming early is good, especially if it is self directed.

<comment><USER5> Sounds slightly more like an argument against dumb education (and I couldn't agree more) rather than streaming.

Personally, I would have preferred to have been working between 13 and 18 - except for maths class, and possibly science and physics, technical drawing, French, art, could have skipped Irish, but would have replaced English with a more modern curriculum, ... okay... school was not as bad as I remember.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If I'm understanding your methods correctly, you only have data for earnings by occupation. So when you say "Computer Science majors earn x." it actually means "People who do the same jobs that computer science majors tend to do earn x."

If that's the case then the data is not really actionable unless we also know the probability of getting a job with and without some degree.

For example, if computer science majors all tend to get job A, but having a computer science degree makes you no more likely than people without computer science degrees to get job A, then the value of the computer science degree is 0.

Of course having a degree does usually provide some advantage at getting a job, and in some fields it's impossible to get a job without a degree.

But still, for this data to be truly meaningful and actionable you must multiply the value of each degree by the amount that the degree aids you in getting a job, which is a hard value to determine.

Edit:

Here's an example of why this is important. Let's compare physical therapy and programming.

According to the data, a Doctorate in Physical Therapy has a value of about $1.2 million, while a Bachelors in Computer Science has a value of around $1.5 million.

You might conclude that the computer science degree is a better value, especially since it costs less than the doctorate.

However, you cannot be a physical therapist without the degree. So the value of the P.T. degree is $1.2m * 100%, or $1.2 million, because without the degree you have a 0% chance of getting the job (and assuming that having a P.T. degree guarantees you a job).

You can be a programmer without a computer science degree. So the value of the degree is going to be $1.5m times some percentage less than 100. In order for the C.S. degree to be more valuable than the P.T. degree you'd have to be 80% more likely to get a job than a programmer without a C.S. degree. (1.5 * .8 = 1.2)

It doesn't seem like people with C.S. degrees are 80% more likely to get jobs. Especially when you factor in the opportunity cost of going to school. That's a lot of time you could spend working on open-source projects, building websites and businesses, etc. which are all things that count more than a degree.

So the value of a C.S. degree could very easily be less than the value of a P.T. degree.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think this data is a _lot_ more accurate and actionable than "All degrees are equally valuable, honey", which is the advice I'm most concerned with competing with.

<comment><USER8> I have to agree with the parent poster, especially given that I have a degree in International Relations but earn a high 'computer science degree' salary since I work in the field. Anecdotally, quite a few coworkers over the years at different positions have also revealed that their degrees are not in the field, but since, like me, they had the skills in it and the experience, they chose to do that kind of work, despite the degree being in a different subject.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A cursory review of the numbers makes me think this is a scam.

> Hard sciences such as Physics and Biology pay rather less well than I would > have expected.

Interestingly, when I used the calculator to search for a BS in Physics, it says "No Statistics for that Degree".

I also find it a bit hard to believe that optometrists and lawyers make out better than doctors, or that the lifetime value of a Physician's Assistant masters is $300,000 more than the lifetime value of an MD.

Finally, having perused the Occupational Outlook Handbook more than a few times, this reeks of blatant plagiarism. The text appears to be heavily rewritten, but all the facts come from the OOH and even the outline of each article is identical to the OOH.

This exercise casts a dim light on SEO as a profession. Scams on top of scams.

<comment><AUTHOR> The numbers/graphs were very definitely not taken from the OOH. They're from the same underlying data source as the OOH, the BLS national salary study, and they're both calculated differently and substantially broader in scope than the numbers presented on the OOH. It should not be surprising that the OOH and this site have the same number for e.g. median salary of accountants, since they both use the BLS data set and presumably have the same understanding of the word "median", but the point of the site is to get a generalizable numbers for the _degrees_ , where the OOH hsa 100% focus on the job categories and generates no statistics whatsoever for degrees.

There may well be rewriting of OOH facts on some of the pages. I likewise haven't read the several hundred pages in detail (I wrote the CMS but wasn't in charge of the freelancers who filled it out).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's really starting to anger me that blogs posts such as this don't do a better job of equating the differences between the for-profit and non-profit universities. The post mentions the value of a in-state degree almost as an aside. This should be way more up front about the fact that, in the U.S. alone:

>For-profit colleges enroll 12 percent of U.S. undergraduates

 _Only 12%_

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-29/plunge-of-for- profi...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-29/plunge-of-for-profit- college-stock-makes-sperling-rail-at-obama.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> I know it's a cliché to complain about this, but the article is a bit Amerocentric (is that a word? It is now!).

The Australian Government, for example, gathers a very large pool of statistics from the publicly funded universities, down to the level of having students grade their professors and courses.

<comment><USER11> We are also very lucky here that we don't take out student loans, and make repayments (we get HECS[1], and the repayments are automatic, like tax, once you cross a certain income threshold), so I'm guessing there wouldn't be a large enough number of people interested to make Australian centric data profitable.

[1] [http://www.goingtouni.gov.au/Main/Quickfind/PayingForYourStu...](http://www.goingtouni.gov.au/Main/Quickfind/PayingForYourStudiesHELPLoans/HECSHELP.htm)

<comment><USER10> HECS has been a pretty good compromise between private and public education. The major flaw is that course place supply is centrally dictated by Canberra and the ALP removed the main pressure valve (full-fee places).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A very interesting use of data. But there's something strange.

1) Looking a Psychology (my major) the "life time value" comes out exactly same ($794,...) whether I choose "doctorate" "bachelor" or "associate" degree. And... the results page does not indicate for _which_ degree its data apply.

2) What _does_ change depending on the degree for which I request data... is the other fields presented for comparison.

3) Requesting data on "doctorate / psychology" compares results for degrees in Real Estate and Cosmetology. Are there really enough people with doctorates in those fields to compute reliable stats? [Note that searching for "doctorate / real estate" _does_ show numbers (albeit low) for Real Estate.

If allowed by the hiring company, can you explain what's going on better than the results pages does?

<comment><USER13> It seems like the "magic search" feature has plenty of glitches, but the data is there; for instance, Marketing didn't appear at first, but after clicking to the full list and then going back, it appeared just fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "No college will actually do this because transparency goes directly against their interests"

This is simply false. Plenty of universities publish employment surveys with salaries by major. For an example, see the University of Pennsylvania's Career Services Web site. The fact that the author makes this statement lightly says a lot about how careful he is.

</comment><comment><USER15> Things that I actually heard from fellow students when I went to college over a decade ago:

"The most important thing is to get a degree, I don't worry about what major I'm going to choose."

"I want to make the big money so I'm going to major in business and start out as the boss rather than the engineer." (I also heard something similar substituting communications for business.)

"They may not make as much as others, but elementary school teachers can always find work."

I was fortunate to have professors and older friends who were up front about the differing opportunities provided by different fields. Many of my classmates seemed to feel that the world owed them a six figure job in whatever field they chose.

<comment><USER13> To be fair, majoring in Marketing looks like it will easily net you six figures if you're in the top 25% (which most people here probably are)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think we're going to see the next generation of kids taking a much closer look at what they will be studying and the cost/benefits of those studies.

College tuition has gone up so much and people are in so much debt now that 2nd generation college students will likely have better advice from their parents.

All I ever got my whole life was, "go to school." Luckily I majored in engineering, but I know too many people with half a mortgage in student loans making $12/hour now.

<comment><USER17> Next generation nothing, barring a major and sudden economic turnaround I expect this to happen next _year_ , by which I mean, this next fall school year. Somewhere in March I expect a few little nervous merpings to trickle out about how college applications seem to be a bit down this year but we're talking ourselves into believing they'll pick back up by the start of the school year, and somewhere in June or July for this to break as a major national news story/obsession after it doesn't pick back up. The obsession will center on how this is yet more proof of the inevitable decline and dumbening of the US and how important it is for high school graduates to apply anyhow. And it will all be wrong, because a return to some cold, hard cost/benefit and affordability analysis is not merely what we need, but in fact will be utterly unavoidable, and this will simply be another consequence of that broad (but quiet) trend.

I think I'm going out on a limb a bit here, but it's plausible. I feel much less like I'm going out on a limb to say that if the economy is still sputtering along in 2012 that this is almost certain to happen. (To avoid this we must not merely tread water but see noticeable improvements in our economic outlook.) I'm also curious as to how the bubble pop in higher ed will manifest, because none of the historical precedents for bubbles like this have the college admission cycle to contend with, and most of them involved resellable goods, even if the value did tank. The housing market can collapse overnight because anybody can sell a house any time, college can't be sold and can only be entered at certain times. Still, fireworks will occur somewhere and sometime, for better and for worse.

<comment><USER8> The data, at least for California universities, couldn't show you further from the truth. Enrollments are at all time highs (especially in California): <http://www.csuohio.edu/news/releases/2010/09/14840.html> <http://www.today.colostate.edu/story.aspx?id=4432> [http://www20.csueastbay.edu/news/2010/08/fall2010-enrollment...](http://www20.csueastbay.edu/news/2010/08/fall2010-enrollment-081810.html)

Furthermore, you mention an economic turnaround, so you seem to be under the impression that a bad economy means less enrollments/applications. It is actually the inverse: [http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/best-graduate- schoo...](http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/best-graduate- schools/2010/04/01/getting-into-graduate-school-made-tougher-by-the- recession.html) Wish I had the graph from my graduate economics course for this, it showed just how much an inverse the relationship is.

<comment><USER17> I know about that trend. It obviously happens because people think college degrees are valuable, so if they're jobless but can get a degree, why not? I did that myself in 2000 when I graduated with my Comp Sci bachelors degree, looked around, decided the bubble was going to pop anytime now, and said, well, might as well go for the masters. (It did in my first semester.)

If word continues to get around that college degrees aren't generically valuable, and adding my personal assumption that many people either can not just become engineers, and/or will realize in advance they can't just become engineers, that trend will stop and reverse. I probably overestimate the abruptness, but it will happen. Increasing enrollment in college during downtimes isn't an immutable fact of the universe, it emerged from social conditions and beliefs, conditions and beliefs that are changing.

That's not so much proof that I'm wrong as the reason why I'm predicting this in the next year or two.

<comment><USER8> Ok fair enough, but it just as accurate as predicting the stock market then. Granted, now that we know we are in a prediction scenario, I'd be happy to take you up on a gentleman's bet that this won't happen in the next year or two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wow, a Bachelors in Business and marketing aint so bad after all :) Now if only I had a CS degree to match my 4th chosen career path ...

<comment><USER19> Why would it? Good marketing guys get paid boatloads and are worth their weight in gold. Far more startups fail for lack of good marketing (all of the pillars, product/market fit, advertising, and PR, nut just advertising) than for lack of good technical product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Let V_x be the value of a college degree x. V_x = \Sum_i{E(\pi_i) for all degree x holders, where \pi is a degree relevant portion of "premium" net cash flow from i th person's labor pertinent to degree x, discounted by the labor- demand prospect of the degree x. If we're lucky, it may be possible to compute such values of the less-than-fifty-years-old degrees.

</comment><comment><USER21> Say it with me:

 _Correlation ≠ Causality_

<comment><USER22> I'll add to this. When A and B are correlated, there are only three possibilities regarding causality (which may work in combination):

1\. A causes B

2\. B causes A

3\. C causes both A and B

If we apply this where A is majoring in computer science and B is high earnings, which answers are true? #2 isn't, obviously. #1 is plausible, since perhaps employers are impressed by a computer science degree. But I think #3 is the most significant, where C is a strong desire to be a software professional. Very few people complete a degree in computer science unless they really want to work with software.

We all know English majors, psych majors, and history majors who became high- earning software engineers. Those are the people who had C (the desire to work with software) but not A (computer science degree). C is the thing that caused them to have B.

<comment><USER6> Assuming that you have a sufficiently large sample set. :)

The key here, of course, is that we don't know what C is. It could be that high IQ causes high wealth, regardless of degree. High IQ could also be a prerequisite of completing a CS degree, so necessarily the two correlate.

My point is that you know what A is, and you know what B is, but without measurement, you can't know what C is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > I paid Mechanical Turk workers for their two cents (quite literally)

Well there's your problem. Mechanical Turk is notoriously unreliable.

</comment><comment><USER24> What are some other sources of data about colleges? I'm interested in similar (but not the same) data mining projects.

<comment><USER25> The official resource for Italian universities: <http://www.almalaurea.it/en/universita/occupazione/>

Situation 1 year after graduation: [http://www2.almalaurea.it/cgi- php/universita/statistiche/fra...](http://www2.almalaurea.it/cgi- php/universita/statistiche/framescheda.php?anno=2009&corstipo=L&ateneo=tutti&facolta=tutti&gruppo=tutti&pa=tutti&classe=tutti&postcorso=tutti&annolau=1&disaggregazione=classe&LANG=en&CONFIG=occupazione)</comment></comment>


Miguel de Icaza: The Right Spirit - <AUTHOR> http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2010/Apr-03.html

<comment><USER2> This seems to be directed at the gaggle of ideological extremists that have hounded and insulted de Icaza for years because he dared suggest that Microsoft had a pretty good idea with .NET and C#. Sadly though, it's precisely those people who will pay the least attention to this.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps, but it doesn't address my two big issues:

1) I fully accept that .NET/C#/most especially the CLR are great ideas. Which I care not a whit about because Microsoft's ownership of them makes them things I cannot trust. For me the technical line of demarcation was in fact the orphaning of VB6, see Joel for more on this. Legally, at about the same time, see #2:

2) When he says " _For open source to win, we do not need Microsoft, Apple or proprietary software to lose._ " he's leaving open a terrible logical hole, since it is not at all clear that the reverse is true.

Maybe Microsoft can't win without open source losing. Microsoft's war to the knife against Linux, by proxy (e.g. SCO) and otherwise, argues that _it_ doesn't see the world in the way de Icaza implies.

<comment><USER4> My own take on C#/.NET, and I bet a lot of others had this take as well, came down to 2 elements:

1\. when it appeared, it looked a lot like somebody within Microsoft said to some other guys, "Hey, go make us a Java. Like Java, but our baby." And they basically approached it by cloning it and then making several superficial tweaks and changes -- JUST enough, especially at a superficial level, so they could say with a straight face to people who were none to observant that this indeed was the product of internal R&D -- true innovation -- rather than being what it actually was. In short, it looked awfully like a student who turned in a paper which was a pretty blatant copy of another student's paper, except with some superficial textual changes made to make it look different and original. I know that both languages have drifted and evolved since C#'s debut, but I remember looking at programs written in the current dialects of Java and C# at C#'s debut and it was hilarious just how much it looked like the C# version was just a functional/semantic clone of Java, only with arbitrary syntax differences (keywords, case, etc.) Life is complex and they've both evolved since then, but there's no doubt in mind that C# started life with a "clone Java, change it's name/keywords" design strategy.

2\. Microsoft's whole business model appears, to me anyway, and to other folks, as being basically about just copying what other folks are doing, putting their logo on it, offering it up for sale, and then once people are using it, to design features and systems in such a way as to create lock-in. Lure them in, then close the door. Or least, slowly start closing that door, so slowly and with enough distraction that the unwitting victim is not smart enough or quick enough to see it.

<comment><USER5> Regarding your #1 element: When I was coding w/ .Net PDC (e.g. pre- 1st beta) I would use the java reference docs to get some idea as to what to do because MS didn't have any real documentation for .Net at that time.

Regarding your #2 element: A perfect example of this is their attempt to take Adobe on with Silverlight (e.g. vs Flash), and also with XPS (e.g. vs PDF/Acrobat).

I'd be curious as to what you (or anyone else) see WPF as copying from as an example for that does not readily come to mind.

<comment><USER4> 1\. funny! but doesn't surprise me :)

2\. I like how even the name Silverlight pretty much tells you it's their Flash knock-off: silver + light = bright light or lightning = flash. It's like they're thumbing their nose and saying " _neener-neener!_ " to Adobe.

Quick Wikipedia read on WPF made me think of similarities to Flash and Apple stacks. But there can be non-malevolent explanations for this, and I don't know a lot about WPF (since I now try to keep my brain non-Microsoft, for efficiency's sake), so take with grain of salt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Subtley different than Torvalds (pragmatism) vs. Stallman (idealism) in that I think the main point is about how people react to others' with different opinions. Should I hate a friend because he disagrees with my ideals? Certainly not. Yet people act as though anyone with a differing opinion is their enemy.

<comment><USER6> I couldn't agree more.

"I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend. " - Thomas Jefferson

Unfortunately, the Us vs. THEM mentality seems to be propagating more and more these days. "Divide and Conquer" isn't just a military strategy. It's a highly successful way for keeping a population from moving forward in many ways. I live in the DC metro area and have seen a "Democrats need not apply" sign up in a store front. I think it was meant to be humorous, but it's still fairly screwed up.

"Disliking or hating something conditions you to (1) ignore virtues in the disliked, (2) dislike people, products, and actions associated with the disliked, and (3) distort other facts to facilitate hatred.

Startups should focus on their customers, not their competition—whom they may dislike." -This is #3 on VentureHacks cheat sheet of point from "The Psychology of Entrepreneurial Misjudgment"

<comment><USER3> Unless Jefferson wrote that after the denouncement of the French Revolution and the appreciation of how it changed the game, I can't consider it to be useful advice today.

E.g. to update a bit (to Marxism or Marxist/Leninism), Jefferson's potential and actual friends didn't include ones who considered him to be a class enemy with all that that implies.

Things like a sign that says "Democrats need not apply" are merely an indication of the continuation of this eliminationist civil war in Western society (well, more likely who it has been heating up in the last year and a quarter; I never saw such in the 1991-2004 period when I lived there).

Anyway, I "dislike" people who want to put me and mine into concentration camps, plus or minus (i.e. less and more severe examples of the same thing). There are no virtues in such people that can cause me to "like" them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The right spirit... for him. I do not share his view. I agree that it is not a "zero-sum game", however, Microsoft identifies Open Source as the "enemy" (add your favourite Ballmer's quote here).

I respect Miguel's opinion, but I will not follow his C#/Mono "vision", as I prefer vanilla C, or in case of needing higher abstraction, use Lisp, Perl, Python, or Bash.

<comment><USER8> I have yet to find someone at Microsoft that views Open Source as "the enemy".

<comment><USER9> _"... I have yet to find someone at Microsoft that views Open Source as 'the enemy'. ..."_

Maybe all the players have left MS now? But I remember Bill didn't like open source ~ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists> James Allchin wasn't that keen ~ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Allchin#Controversies> neither was Paul Maritz ~ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Maritz> and Vinod Valloppillil wrote the book ~ <http://www.vinod.com/blog/NavLinks/FAQ.html> You can get a better view of these MS players reading through the Halloween documents at <http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/> None of that matters much as it once did. MS is spent as a force, at least in the eyes of developers.

There are bigger problems. [0]

[0] Eben Moglen, _"Interview: Eben Moglen - Freedom vs. The Cloud Log"_

[http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Interview-Eben- Moglen-...](http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Interview-Eben-Moglen- Freedom-vs-the-Cloud-Log-955421.html)

<comment><USER10> What does the open letter to hobbyists have to do with open source?

<comment><USER3> Agreed, that was about theft pure and simple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> <i>For open source to win, we do not need Microsoft, Apple or proprietary software to lose.</i>

Hrm. Actually we need Microsoft to lose. A lot of things. We need them to lose the embrace, extend, extinguish attitude. We need them to lose the criminal abuse of monopoly tendencies. And we need them to lose the creepy unspecified claims of Linux infringing their software patents.

Alternatively if we dont actually believe Microsoft, the coorporation, will change behavior - then we need them to lose the dominant position that they abuse to hurt competitors and Free Software.

</comment><comment><USER12> There's a difference between accepting MS software being ported to Mac or Linux such as Office or... I think that's it and what he wants. But Miguel wants big parts of the linux desktop to be built on .Net and C# some parts of which are patented. Why take that risk when we already have gtk/C etc and Qt? Even Steve Jobs wouldn't drop Cocoa and build the whole OSX on top of C#, and he'd be right not to do so.

</comment><comment><USER13> Seems like he's trying to rationalize the position that he has had for the last 10+ years. One can imagine that those M$ contracts are brutal, I hope the cash was worth it for his sake.

<comment><USER14> God, what an ignorant statement. This is the kind of reasoning I would expect on Reddit but not Hacker News. Agree or disagree, but please base your argument on the article and not just some ad hominem attack on the person.

Note: This also applies to anyone who uses the term "M$".

<comment><USER13> When someone fronts their own PRIVATE struggles(by attempting to rationalize the way that they earn a living) as PUBLIC philosophy regarding open-source then counter observations will be made. Nothing unusual really.

Once you graduate from your insulated world in academia and spend some time in industry you will realize just how "ignorant" the previous comment is. Profit determines many decisions. The quicker you learn this the better. Or just stay in Academia forever.

Welcome to the desert of the real ...

<comment><USER15> On the off chance that you're serious and not just intentionally trolling...

I think you forget that he is employed by Novell, rather than Microsoft.

This article is consistent with statements I've seen in the past, and past actions. It doesn't look like a philosophy made up after the fact to rationalize actions, it looks like an existing philosophy that drove those actions. Do you have any actual, um, _evidence_ that this is a rationalization rather than an explanation of a long-standing viewpoint?

Note that the quote comes from Steve Jobs, was he also trying to rationalize how he made a living?

I feel about the same way as is expressed in the article despite it having _no_ financial impact on me and not being relevant to any projects I have (ie, there's nothing for me to rationalize about).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


1995:Bill Gates predicts Apple's product line and the Nest thermostat - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0O0Xjpjvfc

<comment><AUTHOR> Look carefully and you'll see where the ideas for the iPhone, the iPad, the iMac, AppleTV really came from.

<comment><USER2> But were these ideas really revolutionary at the time? Even less so now. I think we always knew that we would have touch devices. We saw them all over star-trek. We knew that we would get TV and movies on demand over the internet, we had it in hotels, but public infrastructure wasn't ready.

Why is the iMac in your list?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, some guys from Cupertino really think they thought about everything :) For the iMac design, see the computer at 0:16:00.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> execution > ideas

<comment><AUTHOR> People should not believe that those who execute ideas necessarily own them exclusively. There can and should be other devices with almost identical form factors without people saying "Oh, they imitated Apple". The truth should be known. The Cupertino guys aren't the navel of the universe.

<comment><USER3> Should... won't.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: The Great Translation Game – Improve Your Writing in Another Language - <AUTHOR> https://www.thegreattranslationgame.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN! My name's Mike. I built The Great Translation Game to help me improve my Spanish writing skills. I figured the best way to improve my writing (and vocab and grammar) was by mimicking native-level content. I was copying and translating back and forth using news articles and books in Spanish, and realized the whole process could be way more efficient, and that's how TG2 was born. I wanted to share it with you all here - curious to get your feedback and hear what you think! Hope you find it as useful as I do. Thanks for checking it out!</comment>


39-day voyage to Mars - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jdCLrGwkk64w96dlzOj990wKFfgA

<comment><USER2> The VASIMR technology is quite frankly amazing. The fuel efficiency is amazing, a single engine is expected to be capable of station keeping the ISS while vastly reducing the expenses and beyond Mars VASIMR engines hold a real possibility for manned exploration of the outer solar system.

VASIMR is to space what the Internal Combustion Engine has been to land. Quite literally it only takes minor modifications to the VASIMR design to attain a faster engine or a stronger engine for a variety of tasks.

In the future these engines will be being used for everything from travel between planets, to moving asteroids for mining. They're really quite incredible.

<comment><USER3> <citation needed>

only one proof of concept has been done so far according to the article. would be cool to see a more vigorous explanation of the process.</comment></comment>


The Future of Abortion Is Here–No Clinic Needed - <AUTHOR> http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/future-abortion-here-no-clinic-needed?paging=off <comment><USER2> Murder by post.

If its not a baby you are terminating then you're not pregnant.</comment>


Skype Out - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/05/skype-out.html

<comment><USER2> _"it may be an inspiration to VOIP entrepreneurs everywhere to think big and create new services that can someday be as big or bigger than Skype. And that's a good thing."_

That's a darn good thing. There have been a few comments in the various discussions here about VoIP increasingly being a commodity, and the fact that Skype has some, but not devoutly loyal, brand value. Having it valued at $8.5Bn could incent some other start-ups with great ideas to enter this space.

I know there are plenty of choices out there. This may breathe some fiscal energy into the market to help a few (some of which may not exist yet) to stand out as greater alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER3> _Big companies mostly mess up entrepreneurial companies when they buy them and it really is best that companies like Skype stay_ independant _and run by their founders if that is possible._

"independant" - google doesn't even mark it as a typo.</comment>


Palo Alto Hackers - How do you afford to rent / buy in that area? - <AUTHOR>

Hi All,
I live in the east bay & have been working from home for two years (Rails developer), just back from an afternoon drive around the leafy suburbs of Palo Alto as I've been considering getting a full time job in the area.
I'm kind of shell shocked at just how much rent costs, we currently pay $1600 for a one bedroom apartment within walking distance to the BART, gym, restaurants etc.. but in PA a similar place looks to be around $3.2k!! Buying looks even more insane, we seen a few old piles of soon to be ruble, disguised as homes, being flogged for upwards of $800k!
My salary expectations as a Rails developer, 29 years old, 8 years experience, 4 in a team lead role is about $110k, maybe $120k.....maybe this far to low for a "valley job"?
Just wondering how other technologies manage to live in this area - do you commute long distances OR is the typical salary far higher than what I'm considering? <comment><USER2> 19 years old and 8 years experience?

Arghhhh.... C'mon..

<comment><AUTHOR> lol - oops, typo. I'm 29...if I had 8 years experience when I was 19 I would not be asking how to afford housing :)</comment></comment>


More than 100 coal-fired plants have been converted to natural gas since 2011 - <AUTHOR> https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=44636 <comment><USER3> …but over 546 have been retired permanently

source: [https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=40212](https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=40212)

<comment><USER4> And replaced with what? While coal is dirtier than natural gas the calorific value is far greater so you get a lot more heat and electricity per unit of combustion by-product. If these coal plants were replaced by gas-burners then emissions haven't been eliminated, only reduced. If we really want to ELIMINATE emissions we need to be looking at base-load sources that emit zero carbon such as nuclear.

<comment><USER5> Based on [https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy- facts/](https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/) So in 2011 we had: Coal at 19.66 quadrillion BTU Natural Gas at 24.95 quadrillion BTU Petroleum at 34.63 quadrillion BTU Nuclear at 8.27 quadrillion BTU Renewables at 9.20 quadrillion BTU

In 2019 we had: Coal at 11.31 quadrillion BTU (-8) Natural Gas at 32.10 quadrillion BTU (+7) Petroleum at 36.72 quadrillion BTU (+2) Nuclear at 8.46 quadrillion BTU (+0.2) Renewables at 11.45 quadrillion BTU (+2)

Basically we replaced the use of Coal with natural gas, and used Renewables to add on new capacity. Indeed not exactly a rosy picture of lowering our emissions. And what's not captured here is that we dropped our fuel use drastically during the 2007-2009 financial crisis and only just recovered from that drop. But our Real PCE (Personal Consumption Expenditures) went up 30% in that same time frame. While it's not a 1-1 correlation or anything, increased consumption without increased electricity use probably means we've just off- shored a lot of our usage to less developed countries in the last 13 years anyway.

<comment><USER6> Natural gas is a net benefit as it releases significantly less carbon per kWh than coal. Coal is almost entirely C + 02 = C02 but with natural gas you also get energy from 4H + 02 = water. Even better it's far more flexible easily accommodating a renewable heavy grid.

Natural gas is also in vastly shorter supply than coal, naturally forcing a transition away from it fairly soon.

<comment><USER7> In terms of climate change, natural gas is comparable to using coal. The CO2 emissions from a natural gas plant are much lower than a coal plant, but it isn't clear that if you account for methane releases during production/transporting/storage that it is better for climate change than coal.

>...Back in August, a NOAA-led study measured a stunning 6% to 12% methane leakage over one of the country's largest gas fields — which would gut the climate benefits of switching from coal to gas. We've known for a long time that methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (CO2), which is released when any hydrocarbon, like natural gas, is burned. But the IPCC's latest report, released Monday (big PDF here), reports that methane is 34 times stronger a heat-trapping gas than CO2 over a 100-year time scale, so its global-warming potential (GWP) is 34. That is a nearly 40% increase from the IPCC's previous estimate of 25. ...The IPCC reports that, over a 20-year time frame, methane has a global warming potential of 86 compared to CO2, up from its previous estimate of 72. Given that we are approaching real, irreversible tipping points in the climate system, climate studies should, at the very least, include analyses that use this 20-year time horizon. Finally, it bears repeating that natural gas from even the best fracked wells is still a climate-destroying fossil fuel. If we are to avoid catastrophic warming, our natural gas consumption has to peak sometime in the next 10 to 15 years, according to studies by both the Center for American Progress and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

[https://thinkprogress.org/more-bad-news-for-fracking-ipcc- wa...](https://thinkprogress.org/more-bad-news-for-fracking-ipcc-warns- methane-traps-much-more-heat-than-we-thought-9c2badf392df/)

As we use more and more natural gas, we can expect more and more methane disasters like the leak from Aliso Canyon in CA which was the largest methane leak in US history. This released over 100,000 tons of methane into the atmosphere and required 11,000 residents to be evacuated.

[http://www.bbc.com/news/science- environment-35659947](http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35659947)

>...Natural gas is also in vastly shorter supply than coal, naturally forcing a transition away from it fairly soon.

Not really. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates in the Annual Energy Outlook 2020 that as of January 1, 2018, there were about 2,828.8 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of technically recoverable resources (TRR) of dry natural gas in the United States. Assuming the same annual rate of U.S. dry natural gas production in 2018 of about 30.6 Tcf, the United States has enough dry natural gas to last about 92 years.

[https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=58&t=8](https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=58&t=8)

And if extracting natural gas becomes too expensive, countries can just make synthetic natural gas from coal like China does.

<comment><USER6> Methane's global warming impact is front loaded, it breaks down in the atmosphere so in a steady state future leaks only maintain but don't increase the amount of methane in the atmosphere. In other words there are significant benefits from eventually moving to something else, but little long term advantage due to methane from doing so sooner.

"technically recoverable resources" is what's possible to extract at _any_ price making it a very poor measurement of economically viable reserves. Considering natural gas is already more than twice as expensive as solar power it's primary benefit is flexibility and the limited amount of solar manufacturing currently available.

Further the absolute worst case from known reserves of 92 years worth of natural gas is the equivalent of less than 28 years worth of coal production at those rates. Which means any coal offset with natural gas is at worst equivalent to zero coal in 2048 and very likely significantly better than that.

PS: 1998 methane levels are 5% lower than current levels because we have significantly increased output over the last 20 years. But looking at the graph it's nothing like a linear increase.

<comment><USER7> >Methane's global warming impact is front loaded,

Methane is 34 times stronger a heat-trapping gas than CO2 over a 100-year time scale. This is the timeframe we need to worry about right now to avoid the worst affects of climate change.

>..."technically recoverable resources" is what's possible to extract at any price making it a very poor measurement of economically viable reserves.

Yes, but technology improves and all of sudden they are viable. People knew of those big oil deposits in North Dakota for decades and then with fracking it became feasible to extract it. As I pointed out, even today China is going forward with making synthetic natural gas from coal (which is even worse for climate change than just burning methane.)

>...Considering natural gas is already more than twice as expensive as solar power it's primary benefit is flexibility and the limited amount of solar manufacturing currently available.

The major weakness of solar is that having 100% capacity at noon in July on a sunny day in Arizona, doesn't help at midnight when you want to run medical equipment.

It is possible grid storage will become feasible in the future to cover the daily and seasonal variations of capacity for wind/solar, but if we end up having the grid rely on natural gas will make it very difficult to avoid the worst problems associated with climate change.

<comment><USER6> "Methane is 34 times stronger a heat-trapping gas than CO2 over a 100-year time scale." That's intentionally deceptive.

Over 20 years it's 86 times more powerful than CO2. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential)

34 = (86/5) + 4x/5 so Average from years 20 to 100 = 21.

You can graph it based on in initial GWP and final GWP. CH4 = 16.04246 g/mol and CO2 = 44.0095 g/mol. So after breaking down it's 2.75x the global warming potential of CO2 which is almost exactly the GWP from years 60 to 100.

PS: Now sure that's greater than 1, but compared to the scale of CO2 released vs accidental methane releases it might as well be.

<comment><USER7> >...That's intentionally deceptive.

Part of the Hacker News guidelines is to assume good faith.

As the IPCC says:

>..There is no scientific argument for selecting 100 years compared with other choices (Fuglestvedt et al., 2003; Shine, 2009). The choice of time horizon is a value judgement since it depends on the relative weight assigned to effects at different times.

I chose 100 years since you seemed to imply that since methane was "front loaded" then "...there are significant benefits from eventually moving to something else, but little long term advantage due to methane from doing so sooner."

Trying to ignore the problems of methane in the atmosphere is not helpful. As the Think Progress article says

>...The IPCC reports that, over a 20-year time frame, methane has a global warming potential of 86 compared to CO2, up from its previous estimate of 72. Given that we are approaching real, irreversible tipping points in the climate system, climate studies should, at the very least, include analyses that use this 20-year time horizon.

>...If we are to avoid catastrophic warming, our natural gas consumption has to peak sometime in the next 10 to 15 years, according to studies by both the Center for American Progress and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

<comment><USER6> _I chose 100 years since you seemed to imply that since methane was "front loaded" then "...there are significant benefits from eventually moving to something else, but little long term advantage due to methane from doing so sooner._

Ahh, ok I genuinely assumed you understood what that number meant and chose to use it incorrectly.

As to 86 for 20 years still being important. These methane leaks from natural gas are nowhere near 1/86th of global CO2 production. They are not even 1/86th of the displaced CO2 from reduced coal use age.

Compare ~10 megatonnes of methane leaks worldwide from _all_ sources of natural gas with global Fossil CO2 emissions at ~37,000 megatons per year and 740,000 over 20. Except your natural gas emissions don't stack linearly for 20 years with past emissions. So natural gas power plants are easily a net reduction in global warming over your 20 year timetable.

<comment><USER7> >...Compare ~10 megatonnes of methane leaks worldwide

It isn't clear we fully understand the extent of methane leaks in the US and probably have less info on many other countries.

This is illustrated in the Aliso Canyon leak:

>..The authors believe there are important lessons to be learned from the leak - particularly the need to monitor oil and gas facilities more carefully. They say that there has been little co-ordinated oversight of the biggest oil and gas leaks in recent years. They point to Aliso Canyon, the BP spill and the Total Elgin rig blowout in the North Sea as examples where luck more than intent ensured the impacts on the environment were monitored. In the case of Aliso Canyon, the surveying aircraft was working on another project searching for pipeline problems, when the scientists were asked to overfly the leaking well. "The state's response to Aliso Canyon was teed off by the first measurement we took, at that point no-one had any clue that this was 50,000kg per hour of gas," said Dr Conley.

This report discusses the overall level of uncertainty in this area:

>...However, given limited current evidence, it is likely that leakage at individual natural gas well sites is high enough, when combined with leakage from downstream operations, to make the total leakage exceed the 3.2% threshold beyond which gas becomes worse for the climate than coal for at least some period of time.

[https://www.pnas.org/content/109/17/6435](https://www.pnas.org/content/109/17/6435)

Using coal for fuel is almost a crime against humanity considering the health costs, so switching to natural gas is harm reduction. The amount of reduction in GHG production though is more uncertain due to lack of investments in monitoring and reducing methane leakages.

<comment><USER6> That's from 2012, we currently have vastly better satellite monitoring of leaks. This provided dual benefits of better measurement and reduction in the number of active leaks thus reducing emissions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I "like" the use of the term natural to make it sound like gas powered plants are a good thing.

<comment><USER9> Historically it was common to make a useful "town gas" which could be used to make heat and light in homes or factories. Often "coal gas" was the town gas used, you make it by processing coal, so, unsurprisingly, the carbon emissions are worse than coal. When it was discovered that the planet has a whole bunch of natural methane we could harvest that's a _natural_ gas you can use instead. It's cheaper, it burns cleaner, once you discover it there's nothing not to like...

Coal gas is also poisonous and its density means it's inclined to lay in a room, so when e.g. Britons mostly cooked with coal gas ovens that's where you get the phrase "Put your head in the oven". The idea isn't that you could somehow suicide by cooking yourself, but instead that the poisonous gas will kill you.

These days if you have a gas oven (they're rarer) and try this it won't work, the gas isn't poisonous and will escape from most spaces - although you _might_ if you're unlucky manage to collect the right amount of methane somewhere to cause an explosion.

The reduction in suicide from upgrading from town gas to natural gas is a success story and a model for other interventions. It showed very clearly that "displacement" isn't a big deal. People didn't go "Huh, my oven didn't kill me. Oh well I'll jump off a building". Thus, other interventions can be expected to be effective, such as anti-suicide fencing on bridges or platform screen doors at railway stations.

<comment><USER10> My house was built in 1914, which is fairly old for Portland. It's been heated by 5 different technologies:

1) Manufactured Gas, which I assume is the same as coal gas. The pipe for this is about 3 times as large as natual gas. 2) Wood chips (still a spot in the concrete floor where the "octopus" furnace (called because of the vents coming off it) sat. This was a byproduct of the timber industry. 3) Oil. The underground tank in the side yard was filled in. 4) Natural gas 5) Air heat pump powered by electricity (partially fed by solar panels)

I'm not sure of the exact order but I think that's basically correct, as the development of trucks meant it was possible to drop off a big bunch of wood chips or later a tankful of oil.

I've read that some towns are not allowing new natural gas connections because of pollution issues. With the explosion yesterday in Maryland and our problems keeping up infrastructure, it seems like a reasonable approach to me.

<comment><USER9> > I've read that some towns are not allowing new natural gas connections > because of pollution issues. With the explosion yesterday in Maryland and > our problems keeping up infrastructure, it seems like a reasonable approach > to me.

Yes. In Britain there was a three way choice offered to central government towards the end of last century. They could discontinue household natural gas service (perhaps gradually over time) and shut the delivery network of pipes under roads across much of the country OR they could replace the entire network of cast iron pipes which are gradually failing so as to prevent explosions OR they could accept that gradually gas explosions would become more and more common as the pipes fail.

The last mile gas delivery is notionally in the hands of private company National Grid, because Tory ideology holds that this is better, but of course the private company exists only to collect profits, government must pay for all the inevitable costs of delivering the service, and thus had to make this decision. In the event they picked replacing all the pipelines, section by section ever since the cast iron gas pipes are being dug out of roads and replaced with plastic pipes expected to last many more decades.

Given that burning gas helps force climate change we don't want, in hindsight probably switching off the network would have been a wiser choice. The plastic pipes may last until say, 2100 but burning natural gas to heat UK homes in even 2050 will be very obviously stupid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Rankine cycle natural gas plants are less efficient than Bryton cycle plants.

Converted plans will always loose out to gas turbine plants.

<comment><USER12> More specifically, Brayton cycle with a Rankine bottoming cycle (combined cycle). Open cycle gas turbines are about as efficient as supercritical steam plants (but are much cheaper to build).

<comment><USER11> An _ _average_ _ steam turbine plant is nowhere near as efficient as a big enough single cycle gas turbine.

A top tier boiler plan of course may well be approaching a smaller/cheaper turbine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A little over 20% of US electricity is generated from coal. There are around 2400 coal power plants in the world.

My understanding is that if we could turn off all the coal plants tomorrow we could actually significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Would it buy us a significant amount of time if we accelerated the conversation to natural gas?

<comment><USER14> I don't think natural gas is actually a carbon-neutral alternative to coal, my understanding is that methane leakage makes it almost as bad as coal in the long term.

[https://www.vox.com/energy-and- environment/2019/5/30/1864381...](https://www.vox.com/energy-and- environment/2019/5/30/18643819/climate-change-natural-gas-middle-ground)

<comment><USER15> True, but it doesn't have the incredibly horrific non-carbon pollution problems of coal. The things almost every coal plant in the world does to nearby rivers would nauseate most people. Fly ash produced by coal plants releases one hundred times the radiation into the environment as a nuclear plant of the same capacity.

<comment><USER16> That's only true because the amount of radiation released by a nuclear plant in normal operation is also negligible.

<comment><USER17> The actual number closer to 1,000 than 100. There is a lot of uranium and thorium in coal. Not all of it is captured when coal is burned.

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is- more-...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more- radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/)

<comment><USER18> "A lot" is relative. From what I can tell, coal ash contains about the same amount of uranium and thorium as granite and slightly more than ordinary soil. (Of course, it's less concentrated in the coal itself, which is largely carbon and hydrocarbons that gets burnt off.) The main reason coal power releases so much radiation compared to nuclear because there's a lot of coal burnt and normal operation of nuclear power plants also releases very little.

What's more scary is the production of things like rare earth minerals - <USER2> quite heavily concentrates the uranium and thorium as part of the extraction process, producing large quantities of relatively radioactive mining waste.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Which is great, except that we're emitting vastly too much still and emissions are growing and it will soon be too late to avoid disaster.</comment>


Datomic 2013 Recap - <AUTHOR> http://blog.datomic.com/2014/01/datomic-2013-recap.html <comment><USER2> Glad to hear things are going well. I'm using datomic for a side project and loving it. Writing queries in datalog is easier than sql, and having the queries be composed of data structures instead of strings is so so nice.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a big fan of Datomic and am interested to see how people will apply it.

One thing that fascinates me is that Datalog (the query language of Datomic and a precursor to SQL) doesn't have negation. (ie in an SQL query you can use the NOT operator in your WHERE clause - but you don't have the equivalent in Datomic datalog at present). It seems to be a low priority feature.

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/datomic/UBWzp4nYOMk](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/datomic/UBWzp4nYOMk)

They very gently touch on this in the rationale page: _Datalog with negation is of equivalent power to relational algebra with recursion._ Which seems to suggest you don't need it.

[http://www.datomic.com/rationale.html](http://www.datomic.com/rationale.html)

<comment><USER4> Negation is a pretty common addition to datalog, along with group-by, max, min and other non-monotonic operators. It merely requires stratification.

[http://webdam.inria.fr/Alice/pdfs/Chapter-15.pdf](http://webdam.inria.fr/Alice/pdfs/Chapter-15.pdf)

<comment><USER2> This looks cool, I'll have to check this book out. For people who are interested, this is from Foundations of Databases ([http://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Databases-The-Logical- Leve...](http://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Databases-The-Logical- Level/dp/0201537710/ref=cm_lmf_tit_11)) and is available for free at the root url from jamii's link.

edit: realized it's a referral link, it's not mine, it's because I got there through Rich Hickey's list of books that influenced clojure: [http://www.amazon.com/Clojure- Bookshelf/lm/R3LG3ZBZS4GCTH](http://www.amazon.com/Clojure- Bookshelf/lm/R3LG3ZBZS4GCTH)</comment></comment></comment>


Translate any JSON object into valid Go Struct - <AUTHOR> http://www.jsonstruct.com/

<comment><USER2> It would be nice if it could detect and handle recursive data structures:

      //Field struct
      {
          "id": 0,
          "type": "date",
          "subfields": [
              //Field struct
          ]
      }

this should be translated to:

      type Field struct {
          ID int  `json:id`
          Type string  `json:type`
          Subfields []Field  `json:subfields,omitempty`
      }

instead, it does the following:

      type ExampleStruct struct {
      	  ID        float64 `json:"id"`
      	  Subfields []struct {
      		ID        float64       `json:"id"`
      		Subfields []interface{} `json:"subfields"`
      		Type      string        `json:"type"`
      	} `json:"subfields"`
      	Type string `json:"type"`
      }

It could also be smarter about detecting number types. For example 'ID' came out as float64, and it looks like the tool will never generate int fields, even though a ton of fields are actually 'int' or 'uint' in my experience. Clearly, JSON's 'number' type allows for int values, not just floats, though I'm pretty sure it's either the json package or the reflect.TypeOf() function that always chooses float64 over int.

Personally, I find it more tedious to edit this autogenerated struct, than to just write the struct I want the way it should be in the first place.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> @optymizer, thank you! I'll see what I can do about that. It's for sure not as good as it can be but this is just first version. I have in plan to get it smarter in some shorter future.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm obsessed with this. Use it all the time. Love you dev! whoever you are.

</comment><comment><USER4> Saves me from installing extra packages.</comment>


Brave Privacy Browser Is Whitelisting Trackers of Facebook and Twitter - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/blob/master/app/trackingProtection.js#L21 <comment><USER3> Hi Im Brave's CTO.

There's a balance between breaking the web and being as strict as possible. Saying we fully allow Facebook tracking isn't right [1], but we admittedly need more strict-mode like settings for privacy conscious users.

We do block Facebook at least as good as uBlock origin with EasyPrivacy. The referenced code is in a separate component which does the same as Disconnect blocking.

We're taking this seriously internally and we'll iterate on where we are to improve the situation. We're looking at if we can polyfill a local JS resource instead for example as one option if it doesn't make further requests.

[1]: [https://github.com/brave/adblock- lists/blob/f25b698aff4666bb...](https://github.com/brave/adblock- lists/blob/f25b698aff4666bbd6a6038ec029855e971b57cc/brave-unbreak.txt#L41)

[https://github.com/brave/adblock- lists/blob/f25b698aff4666bb...](https://github.com/brave/adblock- lists/blob/f25b698aff4666bbd6a6038ec029855e971b57cc/brave-unbreak.txt#L42)

[https://github.com/brave/adblock- lists/blob/f25b698aff4666bb...](https://github.com/brave/adblock- lists/blob/f25b698aff4666bbd6a6038ec029855e971b57cc/brave-unbreak.txt#L43)

</comment><comment><USER4> // Temporary whitelist until we find a better solution const whitelistHosts = ['connect.facebook.net', 'connect.facebook.com', 'staticxx.facebook.com', 'www.facebook.com', 'scontent.xx.fbcdn.net', 'pbs.twimg.com', 'scontent- sjc2-1.xx.fbcdn.net', 'platform.twitter.com', 'syndication.twitter.com', 'cdn.syndication.twimg.com']

a better solution for what, i wonder

<comment><USER5> That line is three years old, so how is this news now? And what's this "i wonder," do we not know how to use git here?

[https://github.com/brave/browser- laptop/commit/c4cd7c1dc41a0...](https://github.com/brave/browser- laptop/commit/c4cd7c1dc41a04bd521813da95e892055b3c2a3f)

[https://github.com/brave/browser- laptop/commit/6edf56775f256...](https://github.com/brave/browser- laptop/commit/6edf56775f25681555fb9219b86a18e15acb73f1)

[https://github.com/brave/browser- laptop/commit/4c30cd08af9dd...](https://github.com/brave/browser- laptop/commit/4c30cd08af9dda75a0e3d6ef634abbbdc2a39c74)

[https://github.com/brave/browser- laptop/commit/0652274db0aee...](https://github.com/brave/browser- laptop/commit/0652274db0aeee79d22d4a48d1195d47ce3e42e8)

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess it's new that it was discovered, nobody seems to have noticed while it's a major issue for a privacy tool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The related commits are years old. This isn't new. Last commit to that line was 3 years ago with the comment "unblocking embedding of twitter timelines".

[https://github.com/brave/browser- laptop/commit/c4cd7c1dc41a0...](https://github.com/brave/browser- laptop/commit/c4cd7c1dc41a04bd521813da95e892055b3c2a3f)

Also I just realized that is an archived repo that isn't used any more.

I took a quick look through the newer repos and couldn't find any kind of hard coded whitelist like that.

Am I missing something?

<comment><AUTHOR> As mentioned by phit_: [https://github.com/brave/brave- core/blob/master/components/b...](https://github.com/brave/brave- core/blob/master/components/brave_shields/browser/tracking_protection_service.cc#L33)

<comment><USER6> Ah, they put an underscore in the var name this time. Thanks for the link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Huh ... I thought that must be a sensationalist headline but sure enough - <USER2> fresh download of Brave browser loads facebook.com on pinterest.com.

[https://imgur.com/a/M4B9kJ2](https://imgur.com/a/M4B9kJ2)

</comment><comment><USER8> "until we find a better solution" to what? More context would help.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is this still in the current version?

<comment><USER10> It is not.

<comment><USER11> It's on the master branch... How did you determine it's not in the current version or will not be in the next version?

<comment><AUTHOR> Brave has two versions, Muon (legacy) running mostly JS code, and the Chromium-based (current), running mostly C++.

The whitelist is in both versions

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks like their claim about privacy protection is bogus, eh?

It is still whitelisted in current.

</comment><comment><USER13> Three years old in an archived repo, hmm…

</comment><comment><USER11> Way to ignore the comment directly before that line:

> // Temporary whitelist until we find a better solution

This post is sensationalist, flagged.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's temporary since 3 years, that's why ;)

<comment><USER11> Then link to the new repo and provide context. Just highlighting a line with absolutely no context is sensationalist. I'm sure there have been public discussions about this.

<comment><USER14> _I 'm sure there have been public discussions about this._

Can you substantiate this? Because that would be extremely relevant to the conversation. Making statements _with absolutely no context_ just seems sensationalistic.

<comment><USER11> I'm not entirely sure how I can substantiate an assumption.

<comment><USER15> If you're sure that there's been public discussion about the matter, then surely you won't have to spend too much time looking it up on Google? Backing up assertions takes energy. Are you motivated enough to champion your own assertions?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Powershell Get-Date – Working with Date and Time Cmdlets - <AUTHOR> https://www.nintyzeros.com/2019/09/powershell-get-date-functions.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> To start creating cmdlet you should look on how to create module. You can use C# but most PowerShell dev use PowerShell with or without OOP. [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/powershell/developer/module...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/powershell/developer/module/how-to-write-a-powershell-script-module)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm thinking of investing time in learning powershell. How are custom cmdlets created? C#?

<comment><USER4> You can write in powershell or c# to write own cmdltets. C# is more preferred way it seems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks</comment>