Programming is not a Glamorous Job - <AUTHOR> http://techbyproducts.com/programming-is-not-a-glamorous-job/ <comment><USER2> I hate these broad sweeping titles on HN. Speak for yourself.

I love my job, I work from home in an amazing home office I designed. I filled it with plants, little bonzai trees, art on the wall, inderect lighting for the evenings, and all the best work equipment money can buy. My environment is pretty much an extension of me.

I have awesome clients that invite me out for events, I go to programming conferences and have a great time, I can buy pretty much anything I need to (not a rolls royce, or anything that expensive, but anything I realistically need is mine.)

and it even sounds cool. I tell people what I do and they're really interested.

I can travel whenever, wherever - as long as they have internet and I can bring my laptop.

And if you aren't known... then make yourself known. No brainer. It's tricky but not that bad to build a small network, just interact with the people you look up to in your career on twitter, go to events and network, build something that a lot of people use and love. If you love your job you may have quite a lot of failures building this 'thing' but eventually you'll hit on one that people really love.

Lastly but not least, its FUN. FUN FUN FUN. I wake up some days at 8am, eager to make some french press coffee, heat up a danish in the microwave and just look at some code. It's really probably the best job in the world I think.

Disclosure: I am not a corporate programmer -- I would imagine in that exact scenario you are treated less than you are really worth, so I'm not trying to downplay the frustration I'm sure many of you guys face. I'm talking from my point of view that the statement "programming isnt glamorous" is just silly.

<comment><USER3> I am a corporate programmer and even though I work in a cube farm, I thoroughly enjoy my job. I get paid awesomely (at least compared to all of the startups I used to work for), the hours are great (except this weekend because I'm on call and we just deployed some new code), and I get to use the tools, languages, and machines I want. Maybe the company I work at is an anomaly, but it's definitely FUN FUN FUN for me too!

Programming is fun because I derive a lot of my satisfaction from solving problems using a computer. Seeing end-users enjoying my creations is just icing on the cake.

I get that satisfaction when I worked at a startup, now in my cubefarm, and I imagine even if I were a consultant.

<comment><USER2> Awesome! This puts a smile on my face :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Most lawyers don't fight exciting cases that expose a complex web of deceit.

Most police don't get into firefights with mastermind serial killers.

The families of martial arts masters have a homocide-by-mobsters rate that is in line with the general population.

Aliens do not invade very often.

None of these facts make for good entertainment.

<comment><USER5> Biggest disappointment of my teenage years: no induction into a secret cadre of American ninjas to go along with my black belt to help our master avenge his murdered wife.

I blame it on our instructor not having a murdered wife. Just a wife few would miss if she were.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Being a doctor is also super glamarous. You lead a team of extremely attractive individuals and identify diseases that are as rare as a narwhal.

Who the hell ever cared about how TV portrays a job anyways?

</comment><comment><USER7> I get to work with highly intelligent people, doing work that impacts tens or hundreds of thousands of people.

My day-to-day involves taking the most powerful and complex invention in history, and bending it to my will in ever more elegant and sophisticated ways.

For my efforts I'm paid X times the average US wage and receive regular kudos from strangers on Twitter and blogs.

My friends and family assume I must be a genius to be able to do what I do. On my best, most satisfying days, I'm not so sure they're wrong.

I'm just an ordinary programmer at an ordinary startup, but from where I sit this job is amazingly glamorous.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm not so sure that public percepiton is different. Loads of people I know still think that because I'm a programmer I must be an expert in fixing printers, or formatting spreadsheets.

<comment><USER9> Totally agree. Just because a movie came out and there is a show about startups doesn't mean its gone mainstream. Far from it. To top it off, what is represented in the media is such a small slice (ie. the startup scene) of what real world software developers do that its almost meaningless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> As someone who worked more than a dozen jobs that no movie has ever depicted as glamorous before becoming a professional programmer, I can say the pay, benefits, relative career security are amazing.

Not to mention, the feeling I get from solving problems and creating things others (and myself) find useful (and fun) for a living.

Quit programming for a month and work as a menial worker. See how you feel. I dare you.

<comment><USER3> I agree. I've worked as a developer in places from startups to financial institutions to large fortune 100 tech companies. Definitely not glamorous but sure beats working fast food that put me through school 15 years ago. I derive my enjoyment from solving problems using a computer and seeing people who use what I create enjoy what I've created. I definitely didn't do it for any sort of fame or glamor.

<comment><USER10> Right, and to add:

It's an awesome profession: the tiny chance of becoming rich and/or famous coupled with the safe odds of relatively good pay, benefits, job security.

Every other "rich/famous" profession is completely all-or-nothing: actors, musicians, artists, athletes, etc...

<comment> UK-AL Many other professions allow you become rich. Too become rich as programmer you need to own some part of the company. You can do that in nearly every proffesion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is this just another form of the lament of geek culture going mainstream? Because the idea that software engineering could or should be represented realistically in media is completely ridiculous. Of course they over-glamorize it because that's what media does. Point me to a profession that is not glamorized, villified or otherwise sensationalized by television and I'll show you a really boring job.

So no, programming is not glamorous, but it's a damn good job (at the right companies) if you can get it.

<comment><USER12> It's the ultimate irony. People of all walks of life will tell you that the way their profession is depicted in the media is unrealistic and silly. And yet we all seem to share the equally silly misconception that those who work in the media are attempting to depict us realistically and failing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Most of us are indie programmers"

I would think most career programmers work for corporate entities, but neither I nor the author have any statistical evidence presented.

</comment><comment><USER14> Stop worrying so much about how other people perceive you and your profession. Anyone worth talking to is going to realize that what they see depicted in a Hollywood film and B(or C)-level shows on Bravo is probably not representative of the vast majority of real experiences in the field.

I say stop worrying, not because I simply don't care, but because no matter what we're needed now and will continue to be needed in the future. If public perception sways a bit and begins to define us as 'lazy slacker partiers', then we should just get back to the keyboard and create something. It's just a function of society trying to come to terms with something that many of them don't have the slightest clue about. We all try to categorize the new and unknown using simplistic stereotypes. It's part of how we build mental models of how the world works.

With time, people will begin to understand more realistically what we do. Until then, let's just enjoy our relatively high job security, satisfaction and compensation while continuing to push technology forward.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good points. What's funny is that by posting this, it's almost like temporary fame, albeit to mostly techies like myself, but none-the-less it's kind of ironic how that happens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Well, so is being a lawyer or a doctor. Those jobs aren't what TV series and movies would have us believe either.

Most lawyers don't try high-profile murder cases. Most doctors don't save countless lives during their day-to-day work.

Even the most glamourous job of all - being a rock star - isn't really all that glamourous if you take a closer look at it. Those rock stars who ultimately love what they do and hence take their work seriously have to work very hard and be very disciplined to make it.

Same thing applies to programmers. Sure, most programming jobs are in a corporate environment and working in such an environment can suck quite a bit. However, the more your work sucks the more potential there is for actually changing something for the better, even more so if you're a programmer. Programmers can create wonderful designs and feats of engineering with little more than a bright mind and a computer.

</comment><comment><USER16> My girlfriend worked in crime scene investigation. I think they probably have it way worse than programmers when it comes to public perception of the job based on shows and movies.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, and I agree with that lol, being that I used to be a fan of the original CSI series.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I agree that glamorizing programming is not particularly helpful, except that coder-entrepreneurs can get more attention from venture capital. Glamorizing programming, along with the app-stores, is pushing the independent programming business into a "blockbuster" mentality, a winner-take-all situation where a small number of practitioners do very well and most don't ever make their development money back. Thanks, Steve Jobs!

</comment><comment><USER18> Could be worse. Could be an artist and therefore free to starve to death in a garret any where in the world, so that your agent can become rich when you're dead. Or as others have said, pick your profession. To paraphrase C&W, "What's glamour got to do with it?"

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't do this for the glamor. I do this for myself and the users. Everything else is gravy.

</comment><comment><USER20> "Why a career in computer programming sucks" <http://www.halfsigma.com/2007/03/why_a_career_in.html>

</comment><comment><USER21> Most jobs are not glamorous in and of themselves, but can be glamorous for what you do with them. Programming is no different: it's the project, not the job, that makes the glamour.

</comment><comment><USER22> Why not embrace it? It's not all negative.

God knows that, as well as other STEM careers, we need less social stigma.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Moral of the story: 1and1 VPS Hosting can't handle the HN effect.

<comment><USER4> You may have heard the saying "Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to WordPress".

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed and all it took was a WP cache plugin, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> and don't forget the fact that there is new competition coming on the market everyday that is probably paid a tenth as much as you are.

</comment><comment><USER23> Programming is funny if you do because you want.</comment>


Australia first country to introduce tax on savings - <AUTHOR> http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-28/federal-government-set-to-introduce-tax-on-bank-deposits/6355662

<comment><USER2> A good incentive to join the 'black cash' economy.

</comment><comment><USER3> First? Hopefully the last. Talk about idiotic.</comment>


Sonos sues Google for allegedly stealing smart speaker tech - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/7/21055048/sonos-google-lawsuit-sues-speakers-assistant-amazon <comment><USER2> > The lawsuit cites numerous news reports that point out similarities between > Google's new product features and systems that Sonos had already pioneered, > including synchronizing audio across groups of speakers, adjusting the group > volume, and setting up devices on a local wireless network.

This makes Sonos sound like a common patent troll. Sounds like sour grapes to me.

I remember iTunes doing synchronized audio _well_ years ago and Sonos didn't make a peep.

<comment><USER3> Apple released the airport express with an audio out and did synchronization with audio playing from the computer audio outs a full year(2004) before Sonos's first product hit the market (2005).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Sonos claims that Amazon has also violated its patents with the Echo device family, but the Times writes that its executives decided against "battling two tech giants in court at once."_

This seems unusual, considering how much is at stake.

Or are there other reasons that Sonos wants to avoid suing Amazon at the same time (cases being combined, hoping for a successful outcome in the Google case to get Amazon to settle, etc.)

<comment><USER5> Amazon would probably pull sonos from their site. They have been known to play dirty in this market before..</comment></comment>


On Infrastructure at Scale: A Cascading Failure of Distributed Systems - <AUTHOR> https://email@example.com/on-infrastructure-at-scale-a-cascading-failure-of-distributed-systems-7cff2a3cd2df <comment><USER2> This was a fascinating read.

> I've had concerns about the sidecars in the past, however after this event I > am convinced that having each workload ship with their own logging and > metric sidecars is the right thing. If these had been a shared resource to > the cluster, the problem almost certainly would have been exacerbated and > much harder to fix.

While I'm all for the sidecars model, I'm not sure that I agree with this...

If logging/metrics ingestion was a shared resource that applications were calling out to directly (basically a shim for kafka 99% of the time), it seems they could have built in a layer to dump writes to disk in the case kafka was unreachable. Even if they didn't and the shared service just started failing, that's a single (likely highly scaled) service failing (or best case 503ing and dropping logging+metrics where necessary) _not_ service downtime/the cascading failures. Maybe I'm misunderstanding something about this quote.

Maybe it's just me, but workloads going down due to a sidecar that handles logging/metrics doesn't sound like the right prioritization to me.

Also, like other people have said, resource limits & using the kubernetes compute reservation systems[0] also seems like a key bit that was missing from this.

[0]: [https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/administer- cluster/reserve-...](https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/administer- cluster/reserve-compute-resources/)

</comment><comment><USER3> For those that are not too versed in distributed systems, kubernetes or docker I highly suggest you read the comments on the post. I am going to promot myself a bit here and link directly to my comment [https://medium.com/@rmb938/thanks-dan-for-the-great- post-1ef...](https://medium.com/@rmb938/thanks-dan-for-the-great- post-1ef87cbd5bcc)

Sadly a large environment was brought down due to not following best practices. This event probably could have been prevent or at least have very little impact if best practices were followed.

</comment><comment><USER4> Some questions I had after reading it:

* Would this have been less painful with Netflix-esque patterns? Circuit breakers, throttling and the like? Failing hard on purpose is often easier to diagnose than failing fuzzily without clear cause.

* Would it be acceptable to maintain spare capacity? For a prod cluster on the main money path, I think everyone thinks yes. Who holds the decision bit for dev, which is a second-order source of money?

* Can I avoid the second act by having a clean way to (1) reset the entire system and (2) bring it up in an orderly fashion, as quickly as possible? Not every app needs to be relaunched simultaneously, there's presumably _some_ order of preference. Once the cluster state began to oscillate it doesn't seem like there were any easy options other than resetting it.

<comment><USER5> The risk with having a reset mentality, "after all it's only dev" (edit: not intending to imply you said this), is that the opportunity to learn is lost. If they took the reset tack, then this occurred in production and they didn't have that option available, choosing the reset path would suddenly be seen in hindsight as a lost opportunity.

<comment><USER4> I hadn't thought of that. I still think it would be helpful in prod, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The authors conclusions seem questionable. Ryan Belgrave's comment on them is worth reading.

[https://medium.com/@rmb938/thanks-dan-for-the-great- post-1ef...](https://medium.com/@rmb938/thanks-dan-for-the-great- post-1ef87cbd5bcc)

</comment><comment><USER7> For some reason, this reminds me of Jay's piece on reliability of distributed systems [1]

[1] - [http://blog.empathybox.com/post/19574936361/getting-real- abo...](http://blog.empathybox.com/post/19574936361/getting-real-about- distributed-system-reliability)

</comment><comment><USER8> > This problem did not affect the TAP production environment in the same way > due to it simply being a much smaller environment

Is it common for a dev environment to be larger than production...? Maybe paints a picture about Target's ratio of software developers to traffic/load?

<comment><USER9> He's not saying that the total dev environment is bigger than the total prod environment. He's saying that this one cluster of dev machines is much bigger than other clusters of machines (dev or prod). that could be true while simultaneously having many more prod machines than dev machines.

The author explains: _however there is one cluster that was built significantly larger than the others and hosted around 2,000 development environment workloads. (This was an artifact of the early days of running "smaller clusters, more of them", when we were trying to figure out the right size of "smaller".)_

<comment><USER8> Thanks, somehow missed that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> tedk-42 key take away that isn't mentioned in the article:

\- Put resource limits on your pods.

<comment><USER10> What's your reasoning?

From my experience, a memory limit, if hit, will cause periodic OOM and restart; and a CPU limit will cause slowing-down of the processes.

The tale already mentions restarting and slowing-down; it's not clear to me that adding more would have improved anything.

<comment><USER11> The issue was the Docker daemon was affected due to poor resource configuration. It should run at a higher priority and with guaranteed resources so it can't be impacted by user mode tasks.

k8s has been slow to catch up in this area but finally has priorities and preemption. That said Docker normally doesn't run in a pod so it's also a matter of setting the node total allocatable CPU to something reasonable and ensuring all pods spawned by kubelet are nested under a namespace that has a lower priority than the system tasks (kubelet itself, Docker if you use it etc).

<comment><USER12> yeah after reading that I came to the same conclusion and tought that he mostly blames it on cluster size, which is just wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Complex systems, even when think you designed to avoid complexity, are unpredictable when shit happens. Any system which is hard to completely understand is likely to fail in unforeseen ways, and possibly be difficult to recover from or to know how to change to keep it from happening again. Sadly I see these types of failures all the time where I work, though not quite the same scale. One time a simple DNS update brought down our operations worldwide, even in places thought not to be connected at all.

</comment><comment><USER14> Interesting. Is there a benefit to running Kubernetes in Openstack in their case vs running it on bare metal?

<comment><USER15> Storage and network stability is much higher if you run it on top of Openstack. k8s on baremetal is a pain in the butt. Disadvantage is that you have even more layers of abstraction.

<comment><USER16> I understand storage, but could you elaborate on why there would be higher network stability with Openstack?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The only real way to deal with this is to test distributed systems.

Doing so is hard, but only way to reliably know a system behaves given unpredictable failures.

So learn up:

\- [http://jepsen.io](http://jepsen.io)

\- [https://github.com/Netflix/chaosmonkey](https://github.com/Netflix/chaosmonkey)

\- [https://github.com/gundb/panic-server](https://github.com/gundb/panic- server)

</comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if Target stores their customers cardholder PIN numbers still [1].

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/27/target- hackers...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/27/target-hackers- stole-pin-numbers)

<comment><USER19> According to your own linked article, target does not store the PIN numbers.

What happens is, the PIN pad encrypts the PIN code and other payment info, using a key known only to the card issuer (i.e. VISA). This encrypted data then finds it way to the card issuer (e.g. Visa) for verification via one of a few possible paths, either PSTN dialup, or more common these days, over the internet. In the Target incident, hackers grabbed this data as it was being transferred over the LAN.

(For completeness, there are many more organisations this encrypted data passes through between the merchant and card issuer, but nobody but the card issuer can decrypt it)

Also, it's incredibly off topic for the post. I'll bet that's why your getting all the downvotes.</comment></comment>


The Best 404 Error Pages Of All Time - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/the-best-404-error-pages-of-all-time-2013-3#whoops-we-caught-techcrunch-with-its-pants-down-on-this-one-1 <comment><USER2> I hate sites like this that dole out content one quantum at a time in order to expose you to more advertising. Once I see the intent of the design, I bail -- I never read them.

Nothing is more indicative of predatory unprofessionalism than an article that puts one word on a page and requires you to move on to more advertising in order to read the next word. Guess how many professionally designed, successful web sites do this?

Also, almost 50% of the links submitted by user "mediagearbox" (<https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=mediagearbox>) are links to businessinsider.com. This is not a coincidence -- it's a shill masquerading as a participant.</comment>


Default Browser of Android 4.0 Shows 550% improvement on V8 Benchmark - <AUTHOR> http://browserfame.com/274/android-4-stock-browser-features

<comment><AUTHOR> <<Comparing with Android 2.3 browser, the Android 4.0 browser showed improvement of nearly 550% on the V8 benchmark and nearly 70% in the SunSpider benchmark>></comment>


Ask HN: Who needs contributors? (November 2016) - <AUTHOR> Looking for contributors to your project? Feel free to post any project that may interest HN readers, with a strong preference towards open source. Please follow this general format: Project name
Project description
What do you hope to build this month?
What kind of skills do you need?
Link to your GitHub or somewhere else you'd like to onboard new contributors, like your project management software or chat room.
Your license(s)
Consider tagging your project's relevant issues with "ask hn". To search these issues, go to https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=state%3Aopen+label%3A%22ask+hn%22&type=Issues&ref=searchresults <comment><AUTHOR> Code Corps ([https://www.codecorps.org](https://www.codecorps.org))

We're helping volunteers and donors contribute to software projects for social good.

Monthly Goals:

\- Finish Stripe integration so projects can start raising monthly contributions

\- Redesign task UI

\- Rework CSS to use flexbox and be more responsive

\- Minor features in blog

Skills needed: Elixir, Phoenix, PostgreSQL, JavaScript, Ember.js, HTML, CSS, Sass, flexbox, UI and graphic design (Sketch a plus), dev ops (Docker, AWS)

Slack: [http://slack.codecorps.org/](http://slack.codecorps.org/)

Elixir Phoenix API: [https://github.com/code-corps/code-corps- api](https://github.com/code-corps/code-corps-api)

Ember front-end: [https://github.com/code-corps/code-corps- ember](https://github.com/code-corps/code-corps-ember)

WordPress blog: [https://github.com/code-corps/blog.codecorps.org- site](https://github.com/code-corps/blog.codecorps.org-site)

License: MIT

<comment><USER2> This looks interesting. Are you a non-profit?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're a public benefit corporation!

> Benefit Corporations: 1) have an expanded purpose beyond maximizing share > value to explicitly include general and specific public benefit; 2) are > required to consider/balance the impact of their decisions not only on > shareholders but also on their stakeholders; and 3) are required to make > available to the public, except in Delaware, an annual benefit report that > assesses their overall social and environmental performance against a third > party standard. Such report does not need to certified or audited by a third > party, but use the standard as an assessment tool.

We opted against a non-profit because it's vastly easier to distribute funds quickly to projects under this structure (think Kickstarter – also a benefit corp) and because the IRS seems to deny charitable status for organizations that build open source software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> CMS Airship ([https://github.com/paragonie/airship](https://github.com/paragonie/airship)) is a PHP CMS that aims to be _secure-by-default_. To this end, we pinned our minimum version to PHP 7 (for type safety and ease of static analysis) and built our cryptographic security features on top of libsodium. What cryptographic security features? In addition to the standard fare (e.g. password hashing), we offer _secure automatic security updates_. We'd like to set the new gold standard for website security.

To see how Airship differs from other CMS platforms, consult this comparison chart of out-of-the-box security features: [https://paragonie.com/project/airship](https://paragonie.com/project/airship)

We'll be releasing version 1.4.0 soon, then shifting gears towards a version 2 (with a minimum PHP version of 7.1) later this month. This means backwards incompatible changes are on the table for discussion.

Although our team has a lot of great security talent, we're not UI/UX experts. We're doing the best we can, but we almost certainly need help in this area first and foremost.

[https://github.com/paragonie/airship/blob/master/.github/CON...](https://github.com/paragonie/airship/blob/master/.github/CONTRIBUTING.md)

CMS Airship is GPL3 licensed, although we offer commercial licenses (under terms equivalent to the MIT license).

Any revenue we receive from commercial license agreements will inevitably be funneled into hiring talented developers to improve the areas we're weak in and make Airship better.

</comment><comment><USER4> JSData ([http://js-data.io](http://js-data.io))

JSData is an open-source JavaScript ORM for Node.js and the browser. It's adapter-based, with adapters currently available for HTTP, Firebase, localStorage, MySql/Postgres/SQLite, RethinkDB, MongoDB, Google Cloud DataStore, Microsoft Azure DocumentDB, and more.

Currently working on finishing up a 3.0.0 release (currently at 3.0.0-rc.6). With so many adapters and integrations that need to be written (and current ones that need maintenance), there are lots of contributing opportunities.

We need help with everything from documentation, tests, and benchmarking, to taking ownership of a current adapter and building new adapters/integrations.

MIT license

Get started contributing at: [http://www.js- data.io/v3.0/docs/contributing](http://www.js-data.io/v3.0/docs/contributing)

We're also on Slack: [http://slack.js-data.io](http://slack.js-data.io)

Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER5> Project Name: HRCloud2

Project Description: A home-hosted personal Cloud that also converts files, OCR's images and documents, archives, de-archives, creates playlists, and more. Also includes a plugin-capable personal assistant named HRAI. Supports multiple users and includes 4 user-selectable color schemes.

This month: I'd like to wrap up the Javascript for auto-playing and auto- iterating songs within playlists. Also I would like to implement a Copy/Paste clipboard (in-process) and a "User Contacts" and "User Notes" sections. Once all the production features are set with the desktop GUI I'll work on the mobile GUI.

I Need: Javascript and PHP developers! Passionate ones.

URL: [https://github.com/zelon88/HRCloud2](https://github.com/zelon88/HRCloud2)

License: GPLv3

</comment><comment><USER6> appleseed is a modern, open source, physically-based rendering engine designed to produce photorealistic images, animations and visual effects. It's been used on TV documentaries and commercials, and it's been integrated in various packages, among them Autodesk 3ds Max [1] and Image Engine's Gaffer [2]. We've also made a short film with it, "Fetch": [https://vimeo.com/92172277](https://vimeo.com/92172277)

This month we're planning on starting the volume rendering subsystem ([https://github.com/appleseedhq/appleseed/projects/1](https://github.com/appleseedhq/appleseed/projects/1)) and, if time allows, investigate switching to Intel's Embree ray tracing kernels [3].

The code is written in C++ and we have a Python 2/3 API. There is work for everyone: pure rendering (a good understanding of rendering concepts and related maths will help), user interface (Qt), samples (Python), system programming, hardcore optimization...

It all seems rather technical, but don't be afraid, we're a small but welcoming community and everyone's happy to help!

appleseed is MIT-licensed.

Home: [http://appleseedhq.net/](http://appleseedhq.net/)

GitHub: [https://github.com/appleseedhq/appleseed](https://github.com/appleseedhq/appleseed)

Vimeo: [https://vimeo.com/appleseedhq](https://vimeo.com/appleseedhq)

[1] [https://github.com/appleseedhq/appleseed- max](https://github.com/appleseedhq/appleseed-max)

[2] [http://www.gafferhq.org/](http://www.gafferhq.org/)

[3] [https://embree.github.io/](https://embree.github.io/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Hi there. Our organisation, Security First ([https://www.secfirst.org](https://www.secfirst.org)) has just launched Umbrella - a free, open source, Android app to help activists, journalists and travellers manage their digital and physical security in high risk countries.

Built by media, NGO, human rights and technology security professionals. The lessons give you simple, practical advice on what to do and what tools to do it with – covering everything from sending a secure email to conducting physical counter-surveillance. You can choose your level of ability or type of protection needed and get answers that reflect your needs. Users can mark, customise and share simple checklists for quick reminders. It also has a series of security information feeds from places like the UN and Centers for Disease Control to keep you updated on the move.

It's free, open source and available to download on Android from Google Play:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.secfirst.u...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.secfirst.umbrella)

Amazon App Store: [https://www.amazon.com/Security-First-Umbrella-made- easy/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/Security-First-Umbrella-made- easy/dp/B01AKN9M1Y)

F-Droid Repo: [https://secfirst.org/fdroid/repo](https://secfirst.org/fdroid/repo)

Github Code and Content Repo: [https://github.com/securityfirst](https://github.com/securityfirst)

-Code audit: [https://secfirst.org/blog.html](https://secfirst.org/blog.html)

Skills needed:

-Android Development

-Copywriting - app content is a bit dense could do we editing down, updating and more graphics etc, but website, documentation etc could be a lot better!

-Translation (80% of Spanish Done, 88% of Mandarin, see [https://www.transifex.com/otf/umbrella-app/dashboard/](https://www.transifex.com/otf/umbrella-app/dashboard/))

-UI/UX improvements and suggestions

-Q&A

<comment><USER8> I do copywriting and I have been a military wife and had annual training in information security when I worked for a major insurance company for over five years. That company also talked a lot about its ground-breaking marketing that made its name a household word and I learned a lot from exposure to their marketing.

I have gone through some of your links and cannot readily see where or how to contribute copywriting. So I am leaving a comment here.

I went to your website. I will suggest that instead of saying _Umbrella: Security made easy_ that you change that to _Umbrella: Security at your fingertips_. Security is never easy and anyone who has dealt with real risk will likely have trouble taking you seriously if you position yourself as making security easy. Plus, the phrasing evokes those push-button little umbrellas that rapidly pop open while also more literally referring to having your tablet in your hands.

Edit: I will further add that you should change _Digital and physical security for people at risk_ in some way. "People at risk" evokes poor people and abused wives and children born in the wrong country. It implies that this app is not of potential benefit to anyone and everyone, just certain people that you would likely think of as _losers._ You need to update that, to something more along the lines of "Digital and physical security information for an insecure world."

<comment><USER7> Awesome! This is the interesting type of insight we are looking for. Going to drop you a mail directly to follow up :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Tomatoes ([http://tomato.es](http://tomato.es))

Description: Pomodoro technique® time tracker.

Last month we built the public API. This month we want mainly to rebuild leaderboards using async tasks.

Skills needed: Ruby, Ruby on Rails.

[http://github.com/potomak/tomatoes](http://github.com/potomak/tomatoes)

License: MIT

</comment><comment><USER10> Borg is a terminal gister/snippet searcher - for now only shell snippets but in the future we plan to move towards way bigger goals. The thing can be self hosted to be a knowledge base for your company, something like a cross between a stacko/wiki etc. We have slack integration, and a bunch others are coming.

We plan to implement private entries and searches this month and also team/organisation management on the frontend (done on the backend).

Right now the front end is lagging behind in terms of features - we are migrating from Angular 1 to React. ([https://github.com/ok- borg/web](https://github.com/ok-borg/web))

[https://github.com/ok-borg/borg](https://github.com/ok-borg/borg)

License is apache 2.

<comment><USER11> So you're aware, your name clashes: [https://github.com/borgbackup/borg](https://github.com/borgbackup/borg)

<comment><USER10> Yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> HaxePunk ([http://www.haxepunk.com](http://www.haxepunk.com), [https://github.com/haxepunk/haxepunk](https://github.com/haxepunk/haxepunk)) is an open source 2D game engine written in the Haxe programming language. HaxePunk games can be deployed on a number of platforms from one code base: Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, Flash, and (experimental) HTML5, with potential console support in the future. If you're interested in or have experience with game development (and Haxe) I'm working on an aggressive set of new features for the next version and would love some help.

</comment><comment><USER13> Lagom ([https://github.com/reimertz/lagom](https://github.com/reimertz/lagom)) is a presentation generator. It comes with a handy CLI that you use to create, serve and deploy your presentations.

My aim is to create a tool that is well known, easy to use and comes with minimalistic themes. I should have more but comes with features with tech- talkers in mind, like:

      - presentation mode
      - synced aspect-ratio
      - synced mouse pointer
      - synced highlighting

I need help on all fronts, iteration on the css, implementing more themes, more features, writing tests.

MIT licensed.

</comment><comment><USER14> StreamX is a kafka-connect based connector to copy data from Kafka to Object Stores like Amazon s3, Google Cloud Storage and Azure Blob Store

Skills : Java, Understanding Kafka, Cloud Object Stores (s3/GCS/Azure blob store)

[https://github.com/qubole/streamx](https://github.com/qubole/streamx)

License : Apache V2

Currently, this has support only for s3. We want to add support for other cloud object stores. Also, we would like to support different output formats(ORC to start with). Feel free to create issues and we can discuss there.

For any more details, mail email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER15> WP Content Calendar

A simple drag and drop editorial calendar for WordPress

I'd like to add new features.

[https://github.com/Tapha/WP-Content-Calendar](https://github.com/Tapha/WP- Content-Calendar)

Licence: [https://github.com/Tapha/WP-Content- Calendar/blob/master/LIC...](https://github.com/Tapha/WP-Content- Calendar/blob/master/LICENSE.txt)

</comment><comment><USER16> Tablesaw ([https://github.com/lwhite1/tablesaw](https://github.com/lwhite1/tablesaw)) Tablesaw is a high-performance dataframe in Java, with hooks into plotting and machine-learning routines. Open-sourced under Apache2. Would be happy to have help with:

\- Integrating more machine-learning algorithms (preferably using SMILE or SparkML)

\- Integrating more plot types

\- improved support for table joins

\- misc. improvements.

</comment><comment><USER17> Sotoki (by kiwix) [[https://github.com/kiwix/sotoki/tree/wiredtiger](https://github.com/kiwix/sotoki/tree/wiredtiger)]

The project aims at making stackexchange website available offline.

Fix the memory leak that was found in wiredtiger branch.

Python

GPL3+

</comment><comment><USER18> And if you're looking for new maintainers, post your project on [https://github.com/pickhardt/maintainers- wanted](https://github.com/pickhardt/maintainers-wanted)

</comment><comment><USER19> fpvracing.tv is an online community for the rapidly growing sport of drone racing. I'm looking for somebody to help maintain the site, which is a rails app hosted on Heroku. Email address is admin at the domain.</comment>


Open Source Security Tools - <AUTHOR> http://www.jayphilips.com/2009/10/06/100-open-source-free-security-tools/

<comment><USER2> At 100 tools, when does it stop being a toolbox and start becoming an obsessive hoarding disorder? I don't think even Backtrack has that much crap.

</comment><comment><USER3> And the original list of security tools maintained by Fyodor: <http://sectools.org/></comment>


The Bermuda Triangle of Wealth - <AUTHOR> https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-bermuda-triangle-of-wealth <comment><USER4> He misses what I consider a major issue. The price of college education is going up much faster than the cost of providing it. If you look at tuition vs what a professor is paid, one goes up much faster than the other. If you look at housing costs things don't add up either - renting an apartment seems to be a source of revenue for the schools. These are the obvious places the schools are making a ton of money - where does it go?

And then there are the absurdities. Where I went to school they now have all sorts of fancy places to eat on campus. I can't imagine students paying $4 a couple times a day for a Starbucks coffee when they're paying with borrowed money. This is just grossly irresponsible. I imagine the justification is "but everybody does it". The problem is nobody is teaching the general public anything about managing their money or evaluating costs of anything.

Sure, if you get a good job you can pay off your loan in X years, but that has nothing to do with the fact that you drastically overpaid for what you got (services provided).

<comment><USER5> " The price of college education is going up much faster than the cost of providing it. If you look at tuition vs what a professor is paid, one goes up much faster than the other. "

That's the most important question. Same applies to health care. Where does the money actually go and how has that changed over the last 50 years? Everybody immediately complains about their favorite scapegoat but there is no comprehensive accounting.

<comment><USER6> Steve Ballmer was talking about how healthcare costs have gone up like 400% over a 30 year period but expected lifespans only increased by .6 years. We're pahing exponentially more for relatively insignificant gains.

<comment><USER5> But where does the money go?

<comment><USER7> Here's one study on the subject:

[https://www.air.org/system/files/downloads/report/Delta- Cost...](https://www.air.org/system/files/downloads/report/Delta-Cost-Trends- in-College%20Spending-January-2016.pdf)

The table on page 11 summarizes the story. The big consistent increases in spending are on student services and academic support.

The growth in spending on student services covers a lot of things. One big chunk is explained by the trend toward organizing and professionalizing things that were historically handled in a sort of ad-hoc manner by a student's academic advisor, sometimes by the Greek system, or by nothing at all: Career counseling and networking, academic advising, mental health services, stuff like that. Another big chunk is non-academic, non-instructional activities like student clubs and athletics. I believe advertising costs also tend to get lumped in under the "student services" budget item.

Academic support is stuff that's related, but maybe not quite so directly student facing: Dean's offices, instructional material development, the IT department, stuff like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I very interesting article. This kind of numbers should be on the news all the time (like global warming) so people focus more on them instead of what is the last Twitt from the president.

> "Get rich or die trying"

I have always seen this as USA's major flaws. You are not supposed to have a good life but to risk everything for riches. This was working when the rest of the world was under-developed. USA citizens had so much more than the rest. As the world catches up and surpases USA its problems are getting bigger and bigger. If ever the dollar stops being the defacto world currency I can't even imagine what will happen.

How many TV shows I have seen that people laugh at the janitor looking down to him? There is no pride in a job well done, there is no self-fulfilment on doing what is correct. Money and fame are the only thing that matter. You even have religious groups that see economic wealth as a sign of God blessing!

Other countries have different and even bigger problems, but meanwhile the american dream is about economic aboundance and not about having a good life you are doom to a rat race.

> The taxman. I'd like 30% please. 40% if you got a bonus this year. Good job. > > Medical conditions! Your income means you have to pay out of pocket

The fact that your taxes are disconnected from a public health care system is scary. I am very proud of paying taxes that helps people to survive cancer, to get an education or to live with a disability. Your problem is not that you have to pay taxes but that the taxes are not used to give you back services as it was designed to be done (and that rich people does not pay their fair share, and that is something that it is also true in Europe).

<comment><USER9> I thought I would roll my own side gig once. The plan was to find broken cars on Craigslist and fix them for a profit. We're talking things like needs an engine or a transmission. I could do maybe ten a year. I'd be keeping a car out of the junk yard (which I imagine is good for GDP in a very small way) and making a very modest profit of $10,000/yr if I was lucky.

Well it turns out that is HIGHLY regulated. You need a dealers license which means you need a building to act as the place of business (can't be your residence), the business has to have $75,000 in assets or you have to get bonded. You have to pay insurance. You need signage. You, of course, have to pay taxes on everything. Basically by the time everyone takes their little piece there's nothing left for you.

I think this happens in any industry. It gets regulated to the point of a normal person not being able to participate. You dont own a bakery, you work for the bakery. You don't own a corner store, you work at Walmart.

What I see is a lot of closed doors yet we still act like they're open. They aren't real options anymore. So what are the real options?

<comment><USER10> I think it would be in society's interest to know the credibility of someone repairing and selling 2 tons of metal that will go out on the road and pose considerable risk to others' and the driver's lives on the road. See the limo crash that just killed 18 in New York state.

There might be situations where corrupt government is inhibiting competition for the gain of particular parties, but some things do make sense, such as being bonded when the risk of the work you are performing could be result in large costs.

<comment><USER9> The bond, I think, is mainly for if someone sues you. For a $1000-$2000 car $75,000 is overkill. They could make a class for people who aren't dealers where you only need to buy a bond for the car you are selling or something like that.

<comment><USER10> An vehicle with improperly installed brakes or other unsafe mechanisms can easily cost far more damage than the value of the car.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Google tells me that the most common reason for hospitalization in the US is > childbirth. Thankfully, here in San Francisco, that would only set me back > $15,000

Surely this is not true?

Does having kids just bankrupt ordinary people in the US or what?

I'm not asking about exceptional cases, like what is the normal way of dealing with having to pay $15,000 just to have a baby climb out of your body, when I'm assuming most people don't have that much money?

<comment><USER12> It costs around the same in Europe if you don't have insurance. I'm pretty sure it's the same in the USA - this is the rate that would be charged to your insurance company. Rates are way lower for uninsured people if you ask them and tell them that you're not insured (I got a bill lowered 10 times when I broke my hand); and of course most people have some kind of insurance.

To the people downvoting: please read properly. If you move your place of residence outside your country, you're no longer insured, and that's what I'm talking about - I specifically said "if you don't have insurance".

<comment><USER13> That's absolutely not true. If it is, name an EU country where that is the case. If you are a citizen of an EU country, you are entitled to use the healthcare system in that country(and any other EU state), purely by virtue of being a citizen.

The only case that would _maybe_ trigger a payment would be if you were a visitor to EU and had a baby - but most likely no hospital would bill you as hospitals are just not equipped for billing, they don't have the staff or the equipment to do such weird things as issue bills for treatment to people. I know at least several non-EU people who had treatment in EU and no one ever asked them for any insurance info to bill them, unless it's something major and very very expensive there's just no point, it would most likely cost the hospital more to figure out how much and how to bill you in the first place.

<comment><USER12> That is absolutely not true. I am a citizen of the Czech Republic and if I stop being insured, e.g. because of changing my place of permanent residence, I'm not entitled to _anything_.

<comment><USER13> Then Czech Republic must be an exception in the EU - pretty much every other country that I lived in worked on the simple principle of "you are a citizen/resident = you are entitled to care". Even if you didn't make any payments ever(due to lack of a job, or being homeless or disabled for example) you would still be 100% covered.

<comment><USER14> Not the case for Poland either. If one is not employed and not registered as unemployed (authorities are doing all they can to keep the official unemployment statistics low), one has to proactively subscribe to "voluntary health insurance". In case one doesn't - _pronto!_ one has no healthcare insurance. Of course, the constitution guarantees the healthcare, free- universal-healthcare blah blah - good luck suing everyone or anyone while being in such life situation.

Slightly different, but also extreme, case - Germany. There, one _always_ is insured, only for the months one doesn't pay a debt is accumulating (you thought healthcare can incur debt only in US?). It's quite difficult to get out of German healthcare insurance actually, even while being EU citizen and moving out of Germany.

In fact, for a EU citizen who takes advantage of free movement of workers and relocates often between EU countries, one can fall pretty badly on its face healthcare insurance-wise.

<comment><USER15> Really? As long as you are properly employed in any EU country you should also be covered in that country. There are some issues regarding cross-border, meaning a German is working in Spain and needs medical attention in Germany that would be invoiced to the Spanish insurance.

In Germany free-lancers face issue, they need to get their insurance somewhere. But thay have to get, there is no such thing as uninsured German resident.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > The sticker price of college pre-loan or pre-financial-aid is about the same > as the median net worth of married couples in America. Just enough to hit > the reset button on those savings.

I know someone who works in a warehouse. She's done that for a while, she's good at her job, and management wants to promote her but can't -- because she doesn't have a degree. They told her as much: if she gets a degree, they'll promote her, but without one they can't, because HR says managers need degrees.

I have a degree, but it isn't a degree _from a good college in a useful field_ , which it seems you need nowadays to get a job better than warehouse manager. I didn't know this, and neither did my parents; they just figured that you need the piece of paper, and that's it. But people with a higher-class background did know that.

And for those people... well, class mobility isn't in their interests, now is it?

(It's worth remembering that colleges themselves switched from academic performance to "holistic admissions"... to ensure that they remained a preserve for the hereditary upper class.)

</comment><comment><USER17> Here's a controversial perspective. Maybe most people's expectations are too lofty, and their abilities much lower than the think they are.

In 2000, less than 25% of the working popultion had a bachelors degree. Today, every young person I talk to expects to finish a Phd, JD, and MBA. And, now everyone wants to live in the trendiest (highest-cost areas). There are plenty of places in the US where a house can be purcahsed for under $100k.

Unless you came from wealth, or you're definitely in the top 1% of your peers, maybe set your expectations a bit lower. Or, at least be patient as you work your way up. Build wealth the old fashion way (like we did 25 years ago) - <USER2> a menial job (i.e. "in the mail room"), genuinely try to help your bosses (not compete with them), slowly build your reputation and circle of influence, take night classes at the community college, live below your means, save, etc.

<comment><USER18> What the linked article is trying to explain is that the opposite is true. It isn't that everyone wants to live in the trendiest areas, it's that they _have_ to in order to find a job that has any hope of paying off their debts fast enough for them to save up enough so that when the next huge expense comes through they can afford it... likely taking on more debt even so.

It isn't that everyone wants a degree - certainly not, given the price - <USER3> if you don't have one then you don't even have a chance of making enough savings to afford housing, healthcare, education for your children, et cetera.

People _can't_ "set their expectations a bit lower". Your options are to have no expectations, and accept that you're not going to be able to provide for your children, or to join the same rat race as everybody else and get locked into this cycle of wildly increasing prices. There isn't a middle ground for people to aim at any more.

<comment><USER19> I disagree. I think it would be interesting to do that same article, but replace the MIT tuition with that of a decent in state school, and replace the housing prices with those of a medium/large midwest city like Omaha, Cleveland, or Pittsburg.

Salaries don't scale like rent does. In Cleveland, you can get a 1 bedroom for around 900 dollars, in SF, that's 3.5k+. That means to maintain the same purchasing power and keeping monthly rent at 1/40th of salary, you'd need to earn 36k in CLE, but 140k in SF. 140k isn't out of reach in the Bay Area at all, but usually requires a college degree, while 36k in CLE is in reach of those without a college degree, and numbers twice that high are in reach of those with a STEM degree.

This means you're going to have more disposable income, not having to deal with 5%+ rent increases every year, pay less in the higher tax brackets, and be able to buy a house without paying nearly as much interest. All just because you stop trying to be the top 1% and live in some place that isn't NYC or SF, but is still in the top 50 largest cities in the US.

<comment><USER18> It's possible that if you did that you might be okay _today_, if your kids are also gonna go to a "decent" school instead of a better school, if you're also gonna get a "decent" house, et cetera, and you happen to live in the right place to enable all of this. The trend lines are strongly suggesting that everywhere is going down similar paths, though. There's no indication there's anywhere specific they're going to -stop-.

The problem here is the trends, not today, because those big expenses are in the future and we need to worry about what they'll be then, not what they are today. The trends are happening just about everywhere, just to different degrees.

<comment><USER10> Yes, with the wealth (and power) gap increasing, if you want your descendants to have a chance to move up class-wise, you have to try and be in school districts where they will make friends who are high achieving (usually from high achieving parents), so then they can get into high achieving colleges where they can create a network of high achieving people to rely on in their future careers and lives, and maybe even marry one of those. It all compounds, and the faster it compounds, the faster the gap widens and the harder it is to catch up. Until something causes the reset button (revolution) to be hit.

<comment><USER19> But that's the thing, by definition, you can't always move up, and in a lot of cases, it's harmful trying to move up when you're really not ready to spend the effort it takes to give there.

It's statistically unlikely that you and your offspring going to perform at world leading levels of being in the 1%. It's the equivalent of buying the best carpentry tools in the industry and then complaining that they're too expensive for your hobby use. If you're going to pay for Harvard/MIT, you're going to get a lot out of them, but the ROI for going to a such expensive school and living in a highly competitive area only works if you can take full advantage by really maximizing connections and getting high grades. If you can't, which is ok, you're just wasting time and money where spending 60% to go to a decent state school and living in a place that isn't next to FAANG office is going to get you 95% of the return in purchasing power.

Sooner people realize you don't have to be the best, richest, smartest, etc to be happy is when people will stop mortgaging their future to try to achieve something they don't actually want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The biggest trick that the FED has pulled is that it convinced the world that inflation is at 2% yoy. What a disgraceful joke!

Had they been real about the inflation, the interest rates on savings would've been higher. Sure, it would crash the stock market but the stock market only benefits the rich disproportionately. Not teachers, admins, nurses etc.

Oh btw, has anyone noticed that 20% of the 20 trillion dollar US GDP is healthcare? That's 4 trillions spent on healthcare every year!!

<comment><USER21> > The biggest trick that the FED has pulled is that it convinced the world > that inflation is at 2% yoy. What a disgraceful joke!

I don't believe it either, or they are counting the wrong things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > But unlike the prophecies of talking cartoon bears, all this money didn't > drive inflation through the roof and crash the stock market. It doesn't seem > to have really gone…anywhere.

It sure did drive inflation. It went into asset prices, which have been massively inflated by low interest rates.

Absurdly, the article is ranting about the rate at which real estate and rent are increasing, then pretending the inflation from printing all that money didn't go anywhere. From one paragraph to the next, somehow the author managed that disconnect. The Fed's zero interest rate policy, spurred the big recovery in housing prices (intentionally), and has enabled people to spend more on housing via artificially cheap mortgages than they otherwise could have, pushing prices up rapidly.

<comment><USER23> Inflation, at least in Australia where I live is measured as a "basket of goods". I totally agree that inflation has gone higher than it seems reported, but I think that is due to categories that are not properly captured in the basket.

No elected government wants to do a review on a metric that will make them look bad unfortunately if it was corrected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> > But unlike the prophecies of talking cartoon bears, all this money didn't > drive inflation through the roof and crash the stock market. It doesn't seem > to have really gone…anywhere.

This essay is obviously backed by a lot of thought, but this specific conclusion is a bit glib. Talking of things which are exponential, 2 trillion dollars is a few magnitudes bigger than 2 million dollars. That is more than the annual GDP of most countries.

The banks havn't lost that money under the couch cushions, they will be using it to their advantage. If it is to their best advantage to have it in excess reserves, that probably means something complicated is happening that is letting them make out like bandits.

If they aren't using it to influence the wider economy, we really need to ask what exactly they are doing with it. It is an extraordinary claim that it "doesn't seem to have gone anywhere", implying that somehow it isn't doing something.

<comment><USER25> Hey, OP here. Thanks for reading.

For sure, this was a bit intentionally glib. My own understanding of macroeconomics is relatively light, so I linked to two different perspectives on this event and glossed by it a bit.

The point I was trying to make (suggest? raise?) was that regardless of your views on printing $2,000,000,000,000, the crazy Cost-Disease-funded-by-debt does not appear to be a symptom of a banking system gone mad chasing risk (ala 2008). Which means it can rationally go higher still, which means it will keep going higher, past the point where all surplus wealth generated by the median Americans is consumed.

I was just trying understand what was fueling this fire, and whether it was rational or irrational exuberance.

<comment><USER24> :D Hey OP.

I didn't put it in my comment because I have no evidence, but my first guess was that the cost-disease-funded-by-debt was exactly caused by those 2 trillion. My instinct is as follows:

* The reserves for fractional reserve banking are excess reserves at the Fed + other reserves.

* Fed is safer than other, so large portions of the banks reserves sit with the fed.

* New money is created by the banks as loans.

* The excess reserves allow massive lending (the multiplier was something like 20x if I recall).

* Banks now have an income stream & massive cash reserves. Actors willing to take on debt push any capitalists smaller than a bank out of capital markets.

Basically, I assume these "excess" reserves are misleadingly labeled and are actually in use relative to the fractional reserve system.

That is obviously a complicated guess with no evidence, and you look like you've put more effort into research than me, but it fails the sniff test that 2 trillion exists and is having literally no impact. I bet it is and it is just complicated enough that it is hard to pin down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> In the UK people's savings have been shrinking for the last 10 years.

Its scary how many people are living hand to mouth, and with banks offering crappy interest rates it is no wonder people are spending rather than saving.

cue : rampant consumerism, payday loans, wage stagnation etc.

<comment><USER27> Yes, and in this case it can't be blamed on healthcare costs and mostly not on student loans - it's mostly housing that's the problem, and relatedly costs of transport (because to some extent you can trade one against the other).

For pensioners the top complaint is usually energy bills, but I don't think it's a good idea to make energy too cheap lest people use more of it.

<comment><USER28> _I don 't think it's a good idea to make energy too cheap lest people use more of it._

Have a tiered pricing system. Make the first N kWh cheap and then gradually increase the price.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've been wondering recently if the economy has shaped to optimally exploit the most readily available and easily renewable resource available: people.

There's been an explosion in computing power over the last two decades, and computing power roughly equals the ability to optimise. Has this allowed the economy, through sheer market forces, to reach an equilibrium where people are maximally exploited while still being able to grow, and increase their "value output" over time?

Has the economy managed to dodge the malthusian trap with humanity, that it has otherwise fallen into with fossil fuels and rare metals/minerals?

<comment><USER30> _I 've been wondering recently if the economy has shaped to optimally exploit the most readily available and easily renewable resource available: people._

Has not shaped of its own accord, it has been shaped. At least to some extent, this is planned, and governments are mostly complicit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> > $180,000 on a 4-year degree in 2018 would've been a $160,000 downpayment on > a house for my parents generation, plus the $20,000 four year degree.

$160k would buy the whole house! (If not, most of it!)

> Success only begins when you build enough wealth to pay for:

> Your own continuing education: $0 — $125,000

> A home for your family: $750,000 — $1,500,000 (depending on how far you are > willing to move from a major urban center — but don't move too far because > the wages go down too)

> Education for your children: $180,000 — $325,000 (start at the bottom of the > range if your kids are 18 today, move up accordingly)

> Medical expenses: $50,000 guaranteed between childbirth and insurance, more > with pre-existing conditions or any large event

> Your own medical care as you age: $0 — $LOTS

I get the feeling that the author purposefully picked one of the worst places to build wealth with "average" incomes (which so happens to be where he lives). While these are bad, these prices aren't average.

I live in the rust belt and might be making some very large (read: expensive!) life changes in the next year or two. There is no way it's going to this expensive.

</comment><comment><USER32> I like where his heart is. The article is a bit hard to follow. He mixes broad stats with his own situation and I'm often not sure if he is referring to USA or bay area. I think with another edit, and to tighten prose up a bit, it could be a great post.

</comment><comment><USER33> I read a passage related to this, in a book called 5000 years of trade. Countries can be categorized as rich/scarce in capital, land or labour. Those countries that are rich in say capital, tend to enforce protections on capital while relaxing the policies for land and labour. So coming back to this article, I would say that US being rich in capital has strictly enforced and nurtured conditions on its society by which capital has decent return through investment into student, house debt etc., while meaningly deteriorating the conditions for labour (wages). This is the reason why it is incredibly difficult to become rich nowadays in US through wages alone..

</comment><comment><USER34> Cost of my childrens' education will much more than $180k. Daycare is 70-80k then private school is 300k+. Public schools are in a very sad state.

Children are a true luxury in this day and age.

<comment><USER35> Out of curiosity where are you living where the public school are so bad the only alternative is 300k+? I live in a larger midwestern city and the public schools are decent. Some students will go to Harvard, most go to a respected state school, some don't go to college

<comment><USER36> In some parts of SF, you don't even have the option of sending your kids to Public school, because they won't let anyone else in: all seats taken. They have a pretty massive shortage of teachers because no one can afford to live there. At that point, your only choice is private school or move.

<comment><USER37> Whaaatttt???? I don't doubt what you are saying, but not living in SF / Bay Area I've never heard this. Can you provide a citation / more information?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This happens when you give a lot of data to entities that helps others to empty your pocket...

<comment><USER39> That's not the root cause. It shouldn't be the case that you need such a massive loan for education or housing. The government has failed if it cannot control the cost of these basic items.

<comment><USER40> Assuming you are, like the article, referring to the USA, the only schooling that may necessitate a massive loan is _post-secondary_ (as in after primary and secondary) schooling. The government has done a great job of controlling costs of schooling up to that point. It is confusing to me why you call that optional tertiary level of schooling a basic item? According to the OCED, only 48% of American adults have post-secondary attainment. The other 52%, a majority, seem to be managing without, living long and fulfilling lives.

It is understandable why you call housing a basic item. The small percentage without are often left to parish if the lack of shelter isn't quickly corrected. That is a real problem. But is any meaningful portion of the population actually taking out massive loans to make rent? In my experience, a massive loan is difficult to get even when you have a security to back it with. I am surprised that someone struggling to pay the rent each month has any collateral to put up against the loan.

<comment><USER39> Loan for housing is just lazy writing on my part. I should have made it clear I meant the cost of housing.

For education, OP's article made a strong case for tertiary education (as the only group seeing wage growth). Also, if you believe that inequality and lack of social mobility are bad things then you should believe that all people should have easy access to tertiary education.

<comment><USER40> _> OP's article made a strong case for tertiary education (as the only group seeing wage growth_

If wages are growing for this group, then it stands to reason that costs of joining this group should also be also rising. Economically speaking, there cannot be a disparity where simply having a tertiary education leaves you better off than not having it. If there is, then people will join that group, driving up costs and negating the disparity. The economy always finds equilibrium given enough time.

It's a similar situation to housing. As an advocate for lost-cost rural living, I have asked _a lot_ of people why they choose the high-cost city. The answer is always the same: Their higher paying job justifies the higher cost of living. And thus living costs are rising to reach equilibrium with rural areas. There, again, cannot be a financial advantage to living in the city, else people will move there, drive up costs and negate the disparity.

Any time wages rise for a particular group, costs have to as well. It is the only way the balance will remain in the economy. The exception is when you don't let all people join that group. Without access, then people cannot move to find that balance. There is why everyone who is ultra-wealthy are so due to exclusive property rights (land, intellectual property, etc.) that are out of reach to everyone else.

<comment><USER39> We have fundamentally different beliefs about the world. I don't believe access to education needs to be controlled by ability to pay, for example. (And costs of education are rising faster than wages, as demonstrated in the article. Also, some people enjoy living in the city.)

<comment><USER40> _> I don't believe access to education needs to be controlled by ability to pay_

 _Education_ is accessible to everyone for free. Not to be confused with schooling, which is presumably what you are trying to point to here. The government already provides all of the schooling one needs to be a useful member of society for free.

If someone wants to attend guitar school to learn how to play guitar on top of that, I am not sure why it cannot be controlled by the ability to pay. Learning how to play the guitar is a useful skill and all, but the time of guitar teachers is a limited resource. There has to be some way to manage that.

<comment><USER39> Ok, I'm out of this conversation. I'm not interested in playing games.

<comment><USER40> I am not sure which game you are referring to?

You are quite welcome to explain why everyone should have equal access to guitar school, schooling provided beyond the schooling the government provides to everyone. It is not clear to me why that is beneficial. What do we, as a society, gain by allowing everyone a chance to learn how to play guitar, irrespective of how much money they have?

I suspect the game here is that you are staring to realize that it is not actually beneficial to provide schooling to everyone beyond the schooling we already provide to everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I really liked this article as it was thought provoking and motivational, with interesting data to back it up!

That said, I don't understand why 750K-1.5M for housing was considered in the one-time expenditure equation. Your home is an asset as well as a monthly liability, and you don't need to have it paid off in order to build wealth, either in prices or in savings while you pay off your mortgage.

</comment><comment><USER36> Whenever people mention real wages, I get the feeling they're not really "real". What I mean is that I don't think they're calculating inflation correctly. Inflation doesn't seem to take into account Housing costs, which often cost significantly more than their constituent building blocks upon which inflation is based. Furthermore, I believe real wages should be calculated based on your ability to afford the necessities of life: shelter, food, water, transportation, medical rather than everything under the sun (most of which won't raise your living standard much). I'd like to see a chart that calculates real "real" wages for the last 50 years,.

</comment><comment><USER14> One clearly hits a salary ceiling and starting from a certain timepoint one becomes only more vulnerable by switching the jobs. One has no means to push back rising prices other than picking something else but sooner or later the prices simply unify upwards.

</comment><comment><USER17> Does anyone know why wages aren't increasing? Unemployment is almost at a 50-year low.

<comment><USER42> Civilians think unemployment means people don't have a job. Reality is its a measure designed in the 30s and heavily gamed and politicized to not mean very much.

A somewhat more realistic measure would be something like FREDs EM ratio. About a decade ago 62% of the population was employed, and after the great recession we've slowly climbed back up to 60%. Flat at 58% from the great recession until 2014, then continuous growth since. Sure theres boomers dying off, but that means demand dying off too, in theory the ratio should be fairly constant. FRED is an online product of the St Louis Federal Reserve; at least semi-trustworthy, surely more trustworth than unemployment stats.

Its not so much intentional dishonest as changing the definitions of what it means to be unemployed with all kinds of moral and ethical boundaries for welfare services etc. On the other hand, the percentage employed is reported honestly as a simple percentage of the population with a job. To have a job is a honest observational result; to be in the legal and welfare state of qualifying for unemployment benefits is a totally different kind of subjective observation. We could have 0% unemployment simply by not providing benefits anymore, which is kinda what we're doing.

Anyway the point is the last time the employment percentage was as low as 60% was after the 1983 recession; the graph is surprisingly not very dramatic and the percentage of employed americans post WWII has never been below 55% and never above 65%. None the less, the current stat of 60% is 3% below the peak in '07, almost 5% below the peak in '99, 3% below the peak in '90... For most of the 80s, all of the 90s, all of the 00s, employment was higher than it is now. Admittedly its better now than at the end of '09, but hardly at a high number.

As such, given that about 3% of the population was very recently working and now is not, we have a long way to go before any wage pressure.

<comment><USER43> unemployment stat isn't gamed, people just don't understand U1-6 unemployment stats.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Medical care has arguably gotten better and continues to improve. Housing is vague and controversial, because land is fixed, and people can live in formats that have significant impact on other people, and they continue to prefer modes that cost more for sundry reasons (not all of them good, but there is choice). Food has gone up, but there are savings to be had if you adjust your habits and expectations. No one need starve.

But education is the big one: no real net improvement from many decades ago (arguably worse), and in greater supply than ever. Why has cost continued to go up?

</comment><comment><USER45> Focusing on the parts of the inflation index that have gone up the most and implying that's the "real" rate of inflation is misleading.

I could write an article pointing out that wages have stayed the same but the cost of a computer has gone down by orders of magnitude - that doesn't imply that we're richer by an order of magnitude just as this article doesn't mean we're poorer

<comment><USER6> Housing and healthcare are much more significant and frequent expenses than a computer tho. They're also necessities.

<comment><USER45> Most of his discussion is about education which isn't necessity - and he ignores the subsidies, quoting sticker prices like most people don't get significant discounts

Also, looking at average cost is misleading because that includes purchases by people who gladly pay higher amounts because they can afford it. You want to look at the cheapest "reasonable-quality" cost to determine what's "affordable", not average.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> What happened around 2000 that caused the accelerated growth in tuition?

<comment><USER28> I'm guessing more people got easier access to larger student loans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Modern societies are supposed to be organised for the benefit of all in society (broadly speaking; obviously there are cases when different people have desires that cannot be reconciled). This is why the government usually sponsors education, for example. All of society benefits from an educated population and hence all of society contributes to the cost of that education. This seems to have been lost in the US (and, increasingly, the UK) and is, I think, the root cause of the problems. I believe the start of the problem was the rise of neo-liberalism, holding the market and competition above all else.

<comment><USER21> I think personally that the main problems in the developed world were globalisation + large scale automation, it completely destroyed the power the average worker had, and power directly means money.

Inflation is only low because better technology and bigger markets are now available which automatically makes everything cheaper to make, but even that isn't enough to compensate the loss of power of the middle class.

<comment><USER47> I tend to agree with that. Globalization has acted in very interesting ways. I wonder how it will affect the standard of living on a global scale. My guess is that it will have a normalizing effect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Is this again millenials fault ? /s

</comment><comment><USER49> The writing of this article seems a bit 'choppy'.</comment>


Ask HN: when using Google what are you struggling with? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Are you referring to Google's search interface or Google Apps, or any other Google service?

I don't really have any complaints about the search, only thing sometimes bugging me is G+, especially the Android App. Some features just seem to be hidden or only reachable in Ways no User would ever imagine (ie the 'Party Mode' feature, which really is pretty cool, but just so unreachable).

</comment><comment><USER3> Getting a business to appear in the places listings. It's impossible to edit your own profile. It all stopped working when the business pages merged with Google places. There's no support. It's utterly terrible.

</comment><comment><USER4> searching for code syntax with (mostly) special characters... (special characters are being ignored)</comment>


What does it mean for American innovation to be backed by oil wealth? - <AUTHOR> https://vicki.substack.com/p/silicon-valley-runs-on-saudi <comment><USER3> One thing to point out: Oil is still _huge_ when it comes to investment and sheer amount of financing available. Anything involving large-scale finance will have oil money involved in it in some way.

Frankly, even at the height of the tech boom, the tech industry has never had significant capital available compared to the oil industry. I've worked in both... Folks in tech think 100 million in capital is a lot. In oil, that doesn't even qualify as a project that needs sign-off by upper management. (The last project I managed had a ~$200 million per year budget. I was a low- level peon 5 years out of grad school in charge of it because it wasn't considered a large enough project budget-wise to give to someone experienced. There are a few caveats around this -- the discretionary budget was on the order of 10 million and the rest was fixed through long-term contracts, but still...)

Significant investments in the energy industry are measured in tens of billions per project. Profits from each of those projects are in the trillions, but spread out over 20-100 years.

As a result, a big chunk of the finance industry is directly or indirectly tied to oil. There aren't many funds that don't have money somehow invested in or sourced from the energy industry.

<comment><USER4> I was at an iron works a while back where I learned that an industrial grade blast furnace was, ballpark, $100 billion. This was built 100 years ago. That day I decided I just didn't and wouldn't ever understand capital markets.

<comment><USER5> Off by a couple orders of magnitude. Capital cost of a blast furnace, rule of thumb, is ~$200 per ton of pig iron per year: [https://www.quora.com/How-much- would-it-cost-to-set-up-a-bla...](https://www.quora.com/How-much-would-it- cost-to-set-up-a-blast-furnace-iron-producing-unit)

The _largest_ blast furnace in the world is about 5 million tons of iron per year (and was upgraded to that capacity in 2013): [http://www.donga.com/en/List/article/all/20130610/406398/1/P...](http://www.donga.com/en/List/article/all/20130610/406398/1/POSCO%C2%92s-Gwangyang- blast-furnace-emerges-as-world%C2%92s-largest)

...so that means the biggest blast furnace in the world has a capital cost of approximately $1 billion.

More than likely the cost (in today's dollars) of that blast furnace you're referring to is $100 _million_ , not $100 billion.

Side note: direct reduction furnaces furnaces are usually cheaper from a capital cost perspective and can use natural gas or even hydrogen for producing steel... We may use more of this tech in the future as we move away from coal for sustainability reasons.... The US now produces about 10% of its raw iron/steel using DRI and 90% by blast furnaces and the rate of DRI growth is fantastic (going from 2 million tons in 2017 to 3.4 million in 2018, pdf page 10): [https://www.worldsteel.org/en/dam/jcr:96d7a585-e6b2-4d63-b94...](https://www.worldsteel.org/en/dam/jcr:96d7a585-e6b2-4d63-b943-4cd9ab621a91/World%2520Steel%2520in%2520Figures%25202019.pdf) A few years ago, virtually no steel was made via DRI in the US. The fracking boom has changed a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Comes close to an important point, and then misses it completely. The problem is not that Saudi money would get them influence at new U.S. tech companies. The problem is that Saudi money is getting pushed into "tech" companies that have unsustainable business models, and this is sucking all the oxygen (e.g. available developers) from other projects that could accomplish more.

Imagine two startup ideas. One, could be profitable, and eventually turn into a $100million company that does something useful. The other, will never be profitable, but makes promises of being worth $40billion. Which one gets the (inexperienced VC) money? The second. Which one would be a long-term bonus for the U.S. economy? The first.

That is the problem; too much money from Softbank (much of that from S.A.) pushes all the developer and other resources into goofy ideas that will end up going bust, instead of more rational ideas that could be long-term useful.

<comment><USER7> Well that just means that a rational investor would make a killing amid this chaos, wouldn't he?

So, we have to assume that for the last decade, not a single VC in the industry have been rational enough to pick up easy money everybody else is overlooking?

<comment><USER8> There has been too much easy money flying around the VC world for the last 30 years that people have literally forgotten how to operate any other way. People have lived entire careers in this environment, so the rational move for them _is_ the current status quo.

But the paradigm is shifting. Where will we end up? My money is on early 20th century style oligarchic capitalism, but that's not a very appealing proposition for a lot of people.

<comment><USER9> > My money is on early 20th century style oligarchic capitalism

I've been enjoying the historical context in this book. I'm not surprised to be liking the book, but i'm pleased to be getting a better understanding of what the early 20th century space was like.

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36448501-the-bitcoin- sta...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36448501-the-bitcoin-standard)

<comment><USER8> I wholeheartedly disagree with any decentralized approach to national economics. Not because it wouldn't work, but because it would. Money is power only because power likes it that way. But power is power, and a decentralized monetary supply does not serve the powerful. They will attack it with every weapon they have (which is basically _all of them_ ) to ensure it doesn't happen until they control it.

In the early 20th century, the rich owned gold mines. Once we moved off the gold standard, they simply took that wealth and put it into the fiat system by owning companies. Even if we do end up on a nominally crypto-backed monetary system, I would expect any governance (even decentralized) to favor the incumbent wealthy as much if not more than our existing system.

<comment><USER10> I look at it in a systems way. If it /doesn't/ serve those with any actual wealth to back the currency to use it then the question becomes why would anybody use it? I don't see how it could work at all even without some vague nebulous bogeyman stopping it. It brings to mind the conspiratorial "big Pharma is withholding the cure" thinking while ignoring that selling the cure would make them way more, that the long term treatment is competitive, and a cure effectively monopolizes the whole segment of drugs and treatments. The real reason cures are rare is because they are /hard/.

With large buy in from lesser concentrations of wealth it could be a "peso" at best - something used by lesser wealths to trade to their localized advantage but lacking the power of big movers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Uber. WeWork. Flexport. Slack. MapBox. DoorDash. What do all of these hip > American companies have in common, other than appearing regularly in tech > headlines (and, now, being leading indicators of a tech bubble)?

> They are - or were at one point - all backed by SoftBank's Vision Fund, an > enormous venture capital fund run by Softbank, a Japanese holding company.

If many of these startups might not have reached IPO without the investments by Softbank, then maybe they don't have such a good business model after all? At least, that's my first thought after thinking what Uber and WeWork have in common.

<comment><USER12> Unfortunately most of the companies in this generation of "unicorns" are being pumped and dumped by VCs. This idea that you can buy your way to a monopoly, get large market share like Amazon and Google,then figure out how to profit from your position in the market will backfire spectacularly and public investors will have to pay for it.

<comment><USER13> _have to_ is a strong statement. Public investors need not buy a single share of a mis-valued stock.

<comment><USER14> That's the problem: Approximately half of the US stock market is made up of passive funds like index trackers which make up a large percentage of American 401k and retirement plan portfolios.

As soon as a company IPOs they enter into the portfolio of millions of passive investors, who unwittingly become bagholders for companies like Uber and WeWork that have no sound fundamentals or viable business model.

The market has become very distorted due to this and a myriad of other reasons. Everyone is gunning to find the next winning unicorn lotto ticket without any regard for fundamentals in a sort of collective pump-and-dump scheme. Thankfully there was a glimmer of rationale with Uber and Lyft's failed IPOs, and I expect WeWork's will be even more disappointing.

<comment><USER15> Major market index funds do not buy into recently IPO'd stocks because such stocks are not in major market indexes. While pension funds may buy in a little, most will not because recently IPO'd stocks are considered highly volatile and thus outside the remit of their investment objectives. Everyone is not gunning to find the next "unicorn lotto ticket". Lots are, but they are a minority of the money in the equity markets. Further, the equity markets are much smaller than the debt markets (i.e. bonds) these days. Do not mistake press attention (they go after the exciting stories) for actual market activity.

<comment><USER16> Last but not least, some indexes (e.g. S&P 500) have recently changed requirements so that most tech IPOs (which usually have two classes of stocks, one "insider" class that has a lot of votes, and one "general" class that has few (if any) votes) would be ineligible (existing members of the index were grandfathered in).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Saudi wealth is seeking to diversify, so its using its patrimony to seek alternative income streams to oil. So good for Saudis. This fund is seeking opportunity in many places, among them SV. That's also a good thing, for the most part. In short, I don't see it being so negative that it comes from oil. It's funneling research away from oil

<comment><USER18> For me it's not the oil that's the problem. It's the wahabi sect of Saudi, the weekly public execution of bloggers and dissenters. The international kidnapping and torture of journalists, the constant bombing of schools and children in Yemen. It's THAT money. I worked there on a foreign military sale contract and I saw a lot that disgusted me. The male Filipino workers told me they grow facial hair to make themselves less attractive to be raped by their male employers and employer friends. I'd walk through chop chop square on my way to get to the gold market downtown as they were power washing the blood off some feminist activist off the ground of the square (officially named Deera Square). I worked with sensitive elements of their military and am aware of indiscriminate bombing. Hell they shot down one of their own fighters when his wingman accidentally fingered the trigger while inspecting the lead plane for fuel leaks he thought he was having so you can imagine the incompetence around dropping bombs on targets, not to mention viewing Yemenis as subhumans.

Imagine if the westboro Baptists accidentally struck oil and became billionaires and tried to export that version of Christianity and we see why maybe it's not good that they are allowed to participate in the international community and invest their money that happens to come from oil into these startups. It's like if Epstein gave money. It doesn't matter where it came from but from whom.

<comment><USER19> This is exactly why Saudi investment should be rejected by the first world. No different than the outrage over Epstein donations and MIT.

<comment><USER20> It's different; it's much worse. Epstein was retail evil. Saudi Arabia is wholesale evil. Unfortunately, human nature makes it much easier to grasp retail-level evil, so we're much more horrified by it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not only is Saudi oil money flowing into SV; it's also been flowing into US higher education institutes and media companies. Some ways they buy influence with that oil money: [https://www.opindia.com/2016/03/money-talks-and-walks- even-i...](https://www.opindia.com/2016/03/money-talks-and-walks-even-in-the- virtual-world-of-twitter/)

</comment><comment><USER22> A lot of FUD, but no evidence that Saudi investors are using their influence to make tech companies do bad things.

If you follow the money, you'll likely find a questionable source. Americans benefit from US military raining drone strikes in other countries. By being an American citizen, are you tacitly approving drone strikes? No. By paying taxes that fund drone strikes, are you tacitly approving drone strikes? No. Taking Saudi investment is not tacit approval of their atrocities.

There's certainly a higher level of geopolitical tension there, though. I don't really know what the US could to answer (make more money?), but I don't think the tech companies themselves can do much about this, they're mostly pawns in a larger game of chess.

If the US wants to regulate these investments, then by all means. Lobby for that if you're really worried.

<comment><USER23> Actually, paying taxes that fund drone strikes on civilians means you have blood on your hands. I wish more people realized that...

<comment><USER24> That's a pretty unhelpfully polarizing statement for something that is a matter of opinion, or at least situational.

Suppose you are a citizen of a country (through no choice of your own) that uses public taxes to <immoral action>. Further suppose that you have no ability to influence how your taxes are spent. You have to pay taxes, but it's not at all clear that you are morally complicit for the immoral actions taken with them. You could argue "well you shouldn't pay taxes". Well, then you lose your liberty via jail or worse. Is that better than being arguably morally complicit?

And, are you putting your actions where your words are? Are you not paying your taxes, or are you accepting blood on your hands?

<comment><USER23> I am voting against politicians who are pro-war, which is sadly almost all of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This article is about Saudi Arabia, not about oil per se. Link should use the proper title of the article, which is "Silicon Valley runs on Saudi - <USER2> does it mean for American innovation to be backed by oil wealth?"

</comment><comment><USER26> I second the author's recommendation to read The Prize by Daniel Yergin. Was very illuminating.

</comment><comment><USER27> _Uber. WeWork. Flexport. Slack. MapBox. DoorDash. What do all of these hip American companies have in common, other than appearing regularly in tech headlines (and, now, being leading indicators of a tech bubble)?_

The big ones bought market share by losing money?

Uber is not a "tech company". Uber is a taxi company with delusions of grandeur. WeWork is a landlord.

<comment><USER28> Uber's lawyers would like a word with you. They aren't a taxi company or in the business of ride sharing. Uber is a digital marketplace company.

It's laughable how delusional they are:

>In fact, several previous rulings have found that drivers' work is outside the usual course of Uber's business, which is serving as a technology platform for several different types of digital marketplaces.

[https://www.uber.com/newsroom/ab5-update/](https://www.uber.com/newsroom/ab5-update/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The apparent carelessness with which Softbank throws its money around makes sense with this revelation. It's not so different from some of the really over-the-top projects funded by oil money with respect to real estate (particularly real estate "created" in the sea).

</comment><comment><USER30> > But, if we do some major, major rounding, and assume that the tech industry > is the sum of its top companies, at $1 trillion/year, $45 billion is about > 5% of the industry.

> So, what happens when 5% of any industry is controlled by parties that are > not direct shareholders?

This seems like an odd comparison to force arrival at a number as high as "5%", not including the rounding. Why would you compare a single investment of $45B to annual revenue? Control would imply ownership, so I'd expect the comparison to be to the summed market cap of those companies, which is obviously higher than $1T.

</comment><comment><USER31> Billionaires investing on "unicorns" aka buying monopolies means increasing inequality. It the whole point of their strategy.

Uber is an especially good example.

</comment><comment><USER32> Salman knows that the future is tech, and he's doing the strategic thing by moving Saudi money into other industries and outside of the country.

<comment><USER33> "My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel"

<comment><USER25> Had to look that up, interesting.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> TL;DR: Saudis invest in VC funds; we don't really know what specific impact that has on the funds' or recipients' behavior.

</comment><comment><USER35> Kind of short-sighted that the US government is essentially giving the keys to AI innovation and the military (check POTUS' latest tweets) to Saudi Arabia's blood hungry elite. More reasons to use what remains of our democracy to change course.

</comment><comment><USER36> Oil wealth comes with a lot of baggage.

</comment><comment><USER37> Innovation in America is essentially dead. First VC's don't know a good product when they see one, and they won't do due diligence on new products. So, they look to the tech companies that control the markets. Second, the services the tech giants are providing result in "soft GDP" dollars. We need VC's to be more community aware, and stop chasing cotton candy. WeWork is a rent seeker that has inserted another layer into the rental arbitrage process. That does not help the U.S. economy.

<comment><USER38> What do you mean by "they look to the tech companies that control the markets"?

<comment><USER37> VC's want to keep their risks low, they are more like investment bankers than true VC's. If someone approaches them with a seemingly good idea, they will want to unload it after a development period and realize a 10:1 return. So, they will first talk with a couple of the big companies and try to "pre-sell" the concept without giving away too much of tge secret sauce. In essence, VC's are captive by the tech giants, just as are most professors, and university curriculums.</comment></comment></comment>


RubyCI: MRI does use RubySpec - <AUTHOR> http://rubyci.org/

<comment><USER2> I suppose this is related to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8821015](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8821015).

Do you have more context? Is this a official CI? Is there a webpage explaining how/who use this?

</comment><comment><USER3> So it's just failing a lot of the time on purpose?</comment>