IRS reminds taxpayers to report virtual currency transactions - <AUTHOR> https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-reminds-taxpayers-to-report-virtual-currency-transactions <comment> purple-again Another point everyone should remember because I've seen the attitude a lot recently.

If the reporting requirements seem to be literally impossible to comply with, this doesn't mean you conclude "so I don't have to pay taxes". It means you should conclude "I have to pay the maximum taxes possible under the worst case scenario because I don't have the records to prove my version of events".

It has nothing to do with crypto, lose basis in your stock and you assume no basis (obviously you make best guess and hope To not get audited, but once audited, you take no basis).

<comment><USER2> The government needs to fix the problem that it's so difficult to know what you're required to pay without just paying the maximum guess (and then pay more ahead of time to avoid penalties). I've reported an instance of 2 conflicting statements in 2 separate IRS forms to the IRS, and rather than clarifying what was required they referred me to a tax advisor, who also didn't know the answer to the question. So we took the more liberal guess, and filed. And then had to rework it anyway because the law for how much tax I was required to pay in 2017 changed in 2018 anyway. The principles that we consider "rule of law" don't seem to apply to tax law.

<comment><USER3> It's not the government's fault you lost track of your records.

<comment><USER2> I'm not even talking about that - parent comment talks about requirements that are literally impossible to comply with, and I talk about laws that are put into place after a tax year ends and apply retroactively, and official documents that contradict one another and the inability to get an official explanation from the government prior to the filing deadline. How is any of that even remotely "losing track of my records"?

edit: Let me be even more detailed. I had to have my accountant rework my taxes 3 times. Once because of a retroactive law change after the end of the tax year. Once because of the inconsistency I discovered in official documents. And once because ETrade's documents and my employer's conflicted. Both of the latter were prepared by professionals. That's pretty typical of my filings. If it's so complex that all of that is fairly routine, that IS the government's problem. I have no problem keeping track of my own records; in fact my own record keeping and fastidiousness led to the discovery of all 3 of those problems.

<comment><USER4> > in fact my own record keeping and fastidiousness led to the discovery of all > 3 of those problems.

Does that mean it might be safer to be less fastidious so that no-one can uncover records that never existed?

<comment><USER2> The records exist in all these cases. I operate under the assumption that the IRS is better at noticing these discrepancies than I am and that the cost of reworking it with my accountant is less than the cost of getting audited by an agency that gets off on this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A tax CPA I used in the past advised me with (hundreds of) short term equity trades to just present the before and after figures, since that represented the true income. They explained that in their experience, that was satisfactory to the IRS.

It is unrealistic to expect people making frequent trades to carefully document every trade (unless perhaps that is their profession). It's even worse for cryptocurrencies, since the value of the outcome of a trade is entirely relative to some other more established asset (such as US Dollars).

If you trade USD for BTC, then some time later trade BTC for XRP, then liquidate that for something more obscure (like cV), determining the value is really difficult. You would have to lookup the currency pair rates for each pair in a given trade, as well as some chain of currencies which can be associated directly with USD. Not only would that be highly inaccurate, but it could easily be argued very differently depending on which exchange(s) you used (since at any given moment, the difference of rates on different exchanges can be very significant).

I think as far as the IRS is concerned, unless you're obviously getting rich, if you can just show you made reasonable effort to assess and report what you earned, they'll be satisfied. But if they think you're trying to fool them, they make take personal offense and put far more resources into nailing you than you think it's worth in lost tax revenue.

<comment><USER6> Why is it unreasonable? Your brokerage should be tracking your entry and exit for each trade and sending you a comprehensive 1099-B come tax time.

If your cryptocurrency brokerage isn't doing that for you, move your money elsewhere. If you can't find a brokerage that does that for you, maybe you should start wondering what other important controls are missing from your brokerage. Just saying.

<comment><USER7> What brokerage? I don't need any brokerage to trade one crypto for another. Find someone who wants X, I send them X and they send me Y in return. X and Y may not be fiat currencies, and the value in USD at the time may be spread by 10% on various markets at the moment. Does the IRS want me to value those transactions as per GDAX at that moment, or Upbit?

Crypto takes out the need for middlemen like brokers. You _can_ use them, but you don't have to either. Even with them, unless you're trading for USD at the time it's a standing question of what the USD value was at the moment. This isn't like, "use the price in the WSJ that morning".

<comment><USER8> > Even with them, unless you're trading for USD at the time it's a standing > question of what the USD value was at the moment. This isn't like, "use the > price in the WSJ that morning".

If you don't know the USD value of what you are trading then you are a pretty poor trader...

<comment><USER7> Or have high speed trading bots constantly selling alt currencies against each other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Reminded me of this kid that said he bought some bitcoins and then sold to buy some alt coins.

>At the advice of my friends, I took most of my savings and bought 8 bitcoins back in early 2017 for about $7200. You can imagine how I felt when it went up. Around December 2017, I got caught up in the altcoins frenzy and sold most of my bitcoins (about $120k worth) to buy a bunch of different coins. I didn't know this back then but it looks like I owe income taxes on those trades,

Thread: [https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/84huks/i_j...](https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/84huks/i_just_discovered_that_i_owe_the_irs_50k_that_i/)

<comment><USER10> I still find it weird that he has to pay taxes in dollars on something that he doesn't know the value of in dollars since he hasn't converted his cryptocurrency assets to fiat yet.

<comment><USER11> Vanguard allows me to exchange one mutual fund for another mutual fund (without having to explicitly sell and re-buy). Do you think that's something that shouldn't be taxable? Where's the difference to the cryptocurrency example above?

<comment><USER12> Depends on the technical contract but per IRS rules are that when you trade one asset for another, you are virtually selling the asset and buying another. They did it to keep accounting simple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> purple-again If you are walking down the beach and find a $20 bill on the ground, you are required to report it as income.

The only way that I know of that you can legally enrich yourself without paying taxes is via a direct gift and that's because the giver pays tax instead of you.

<comment><USER13> Worth mentioning that there exists a $5MM lifetime max that any individual can gift before paying taxes.

A common misconception is that you have to pay tax on every gift you make, but as long as you're under that $5MM all you have to do is report it.

<comment><USER14> Not that it would probably ever apply to me, but I'm curious if that's per "individual gift giver - giver receiver" pair? Or is it the case that it's solely per individual gift _giver_? As in, would receiving a $500 gift from Bill Gates (who presumably has met the $5MM lifetime threshold) be fully taxable? Just random Sunday curiousness. :)

<comment><USER15> Would have to be per giver, otherwise it would be trivial to avoid (want Dave to get another $1m, either give $2m and have the taxes taken, or give $1.1m to Joe Bloggs, who gives $1m to Dave and keeps the rest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The problem, if one want to trade crypto currencies, is that you have to record every transaction. Then one has to figure out if the coins you have traded have been held for over a year and thus treated at the long term capital gains tax rate as opposed to the short term rate. Then, I believe with the new tax bill, one has to, going forward, sell the oldest coins first (if they are going to be treated like stocks). This makes complying very hard; impossible if you did not start at the beginning being very careful with your records. Basically trading a lot, especially algorithmic trading, is not something illegal, just impossible to do legally, in practice. Same with stocks. Professionals (of course) have some kind of special rules where they only have to keep track of net gains (or losses) and not every trade.

A good analogy would be if, when gambling at a casino, one had to keep track of every bet and report it and the outcome. Then, if one kept chips for over a year, you would also have to keep track of how old the chips you were betting were. Cashing out chips you held for longer than a year would have a lower tax rate. New rules now would say you have to bet with your oldest chips first. Now report all this activity to the IRS with your taxes each year. Vegas and other casinos would not exist with such rules and so much pressure would be against laws treating Vegas style gambling the same way.

<comment><USER17> > _if one want to trade crypto currencies, is that you have to record every > transaction_

This is true for all capital assets. With cryptocurrencies, the data are all public. There may be room for a service which, given a set of wallets, produces a sample tax transcript.

<comment><USER18> You still need the fiat exchange value at the time of buying/selling the cryptocurrencies (unless you only assume "token for token" trades), which is not stored on the blockchain.

<comment><USER17> Aren't those data trivial to procure for the common cryptocurrencies? For uncommon ones, just ask the user to find the price on dates X, Y and Z.

<comment><USER19> A given day could have multiple instances of open/close price _n_ for any number of trading intervals though couldn't it?

<comment><USER17> The IRS is usually fine with reasonable approximations. Tax lawyers and preparers are familiar with this problem; their input could inform a compliant system.

 _Disclaimer: I am neither a lawyer nor a tax expert. This is not legal nor tax advice. Talk to a CPA about your tax situation._

<comment><USER19> Ahh okay. Thanks for the correction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I thought you didn't need to unless you sold. If you simply buy or receive, that also needs to be reported? I have some of those stellar/lumens from when they awarded them for free for signing up back in 2016, but have never sold or transferred them.

<comment><USER21> Keep in mind:

\- Trading cryptocurrencies produces capital gains or losses, with the latter being able to offset gains and reduce tax.

\- Exchanging one token for another — for example, using Ethereum to purchase an altcoin — creates a taxable event. The token is treated as being sold, thus generating capital gains or losses.

\- Receiving payments in crypto in exchange for products or services or as salary is treated as ordinary income at the fair market value of the coin at the time of receipt.

\- Spending crypto is a tax event and may generate capital gains or losses, which can be short-term or long-term. For example, say you bought one coin for $100. If that coin was then worth $200 and you bought a $200 gift card, there is a $100 taxable gain. Depending on the holding period, it could be a short- or long-term capital gain subject to different rates.

\- Converting a cryptocurrency to U.S. dollars or another currency at a gain is a taxable event, as it is treated as being sold, thus generating capital gains.

\- Air drops are considered ordinary income on the day of the air drop. That value will become the basis of the coin. When it's sold, exchanged, etc., there will be a capital gain.

\- Mining coins is considered ordinary income equal to the fair market value of the coin the day it was successfully mined.

\- Initial coin offerings do not fall under the IRS's tax-free treatment for raising capital. Thus, they produce ordinary income to individuals and businesses alike.

[https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/30/cryptocurrency-and-taxes- wha...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/30/cryptocurrency-and-taxes-what-you- need-to-know.html)

<comment><USER22> > Exchanging one token for another — for example, using Ethereum to purchase > an altcoin — creates a taxable event. The token is treated as being sold, > thus generating capital gains or losses.

Which is absurdly difficult for the average person to account for. If I buy 60000 XRP for 4 BTC, what is my cost basis? Do I have to keep track of how much those bitcoins were worth on a different exchange with Fiat pairings at the moment I traded on a pure crypto exchange? What if I don't have that data? How is that calculation supposed to account for actual liquidation costs if I liquidate to pay my taxes?

<comment><USER23> > If I buy 60000 XRP for 4 BTC, what is my cost basis?

For the BTC? The USD value at the time you bought them.

> Do I have to keep track of how much those bitcoins were worth when I traded?

Yes

> What if I don't have that data?

You can get the transaction date via the block chain or your exchanges reporting and then lookup the USD value at the time.

> How is that calculation supposed to account for actual liquidation costs if > I liquidate to pay my taxes?

Liquidating to pay taxes is another taxable event. That's the same as if you did this with equities.

<comment><USER22> > You can get the transaction date via the block chain or your exchanges > reporting and then lookup the USD value at the time.

What if the exchange I traded on doesn't have a USD Fiat pairing? Can I use any price from any exchange that day? Can I report $0.06/BTC for an xrp sale on 4/16, the date of the major coinbase flash crash? Does it have to be the exact price at the exact time? Can I choose the USD value of the KRW/BTC market on Bithumb?

<comment><USER24> It kind of sounds like you're trying to think of tax law as some sort of CTF programming game where you're supposed to find the exploit. That's definitely not what tax law is.

You should report your taxes as honestly as possible, using reasonable prices for things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This all seems pretty reasonable IMHO. Relevant section:

* _A payment made using virtual currency is subject to information reporting to the same extent as any other payment made in property._

* _Payments using virtual currency made to independent contractors and other service providers are taxable, and self-employment tax rules generally apply. Normally, payers must issue Form 1099-MISC._

* _Wages paid to employees using virtual currency are taxable to the employee, must be reported by an employer on a Form W-2 and are subject to federal income tax withholding and payroll taxes._

* _Certain third parties who settle payments made in virtual currency on behalf of merchants that accept virtual currency from their customers are required to report payments to those merchants on Form 1099-K, Payment Card and Third Party Network Transactions._

But I think this last one is probably the most interesting to us HODLers

* _The character of gain or loss from the sale or exchange of virtual currency depends on whether the virtual currency is a capital asset in the hands of the taxpayer._

</comment><comment><USER26> There are people who have lost the key to wallets. For most of them, that is the same as not owning the cryptocurrency, but a small number might get lucky and remember where they put it, or remember enough of it to eventually recover it, at some point in the future. I haven't looked in detail, but do the rules address this scenario?

<comment><USER27> Lost assets are commonly reported on this form, which you should file if you knowingly hold coins and then lose access to them:

[https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i4684.pdf](https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs- pdf/i4684.pdf)

If you recover the property in the future after filing it as lost, pay a tax professional to advise you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> They still haven't issued guidance on how to treat forks like BTC/BCH, have they?

<comment><USER23> It's still ambiguous but the most straightforward way is to treat it as miscellaneous income, which is how I reported it.

<comment><USER25> If Apple's stock were to split and then "moon" would you claim the difference in portfolio value as misc income? That sounds nonsensical to me. The IRS guidance states it can be treated as a capital asset. You're still HODLing right? Right?

<comment><USER23> I did the research a few months ago and don't remember the details, so sorry if this is vague.

There are certain criteria that are required for something to be treated as a split and IIRC coin forks were really iffy in this case. The usual case in a stock split is that you get either more of the same security or something of similar likeness (a non voting class of shares in the case of the google split), which is arguable in the case of crypto.

You could argue it's a split to save money and if you had a huge amount in BTC at the time of the split it'd be worthwhile. My tax savings were going to end up being trivial so I went with what was "safe".

Edit: noticed your comment about Apple stock "moon"-big. If we're reporting the fork as income then it'd be income at the value at the time of the fork. So if you had one BTC then the BCH income would be $277 or so and that would become the cost basis going forward. I didn't have a lot of BTC so the actual tax cost was very low. If you're holding thousands of BTC at the time then the story would be different and you'd be incentivized to argue a different tax treatment.

Apologies for the wordiness here!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Built an app to solve this issue:

[http://zenledger.io](http://zenledger.io)

Companies like blockseer.com are being used by regulatory folks to find people skirting the rules.

</comment><comment><USER30> Do I get to report my misplaced cryptocurrency wallet password as a loss?

</comment><comment><USER31> So, reading through this discussion, I'm seeing a lot of "IRS tax law is confusing, complicated, and even contradictory on cryptocurrencies", and a lot of other people saying, in effect "well tough, it's the law, deal with it".

What I'm getting out of it all is, people who did not make money on cryptocurrencies this past year are getting some satisfaction from the difficulties of those that did.

</comment><comment><USER32> Can someone explain how a "property payment" is reported and taxed:

"A payment made using virtual currency is subject to information reporting to the same extent as any other payment made in property." [https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-reminds-taxpayers-to- report...](https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-reminds-taxpayers-to-report- virtual-currency-transactions)

<comment><USER23> Treat it as if you sold the crypto for USD (and pay capital gains). So if you bought a crypto for $10, the price appreciated to $110, and then you bough something worth $110, then you have to pay taxes on $100 of income. It's the same place you repot capital gains for equity (I don't remember the form number)

<comment><USER32> What if I bought 1BTC at $10, then I bought 1BTC at $200, then I bought something with 1BTC when BTC dropped to $100/1BTC? Which BTC was used for the purchase- the one I bought at $10 or the one at $200?

It sort of kills the use of cryptocurrency as "currency" in the US. Imagine if in the end of the year we had to report every dollar transaction (e.g. buying a coffee and a bagel), trace how you earned that dollar and calculate capital gains/loss.

<comment><USER15> If I bought 1 ton of gravel at $10, then bought one ton of gravel at $200, then swapped one ton when it was $100 for a meal out. Which ton was used for the purchase, the one I bought at $10 or the one at $200?

<comment><USER33> I'm unclear if you were asking this tongue-in-cheek, or if you really were interested and simply used an arbitrary asset for your example, but in case it was the later, here's my understanding:

Do you account typically report FIFO or LIFO?

You can register a capital loss of $100 if you account last-in-first-out, but will be on the hook when you sell your $10 gravel on the future at any price higher than $10.

You'd register a capital gain of $90 over cost if you account first-in-first- out.

AFAIK, in either case you have to account for all of your transactions the same way, for the year in question. It's not pick and chose to gain the best benefit.

Tax rate in either case would be calculated based on how long you held your gravel.

<comment><USER15> Arbitrary asset, my assumption was that bitcoin is no different to any other asset. Now you mention it, I do remember LIFO, FIFO and AvCo from when my mother was doing accountancy courses when I was a wee lad in the 90s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> "Income from virtual currency transactions", not "virtual currency transactions".

</comment><comment><USER35> The make it easy and simple to report them. Expecting regular people that can't afford expensive accountants to report potentially thousands of transactions a year is kind of crazy.

But America likes its tax system to be super complicated and complex.

</comment><comment><USER36> If someone pays me for a service in bitcoins (e.g. GPU rental), what dollar amount do I report for income? The dollar value of the bitcoin at the time I was paid? The dollar value on 12/31/2017 at 23:59?

<comment><USER37> You owe income tax on the value at the time you earned the income...

If you later sold it for more, you owe tax on the gains.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> "No", respond taxpayers.

How do they intend to record this?

<comment><USER23> Coinbase and other crypto exchanges report to the IRS for one. There's also forensic accounting where large unexplained cash flows (i.e. buying a house for money far above your income level) establish probable cause, which allows them to go fishing.

<comment><USER39> It's actually trivial to dodge US taxes. The most basic and effective way to accomplish that is to establish fiscal residency in a friendly european country. It becomes /really/ easy when you have dual citizenship.

Same applies for crypto gains, if you avoid using US based crypto-exchanges you are probably OK for the foreseeable future.

I have found that many americans overestimate the reach, competence, and sheer willpower of the IRS.

You would be surprised at what /doesn't/ happen if you stop filing taxes.

<comment><USER40> > You would be surprised at what /doesn't/ happen if you stop filing taxes.

You are right: the sun would still rise everything morning, life would continue pretty much unchanged, no one would break down the door to haul you away for not filing your return. This is not Hollywood. But a little envelope could show up in a year, two years -- or twenty years. If you do not file there is no time limit on collection of taxes, interest and penalties. [https://www.irs.gov/irm/part5/irm_05-001-019](https://www.irs.gov/irm/part5/irm_05-001-019) Maybe you are living in a van now and getting cash on the nail and can't care less. But... what if you clean up in ten years and want to live better? Even a zero return is better than no return.

And if you do not live in a van but have an actual income with a paper trail, the IRS might just file a Substitution for Return on your behalf and then, if you do not respond, they will, with the full force of the law, come after what they think you owe them, putting a federal tax lien on your real property, garnishing your wages and so on.

Once you or they filed a return, there's a ten year time limit on collecting the money, but, again, that doesn't apply if you do not file.

What really doesn't happen is criminal tax evasion charges. That's truly rare and reserved for the heavy hitters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> good read on 1031 Like-Kind exchange for those who are thinking about it.

[https://www.mdmfinancialservices.com/cryptocurrency-and- like...](https://www.mdmfinancialservices.com/cryptocurrency-and-like-kind- exchanges/)

</comment><comment><USER42> If I invest but didn't cash out, then do I have to report? And if yes, then report what?

<comment><USER43> As usual, you report income. If you bought something and did not sell it, you didn't receive any income. Replace "something" with any kind of asset.

</comment></comment><comment> k-ian why don't we just... link directly to the memo... [https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-reminds-taxpayers-to- report...](https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-reminds-taxpayers-to-report- virtual-currency-transactions)

<comment><USER44> OK! We've updated the link from [https://altcoinreport.co/irs-warns-taxpayers- to-file-cryptoc...](https://altcoinreport.co/irs-warns-taxpayers-to-file- cryptocurrency-gains/).

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> -

<comment><USER46> What isn't sane around "report your income"?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to build a technical org from scratch? - <AUTHOR>

I am considering an interesting opportunity at a pre-existing, privately held (and massively profitable) media business; they view the future of media as inextricable from technology, so I'm being asked to build not merely a technical platform but an entire technical organization, pretty much from scratch.
This is exciting; I, like most of you, have strong opinions about rightness and aesthetics in technology, and having worked in a broad swath of organizations, I also have strong feelings about culture.
But I'm worried, because this is a sui generis sort of thing. It's not the same as starting a small company, because a large company exists already; it's not the same as being hired into an existing org as a director or CTO, because there is no org. So I see a lot of scary-type challenges and potential obstacles. How do I hire? How do I interact with existing business lines? How do I interact with soon to be obsolete business lines? How do I strongly delineate what is my bailiwick and what is that of the existing structure?
Thanks for any and all input!
EDIT: This is not posted from my personal account because I want unvarnished conversation, if you get my drift. <comment><USER2> The first thing to strike me is the double-edged sword which is the current massively profitable status of the business. Any sane executive will be very careful about doing anything to harm a massively profitable business. If they are not careful that would mean that they were not fulfilling their fiduciary responsibilities to the owners.

Having said that the current leaders are trying to be very forward thinking and say we have to get deeply competent in technology because the world is changing under our feet. And for that I commend them. And, the current profitability certainly gives them the firepower to get ready for the next stage of their business.

If I were the owners I would do a multi-pronged approach. I would create a venture fund to do seed and series A venture investments and I would find the 10 most promising ideas and teams that could disrupt or replace my current business and invest from $250K to $2M in each of them, depending on the stage. I now have a chance of participating in a future big winner. And, for those ideas that don't work out I create another fund to do acquisitions of those start-ups that have forged really competent teams. It becomes a means of identifying really competent technical people and knowing that they have experience in the challenges of my media space.

In parallel to that I would go ahead and build out an internal technical organization like you have described but take it kind of slow, especially with the lines that generate the current massive profits.

Your position internally will, as you have already discerned, require the utmost of tact and team building even while you seek to make the decisive moves that the new technologically driven business requires.

You will need vocal support from the very top of the organization, expressed through your title, your budget, your reporting line, and inclusion in strategic planning sessions at the highest level in the organization. Otherwise it won't work. Those executives leading really profitable business lines will resist your "crazy" efforts to remake their golden-egg laying division, and they may be right! And, those who are already becoming obsolete and seeing their business model undercut by technologically sophisticated competitors will be fighting you out of fear.

If you can forge a vision that uses the units hard-won domain expertise and super-charge it with technology you will be the hero, otherwise you face opposition at every turn and you need authority from the very top to succeed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, this comment is extremely astute.

I'm not too terribly worried about cannibalization, as the media company is a subsidiary of the profit making business, and they don't have a lot of profit making businesses in said subsidiary. I am worried about importing an engineering culture (I have worked my entire career for engineering-focused companies) into a very different environment.

What makes this so attractive to me is that it is an out-and-up move from senior/lead/principle engineer or line manager to a director position. There would be one person between me and the CEO of the subsidiary business, and obviously relationship management is a _huge_ part of any executive job, which I view this one as.

I very much like your idea of building a seed fund, but that seems like something that would be outside my area of control. I wonder if proposing something like that might be a reasonable way of opening the conversation about defining the role that I would be playing.

Again, thanks.</comment></comment>


"Unequivocal" Front Running Denial from Go Daddy - <AUTHOR> http://inside.godaddy.com/front-running-debunking-myth/

<comment><USER2> "In fact, more than six percent of customer searches for available domain names are performed by more than one person each day."

Not a very strong argument here.</comment>


Why ghostly false positives cropped up in MH370 satellite hunt - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-03/26/ghostly-plane-images-mh370-satellite-hunt <comment><USER2> Math doesn't check out for me: plane flies at ~700mph or 0.2 miles per second. Satellite speed is on the order of 5 miles per second. Sensors separation is on the order of a few inches. It would take about 15 microseconds between first and last sensor passing over the same spot. The plane can only move around 5 millimeters in this amount of time. It looks like it's moved several hundred feet.

What am I missing?

<comment><USER3> I believe that what you are missing is the distance between the satellite and the plane. planes are at ~10,000 m altitude, GPS flies at 20,000,000 m altitude. A very small angle of distortion creates a very large distance at the plane.

<comment><USER4> Just a note - It's not GPS satellites taking the pictures. It seems to be the RapidEye [1] satellites, which are much closer to earth at 630km.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RapidEye](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RapidEye)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Since there shouldn't be too much moving around the open ocean besides planes, couldn't you use this artifact to build a semidecent search algorithim rather than going through all the data by hand?

<comment><USER6> In addition to planes and boats, "islands" of garbage also exist and they range from the size of small cars to that of small cities.

<comment><USER5> This particular type artifact is created because the plane is bright and moving FAST enough that it isn't in the same position relative to the sensor from the beginning of the image to the end. My best guess is that you need something moving at least 100MPH to see this effect at all and the position of the double image (assuming the same sensor) should be a function of the speed of the object. Islands of garbage moving fast enough to be mistaken for a plane are probably interesting in their own right.

<comment><USER5> As it turns out that the real problem here is that the all of the data from the 8th is in a pretty useless spot given what we know now. So what is useful to find is wreckage not planes. After looking at the data I'm also unconvinced that speed has anything to do with it and that the more likely cause is altitude.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thus far, have we found even a single piece of debris that we know came from the MH370?

I just don't buy the idea that the plane ended up as far south as it did and I haven't really read of any solid evidence to support this other than one blurry satellite image with a large but unidentifiable object. If that object was in fact part of the plane, I have yet to hear of any explanation as to why the plane was that far south of it's last known position instead of continuing north west.

<comment><USER8> It's a multitude of satellite images, combined with a Doppler analysis of satellite pings of the aircraft, plus a fuel-range analysis, plus a radar analysis of the northern half of the potential travel routes...

 _I have yet to hear of any explanation as to why the plane was that far south of it 's last known position instead of continuing north west._

No one knows that, yet (possibly ever). But they do know that the plane did not travel north west, as it didn't show up on the civilian or military radars of multiple countries.

<comment><USER7> Do we have any good theories explaining why the plane would have even traveled in that direction? AFAICT there is nothing in that direction on the map. What were they flying towards?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Out of all the news coverage showing the search crews manning the planes, never once did I see anyone wearing sunglasses. Wouldn't polarized glasses actually help with reflection/glare?

<comment><USER10> Polarized glasses help with reflection at a shallow angle, but the observers will be looking down, not across the surface, and when the sun is low on the horizon, all observers will be looking away from the sun, as it would be a waste of time to try to see anything up-sun, even with polarized glasses.

In addition, using polarized glasses might lead to seeing the colored bands of stress birefringence in the window, depending on what material it is made of.</comment></comment>


7 free project ideas for an academic hackathon - <AUTHOR> http://scripting.com/stories/2010/10/08/ideasForAnAcademicHackatho.html <comment><AUTHOR> [http://scripting.com/stories/2010/10/08/4MoreFreeProjectIdea...](http://scripting.com/stories/2010/10/08/4MoreFreeProjectIdeasForYo.html)

</comment><comment><USER2> 4 sounds an awful lot like any normal RSS reader!</comment>


Bypass Paywalls Clean for Firefox/Chromium - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/magnolia1234 <comment><AUTHOR> Refactored extension (no google analytics)/add-on with lots of new sites, bug- fixes, add custom sites and update-notification.

[https://github.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox- clea...](https://github.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean) [https://github.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome- clean](https://github.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean)</comment>


Can I completely opt out of (LinkedIn) endorsements? - <AUTHOR> http://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/34318

<comment><AUTHOR> The answer is: "Currently, there is no way to completely opt out of endorsements."

Was this answer helpful? No</comment>


Microsoft announces OWA for Android, Coursera's app coming this Friday - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Source?

<comment><AUTHOR> Outlook Web App: [http://venturebeat.com/2014/03/31/microsoft-announces- outloo...](http://venturebeat.com/2014/03/31/microsoft-announces-outlook-web- app-for-android/)

Coursera: I'm a beta tester</comment></comment>


Twitter Spam by Popular Media Orgs - <AUTHOR>

A practice on Twitter that really bugs me is the constant re-posting by media organizations of their tweets, sometimes reworded, but often the same tweet, over and over. Popular media outlets such as Vice, Forbes, Fast Company, and Ars do this regularly. I understand the need to push articles and capture our attention, but when does this cross the line into spam?
For discussion, I propose Twitter create a duplicate and similar post filter, that collapses similarly worded posts from Twitter accounts. Particularly those posts with the same link. I believe that by doing so it will reduce the "scroll time" needed to read a Twitter feed for a given time better, allowing for more consumption and a better experience.
Thoughts? <comment><USER2> >Thoughts?

Is it any surprise that companies with little to no social media intuition would just jump onto the bandwagon of what was, at the time, the Next Big Thing™ in social media? Social media is (or at least it used to be) an inherently organic, grassroots thing. It's been shoehorned into an advertising platform but the grating experience of reading the latest spam from Coca Cola or whoever is absolutely due to the friction caused when people try to use a conversation platform to simply blast out their latest announcements. They treat it like an RSS feed that they can post to, not like an opportunity to actually interact with their market.

Your idea has merit, but would be better off being posted on a twitter suggestions page than HN, I think.</comment>


Flash 0-day exploit - <AUTHOR> https://lists.immunityinc.com/pipermail/dailydave/2011-December/000402.html <comment><USER2> I find it amazing that browsers do not block Flash from running by default. I've posted the Chrome help page[1] that shows how to block and selectively unblock plugins to my Facebook/Twitter, as I really don't want to return home for the holidays to have lots of repair requests.

[1] [http://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en- GB&...](http://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&answer=142064)

<comment><USER3> I find chrome and ff are much more often dead-crashed by a single line of Javascript than tons of flash. Firefox even re-crashes when you open it again in many cases, without letting you prevent reloading of the offending Javascript.

<comment><USER4> If Firefox crashes when you restart it, the next time it starts it lets you choose which tabs to re-open. This solves the problem of something repeatedly crashing it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> At least VUPEN restricts who they sell to. "Step Ahead" sounds like they've dropped even the pretense of being for pen testers.

<comment><USER6> I think you mean Intevydis, "Step Ahead" is the name of the product.

Immunity makes the framework all these exploit packs plug into and acts as the primary sales channel for them. They do a pretty good job of keeping the undesirables out, but like any other desirable software product copies do have a tendency to grow legs and follow employees home.

<comment><USER5> No, I meant the product line - you don't get this bug in their "pro" version, only "step ahead" - step ahead of the vendors presumably.

It seems hard to believe that private 0-days are legitimate pentesting apparatus - what are you testing in this case, whether your enterprise runs software that someone might find a bug in in the future?

As far as I understand it canvas/Immunity is firmly in the offensive security market anyway, aren't they actively part of the scene that derides "killing bugs" aka reporting security bugs to software vendors (for any price)?

I'm sure this bug hasn't been reported to Adobe, all they'd be doing is closing their marketing window.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm expecting Chrome/Google to patch this vulnerability before Adobe does.

<comment><USER5> Google has a source license for Flash - they just get the fixes from Adobe before they've passed QA in all of their products. Google doesn't actually develop their own fixes in these cases - they just ship them faster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't understand - doesn't the security community usually give the vendors a heads-up before they announce?

Did Adobe just ignore them?

How does the 11.2 beta fair against the exploit?

[http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplatformruntimes/fla...](http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplatformruntimes/flashplayer11-2/)

</comment><comment><USER9> about:plugins in chrome to disable flash.

<comment><USER10> Good tip

I had a surprising number of random players installed too. e.g. Silverlight - requiring a critical update; amongst other plugins that I never even use any more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> In the video he says that he's using the latest version of IE, but it's IE8.

I'm not sure it'll make a difference, but maybe it could.

<comment><USER12> Presumably it is win xp? Ie9 doesnt go there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> one word: Flashblock

<comment><USER14> flashblock is not good at blocking flash from a security standpoint. with it enabled, visit <http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/html5object/> and you'll probably see at least one flash animation start.

[http://lcamtuf.blogspot.com/2011/03/warning-object-and- embed...](http://lcamtuf.blogspot.com/2011/03/warning-object-and-embed-are- inherently.html)

<comment><USER15> Maybe flashblock isn't good enough, but when combined with noscript, it didn't let anything on that page slip through.

<comment><USER14> noscript natively supports blocking embedded things with a click-to-activate interface, so if you're using noscript there's no need for flashblock.

<comment><USER16> The thing I like about NoScript is that you can set it to block everything, even on trusted sites. You have to click the placeholder to make it load, or if there isn't a placeholder (web fonts, hidden flash embeds) you have to look at the Blocked menu.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> and this is why I don't have flash installed

<comment><USER18> This was also the last straw for me. It's just not worth the risk anymore of the extra attack surface it exposes. I've uninstalled flash from all my machines and disabled it in chrome.</comment></comment>


Speech-to-Text Benchmark: Framework for benchmarking speech-to-text engines - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Picovoice/stt-benchmark <comment><USER2> I'm surprised no one has questioned that this benchmark is published by the creators of Cheetah. The conflict of interest is extreme.

Is anyone enough of a STT expert to weigh in? Why should I trust this?

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with your point. That is why we open sourced the benchmark so you can verify it yourself. You just need an Ubuntu machine with python 3.6. I appreciate the question.

<comment><USER2> It's the methodology, not the results or the code, that I'm suspicious of. For a highly variable task like STT, I'm sure an expert could contrive a test that gives far better results for either of the other programs tested.

That's why it would help to know why this test is comprehensive and representative enough to be considered unbiased or otherwise where its biases are. I don't have that expertise myself.

<comment><USER3> I think the biases are pretty obvious, but the most serious shortcoming of this benchmark is that their result (30% WER on CV) is not reproducible: it's not clear what they trained their model on, and the model itself is not available, so you just have to take their word for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comment. Just wanted to quickly clarify that the model is available here: [https://github.com/Picovoice/stt- benchmark/tree/master/resou...](https://github.com/Picovoice/stt- benchmark/tree/master/resources/cheetah)

<comment><USER3> No, "reproducible" means that I can train it on the same data you used, and get the claimed result.

Anything other than that is taking your word for it.

<comment><USER4> As someone who has no idea about ML, why is knowing how it was trained important?

I would guess to anticipate possible problems, but I don't really know.

<comment><USER5> To make sure it wasn't trained on the test set, even if by accident.

<comment><USER6> Kinda like creating your acceptance test using the same scripts as your unit test... the result would look good, but in fact be less than reliable.

<comment><USER7> More than kind of like; you nailed it: exactly like. This has been an infamous issue with machine learning for decades, where unwary researchers/developers can do this quite accidentally if they're not careful.

The thing is that training data is very often hard to come by due to monetary or other cost, so it's extremely tempting to share some data between training and testing -- yet it's a cardinal sin for the reason you said.

Historically there have been a number of cases where the best machine learning packages (OCR, speech recognition, and more) have been best because of the quality of their data (including separating training from test) more than because of the underlying algorithms themselves.

Anyway it's important to note that developers can and do fall into this trap naively, not only when they're _trying_ to cheat -- they can have good intentions and still get it wrong.

Therefore discussions of methodology, as above, are pretty much always in order, and not inherently some kind of challenge to the honesty and honor of the devs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks like Kaldi gets 4.27% WER on CV: [https://github.com/kaldi- asr/kaldi/blob/master/egs/commonvoi...](https://github.com/kaldi- asr/kaldi/blob/master/egs/commonvoice/s5/RESULTS#L19)

But that's likely trained exclusively on CV audio and using a language model derived from the CV training data so that's also not a fair comparison unless the other engines were trained the same way.

Comparing systems trained on different datasets (with different language models) like this is like comparing apples to oranges. Mixing wildly different CPU and memory requirements into the benchmarks just makes it worse.

It should be fairly straightforward to do an unbiased comparison by training and evaluating with the standard Librispeech split and language model. It might be interesting to see how accuracy improves as the models scale up until they match the resource requirements of the other engines.

That said, the speed and memory usage are impressive and I like the focus on very low resource environments. Seems like it has a lot of potential even if it may not be SOTA.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link. I'll be sure to look into it. It is impressive.

A disclaimer is that we use the valid train portion of CV as part of our training set. But it is less than 10% of the train set (in terms of hours). Also, we do not employ an LM mainly because the systems we are targeting do not have enough storage for a strong LM (usually the storage on them maxes out at 64 MB). Cheetah is an end-to-end acoustic model. For later versions, we might be able to add a well-pruned LM for specific domains with limited vocabulary to boost the accuracy with limited storage available.

I fully agree with your points. I am taking notes here as I think we should follow up on a couple of your suggestions. Scaling up to DeepSpeech model size can be a bit tricky as it would require much more compute resources (GPU). But should be quite doable with time and budget.

Thanks again for your comments and suggestions. As you correctly pointed out our main focus is the very low resource (CPU/Memory) embedded systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It would be great to have a service that let you personally audition a bunch of speech recognition engines to measure and compare how well they understand YOUR voice.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, but it'd be like getting a blood test and trying to interpret it yourself :).

There are so, so many variables - and many engines could be optimized for 'your voice and the things you're going to say right now given cpu/memory, quality of microphone, background noise etc..'

The game of NLP is inherently about dealing with 'noisy channels' (in the academic sense) in which there is kind of a probabilistic guarantee of imperfection. So then it comes down to creating the best products in a given context, which is almost always 'less than optimized' for any individual.

So there's the model size, cpu/ram, quality of signal (microphone, network) just to start.

Optimizing for standard english means probably reducing quality for people with accents. Maybe in a specific context you could go from 80% accuracy to 85% accuracy for 'most of us ' \- but then yo go from 60% to 40% for anyone with an accent.

And if you reduce the accepted vocabulary, you can get way better results. Of course, we all might want to say words like 'obvolute' and 'abalienate' every so often.

Kind of thing.

It's really fun from an R&D perspective, but it's a product managers nightmare. Consumer expectations with these technologies are really challenging because of inherent ambiguity in a system, people kind of want perfection. And there are always corner cases where it would _seem_ like things should be say, but they're not - because the word you're saying is common, and you'r saying it 'perfectly clear' ... but little do you know there are 2 or 3 other very rare words that sound 'just like that' ergo ... problems.

From a product perspective, it basically always feels 'broken' which is such a terrible feeling :).

But it can be fun if you like really hard product challenges which have less to do with tech and more to do with pure user experience, expectations, behaviours etc.

<comment><USER11> I think this is a great summary of where we are at now, but I think stronger broad-coverage language models (=expectations for what people say, better generative models of speakers) are feasible (for a couple 10s-100s of millions in R&D) to bring ASR up to parity with people. It's pretty clear we are getting close to the limits of what acoustics can offer, and it's the language model that is the next frontier both in terms of accuracy and real-time performance.

<comment><USER10> Agreed. We are getting close to a nice reality as all of the pieces are getting better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can this be used to transcribe voice data in real time?

I am building a docker image which will eventually accept in-browser audio via WebSockets outputting transcription in real time without needing Google WebSpeech.

[https://github.com/ashwan1/django-deepspeech- server](https://github.com/ashwan1/django-deepspeech-server)

I planned to use DeepSpeech but this looks promising given it's low resources.

<comment><USER13> Could you tell me some more about this? I have used the web speech recognition API in Chrome (coming soon to Firefox also) to create a free project for real- time, editable, transcriptions in the browser that could be projected on a screen or subscribed to on a person's own device.

I am frustrated by:

\- lack of cross-browser support on whatever device is generating the transcript. It will work from any Android phone but not from iOS

\- No offline functionality, because the work is actually not done locally

\- Poor accuracy.. we can correct this on the fly with the live editing, but it feels like it is not using the latest & greatest Google has to offer in terms of STT

I don't know much about Docker or how to "use" a Docker image. Not asking you to teach me, but do you think your project would be useful for what I'm talking about? Currently using Firebase for the backend but it's really just exploratory at this point.

<comment><USER12> My goal is to create a docker image with all necessary dependencies deployable with WebSocket endpoint exposed. Similar Watson S2T demo ([https://speech-to- text-demo.mybluemix.net](https://speech-to-text-demo.mybluemix.net)) which utilizes WS.

This is after I struggled to find anything in usable form on GitHub and Google Cloud pricing is prohibitive for my free projects. Perhaps there has been progress?

 _web speech recognition API in Chrome_

I looked at this last year (See my comments 8-12 months back) and it seems either Google or Chromium dev team removed recognition.speechURI . It was there in Chrome however later removed. Would have been really helpful to just switch out provider from the browsers default to an alternative perhaps cheaper or free option. I don't know enough about the decision behind this, or if it was actually working in the first place. To be fair the whole "SpeechRecognition" is still in draft. See: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/SpeechRecog...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/SpeechRecognition/serviceURI)

End goal is to easily provide ASR/S2T through WebSockets. The uses and possibilities I have thought out just myself are many and I am sure it will be of use to others.

> I don't know much about Docker or how to "use" a Docker image [....] but do > you think your project would be useful for what I'm talking about? [....]

Yes. But accuracy is probably something Google is winning on here. If your app is browser based, unless my assumption is incorrect you do not need an API key therefore are not bound by quota limits/costs.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for expanding! Yes with the spec being in draft who knows what will change. I'm really interested in seeing what the Firefox implementation turns out to be. Hopefully close enough to Chrome's that everything still works.

Are you on Twitter or is there some other way for me to know about your progress?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If Mozilla's DeepSpeech is getting a 30% WER on this test set with a >2GB model... something is very wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a bit of surprise to me as well. That being said. The dataset is a tough one. I am ESL, but some of the accented examples I have a hard time understanding. Also the recordings are not near field and there is sometime some background noise.

<comment><USER3> What is the WER of your model on Librispeech?

<comment><AUTHOR> We used entire librispeech as part of our training set.

<comment><USER3> Until you publish Librispeech WER for your model, it's pointless to discuss any advances in efficiency. I have no clue if your results on CommonVoice are good or bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hi, I'm a co-founder of [https://snips.ai](https://snips.ai) and we are building a 100% on-device and private-by-design, open-source VoiceAI platform with our own ASR which works on Raspberry Pi3, Linux, iOS, and Android

We already have a community of more than 14 000 developpers on the platform,

you can get your own assistants running on a Raspbbery Pi in less than 1h, those are a few tutorials:

\- [https://medium.com/snips-ai/voice-controlled-lights-with- a-r...](https://medium.com/snips-ai/voice-controlled-lights-with-a-raspberry- pi-and-snips-822e53d7ede6) \- [https://medium.com/snips-ai/an-introduction-to- snips-nlu-the...](https://medium.com/snips-ai/an-introduction-to-snips-nlu- the-open-source-library-behind-snips-embedded-voice-platform-b12b1a60a41a)

<comment><USER16> I can't be the only one that sees "Token Sale" and immediately loses all interest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder how these engines compare to cloud services described in [1].

[1]: [https://blog.rebased.pl/2016/12/08/speech- recognition-1.html](https://blog.rebased.pl/2016/12/08/speech- recognition-1.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great question. I believe that someone has already performed this measurement on a variety of could APIs (Google, Amazon. MS. etc.). I remember seeing it on GitHub while ago. I can't find it right now with a simple Google search. But I will spend more time later in the evening and comment here when I have it.

The comments are absolutely correct. Could services (can) do better simply because they have access to more compute resources and also data (what is sent to them can be/is used for training later). There are situations where on- device is preferred due to privacy reasons, latency, cost, or lack of internet connection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This basically seems like marketing paraded as research.

</comment><comment><USER19> If I'm reading this correctly, the resources used by Cheetah would allow your laptop to do stt for around 30 streams?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you use the CPU that we used for testing yes. It's an Intel CPU. The detail is in readme. You can do 30 streams per core. If you have 2 cores you can do 60.

<comment><USER19> With such amazing efficiency, I would suggest forking off a second branch that massively increasing complexity for gains in your WER. CPU is just going to keep getting cheaper and faster, and being able to leverage the extra cycles for a platform that has them would allow you to dominate from embedded up to the Xeon space.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a good point. Definitely a valid roadmap and something we should consider. Thank you for the suggestion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wonder if they actually trained Cheetah on a different or the same dataset they are benchmarking on.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for comment. We don't train on the dataset being tested on. I am fairly certain the other engines don't as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> What would you folks use for a much narrower use case more like an IVR system? Like if I could give a very restricted set of inputs to recognize and don't need much if any learning to happen.

<comment><USER22> IBM Watson with [https://freeswitch.org/confluence/plugins/servlet/mobile#con...](https://freeswitch.org/confluence/plugins/servlet/mobile#content/view/16352039)

Or stream to Google Cloud.

Both are used in production successfully already. Latency is on par with what you would experience calling FedEx and talking to their ASR bot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Just checked out and tried to play with it, turns out this is a binary- only(closed source) release actually. I'm on a mips platform so there is no way I can test it there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, we only offer Ubuntu x86_64 at the moment. We are planning to add more platforms (Mac and Windows). I make a note of your request and add it to our todo list. Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm curious about the background of the team. They don't seem to have any linguistics experts from what I could tell.

<comment><USER11> If that quote attributed to Fred Jelineck ("Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up") is right, they should have negative linguists.

<comment><USER7> > If that quote attributed to Fred Jelineck ("Every time I fire a linguist, > the performance of the speech recognizer goes up") is right, they should > have negative linguists.

That's a really, really, really stupid quote that pushes the increasingly popular world view that experts only drag the world down on every subject.

Linguists' contribution is unrelated to performance, positive or negative. Performance is the job of computer scientists designing architecture and of skilled programmers doing smart implementations of architecture.

The performance would probably go up if the company fired all presidents/vice presidents/CFOs etc., too (giving implementors free reign, unconstrained by costs and schedules), but the company would probably go under.

Every specialist has their own role to play. Thinking that subject domain expertise is a negative is indefensible.

<comment><USER11> I think you are misinterpreting the quote. He meant that experts (computational linguists and statisticians) had a firmer grasp of the task of inference in language than linguists, who tend to care more about formal structure (i.e. Chomsky's competence/performance distinction) and are less aware of problems like overfitting. If anything, it's stressing the importance of domain expertise, just suggesting that who those experts are may be nonobvious.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for explaining. I would then say that a quote that actually means the opposite of what it appears to mean is a stupid quote for other reasons.

Even with the explanation, it still comes across more as blaming the linguists than the people who assigned the wrong people to the wrong tasks.

(Why are they fired rather than reassigned? Why were they ever hired if they're the wrong specialty and aren't needed elsewhere?)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Synaptic Web - <AUTHOR> http://synapticweb.org/

<comment><USER2> This is eerily reminiscent of "Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex". (Or maybe I'm just being geeky.) I feel this way whenever somebody tries to compare the internet to a living organism, and I guess it's similar to the way I would feel about any system that I am a part of, and that is "more than the sum of its parts".</comment>


Wikipedia case against NSA internet snooping returns to court - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/courts/wikipedia-case-against-nsa-internet-snooping-returns-to-court <comment><USER2> Few questions after reading this:

Did NSA really stop the warrantless searches? They hinted in April they would.

What is NSA going to do with their Utah data center? Tax payers paid for it right? [https://reason.com/video/nsa-utah-data-center-spying- snowden...](https://reason.com/video/nsa-utah-data-center-spying-snowden-spy/)

James Clapper blatantly lied to Congress, is anything ever going to happen to him? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGYn7ER5U_0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGYn7ER5U_0)

<comment><AUTHOR> Clapper ran out the clock. 5-year statute of limitations hit last year

[https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/01/19/james- clap...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/01/19/james-clappers- perjury-dc-made-men-dont-get-charged-lying-congress-jonathan-turley- column/1045991001/)

<comment><USER2> Yeah I saw that. Did the last administration purposely not pursue because they knew time would pass and he would get a pass based on statue of limitations?

What's crazy is he is trying to say he did not lie... wtf! Accountability for ones actions is difficult for those in power.

[https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/mar/6/clapper- deni...](https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/mar/6/clapper-denies-lying- congress-nsa-surveillance/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> java-man we must hold the government accountable.</comment>


A deep dive into Linux namespaces, part 2 - <AUTHOR> http://ifeanyi.co/posts/linux-namespaces-part-2/ <comment><USER2> Enjoyed the user namespace section. Looking forward to the `mount` and `net` namespace sections and how they are used in docker.

</comment><comment><USER3> I feel a lot of namespace stuff make sense only if you simultaneously also look at cgroups.</comment>


Ask HN: Going to work for a big corporate as a developer? - <AUTHOR> After searching around here for similar question I could find plenty of posts asking for advice in the following career trajectories:
Big corporate --> Work in a startup
Big corporate --> Start a company
However I am keen to ask what peoples experiences have been for
* Startup / Small/Medium Tech company --> Big Corporate
The company is very big in the automobiles market and they are now doing a lot of projects to do with electric vehicles. Since they are a monolith, they decided to startup a separate tech company inside their organisation to work on these EV products. So they are claiming to have a high a good degree of autonomy from the rest of the company.
The salary is good, and its early days for the team. However I am worried about bureaucracy which does frustrate me.
After some google-fu, it seems that being a software developer in a big corporate is bit more laid back. However it is more prone to archaic business models and management plus you are at risk of vegetating away to a comfortable pension.
Most of us have seen Office Space and can relate to those situations
Interested to hear peoples experiences and advice.
Thanks <comment><USER2> I started my career at a startup and worked there for 3 years. Since then I bounced around at various companies of all sizes. Smallest company was 5 people. Largest was over 70,000.

A company is a miniature command economy that is insulated from the larger free market and interacts with it as a whole. I'm skeptical of "small autonomous teams" inside a large company. That sounds like a VP or Director who wasn't able to find greater support from the rest of the company on his pet project and managed to secure a small budget to run everything himself. Unless you're talking about a small startup that was acquired by the large company and was granted autonomy to continue business as usual while the larger org decides what to do with the team and IP.

It's impossible to say "being a software developer in a big corporate is <Cultural Norm X>" because each manager runs their own team with their own managerial style. You'll find every stress level and every team structure in a single large corp. Culture wise it's nothing but a collection of diverse people.

But I can say this about software projects at large companies: you will have many stakeholders on any given project, whether or not you are aware of it. Even if you are given "autonomy," if your project is successful it will eventually come into contact with the larger org and you will suddenly find new people with all-new demands on the project. Satisfying all these people is impossible and stress-inducing but that's part of why large corps pay so much better.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your input, would you say the stress levels are the same as what you would get in a startup?

In terms of culture, I have no idea what it will be like. I will be their 14th hire as a senior developer.

<comment><USER2> Different things stress different people out. My highest stress job was at the largest company. My startup job was medium stress (mind you, I don't live in SV). The sweet spot for me has usually been mid-size companies. What do you think causes you the most stress?

<comment><AUTHOR> Things like commuting, having fixed working hours, trapped in an expensive lifestyle.

Which is why I quit my job in London.

Deadlines and technical problems dont bother me too much.

This job is flexible working and is in a cheaper city with good links and at a London salary which is why I am attracted to it.

<comment><USER2> I say, go for it. Large companies are just large because they have more people on the payroll. If the job and team looks right to you, it doesn't matter how big the company is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> One thing that really sucks about "Big Corporate" is that raises and bonuses are typically pretty standard no matter performance of that individual. You do amazing and save the company $100 million? Great, 4% bonus! Do the bare minimum to get by? Great, 2% bonus! And then there is the standard raise which will keep up with inflation, if you're lucky. The only way I've found to get a big raise is to either have another job offer in hand and negotiate or get promoted.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, sounds like these are places you can do the bare minimum and do alright.

<comment><USER3> Yep. They can be really good for those looking for a steady paycheck and just clock in and clock out and be done with work. I don't work after I leave work (with incredibly rare exceptions), I get 25 days of PTO and the ability to work remote as needed. The work is boring but I do side projects on my own outside of work to keep my skills sharp and to scratch my "exciting" coding itch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> in my experience, pay and benefits are good, but autonomy is non-existent. all decisions are dictated from the top and none of my ideas ever got tried

<comment><AUTHOR> yea thats what I am worried about</comment></comment>


5 Early Wins That Got Our SaaS Startup 1,000 Beta Users - <AUTHOR> http://www.groovehq.com/blog/early-wins

<comment><USER2> Kind of an obnoxious popup. Close button said "No thanks, I don't want to grow my business".

<comment><USER3> haha, we thought that was kind of funny actually :) all in good humour

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> i need background story on who this guy is and where he came from, to better understand if his "insights" would be applicable to a hacker like me, or if it's only for top biz-school douchebags who already know VC's and are starting the game with $250k in the bank.

i.e. how did he get picked to be a founding member of BantamLive and how did that get bought by CC for $12MM?

i.e. start at the bottom rung of the ladder if you want real world hackers to learn something from this. otherwise it gives the impression that it's unreachable if you are starting from zip.

i tried to ask on the blog, but it appears my comments get deleted if they are not 100% supportive surfer-dude talk. so at least I'm getting an idea of what type of "transparency" is being given by these blogs. i hope i'm proven wrong when the next blog post comes out.

<comment><USER4> silence. crickets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very cool to see a first-hand account of growth hacking in action. I'm recommending this series to everyone. Great job and keep em coming!

<comment><USER3> Thanks man! Really appreciate the feedback :) Glad you're digging it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Awesome stuff, guys! Thanks for sharing!

<comment><USER3> Thanks, glad you liked it!

<comment><USER6> When does the next post come out? I really enjoyed this one too [http://www.groovehq.com/blog/death-of-the- mvp](http://www.groovehq.com/blog/death-of-the-mvp). Good stuff!</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Whats features do you need for uptime monitoring of 50 endpoints? - <AUTHOR> If you are a user of uptime monitoring service and using more than 50 monitors, what kind of service characteristics is critical to choose a service provider for that? <comment><USER2> The number of endpoints is not something I think about. One service I run has two endpoints, another has several hundred, another reads from a queue.

There are standard metrics we monitor and it is more than a heartbeat or health check endpoint with a status for each dependency. We monitor success and error counts, counts of response codes, cache hit miss ratio, latency, time spent on networked resources, time spent doing complex computation, load balance between regions, queue depths, and then specific meta data like user id, payload details like types of parameters used, size of requests, method of authentication, user agent, etc.

The key here is the number of endpoints is not interesting. We just use a label and filter on that. What is interesting is how the metrics can scale, requests per second, higher cardinality labels, data aggregation over time, retention time, the ability to set alerts, trend analysis that can alert if this Tuesday morning's graphs are odd compared to other Tuesday mornings, handling math functions like derivative and sums and percentiles, etc.

If you are purely looking for what is important for an uptime service, the minimum is that it alerts me if a heartbeat fails for too long. But I would only use such on a hobby project. If an endpoint is in production, I want all the metrics I mentioned earlier as a minimum.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reply.

I just wondering why uptime monitoring Saas services have a pricing model about the count of monitors (25, 50, etc). I got that they trying to separate hobby users from companies but for me sounds more reasonable to have tiers about a count of servers, IPs, projects (limited by some resources cap) or tiers about additional features like grpc, graphql support, alerts filtering, etc.

Also, if you have a serious project usually it makes sense to set up rich monitoring tools so maybe users of such services have specific cases. Probably they have something like a lot of simple sites, or need a cover of API endpoints by monitors but don't wanna use complex tools.</comment></comment>


Tablib: Pythonic Tabular Datasets - <AUTHOR> http://docs.python-tablib.org/en/latest/ <comment><USER2> FAQ Incoming:

How is this different from Pandas?

<comment><USER3> Presumably this is for those times when you only need a Volkswagen and not a fleet of trucks.</comment></comment>


Ask YC: Automated ways to perform credit check? - <AUTHOR>

I've been googling looking for APIs to automate credit checks of people and businesses submitting applications to a finance related website but haven't had much luck.
Has anyone in the Web2.0 space seen or heard of such a service that would provide an API and structured credit reporting data?
The only thing I've been able to find is: http://www.strikeiron.com/Catalog/ProductDetail.aspx?pv=2.0.0&pn=Cortera+Credit+Pulse
That looks okay -- and pricing isn't too crazy -- but was wondering if folks knew of anything else out there? <comment><USER2> It's not "cheap" for a license, but I looked into this company a few years back when I was thinking about getting into the space, and it seemed pretty reputable. Haven't reviewed the documentation in great detail; however, it still might be worth a look. <http://creditengine.net>

</comment><comment><USER3> I worked at a place that used: 1) Hart Software <http://www.hartsoftware.com/view/> 2) A service directly from Experian

Neither of these are Web 2.0 type solutions, but they certainly worked...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> URL: [http://www.strikeiron.com/Catalog/ProductDetail.aspx?pv=2.0....](http://www.strikeiron.com/Catalog/ProductDetail.aspx?pv=2.0.0&pn=Cortera+Credit+Pulse)</comment>


One month command line challenge - <AUTHOR> http://blog.expertinamonth.com/post/110437403117/learning-to-love-the-command-line

<comment> FLUX-YOU >Many candidates will immediately start writing a program in Java or Python, if they get it right, then they will start optimizing the algorithm

> and in most cases programmers who are comfortable with the command line > version are also the ones who are better at writing code

These two statements indicate to me that you are ineffective at communicating what skills you are looking for in a programmer.

The reason they are coding a sorting algorithm is that you're interviewing a programmer for a programming position. The assumption is that they are being tested on the knowledge in that domain, which includes sorting algorithms.

If I answered the exact same question by putting the file lines in a data structure and calling Sort() in someone else's interview, I might be thrown out for not giving them the actual algorithm that Sort() implements.

Or maybe you just want people calling system()/exec()/execvp() or whatever. I dunno.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi OP here, I am sorry! I should have added more context to the post. I have never rejected candidates solely on this basis.

Its just that I appreciate programmers who think of simpler solutions first.

<comment><USER2> I can appreciate this also. Your `sort` question reminds me of an interview where I asked the candidate to give me an example of where he used his general coding knowledge to solve a problem. He told me how he had two long lists of email addresses with duplicates that he needed to sort and merge into one unique list.

He explained his solution in which he spent considerable time writing a C++ program to do this - iirc it even wrote the unique entries to a db. He seemed stunned when I explained that he could have achieved this easily with something like `sort -u a.txt b.txt > sorted.txt`. Sorted! To be fair he was inexperienced, but there is a lot of power in the command line that some developers don't seem to be aware of at all.

In other cases, some developers who do know will still grab to the new and shiny solution every time. The simplest solution is usually good enough, and the most maintainable (if that's a concern).

Ted Dziuba's 'Taco Bell Programming' nails this perspective pretty well. I'm sure it has been posted on HN many times already:

[http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell- progra...](http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell- programming.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I was asked a variant of this sorting question (with the same expected answer) a while back. I think it's utter horseshit, just on principle that in 99% of cases the interviewer will be pissed at the answer "call the standard library's implementation that solves this problem". Why is this some exception?

<comment><USER4> I agree, it's really important to set the context for the question correctly so they don't think you are trying to ask them a question to showcase their programming abilities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Once, Ubuntu Desktop issued an update that hosed my fglxr drivers.

I needed to get some work done on a remote machine. I didn't have time to download and re-install graphics drivers so I just soldiered. GNU Screen, elinks, vim, ssh, rsync, irssi, et al. I was amazed how much distraction free actual programming I could do. On an aesthetic full-screen bash console, no less. Was even have tempted to setup Gmail in pine.

Until I needed a browser to test a layout. Finally, I had reached the limits of CLI. Believing I could merely surf to amd.com, download the appropriate tarball (linux x64 supported), unpack install reboot and rejoin modern civ.

Fired up elinks, went to amd.com and was properly re-buffed. There was a javascript "system detection" routine that could not be bypassed to navigate directly to the download urls!

In the end, apt saved the day. Moral of the story: always test your http works in elinks, please ;)

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure how I feel about the sort question being a super simple "fizzbuzz" type command line question in an interview. The problem with some of the CLI stuff is that its really a simple yes/no "do you remember that command name" type thing. For something like grep that makes sense. But as somebody who also lives in the terminal, I have mixed feelings about expecting things like wc, sort, xargs, etc out of a potential candidate.

Although, I do actually totally agree that the more a person knows about the CLI in general, the better they sometimes appear to be. I feel like learning to use command line tools also sort of inspires that general DRY attitude about software in general. Don't reinvent the wheel!

<comment><USER7> Yeah, "sort" is a super esoteric name...

(I probably agree with you more than I disagree, and I'd rate "can read a man page" more important than "remembers -n for sort", I just thought the particular objection somewhat humorous)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _" I would ask the candidate a simple sounding question

"You have a file on your computer with 100,000 unsorted numbers, each number on a new line, Sort them and write the output into a new file.

"Many candidates will immediately start writing a program in Java or Python, if they get it right, then they will start optimizing the algorithm, some of them even start talking about big data and how they need Hadoop to solve the problem.

"I am looking for the candidate who can give me this simple command line solution [...]"_

I live at the command line. I spent a year at a gig maintaining 90k lines of bash. And yet I think I stand a substantial chance of failing this test.

Not because I am incapable of trivially producing the line in question (even without recourse to the manual). But because interviewers usually aren't looking for "I would run the code someone else wrote to solve your problem". Of course, in practice, reusing code is great - and that _should_ be the answer where it's applicable! But in an interview asking for a solution to a problem where existing code cannot be the bulk of the solution is likely to be too big a question.

</comment><comment><USER8> WORD!

Generally, programmers who are afraid of the command line aren't very good at putting textual commands into a program text file, either.

They will cling for dear life to code generators and other such facilities in an IDE. (but not the good kind of code generators that define an original source DSL to be expanded into otherwise unseen code by the build process itself, always the IDE based code generators that generate mountains of crap code that now must be read and saved in source control)

They will cling to rigid, bloated, frameworks that require that they fill in parameters in an XML file, and write (many, scattered) tiny pieces of code to fill in the blanks for that framework, but which allow little variation from the application style which the framework mandates.

Beware the illiterate, programmer, grunting at cave paintings on the wall (clicking pictures on the screen, only).

See also: Pragmatic Programmers - power of text/shells sections; Neil Stephenson - "In the Beginning was the Command Line" essay.

</comment><comment><USER9> Good and sound advice but imho poorly illustrated.

I do believe that a programmer ignoring the CLI would not go far, it's not a MUST know it is a HAVE TO know.

First it is about tooling, you will unlikely use a programming language that does not work first on the command-line: the compiler(s), even for non- compiled languages like JS things like grunt, gulp, closure, etc. are part of what you have to know to be efficient.

But most importantly it is about the Unix tools philosophy, the classic "do one thing, and do it well", when you do know how those different tools are unique independently but can also connect (pipe) with each others it helps tremendously to write better code in general.

Last but not least, every single languages we take for granted now (like PHP, Python, Ruby, etc.) have all started with the CLI and with CGI, the basic abstraction of standard I/O (as in stdin, stdout) is the root of many many more complex problems.

I don't see how a programmer could have a deep understanding of HTTP for example if he/she does not grasp the CLI first, sure you may not need it all the time or to know it that deep but really knowing the details of the CLI is a bit like knowing a bit of "assembler", it is a layer of tech you really HAVE TO know to become really really good opposed as to just know enough to write some code and make it works.

Now to test it like that in an interview I would go more blunt about it "do you know the CLI, give me examples how you use it (or which tools) in different daily programming tasks?", anything CLI-related that shows knowledge of the operating system, of the compilers or other programming tools, of automating tasks, etc. is imho a sign of a damn good developper, any lack of it is probably a sign that you are either a junior dev (didn't discovered the CLI yet) and certainly not senior (can't be if you don't know the CLI).

</comment><comment><USER10> I agree that knowing the CLI (of whatever OS you use) is a good idea but ...

I'm not going to take the challenge as I have the opposite problem. Since I wrote software for 20 years before I had a GUI, I find myself using the CLI too much in certain cases. I've been trying to learn more of the hot-keys for the windowed tools that I do use ... and how to do some of my CLI tasks in a windowed environment.

One curious note: I could live with 8.3 file names (since I did for years) but I ditched Mac OSX because I couldn't tolerate it being case-insensitive.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe you should take the "One month GUI challenge" :), I wrote this for folks who are just getting started I believe that once knlowing the CLI gives you some confidence about uour computer and sets you up for easier learning in the future.

<comment><USER10> A "one month GUI challenge" would be interesting ... I'm not sure I could do it though. Would we exclude interactions with remote servers? If I use a GUI editor to create Ansible playbooks that are run against a server farm, that feels a bit like cheating.

The example in your article was great (sort) - what other tools can't you live without on the CLI? Here are a few of my favorites:

\- unique \- sed \- grep \- wc

<comment><AUTHOR> I usually get a lot of this, can you find me number of x from this file and y that DB table for December .

I find myself using 'join' a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have used CLI based interfaces with fluxbox and urxvt wherever possible for a long time now. It started when I found myself with only a laptop with low resources.

Nowadays I have a half-decent machine but I still keep resource usage low where possible. The only 'GUI' application I use on a regular basis is the web browser. Media is handled by cmus/mpv.

Widescreen monitors make it easy to have a permanent tmux sidebar. So 20-30% of the screen is made up of terminals at all times, the rest can be a web browser/IDE. Or, three panes side by side with terminals at left, vim at centre, firefox at right.

I find it cathartic. It's also really easy to knock together scripts and run them with watch. For example I have one that shows me clockspeeds, battery life, uptime, etc and takes up 2 lines on the screen.

I also find hotkey based navigation easier than futzing around with the mouse - goes doubly when i'm working mobile on a laptop.

</comment><comment><USER12> but that isn't the command line, that's unix... windows has its own sort utility but the flags are different...

also contrast the submission with this post: [http://pgbovine.net/command- line-bullshittery.htm](http://pgbovine.net/command-line-bullshittery.htm)

<comment><USER13> I read the post you linked and I disagree with it because familiarity with the *nix command line is very useful for a developer working in industry. This guy sees it as a roadblock because he believes that the complicated nature of it will turn students away who would otherwise be good computer science researchers. This could be true. In any event, the post linked here seems aimed at people who want quick vocational education.

This is the difference between being a craftsman or being an academic. If you're a craftsman, you'd better know how to use your tools well. They're not an "obstacle" in the way of interesting research. They're a means to an end in accomplishing a goal.

At some point one should realize not every programmer is a computer scientist. Many of us are so much of computer scientists as a carpenter is an architect. For those of us who like to build things rapidly, familiarity with the posix shell and variants is a huge asset.

<comment><USER14> > familiarity with the _nix command line is very useful for a developer > working in industry.

Depends on the industry. Familiarity with the command line for a Java developer is hardly required. Familiarity with the _nix command line for a C# developer is utterly useless. Ditto that for video game developers.

On the other hand, if you're writing for linux, then yes, knowing the *nix command line is going to be incredibly useful. That said, there's a lot to "know" \- it is its own programming language after all. How much familiarity do you want them to have, and what tradeoffs are you willing to assume if they have that familiarity?

<comment><AUTHOR> >Familiarity with the command line for a Java developer is hardly required.

You are assuming that developers would never require to grep app/db logs etc, I think in practice Java developers have to deal with the command line, I would partly agree with the C# bit

<comment><USER15> I'm a Java developer that touches the command line for something besides git almost every single day. Just because you're in a higher level language does not mean you don't need tooling or don't have repetitive tasks. I refuse to start a JVM just so I can do some arbitrary task.

<comment><USER16> It's also partly the case of "everything looks like a nail". I personally feel that we are problem solvers first, and "programmers" second. So using a tool is a perfectly valid way to solve a problem. In fact, it works towards one of our key programming tenets of "reusability".

As an interesting aside to that; I have recently worked with a very peculiar older developer (his age isn't related, btw). He lives, and breathes the entire Microsoft stack. Knows all the buzzwords, configs, arcane incantations, etc. Whatever problem he comes across, his first response is "write a C# program". He has riddled our source control with arbitrary little executables, sitting next to *.pdb and app.config files.

Luckily, he doesn't work on our backend which runs on AIX (and we haven't pioneered trying Mono on it, yet).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Meh. It's useful, but the "no true scotsman" argument is just wrong. Coding solutions is usually better in the long-term. It's why Perl was invented. Command-line is all about learning thousands of arcane details that anyone can just google the answer to.

<comment><USER18> I tend to agree. There have been approximately zero times I've been given a file with 100,000 numbers that needed to be sorted. Similar tasks are honestly rare enough that my intermediate command line skill has gotten me by just fine. Every once in a while a complex task pops up but I just google it and figure it out fairly quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _" If you don't know how to do a certain task with the command line, you can look up the man pages or look it up online."_

If you know the name of the command you need, read the man page. If you don't, search for the man page using apropos. If you don't know how to use apropos, read its man page.

</comment><comment><USER7> _" Of course, you can use your browser and media player etc, but for all other tasks such are writing and editing files, copying files, launching programs etc, you must use the CLI exclusively."_

Although, forgoing the web browser might do more for your productivity than anything else...

/me closes HN

</comment><comment><USER19> > After one month, you will be surprised at how inferior and cumbersome the > graphical interface seems compared to the command line.

Maybe because one does not need to change the way he/she is interacting with machine?

<comment><USER14> Depends on your goals. If you're ever asked to debug a problem on a remote Linux machine with no X, you'll be lost if all you know is the GUI.

Even if you never have to step outside of Windows, you might still benefit from learning Powershell, simply because it allows for a surprising amount of automation of routine workflows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> You may want to consider a new name, especially since you just registered this one in Jan.

Onemonth.com is in a very similar space and the conflicting names will likely hurt you.

</comment><comment><USER21> Reminds me a bit of "Learn X in 21 days" \- but then, the way we learn might got more effective.

</comment><comment><USER22> It is always a good exercise to try to accomplish more with less.

It stimulate creativity like nothing else.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is the perfect example of the whole hipster culture making it's way into web and software development.

I literally expect to see people like this writing about how they're experimenting with punch card input any day now.

<comment><USER24> What exactly is hipster culture in this context? The challenge seems like a good way for some people to learn something new. If you are familiar with the UNIX tools you can solve some problems faster than without them.</comment></comment>