Ask HN: Part-time money through programming? - <AUTHOR>

I'd like to learn to code to earn some extra money on the side, and I'm trying to figure out what language or what market would be best to go for.
My needs are:

      1. Very low-risk / high-probability of success.
            If I do it, I will almost certainly be able to make money.

      2. Easy to find the work.
            Relatively lower supply vs the demand.

      3. Short(er) path from beginning to learn to working.
            While I expect to work hard to ramp up, I
            want to begin earning soonish, even
            if it a lower rate.

      4. Allows for part-time work without having to
            move or travel much (I live in Atlanta).

      5. Visual design skills are not essential to finding work.
 I've had a few people tell me to focus on Wordpress (html, css, php). Others have said either Django or Ruby or Rails. I've also heard that learning to support a specific enterprise application may be the better way to go for my purposes.
I'd love to know what you guys think. <comment><USER2> Kudos for starting the path to self discovery, aka programming. However, it is tough to go from zero coding experience to being able to pick projects that are fulfilling and worth the money earned.

I would study the following day and night for 60 days straight if I were you:

\- HTML (so you can come up with and create designs - even if very basic) \- PHP (it is widely available, has a large market, you can prototype other people's ideas easily with it, gives you a decent base to go to other languages with) \- CSS (so your designs are at least more efficient by separating presentation from content) \- JavaScript (read: jQuery)

Spend a solid two weeks of doing html/css/js, then add PHP into the mix. Add in MySQL after another couple of weeks and then iterate on the whole system for another month. That will give you the confidence to seek out the work that will be worth your time (after 2-3 months of really hard work).

Another point: Knowing how to program is a different job than getting side work/contracts and dealing with customers. Find someone to partner with you if you can - maybe give then 25% or 33% if they are dedicated to helping you manage customer relationships. Dealing with customers takes a lot of time away from actually programming and leads to burning out sooner if you are _doing it all_.

Lastly, network as much as you can. If you do so effectively, you will meet some people who want to hire you for your skills later down the line (from a few months to 6 months or more away) so its best to get them in the pipeline early and follow up every once in a while.

<comment><USER3> I haven't worked with many other languages, but in my experience, most PHP projects are a tangled mess that are hard enough to figure out when you're an expert, much less a novice. I would recommend a language with a better user- base, and one less susceptible to newbies building big projects. I'd wager that given any 100 PHP projects vs any 100 Rails projects, the rails projects would be easier to read and understand.

<comment><AUTHOR> Does that mean you'd recommend Rails for me based on my criteria?

<comment><USER4> I would actually recommend against Rails, unless you have a fair amount of programming experience already. I really like it, and Ruby is a wonderful language, but it's extraordinarily complex. It'll get you from zero to _something_ very very quickly, but the "magic" behind the scenes will inevitably bite you, and the solutions can be difficult to grasp. It's also a very quickly changing framework, so you will have to watch out if you change versions, even fairly minor ones.

If you take your time with it, it can work, and there are a fair number of very good guides for it. But be willing to take the time you need to really understand what's going on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > I'd love to know what you guys think.

Yes. Any of the things you mentioned, there are people willing to pay you for it.

Addressing your needs:

1\. You be able to make money on any of those areas.

2\. This is the hardest thing when first starting out, there's tons of tutorials and blog entries out there on starting to freelance.

3\. Again, it shouldn't be difficult to find someone willing to take a big discount for you to learn while doing your first project.

4\. You're in Atlanta for freaking sake. There are people in Nowhere, Iowa making decent livings doing remote projects.

5\. There's plenty of templates available online for wordpress or django. This shouldn't be an impediment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great response. Thanks.

Follow-ups:

2\. Are some market/language combos more or less saturated than others? I'm willing to tackle less sexy, more difficult stuff if it makes this aspect smoother.

3\. Good point.

4\. I suppose it's more the "part-time" aspect I'm wonder about. People seem to really, really want full-time for some of these skill-sets.

5\. Good to know.

Did you have an overall recommendation? Anything I should have asked but didn't?

Thanks again.</comment></comment>


Learn Morse code - <AUTHOR> https://www.morsecode.io <comment><USER2> I totally learned. What do I do with the skill?</comment>


Digging in the Trash - <AUTHOR> http://bittersoutherner.com/digging-in-the-trash-david-joy <comment><USER3> I was born in raised in a suburban midwest area, my wife is from WV.

In some ways the area seems so backwards; a guy with the legal name "Stingray", trashy houses and trailers all over. The closest mall is an hour drive. The only local entertainment is heading to walmart or the single screen movie theater.

Yet there's an intangible charm to the area. A beautiful landscape, an absolute kindness and compassion to even unknown strangers.

>I get the same kind of questions about addiction. People don't understand what would push someone to drugs like methamphetamine or heroin. [...] That's what every single addict I've ever known really wanted: just a second to breathe.

So real.

<comment><USER4> > In some ways the area seems so backwards; [short list of lack of facilities > and features]

> Yet there's an intangible charm to the area. A beautiful landscape, an > absolute kindness and compassion to even unknown strangers.

Perhaps when all you have is each other, not only are you "forced" to realize that you rely on each other, it _allows_ you to rely on others and be relied on.

Modern suburbs and cities with their abundance of impersonal support allow us, maybe even force us, to be recluses in a crowd.

<comment><USER5> > Modern suburbs and cities with their abundance of impersonal support allow > us, maybe even force us, to be recluses in a crowd.

Being a major driver for people moving to cities, of course: you can't get what you want out in the sticks. Sometimes it's access to something concrete like a specific job or such, but other times it's because you don't "fit in" (e.g. you're gay in an intolerant area, or aren't interested in the local religion monopoly).

Hopefully those who stick around find it to their liking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I found the article and many of the comments here annoying.

Yes - rural people can be nice, helpful, friendly, wise, experienced, and unpretentious.

Rural people can also be short-sighted, rude, intolerant, gleefully embrace ignorance, and every bit as pretentious as a city-slicker.

This is because whether it's city, suburban, or rural, we're all still people. And here's the kicker: All things being equal, people are people, and some are jerks and others saints. But things AREN'T equal. I've lived in trailers, and I've owned a house - I can't tell you about your neighbors in those situations, but I can tell you about the areas.

I won't speculate the reasons here, but rural areas (more in the American South than other places I've been, but still in general) have more than their share of bitter, racist, sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, self-righteous people. This is demonstrable in a variety of statistical ways by look at different states/counties.

When reviewing the Voting Rights Act, Chief Justice Roberts asked "Is it the government's submission that the citizens in the South are more racist than the citizens in the North?". I've been there. It totally is. And the more rural, often the more racist (etc).

When you look at states where they are removing actual science from the textbooks, where are they? When you find the populations of people that want to "go with their gut" in the face of any evidence, where are they concentrated?

Of course, you can't paint with broad strokes - for me to condemn everyone in a low-population density area is just as wrong as calling them all saintly. There are many people, many towns, many areas, where what I'm talking about is less common than in many cities.

But my experience says the embrace of ignorance to be more likely there. I don't look down on someone for coming from or being in a rural area. I don't admire someone for coming to or being in a city. But the sort of "noble savage" picture that I'm seeing painted here utterly disregards the very real problems and social ills that many of these areas have.

Tell me your in/from a rural area and I don't care. Tell me you're poor, it doesn't impact my impression of your worth as a person. But don't be an asshat and surround yourself with other asshats and then complain about the reputation you're getting.

<comment><USER7> You know the illusion of open mindedness in a city - its more persistent yes. But they are not more open-minded there- they are just two-faced and can turn around on a needles pin.

Maybe you should read upon the Weimar republic- it seemed so open minded and avantgardist in the citys. But when the mood turned, the very avant-garde turned out to be the best turn-coats of them all, abandoning all they hold tear (except of there love for new tech) and leaving the other, the weak and the feeble hanging out to dry. If that situation would be mapped to valley today- the failing designer sitting in the office nearby- could be the next great chieftain, the marketing guy at the water cooler the next Goebbels. In a city, everyone is by default more separate and lonely, thus allowing for any -ism to grow rapidly once formed- into not only a disgusting ideology, but also a add-hoc family/community replacement, which is hysterically defended against any attempt to dissolve it with reason.

<comment><USER6> > But they are not more open-minded there- they are just two-faced and can > turn around on a needles pin.

If you're saying they CAN be that way, then I agree, as I said in my post. Humans that suck are everywhere, and all of us have flaws. My point is that it's often (not always) WORSE in the rural areas.

OTOH, you didn't qualify your statement at all - you said they "are just two- faced [etc]" \- and that sounds like someone ignoring all nuance to the issue.

<comment><USER7> Im not declaring all humans in citys to be that way. I presume its the same percentage of racism and baseless hatred on other beings (for whatever imagined injustice) everywhere.

In the countryside, people just dont switch there roles constantly on a hourly basis. You are who you are, with near no authority to punish you for saying what you think. On your farm, you dont have to worry about your boss, your church, your neighbors, the street, the block and that shows. So people say what they think, and everyone knows what it is and is not. You can actually, quite lively debate, racism with a racist (Recommend reading Jared Diamond and lots of history books ahead).

I know some people living in citys, and you can bet all you got that these, while today singing liberal Songs, when they would hear the mob yell for a stake, would look at all the others, and if they sees a majority, put all there former friends on a serving wagon. In your face racism and hypocrisy much preferred thank you. That way it can be addressed.

One of the things i also noticed is, that some countryside personal - <USER2> particular truckers, turn into deep thinkers, philosophers even. Routine either dumbs you down or sends the mind for a walk.

Finally, to put some perspective to the first statement- in some city's (Berlin e.g.), the neighborhoods begin to form what is basically small villages again, with the towns drunk, the village schizo and everyone looking out for one another. Such things are awesome- and very rural.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good read, and relatable as I had an uncle and two cousins who lived in a trailer in a trailer park.

It was fun to visit for a day, but a relief to go home to my safe residential neighborhood a few hours later.

It is easy to see how the trailer park environment affected the kids who had to grow up there. Child abuse of all varieties was common. This, in turn, fostered violent and irrational outbursts from the males and promiscuity in the females. I remember that there were mattresses strewn about in the woods surrounding the trailer park, and an informal scheduling process for semi- private use.

You, of course, can't apply the generalization of my anecdotal experience to every trailer park or to every family living in a specific trailer park. That said, I think that the article is a little too idyllic. There seems to be a much higher concentration of social problems - domestic disputes, child abuse, substance abuse - in trailer parks than in the surrounding areas.

<comment> joatmon-snoo I wouldn't say the piece is striving to be idyllic - rather, trying to reclaim dignity for those segments of our society that have been left behind and derided by the rest of us in our ivory towers.

<comment><USER9> I loved the part at the end where he talked about the "Doomsday Prep for the Super Rich". I'd read the same article a month or so ago, and his intution on the subject seemed spot on.

I think the mindset speaks to exactly the sort hubris that could most directly threaten our species.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I knew people like that growing up. I can't say we were friends, mainly because of the societal gulf between us.

But if you're broken down by the side of the road, or your car gets stuck in the ditch, they're some of the first people who'll stop and help you out.

<comment><USER11> Some of the nicest, most helpful people I've met lived in trailers for a time. I wouldn't even call an animal trash. Those who use that term to describe any person, let alone those people, need to check their sociopathy.

<comment><USER12> +1000

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I always love the connotations trailer parks draw to outsiders.

I spent my first 5 years of life there.

Never knew anything was wrong with it until people who've never been to one told me.

Ah, to be a child...

<comment><USER14> As a child, I always wanted to go visit and stay with one of my aunts. My Mom eventually figured out that I liked that she had neat blue water in her toilet in her trailer.

As a five year old, that was cool.

<comment><USER13> Not gonna lie, that was kinda cool even after 5...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I never knew much about that subculture. Is it bad that those people look rich to me?

They have cars, and a place of shelter that they own. They have family. I scrape by paying rent and put food on the plate, and ride a bicycle to work every day. I still can't afford to learn to drive. Parents won't support me, although I spend 3 months of savings to buy a plane ticket to see them each year, using the 8 days of holiday I'm offered. Most of my friends and colleagues earn half of what I do. The idea that someone could earn 30,000 USD in Alaska in only a few months sounds unbelievable to me. The trailer lifestyle would be an upgrade from working for a tech company in Asia.

<comment><USER16> Imo it is relative poverty within communities that is most damaging. This causes learned helplessness and deprivation of self respect. That is part of the reason the world is getting more unstable-- because it's shrinking and so people are comparing their lots to an unprecedented degree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Maybe the urban poor are completely invisible. It was a collection of stories about poor people that we're told are rural but like bad soft sci fi the setting didn't matter a bit.

I grew up with/near rural people, and will probably retire to the country, and I'll tell you four anecdotes that are genuinely specifically rural, although not necessarily poor:

1) Rural folk understand balance sheet vs income statement like urbanites don't. There are a lot of people who suffer from being land poor, where they own the land but struggle to finance day to day operations on and for that land. Life can be complicated when your septic tank breaks and all you have for income is SS and it would take 15 years of SS payments to pay someone else for a new septic system even if you had no other expenses for those 15 years ... also consider prop tax for example. If you own the land there is no building superintendent and the closest urban contractor is a 2 hour truck charge drive away, so you make do as best you and your neighbors can. There's a lot of rural paper millionaires who can't afford to fix their rusty truck.

2) Rural folk, unless they live in the upper midwest and therefore speak newscaster English accent, are generally not terribly interested in your opinion of their accent or the stereotype you think it implies. You think you're holier than thou because you're not from rural Louisiana, how nice, but sorry we don't care at all. Sort of like the stereotype of poorly socialized rural folk trying to save your soul, that's how we look at poorly socialized urbanites trying to "save us" from the wilderness that is our home. How cute, you came here to tell us we're doing it wrong, that's so funny, come back when you grow up.

3) Some rural folk are very lonely because you have to spend a significant amount of money on gas to drive a couple dozen miles to do anything. The phone is nice, but as you know a fraction of the population has an uncontrollable urge for physical presence. Those folks, especially the old ones, have a rough time, especially when their local peers die off and they literally can't afford to visit whoever is left. There is a filtration effect such that the survivors are the type who can be alone without being lonely, but as its a spectrum there will be lonely people, although not as many as if urbanites were air dropped into the wilderness. Almost stereotypical for a new teen driver, who's parents can afford it, to be assigned to drive old uncle whatshisname all over the place. Unlike urbanites this leads to rural youth learning much younger that old people have wisdom, or at least respectably interesting stories.

4) Rural areas are beautiful. Urbanites don't understand because they live without beauty, somehow. No one ever daydreamed about seeing the grease trap at McDonalds back by the overflowing dumpster on a crisp winter morning. Or watching the daily migration of the homeless as the wind blows trash past them down the street. Or inhaling diesel bus fumes on a hot summer afternoon. Living in beauty is in itself an addiction that is hard to shake, hard as a chemical addiction, leaving urbanites very confused about why ruralites don't want to move into town and live in a nice gray soviet style apartment building where they can't even see the sun and the closest green plant is miles away. Sorta like asking, "so... why not just stop shooting heroin" its not quite that simple to break an addiction... If you live essentially in a national park your whole life its very difficult to get people like that to leave.

<comment><USER18> Your last bit really spoke to me.

I live on a small farm, on a hilltop with an amazing view. After 10+ years, I barely ever notice the view unless it's something spectacular like sundogs on a clear, -10F morning, or the sun rising above a blanket of early summer fog. I only think about the location when the howling winter wind keeps us awake for hours or the hail batters the roof and windows during a summer thunderstorm.

But vistors see it differently. The first comment after walking in the front door and facing the big window is "your view is beautiful."

Even though I rarely notice it, I know I'm so addicted to the casual natural beauty around me that I could never leave. It's kind of a scary thought that I can probably never be happy living in a city again.

<comment><USER19> It took me a long time to get used to not seeing mountains all around when I moved down out of the boonies to the seacoast. My parents' house looks out south across a wooded valley at this ridiculously picturesque ridge of rolling, almost perfectly rounded hills. When I head home, it isn't until I hit those first foothills at the edge of the Appalachians that I really feel like I'm where I belong.

The other thing that I miss dearly is being able to see the stars. You can't get away from the ever-present orange street light haze around here, and it never actually gets _dark_. There's nothing like those cold, cold, clear still nights in the middle of the winter, with the moonlight on the snow and a Milky Way that you can actually see.

<comment><USER20> Same here, Ozark Mtns will always be home to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I grew up in the deep south, and my folks were the first generation in my family to move out of the trailer park (technically, their parents lived in mill villages, which was a similar indicator of poverty, but the first several years of their marriage was spent in a trailer). They made it out before I was born, so I had a lower middle class upbringing most of my life. Many of my friends were in the same situation; their folks bought houses and moved out of trailers during their childhood. There was a general trend upward, out of the trailer park and into middle class lifestyles.

What's alarming, to me, is that _many_ of those same friends are back in trailer parks, or slumlord-run apartments, today. The trend today is pushing people down and out of the middle class and back into poverty. Poor folks could scrabble their way out of poverty through the 70s to early 90s, even though we don't regard all of that time as a "good economy", my recollection was that the average family was coming up, rather than falling down. That doesn't seem to be working anymore.

The numbers seem to agree with this: the American middle class is shrinking. Some are climbing up into the upper class, but I suspect that's mostly people who never knew poverty. I think past poverty has a gravity that pulls folks back down, if anything goes awry.

Health problems have been a leading indicator among my old friends. When people get sick in America, it can be an economic disaster. Less so with ACA, but it's still too much if you're barely hanging onto your house, your car, etc.

I live in RV parks quite a bit these days, as I live in an RV and travel kinda full-time (in a leisurely manner, after many years of constant travel), and I meet a lot of people who are "choosing" to live a more minimal lifestyle in an RV. But, the reality is, they often don't have the option to live in a house; at least not one they own. The Tiny House movement seems to be a lot of the same: people who can't afford a traditional suburban home, but still have dreams of home ownership. I see the Tiny House "movement" being criticized a lot as "fetishizing poverty", but I think that misses the point that a lot of the people choosing to live in Tiny Houses aren't fetishizing being poor...they're just poor. They come from middle class backgrounds, so people just don't recognize it as poverty.

I worry that the economic divide in the US is a disaster waiting to happen for the country as a whole, but it's already causing significant pain among the people who come from a poor background and don't have family safety net to help lift them back up, when things go wrong. They just keep falling, and trailer parks, RV parks, slumlord-run apartments, etc., is where they end up. And, getting back out again is harder than it's been in a long time.

<comment><USER22> Seems like back in the 60s-70s the thing to do was to get some land not too far (1-1.5hrs driving) from a reasonably sized town where there were jobs, get a trailer and then gradually build a house next to it and move there once it's ready. Or,save some money and buy a "proper" manufactured home. I know ppl whose parents did something along these lines.

One other thing I'd add is for a lot of these ppl the "expenses breakdown" is different from the typical suburban population. They don't place too much emphasis on the actual house being up to par with their "class" \- but if you'd add up all the "toys" they own and spend significant sums of cash on - GUNS, ATVs, tractors, snowmobiles, boats, bikes, GUNS, hunting and fishing gear, GUNS etc - if you add all this up we're talking being able to afford a much better house.

<comment><USER19> > GUNS, ATVs, tractors, snowmobiles, boats, bikes, GUNS, hunting and fishing > gear, GUNS

I'm curious why the emphasis on guns... Have you looked at the relative prices of these "toys"? You can buy a helluva an arsenal for the price of one ATV or tractor or snowmobile or boat or motorcycle. Shooting shit is actually one of the cheaper recreational pastimes in rural areas, especially now that the run on .22 LR ammunition is pretty much over.

<comment><USER22> Yes plinking is cheap these days, no doubt. I emphasized guns because they are typically the #1 thing that takes precedence over anything house-related unless we're talking some major malfunction that needs to be addressed.

And they do add up - an "average" household from the likes I'm talking about would typically have 2-3 diff caliber hunting rifles, maybe a bow, a 12 and a 20 shotgun, a 22 (typically one per member of the household - rugers for the kids, henrys for the grown ups :) ), not always but almost always an AR or Mini14 or an AK.

Then there are the handguns - there would be at least one but most of the time there would be an assortment - a 9mil, something more high powered like a 40 cal glock or a .357 revolver, maybe a Kimber 1911 but that one is optional :)

All of that adds up, especially with ammo. Which, after the shortages few years back ppl are still stocking up. Not like they used to, but more like - go buy a fishing lure and if the price is right pick up $100+ worth of ammo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Posting this here is an exercise in futility. It will go right over the heads of the people who need to be exposed to these sorts of opinions.

<comment><USER12> Not always, and that is exactly the point.</comment></comment>


As usual, it's OK if you're Apple - <AUTHOR> http://www.edbott.com/weblog/2012/10/as-usual-its-ok-if-youre-apple/

<comment><USER2> Its interesting to see all of the blog postings which exist solely to point out bias in some other blog posting. Since blog postings are like the worlds biggest 'opinion' section one might think that pointing out bias is unnecessary.

So what do folks who point this stuff out hope they will achieve? Does anyone reading MG Siegler think he is anything but a total Apple Fan? Or Gruber? And do their readers not know this?

I get the angst about "Gee this person with a really big soap box is saying things that distort the 'truth.'" Where truth is defined as an opinion. But I always wonder about the point. I tell my Dad that Fox News distorts the way they report on issues to favor the conservative viewpoint, but it doesn't change either how he feels about their journalism, or his desire to share 'juicy tidbits' with me.

<comment><USER3> Everyone needs a dose of reality sometimes. And arguments such as these can bring about new ideas and changed perspectives.

These so called "Apple Fans" often seem to have the perspective that Apple's ways are inherently better. It's good to see people showing why it's not better, it's just different.

<comment><USER2> Certainly there is value in having alternative view points and other sources available, and folks who are critical consumers of information will seek them out. And I found the detail and data sources in the rant very persuasive that Microsoft's actions were no more nor less 'good' than Apple's efforts at dumping late breaking fixes into the market.

I read a great exposition on Gamasutra once which very crisply derided game companies for 'squeezing' a couple more months of development time by putting out what was beta quality at best CD's with games on them during the 'shopping rush' and having a patch available basically Christmas day when most of those sales would be unwrapped and installed. High speed internet is a curse for folks who want to play 'old' games from that period, since the 'real' game, the one that was the best build, can no longer be downloaded as a patch from the manufacturer. But it didn't need to call out specific manufacturers, just example games.

So I find calling out MG Seigler to be unnecessary, as the exemplar author of a poorly articulated piece sure, but as part of the argument on whether or not big after ship patches are 'good' or 'bad', well it doesn't add value for me. I know, I'm too sensitized to this stuff and should just ignore and move on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's amusing to watch those two go at it, but the truth probably lies somewhere in between their two extreme positions.

Is it a bad sign for Microsoft to be patching Win8 in response to OEM and enterprise feedback now? No, probably not. Bott is right that this should be expected because of how MS's ecosystem is structured. However, there could be a whole new set of bugs and deficiencies uncovered by end-users in the weeks and months following Win8's release that could require more patches.

I'm going to go out a limb and say that Win8 will require some pretty serious patches by January. I'm not saying this because I think MS is incompetent. I don't. I say this because W8 is _ambitious_. There's so much new stuff that some of it is bound to need fixing. Mountain Lion, on the other hand, was a relatively unambitious upgrade and it still needed extensive fixes. What does that say about Apple? Again, I don't think it says Apple is incompetent. It says this stuff is _hard_.

New OS versions, even relatively unambitious ones, can cause growing pains. Win8 is not unambitious. There will be problems, and _smart_ people will mellow out and give MS a chance to fix them.

</comment><comment><USER5> Usual sort of 'inside baseball' with bloggers getting upset about other bloggers' opinions. This applies to political pundits, sports pundits, gaming pundits, and, obviously, tech pundits.

These aren't the interesting thoughts you're looking for.

</comment><comment><USER6> It sounds like Rush Limbaugh complaining about some Democrats. I meant it goes both ways.

Edd Bott to Microsoft is like MG Siegler to Apple.

So, why give these Elitists any attentions at all?</comment>


IPT – Image Perspective Transformation (1996) - <AUTHOR> http://www.fmwconcepts.com/fmw/ipt.html <comment><USER2> I once used this technique to make a 2D pseudo-lidar sensor from a camera mounted on a indoor vehicle, it worked fairly well when used on uniformly textured flooring. After transforming the camera input image using an IPT, you could do some basic trig to figure out the distances away from the camera to non-floor objects.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is really cool. Does anyone have links to the math/code behind this?

<comment><USER4> The first few are simple, photograph + DEM (digital elevation model) or DTM (digital terrain model) aka height map will give you a 3D landscape with photo-accurate texture. They add manual CAD modeling in the later images, and that gives them the extra detail they need for 3D buildings / structures.

For the interior, it's a lot more impressive. They're doing photogrammetry or SLAM equivalent, reconstructing depth from stereo photographs and stitching multiple pairs together to generate a scene. They're also adding CAD in that case, as you can see with the wireframe for the generator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The title is missing a right parenthesis after the date [https://www.xkcd.com/859](https://www.xkcd.com/859) . EDIT: I originally put one in this comment, but then realised that that would be even worse once the title was fixed ….

</comment><comment><USER6> Great stuff. Would it kill this site to allow for even just the tiniest bit of context for why a 22 year old article is being posted? Also it looks like fmwconcepts.com has come up on Hacker News a few times for Fred's ImageMagick scripts. But has anyone found the code to do the perspective transformation discussed here?</comment>


CARB Finds New Audi Defeat Device, German Paper Digs Up Smoking Gun Document - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/bertelschmitt/2016/11/06/carb-finds-new-audi-defeat-device-german-paper-digs-up-smoking-gun-document <comment><AUTHOR> Hat tip [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=aburan28](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=aburan28) whose [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12885416](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12885416) submission got flagged off earlier today.

This is the Forbes version of the submitted Reuters story ( [http://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen-emissions- audi-...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen-emissions-audi- idUSKBN1300V7) ), both originated with apparently leprous German newspaper Bild.</comment>


Too Many "Tourist" VCs? Fewer big exits than total number of VC firms, 2001-09 - <AUTHOR> http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2010/08/too_many_touris.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+InfectiousGreed+%28Paul+Kedrosky%27s+Infectious+Greed%29

<comment><USER2> This points out why I feel like we are about to hit another bubble in the tech sector. Ipad/Iphone/Droid app investment is starting to get out of control, there seems to be a lot of money floating around, and unlike 2000 when the bubble burst in isolation, I'd hate to see it burst with the current economy.

If I were an engineer or someone with an early stage idea i'd be careful that you don't get lead astray by some VC who is going to tell you your both going to get rich.

Develop slowly, good solid businesses weren't built in three months. If your idea is something that can't stand the test of time perhaps VC shouldn't be throwing tons of money at it.

A lot of VC and business folks don't understand technology and engineers often don't understand good business practices and practicalities of positive revenue, net profit and cashflow. I see the blind leading the blind on a regular basis.

These next few years I think are going to be a bunch of micro roller coasters, lets just hope they bottom doesn't fall out, like it has several times before.</comment>


Send and receive Gmail on your phone as SMS - <AUTHOR> http://google-africa.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/send-and-receive-gmail-on-your-phone-as.html

<comment><USER2> This is awesome. As someone who has a 'dumbphone' but uses twitter, I'm really impressed by this.

Edit: Oh. It's only for Africa. Well I guess that's cool too.</comment>


Persistent wind has driven people mad throughout history - <AUTHOR> https://lithub.com/a-brief-eerie-history-of-how-the-wind-makes-us-crazy/ <comment><USER2> Easily the most interesting thing I've read on HN in the past month, I don't think I've ever given wind a second thought due to my local climate.

Absolutely fascinating.</comment>


Space: The Final Frontier of Profit? - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703382904575059350409331536.html?mod=WSJ_hp_editorsPicks

<comment><USER2> _Most people don't realize that the major cost of a launch is labor. Fuel is less than 2%, while the standing army of people and infrastructure is well over 80%._

Rather interesting that. I'd always thought the main expense was fuel.

I still think it's a long way off, it's not enough for a half kilometer wide asteroid to be worth $20 trillion, the minerals within have to be less expensive than earth bound alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER3> _[E]verything we hold of value—metals, minerals, energy and real estate— [is available] in near-infinite quantities in space._

Yes, and there is a pot o' gold at the end of every rainbow. A pity you have to bring it back here to be able to get any use out of it. If there were a pot o' gold in earth orbit and I had a space shuttle ready to go up and snag it I'd be better off canceling the launch, letting the gold rot, and pocketing the money saved. It doesn't matter if that pot o' gold were the size of an aircraft carrier.

How long before bored billionaires figure out that being on a souped-up jet with sucky cabin service has lost its $X-million-a-pop "story you can brag about to your friends" cachet, and we actually have to start extracting value out of space? Private industry is then going to go back to exploiting space via the only thing we can move without incurring fuel & etc costs: data, via satellites.

<comment><USER4> I think you either grossly underestimate the value of gold or overestimate the cost of a flight. (Or have a really, _really_ weird idea about economics and when you've made a profit.) Besides, even if _you_ think you're better off sitting on your ass, that doesn't mean everyone will, or should.

But your point is irrelevant, because we need those minerals anyhow. Remember the people who point out that we don't have enough platinum on Earth to make enough fuel cells for cars (and other things), or enough rare earths for other worthy green technologies? The value of those minerals is going up over time as we deplete our supply, the costs of spaceflight will go down. The question is when those curves cross, not if. There are some things that we can do a lot better with those resources that just "sitting on Earth" is not going to be a _economically_ viable alternative to.

<comment><USER5> Gold is a weird case, in that we _don't_ actually have much practical use for gold. Some, sure (electrical contacts and such), but the vast majority of its value is circular: it's valuable because people perceive it to be a safe store of value, and therefore lots of it is held in vaults. A sudden discovery of a way to get large quantities of gold to earth could cause its value to totally collapse to near-nothing.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, that's why I switched to discussing platinum. Not only is it generically useful, it's even useful strictly from a "we need to learn to live on Earth first" sense. We don't have enough for known green technologies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure that people are mentally prepared for the risks that human space flight will incur under private industry.

People will die in the name of making manned space flight affordable. Is there going to be a public backlash from this? After both Space Shuttle disasters there were year long backoffs from Shuttle launches.

A commercial entity will not have the luxury of just halting its mission for multiple fiscal quarters because of fatal engineering issues.

<comment><USER7> How many commercial fisherman died on the job last year? How many coal miners? Truck drivers? Electricians?

The fact that you don't know (neither do I) says a lot about the risks some businesses take in stride.

There's a business world outside of offices full of computers, and some of those jobs involve literally deadly risk.

And yet those industries still thrive.

<comment><USER8> _How many commercial fisherman died on the job last year? How many coal miners? Truck drivers? Electricians?_

How many electricians don't know the basics of not electrocuting themselves? His point is that space is a new frontier, and we don't yet have standard safety protocols in place. The only way to develop them will be through trial and error, which will inevitably involve the loss of human life.</comment></comment></comment>


1Password sends your password in clear text across the loopback interface - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@rosshosman/1password-sends-your-password-across-the-loopback-interface-in-clear-text-307cefca6389#.h9l20j6lv <comment><USER2> [Disclosure: I work for AgileBits, the makers of 1Password]

We've talked about this several times, most recently was in June. Please see [https://blog.agilebits.com/2015/06/17/1password-inter- proces...](https://blog.agilebits.com/2015/06/17/1password-inter-process- communication-discussion/)

This falls into the question of what can we do to prevent attacks from malicious processes running on the user's machine. For the most part, we do try to defend against something where we can. For example, we take steps to make key logging a little more difficult.

In this case, the steps (other than mere obfuscation) that would be necessary to properly encrypt that channel would require that the user be confronted with a "pairing" request and prompt almost every time they restart their browser.

Again, it would be easy to obfuscate this communication, say by using wss; but the private key for that server would still need to be stored en clare on the computer.

There are other approaches as well, but all have unpleasant side effects that risk user data in other ways.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here:

Thank you for responding. The reason I wrote this up is not to let people oh my god the world is ending but to let them know, hey if you are using the browser extension there is clear text passwords being sent over the loopback, if you don't like that then don't use their extensions.

You have made very well informed arguments about how hard it is to protect if someone has access to your machine, specifically elevated. But the argument to me seems kind of like "well, it's hard to protect against then so we just decided to not do anything at all." It seems like one other password manager company did something, so why wouldn't you?

Can you explain why it would require a pairing request every time? Couldn't you just pair it once and then be done with it? Can you explain the other approaches?

<comment><USER3> I am not affiliated with 1password, but I am a security engineer.

You are asking 1password to fix a non-issue. Sniffing loopback requires root privileges on the machine. If someone can sniff loopback, they can just as easily reach directly into the 1password processes's memory and extract the password from there, or replace 1password with a malicious extension that sends all your passwords to the attacker, or just log your keypresses. These other strategies may actually be easier than sniffing loopback. There is no reasonable defense against an attacker with root access, and encrypting communications over loopback would be a complete waste of effort and CPU time.

Honestly I feel bad for 1password that this article insinuating a security issue in their product is trending on HN when there is in fact no issue (as far as I can see, from the information presented).

<comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't always require root privileges...for instance if some program (wireshark) changes the permissions on your loopback. There are other questions there but I'll probably dig into it later.

The thing I guess I would say bothers me about your post is you just say well, if a person gets access to a machine it is basically all over which isn't necessarily the case. Even if they get root access we don't want to make it easy, right? Thats why we encrypt databases or in certain cases storage at rest so even if the hacker has root access it is sure going to be hard.

1Password can never absolutely protect against an attack when an attacker has root. But they can make it harder then just dumping out lo0. Level of effort does account for something.

<comment><USER3> > for instance if some program (wireshark) changes the permissions on your > loopback.

That would be a serious security flaw in that program. Some program could also change the permissions on /dev/mem (or really any other device), with similarly disastrous results.

You can't expect 1password to defend you against other programs disabling the security of your operating system.

> if a person gets access to a machine it is basically all over which isn't > necessarily the case.

Root access with ability to run sophisticated arbitrary code is game over, period.

Things that we should actually try to defend against (somewhat) include:

\- A human briefly sitting down at your machine while you go to the bathroom. (E.g. Chrome's UI that allows you to display back your saved passwords in cleartext with no challenge is a legitimate security flaw, IMO.)

\- Someone physically stealing your machine and then trying to dump the disk.

\- Malicious software running without priviliges.

However, malicious software running as root is game over. Sorry, it is. Trying to make it hard for such software to do bad things is simply not feasible; there are far too many avenues of attack.

> Thats why we encrypt databases or in certain cases storage at rest

No, we encrypt data at rest to defend against _physical theft of the storage medium_ , not to defend against live running processes that have root privileges.

If a malicious process has root, your encryption is meaningless. The key is in memory somewhere. The attacker doesn't really need to know where. They can dump the entirety of memory, and then cycle through it trying every N bytes as the encryption key and see if it works. This won't take very long!

<comment><USER4> You make some very good points. Question is, is there any way to know if such a malicious program is on your machine?

<comment><USER3> Maybe. Many will not hide themselves very well, but some use their power to make themselves invisible (often called a "rootkit"). I think the most promising approach to avoiding them is to use "secure boot" where the hardware verifies a signature on the firmware, which in turn verifies a signature on the OS, etc. ChromeOS devices (and some smartphones?) are pretty good at this. However, secure boot also prevents you, the rightful owner, from hacking (customizing) your own machine, which kind of sucks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> By no means an expert but is this even exploitable if the machine is not already otherwise compromised? Loopback is used for communication between two network applications on the same machine but it doesn't actually use the network device. Of course you'll be able to see it listening on your own computer but an outside computer can't sniff something that doesn't actually get transmitted over the network.

Also in order to populate the password/credit card fields at some point doesn't the information need to be decrypted? I'd be more concerned if 1Password was storing the keys to decrypt passwords in a browser plugin as that is a way easier attack vector

<comment><USER6> No, it is not exploitable.

<comment><USER7> But could it leak something - lets say antivirus or firewall with heuristics picks up the traffic and sends it for analysis?

<comment><USER6> Don't install antivirus software on OS X. Who knows what crazy shit it might do to your system?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Serious question: Why is this a bad thing, and how would you do it differently?

You need the password to be "plaintext" in the input field in the browser, so how do you get it there?

Give the extension access to your private keys and master password to do decryption there? Is the browser a safer environment than an app on your machine?

<comment><USER9> I explained in a previous comment the problem.

As for the solution, without thinking too much, using TLS to encrypt the channel would do it. If we think the browser is not safe, well, all your stack is basically compromised. But if it could handle TLS correctly (and I guess it does it pretty well since it use it to send the info to your bank) it could get the password in a sfae way...

<comment><USER10> You can't read loopback as a normal user. If you have root, you don't need to read unencrypted loopback traffic to get the passwords - just use a key logger.

<comment><USER9> Fair enough... or not!

First of all, when assessing security of a solution you have to define the perimeter of attack. You could imagine a privilege escalation that gives you access to the loopback interface but not enough to install a key-logger.

In other words, you are making an assumption that could be wrong!

Second, I could agree that perfect safety against every attack is impossible unless you assume your machine is switched off. But reasonable safety measure is achievable at low cost. Diffie and Hellman won the Turing price yesterday and their work is almost 40 years old...

<comment><USER10> > You could imagine a privilege escalation that gives you access to the > loopback interface but not enough to install a key-logger.

That's a weird thing to say. If you manage to bypass file system access rules, there's any number of ways you can get access to the password manager.

I'm not convinced that any measure 1Password could take to make this harder would amount to more than mere obfuscation, with the cost of additional complexity (and attack surface).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> At least on OSX 10.11 (not sure about others), you can't sniff loopback as a normal user.

So, if you could sniff this, you'd have elevated privs anyway, which means you could read the keyboard device, memory, etc.

Not ideal, but not sure it's a glaring hole. IMHO. I'd love to hear other thoughts on how to exploit this / how I'm underestimating this hole.

<comment><USER12> The author used `tcpdump -i lo0 -s 65535 -w info.pcap` which, as a non-root user without sudo, successfully captures loopback traffic in OS X 10.11.3.

I just tried it, and with Chrome and 1Password, I was able to see my auto- filled bank password in the pcap. So, I presume any process on my system, without root privileges, would be able to sniff loopback.

I don't see why 1Password wouldn't use TLS here. This is not good.

<comment><USER6> Your system is misconfigured.

        > $ tcpdump -i lo0 -s 65535 -w info.pcap
        tcpdump: lo0: You don't have permission to capture on that device
        ((cannot open BPF device) /dev/bpf0: Permission denied)

<comment><USER12> This is a fresh OS X install on a test machine :/

<comment><USER13> Works for me too on OS X. sudo is not needed to run tcpdump for any interfaces.

$ ls -l /dev/bpf*

crw-rw---- 1 root access_bpf 23, 0 Mar 1 09:18 /dev/bpf0

Edit: Wireshark is installed

<comment><USER6> Did you install Wireshark? Did you let it reconfigure your system? Is your current user in the "access_bpf" group?

 _Later_

Yes. Your system is misconfigured. Don't let Wireshark do that.

<comment><USER14> It looks like Wireshark will happily keep your system permanently misconfigured. To fix it, disable

/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.wireshark.ChmodBPF.plist

This actually seems like a much crummier thing than the 1Password non-thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> [https://blog.agilebits.com/2015/06/17/1password-inter- proces...](https://blog.agilebits.com/2015/06/17/1password-inter-process- communication-discussion/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Encrypted or not, if 1Password is sending passwords to the browser extension, that means its keychain is unlocked and malware, should it really want to grab data out of the keychain, could just request it from the 1Password helper itself. No need to passively sniff for passwords.

I don't really see what the vulnerability is here.

<comment><USER17> In a corporate environment, a system administrator with administrative access to employee/user machines could gain access to their credentials.

That's the big issue, I think, unless I'm missing something.

<comment><USER10> Someone with administrative access would have an almost unlimited number of ways of accessing passwords in any password manager. Key logging, memory dumps ... once your system is owned, you're SOL.

<comment><USER17> I agree, but this makes it a helluva lot easier.

<comment><USER10> I don't agree that installing a key logger (of which there are hundreds out there) and stealing the encrypted password files is in any way harder than logging lo0 and waiting for passwords to slowly trickle in while they're being used.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In february 2015 I had contact with agilebits at email@example.com and they answered me within a day. Seriously, you claim you tried to reach them, but I have a hard time believing that. What is 'not too long ago'?

<comment><USER19> He only claim he send them an email and that he then decided not to wait for an answer and publish this before they got a chance to respond. In no way is this acceptable behaviour from any security professional. In my mind he's just a kid who thought he would get some cheap points for discovering some big security issue but in the heat of the moment forgot to follow normal protocol

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm not sure what the implications are. What has access to that information? Is it public to all services on the machine?

Either way, I don't think this is 100% responsible disclosure.

<comment><USER17> Anyone with administrative access to the machine could run a capture on the loopback interface and gain access to the plain-text passwords. It's certainly an issue, albeit a limited one (the same user could sniff your keystrokes, etc.).

The author gives his justification for full disclosure in the last paragraph. As I wrote yesterday [0], opinions vary regarding "responsible" disclosure -- and the "discoverer" gets to decide how he wants to handle things.

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11206955](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11206955)

<comment><USER21> Maybe I'm not understanding fully how this works, but couldn't any user with administrative access already gain access to this information anyway? It's obviously got to be stored unencrypted in the browser's memory, regardless of how it gets there; I'm not sure what the difference is here.

<comment><USER17> They could, sure, but this lowers the bar, I think. It's a helluva lot easier to simply fire up a packet capture for a few minutes and grab the credentials from that than to go sifting through all the gigabytes of RAM for the credentials.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I believe this is the same issue that AgileBits has been aware of for some time. [https://blog.agilebits.com/2015/06/17/1password-inter- proces...](https://blog.agilebits.com/2015/06/17/1password-inter-process- communication-discussion/)

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm trying to understand when this can be a problem. I guess if you are sharing a VPN / socks proxy with multiple people? And then they are sniffing the loopback and catch your plaintext? Or something?

</comment><comment><USER24> Do other browser extensions have the ability to look at this data? Could a malicious extension have the necessary permissions to read the loopback interface data? Seems like if the 1Password extension has access, I'm not sure what would prevent others from exploiting that access as-well.

</comment><comment><USER25> I mucked with this a while back. You can dump all your passwords over the websocket pretty easily (provided your 1password is unlocked):

[https://gist.github.com/joevennix/438782cbe447e86f2506](https://gist.github.com/joevennix/438782cbe447e86f2506)

It would be more interesting if an arbitrary website could do this, but they prevent that attack by checking the Origin header on the initial websocket request.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm very skeptical of any attempts to secure already compromised machine. It's just unnecessary complications for user, bloat for software and determined attacker is likely to overcome them anyway.

</comment><comment><USER27> So how vulnerable is loopback on a machine in general? This is almost certainly not a best practice, but I can't help but wonder how practically exploitable this is.

<comment><USER28> You need superuser privileges to sniff the loopback. Which means if you're in a position to exploit this, you could just sniff the keyboard, or do any number of other malicious things instead.

This is a complete non-issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Is this post about the 1Password browser extension communicating to the Mac app?

I'd like to understand better to know whether it a similar issue affects LastPass. Though at least with LastPass we're able to use the browser extension without having the native app. I don't think that's possible with 1Password for Mac.

</comment><comment><USER6> So what?

</comment><comment><USER30> The SASL authentication protocol sends cleartext passwords across a local UNIX domain socket. That's very similar: local IPC.

I use this in a web service to authenticate users. The form containing the password is submitted over HTTPS. The CGI script opens the socket, and sends it to saslauthd, which replies OK or not.

</comment><comment><USER31> What's wrong with that?

<comment><USER9> Every app that runs on your systems with enough privilege could sniff your username and password and send it out.

That means also apps installed by a person who has access to your systems or malicious code that you, or someone who as access to your system, launched on your system. I'm not sure where it put 1Password in terms of safely storing password, but it is probably in the area of a post-it on your monitor.

I don't know what's your opinion, but if I use a password manager, I'm expecting something more

<comment><USER32> > Every app that runs on your systems with enough privilege could sniff your > username and password and send it out.

Every app that runs on your systems with enough privileges can dump the memory and extract information via that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> On a quick look this seems to be the same as the vuln discussed in [http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.06836](http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.06836).

1Password responded in a blog post here [https://blog.agilebits.com/2015/06/17/1password-inter- proces...](https://blog.agilebits.com/2015/06/17/1password-inter-process- communication-discussion/)

</comment><comment><USER34> If you can't trust your system, there is no point in encryption. There is an innumerable number of ways an attacker can get your password if you assume the attacker has system privileges.

If you have loopback sniffing privileges, you could just also ReadProcessMemory the password right out of 1passwords memory.

<comment><USER35> If this was an easy task to tackle, we wouldn't be paying a commercial entity to take care of it.

<comment><USER34> You're not understanding. The only solution to this "problem" is to not give the computer access to the password, which defeats the purpose.

But the moment you trust the password to a compromised computer, it's game over.

<comment><USER35> No, I understand, but it looks like browsers can tackle this better than any third-party could unless there's a plugin mechanism just for that purpose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> For the record, as it's been asked in the blog post: Enpass uses loopback as well, but encrypts or decodes (obfuscates?) the data somehow. I looked into decoding the data, but I wasn't able to do it (just tried for half an hour).

</comment><comment><USER37> General question: why is it so common to use loopback, vs unix domain sockets? I haven't seen the latter used outside of mail infrastructure, and they seem slightly more secure to me regarding who can connect to them.

<comment><USER38> [full disclosure: I work for AgileBits]

Two reasons we don't use unix domain sockets are: 1) they are not cross platform 2) they can't be created by browser extensions

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> On a side note I find 1Password Mini makes the browser extensions irrelevant. I think the extra steps that Mini requires are not a big deal, and you get a smaller surface area.

</comment><comment><USER40> If someone is observing your loopback isn't it just as likely they're keylogging and have your 1Password master keyphrase?

</comment><comment><USER41> This is stupid.

</comment><comment><USER42> Seems bad!

</comment><comment><USER43> While we're talking about 1Password: Why do they obscure the text editing area while I'm typing, but then de-obscure it when I'm done typing? The text I typed is visible when I'm done typing.

</comment><comment><USER44> Wow, the communication should be encrypted.

</comment><comment><USER7> That is obviously sloppy work on the part of the developers. And bad. But anyone that can snoop on loopback already owns the machine and he could just cheat engine the passwords from the browser ram.

So it is not making safe situation bad, but bad situation worse. Of course with Blizzard Warden, Steam anti cheat, driver level firewalls and all the other little helpers that collect information about your system - this could lead to a leak to some entity's logs in the cloud.

<comment><USER45> I have a problem with the phrase "obviously sloppy work on the part of the developers." How exactly does one avoid loopback in an application like this?

Your second point is spot on though I think, one would need to own the machine already before being able to sniff loopback.

<comment><USER7> Sending in plaintext is sloppy. You can have any protocol over loopback.

<comment><USER2> And where would you store the keys for that communication in a way that an attacker with root privileges couldn't get it? "Encrypting" with keys available to the attacker is mere obfuscation. In this case, it would provide no extra security to customers; all it would do is lead them to believe that something is encrypted when it is merely obfuscated.

<comment><USER46> Except that you can attack stored encryption secrets either off-line, or with the same privileges as the user.

If they are hard-coded in the binary, they can be extracted off-line by another use with the same binary. If they are generated at run-time, they have to be stored with permissions that grants the user access to their own resource.

There are programming techniques for sharing a file descriptor, but they aren't portable. That makes generating a keypair, then sharing an open file descriptor to the file containing the keypair impossible.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


3M truckers, relegated to babysitter duty - <AUTHOR> http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-driverless-economy.html

<comment><USER2> There is the obvious direct comparison with airline pilots. But it doesn't look like airline pilots became low-paid babysitters. This is still quite a respectable profession.

<comment><USER3> Because the pilots still have to be able to fly, which takes a lot of training, practice and certification. The skills called into play during a flying intervention are much more than the skills called into play by a driving intervention.

If a pilot walks, it's very expensive to replace him, because the pool of pilots are already trained and certified prior to a job app. An airline can't take anyone of the street and create a pilot. Or at least, they don't. Pilots are rare.

A trucking company _can_ take anyone off the street and create a driver/monitor, in part because virtually everyone can already drive, even if they don't yet have a CDL. Drivers are not rare.

<comment><USER2> I don't buy into this logic. If you are able to intervene (i.e. suddenly take control of a large semi at its full kinetic energy in a life-critical situation), then you need skills of the same complexity as an existing truck driver. If you are not able to intervene in a tough situation, then the truck better be riding empty (with a procedure, for situations it can't resolve on its own, to stop and wait for support personnel to arrive on a car).

<comment><USER3> Yes, you do need those skills, but they are easier to put into someone off the street who has already spent years driving. People who have spent years flying are rare.

<comment><USER2> Training cycle for airline pilots is surprisingly short, less than a year if I'm not mistaken. It's just expensive because of all the gadgets involved.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


UK man convicted for sending "menacing" tweet wins appeal - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-19009344

<comment><USER2> I can't find anything now about it, but I seem to remember he lost his job due to this. What compensation does he get for that?

<comment><USER3> As far as I can remember he was either a trainee accountant, or a financial manager. Something along those lines anyway.

As I see no mention of financial restitution I'm guessing it's a 'you no longer have a criminal record, feel lucky about that'.

<comment><USER4> He was a Financial Manager and did lose his job. He's now a trainee accountant.

I've just tweeted one of his lawyers (David Allen Green aka Jack of Kent) asking. He's normally pretty good at responding to questions (he's answered stuff I've asked before), shall post if he does.

UPDATE: This from The Guardian:

"Chambers said outside court: "It was a long, hard road. I would like to thank everyone on Twitter." He had lost two jobs because of his conviction, he said, but "it was now time to move on". After the judgment, the Crown Prosecution Service was accused by Chambers's supporters of wasting public funds in pursuing its action against the trainee accountant."

Lost two jobs though it he doesn't sound like he's looking for compensation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder what would happen if someone did the same in the US. We do have the first amendment and all, but an airport?

It seems that the constitution is null and void in all situations relevant to airports now.

<comment><USER6> The scaling back of these protections isn't unique to the airport context. The breakdown of Constitutional protections against search and seizure happened back in the 1970's and 1980's, under the conservative Burger court (in conjunction with the drug war). Middle class people are just noticing now, in the airport context, what poor minorities have been dealing with for a couple of decades now.

That said, I'm not aware of any similar breakdown in 1st amendment protections. The author's tweet in America would be evaluated under a test that would look at whether people would actually consider his statement to be a threat (keeping in mind that the internet makes it uniquely hard to convey context that might mitigate words that are threatening on their face). So far as I know, courts have been following this pretty faithfully.

<comment><USER5> I agree that minorities have totally been screwed on the 4th amendment. Same with middle class people too now. There are warrant-less checkpoints all over the country.

Fortunately, there is one fairly good guarantee of protecting your fourth amendment rights. Your smart phone.

If you suspect you're about to be unconstitutionally searched, bust out your smart phone, say I do not consent to this illegal search loud and clear, and film the cop.

If he doesn't try to steal your phone, you're all set!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The link to the full judgment was tweeted here: <https://twitter.com/JudiciaryUK/status/228777076352770048>

<comment><USER8> Impressed that the UK judiciary has a twitter feed.

Depressed that it has taken them two years to see what was obvious to everyone else in the country wrt this case

<comment><USER7> For me, the blame lies principally with the CPS and the Police, who should have exercised their judgment and not prosecuted.

<comment><USER9> I believe the police recommended that no charges be pressed but the CPS went ahead anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can this guy sue the CPS for the damage they've caused him?

</comment><comment><USER11> Next time he'll use the #joke hashtag.

<comment><USER12> #ThisIsAJokePleaseDontProsecuteMe

<comment><USER13> Why should ordinary people have to suffer? Make the terrorists use the #ThisIsAnActualTerrorThreatNoReallyItIs hashtag instead. Which would also give them far less characters left over in which to communicate their despicable intentions and so therefore they won't be able to have as big a list of things they are going to destroy. I'm sure that's more or less how these things work.

<comment><USER14> There already exists a much more efficient protocol for that: RFC3514. After all, "is this evil" only requires one bit, information-theoretically. <https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt>

<comment><USER15> Ok, I might be missing something here, but WTF? Does this bit actually have a use?

EDIT: Oh, April 1st...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> His local MP, Louise Mensch apparently tweeted 'It is for Parliament to investigate actions here'. Talk about missing the point! This man was convicted because he fell foul of the nannying, micromanaging, politically correct, busy-body society that Parliament has allowed and facilitated to evolve. We need less political interference in our lives if we are to stop absurd prosecutions like this one.

<comment><USER17> Ah, The Mensch. A foul beast if ever I've seen one. I can remember her flying off the handle and saying she was going to send the police to a fifteen-year- old's house for something he tweeted at her.

<comment><USER18> She is a reactionary showboater who will hype anything for a chance to get a face out there. I think she is a dispicable person. Who else when they get a tweet about some known person who makes silly tweets. Does she call the police to have a word with him, no she tweets come on in effect. I don't like her and she optimises all the worst in politicians. She even set up her own tweet riip off, so for her to lambast twitter is purely alteria motives. So in effect it is her showboating that casued this mess with her doing her rabble rabble in parliment.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How would you come up with $1500 in 30 days or monthly? - <AUTHOR>

Good Evening & Happy Saturday,
               If you didnt want to have a corporate america job, but was a beginner-type novice programmer/proficient Electrical Engineer with okay skills in Java/PHP/C/C++, how would you come up with $1500 in 30 days or monthly? <comment><USER2> There is risk involved, but you could be a trader. Lots of successful algorithm traders are one person shops that are later bought by banking firms like Goldman Sachs. I'd trade forex because it's simple. Two simple strategies are trading at ema crossovers and arbitrage. As a programmer, you have power to play with data and build automated trading systems (bot or assisted trading). I recall from a book on stock/futures trading that around 70% lose money, 20% stay the same, and 10% make money. Also, 10% is the average annual return rate of the stock market, but you also need to calculate taxes. This thread is a great resource on exploiting bitcoin trading, which is applicable to forex in general. [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=60501.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=60501.0)

<comment><USER3> I have been doing Forex on an off, lost tiny bit of money, but overall having a lot of trouble consistently profiting in the market.

Do you have any serious tips on how to be consistently successful.

<comment><USER4> Forex is an extremely risky niche, try stocks or something that isn't zero sum.

<comment><AUTHOR> Okay, I do more research into stocks as youve, suggested. Thanks for the input.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why the hate for corporate America? It really isn't that bad. You work half as hard for twice as much money as you would freelancing or consulting.

But if you must, front-end development is hot right now. Learn a popular JS framework like Angular or Backbone and whore yourself out to design shops. They'll work you to death but you'll have your $$. Bonus points if you can pick up Rails and therefore be able to develop an entire app soup-to-nuts.

<comment><AUTHOR> \- I have no hate for corporate america vinceguidry. I had 2 jobs as an Electrical Engineer before I resigned and decided to do a startup. Still,, I want to thank you for your advice and knowledge. Im famaliar with HTML, JS, & CSS but I will step my game up as you've suggested.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I tried freelancing, but all the work I got were way over my head. The easy ones that I try to get were already taken. I tried building a startup app but I need more time.

<comment><USER6> It sounds like you should get a job at the moment so you can build up your skills. Then you can quit and build your startup app much more quickly, and freelance on the side as necessary.

<comment><USER7> Exactly, make a list of companies doing something similar to what you plan on doing try work for them and learn the trade on their dime.

<comment><AUTHOR> \- I can see where you are coming from now. I never thought of getting a job in an area of the same skills I wanted to become an expert in.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Harvey: This is probably the worst US flood storm ever; I'll never be the same - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/08/this-is-probably-the-worst-us-flood-storm-ever-and-ill-never-be-the-same/ <comment><USER2> The Great Storm of 1900 _killed_ over 8,000 in Galveston alone and permanently ended its prominence as the jewel of the Gulf.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1900_Galveston_hurricane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1900_Galveston_hurricane)</comment>


Is an MBA a Plus or a Minus in the Startup World? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/08/is-an-mba-a-plus-or-a-minus-in-the-startup-world/

<comment><USER2> I think the actual education would be very beneficial. Most MBA schools now position themselves as very entrepreneurial. Oxford, for example, has a seed fund for startup ideas from MBA students.

The thing that puts me off doing an MBA is the time and the cost. One or two years is a long time to _not_ act on an idea if you've already got some in your head. If you don't already have some startup ideas in your head and you're thinking of doing a MBA I would argue that you're not really a startup person. There are lots of people that want to be an "entrepreneur" but don't have any actual startup ideas.

The cost is my biggest worry though. Having a £50,000 dept with £700/month repayments really does put a dampener on the idea of bootstrapping a startup. Hence why so many MBA graduates end up doing investment banking or consulting.

Me - non-coder, lots of startup ideas, entrepreneur wanabee, business school interview in a week!

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a non-technical founder who's founded one startup, joined another, and am now an Advisor at TechStars - before I go back to B school to get an MBA. And that's _after_ I did a business degree in undergrad.

To me, getting an MBA is all about option value. If I want to go to a big company, it's a prerequisite. If I want to do startups, it's not. If I want to jump back and forth, then it's a prerequisite again. I'm willing to pay $150,000 to have the option value of jumping back and forth for the thirty years after I graduate, not to mention the experience of the two years there, the network I'll have, and the other attendant benefits.

I wrote about this decision last week; maybe it'd be useful to some people here: [http://www.sachinagarwal.com/why-this-startup-guy-is- going-b...](http://www.sachinagarwal.com/why-this-startup-guy-is-going-back- to-busines)

<comment><USER4> Exactly the kind of the logic that people use to justify going into the corporate world instead of a startup. For people serious about building a successful startup the possibility of going back to a cushy corporate job if things don't work out should be the last thing on their mind.

<comment><USER5> So should health insurance by that logic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In the Startup World, it's not the MBA that matters, it's you!

<comment><USER7> I don't know much but I have a slight doubt whenever I read something like this. I presume you get an MBA to give you a better understanding about business. And startups are in essence businesses. Then how come having a better understanding not impact your startup?

<comment><USER8> The cause of the apparent paradox is that "business" spans a huge range. MBAs train you to be junior officers in the armies of managerial capitalism. But there is almost zero overlap between that sort of work and what startups do.

<comment><USER9> Do you think there could be an MBA program that teaches relevant things to what start ups do? and what would it teach?

I feel in some ways part of what Y Combinator does is like an extremely condensed business school that is relevant to start ups.

YC "spend[s] much more time teaching founders how to pitch their startups, and how to close a deal once they've generated interest." YC also invites speakers to share their knowledge <http://ycombinator.com/w9speakers.html>

I think the ultimate educational experience for a future start up entrepreneur would combine what Ars Digita University taught (programming) <http://www.aduni.org/>, web design, the relevant aspects of business, a bit of elementary worldly wisdom <http://ycombinator.com/munger.html>, and to top it all off the school would require the students to work on a start up as a side project.

<comment><USER8> Startups are one of those things that are best learned by doing, so YC pretty much already is what you're talking about. We've tried to make it the optimal way to learn about startups. But YC is structurally so different from a university that I don't think they'd be able to evolve very far in this direction.

There's a discontinuity between investment firms and schools. We've taken the investment firm and made it a lot like a school, in much the same way that seals became a lot like fishes. But as with seals and fishes, there is an unbridgeable gap despite the surface similarities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't get this either or thing. I got a BSc in Computing Science when I was a kid. I'm 30 now and preparing for the GMAT. I also keep abreast of the latest on the lean startup and on the fat startup. Why not learn it all?

<comment><USER11> In my opinion you're the ideal MBA candidate - undergrad in either engineering or a science, some work experience, then the MBA. The problem is that so many MBAs have undergrads in Business and go straight to the masters without any intervening work experience. So they don't have experience and the courses have a lot of overlap. They give the MBA a bad name, but they're the cash cow of business schools.

<comment><USER7> Where I live (India) most of the MBAs are Engineering or Science Graduates. This year only 9 people from business and 1 from arts got into IIM-A. Its a common choice among Engineers to take up MBA after there Graduation (BE/BS/B Tech).

It kind of annoys me though. Its fine if you are doing an specialization in something like Project Management, Computer Management, E-Commerce or something like that. But it just bugs me if you take up finance or banking. WTF? If you wanted to do finance or banking why the hell did you waste the one seat of Eng/Sci student. In a country where there is already a shortage of Quality Engineering studies, these people take there education from IIT and then join IIMs taking up banking or finance. This is a total waste of the Rs 900,000/- the government is spending on each IIT student. I just hate to meet someone working in a bank and them mentioning "I did an B Tech in Electrical from IIT then went to IIM".

Either I am missing the node joining finance and banking with engineering or this is really just the product of the herd mentality students here have. Its a trend now to go for MBA and they would take any branch if they get into an IIM, "Why bother, its IIM!!!".

<comment><USER12> What's an IIM and IIT? How much is 900k Rs?

<comment><USER7> IIM : Indian Institute of Management. These are the most premium B-schools of India supported by Indian government.

IIT : Indian Institute of Technology. These These are the most premium tech schools of India supported by Indian government.

900 000 Indian rupees = 19 758.6 U.S. dollars

<comment><USER13> IIT - most selective school on the planet. Much more competitive than Harvard.

<comment><USER14> Your comment inspired me to do some research, and the first page I found was this one: <http://www.kamalsinha.com/iit/acceptance-rate.html>

Given your comparison to Harvard, I thought you might be interested in this paragraph:

>While it seems true that admission rate at IITs is less than even the most selective US school like the CalTech, it does not mean IIT recruits students of higher caliber. In a country like the USA, educational resources were well developed and the enrollment capacity for engineering majors is kept about the same as the number of seniors intending to enter those programs, if not more. It means less desparation. Moreover, there are lot of top-notch schools schools of about equal caliber which decreases their selectivity figures. My guess is that the top 50 engineering schools in the USA exceed IITs in almost all respect and another 100 or so other schools are not far behind.

<comment><USER15> glen is probably referring to the ratio of the number of successful applicants to the total number of applicants - which is about 1% ( about a decade and half ago, maybe even less now).

I don't know whether it makes any sense to compare the calibre of students coming from colleges in different countries with vastly different cultures in the absence of results from common tests.

However, these people are definitely among the best from a populous country where education has a status closer to religion and is also a ticket to earn legal income disproportionate to efforts expended.

<comment><USER14> Yes, I knew that's what he was referring to. But the comparison to Harvard was obviously intended to imply something more, thus my quote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It was a very good plug for the authors' own classes that he teaches (link in the last paragraph).

<comment><USER17> I don't mind it. Almost everyone plugs their own stuff in guest posts on TC, and I've read plenty of Vivek's brilliant posts to allow a plug like that in the latest one. I do mind the fact that he maintains his affection towards the MBA and disagreement with Guy although he clearly believes an intense one-year program that focuses on the important bits is a better alternative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Being in a start up is a game. We have an idea and we are playing the game to make that idea as successful as possible. We need tools in this game - engineers, lawyers, accountants etc.. are all tools. Some tools are more useful in the beginning than others. Some tools become more important as our startup matures.

Now MBA is this awesome general degree that teaches you a bit of everything - accounting, sales, some business law. This makes you a versatile tool! :D. The question is, do you know how to best serve a startup? What can you do? What do you want to do? How will you make up for your lack of experience in a certain area - can you learn quickly? Adapt?

Many startups these days start out with the core team being engineers - they're looking to build something, so it makes sense. That said, some startups may do well with a gritty MBA who can go out there and talk to tons of people to generate / prove ideas and report back to the engineering team; take care of accounting; HR stuff if need be; etc... basically it means being the CEO from day one without worrying about the title.

Is that what you're looking for or do you just want a cusy desk job as a junior manager? ;)

</comment><comment><USER19> I think an MBA can be helpful in the right situation/startup, but in other situations it might not be needed or the person might need to unlearn some things. It's the debate between B-School and E-School (Entrepreneurship School advocated by Steve Blank).

</comment><comment><USER20> Related Reading Which You Will Find Useful: The Simple MBA Manifesto: Do We Really Need MBAs? A Presentation [http://www.slideshare.net/pramitsingh/the- success-manual-do-...](http://www.slideshare.net/pramitsingh/the-success- manual-do-we-need-mbas) Presentation Transcript is Available Here [http://bighow.com/news/the-simple-mba-manifesto-do-we- really...](http://bighow.com/news/the-simple-mba-manifesto-do-we-really-need- mbaspresentation-transcript) Do we need MBAs? A 5- part look <http://bighow.com/tags/doweneedmbas>

</comment><comment><USER21> I was a founder at consecutive startups years ago and I recently got my MBA. One thing I can attest, if I had my MBA in the past, it would have helped to run the startups more productively and efficiently.

</comment><comment><USER22> I don't think this debate will really be settled until we have actual data to deal with, which isn't likely to happen any time soon, because you'd have to observe the same people with, and without MBA's.

<comment><USER23> We actually do have some data, but a little thing like facts never hinders an uninformed opinion.

<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1127248>

<comment><USER24> That's an interesting read. Some conclusions about US-born tech startup founders include: (1) they tend to be 30+ years old, (2) they tend to have advanced degrees, especially from ivy-league schools, and (3) those with advanced degrees tend to create bigger companies, especially if they went to ivy-league schools.

I didn't see any commentary on whether someone who is older or has a degree is more likely to succeed in their venture at all. This study couldn't address that question because the survey sample was composed entirely of people who had already reached a certain threshold of success. I find the study interesting mainly because it hints at the answer to this related question, and would love to see some data that addresses this issue more directly.</comment></comment></comment>


A Plea for Developer Unity - <AUTHOR> http://www.bigspaceship.com/blog/labs/will-all-the-flash-devs-please-stand-up/

<comment><USER2> Developer here. I don't care about flash, if it dies (along with silverlight) much better. Java should go the same way. HTML is the way to go. Everything that can be done in flash or java should be ported to HTML so nobody can have control over it.

So no, wrong call for unity.

<comment><USER3> I can see your point with flash, but... Java? No, unless by Java you mean "applets" which noone uses anyway.

There is more to life than the browser, and Java (ok, the JVM: Java-the- langauge sucks) is a pretty good tool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't like the "technologies are just tools, sometimes you need one, sometimes you need another, blah blah blah" line of reasoning.

Sure, it makes a certain amount of sense, and it sounds all nice and reasonable. But that's just not the way it is. Technologies a ARE better or worse than eachother, and the choice of which to use does have technological, social and business ramifications.

The situation is actually more analogous to arguments of whether to use domestic or foreign oil, or discussions about the merits of trade unions. The options are not just handily available to pick off my workbench. They will shape the way things are done in years to come.

</comment><comment><USER4> An interesting post, but...

 _Should we always use a power drill for everything... even when a regular old fashioned screwdriver might suffice? And what of a hammer?! A jigsaw?_

This is not like the situation with the HTML5/Silverlight/Flash/Apple battle for developer mind share.

\- Information is more important than physical things, because information lasts forever and is often unique.

\- Locking information up in such a way that it _permanently_ has a gate keeper or cannot be accessed by everyone is not a good thing.

\- Through the choices developers make they directly select which technologies succeed.

\- The technologies that succeed will change what information is available and to who. (For example, if Silverlight wins, Linux users stop being able to watch Internet video. If Apple wins then everyone has to fork over money for a H.264 license. If Flash carries on winning then that's hardly perfect either.)

None of these outcomes are going to be a particular roadblock to affluent westerners (particularly Americans and/or people who aren't rigid idealists), but the impact on the developing world and also the startup environment will be pretty big.

Therefore picking sides in this particular technology struggle seems totally justified to me.

</comment><comment><USER5> The assumptions of Flash UI wouldn't work on the iPad. That is plenty of reason not to include it, all sinister corporate motives aside.

(edit: perhaps I was too brief, no mouse pointer has severe implications for Flash—think it through)

</comment><comment><USER6> Article summary:

Bitch bitch moan whine can't use Flash on iPad bitch whine moan misunderstand how application development works bitch whine moan I don't know that many languages have C FFIs or even what an FFI is whine whine moan I make all of my money working on Flash sites and am afraid of a world where Flash is irrelevant because I have no confidence in my abilities to program outside of this one limited environment where all of my experience is moan whine moan Apple sucks the iPad should run OS X.

<comment><AUTHOR> That pretty much the opposite of what the guy is trying to say. Did you even bother to read and digest the article? And what the hell has foreign function interfaces got to do with it anyway?

I despair at some of the commentary and elitist snobbery within this community that is expressed from time to time. I stumbled across this place off the back off a PG essay and loved it ever since because of the hacker nature and general level of intelligence of the people. I am starting to feel like it is a waste of my time even trying to be a part of it based on attitudes and comments like this.

But hey you mentioned FFI and expressed a populist ill judged comment, so you got my vote. Good-day sir.

<comment><USER6> No, it's exactly what he said. I don't get where you're coming from at all.

He started by saying that the iPad not having Flash is bad:

 _The announcement that the iPad won't support Flash kick started a lightning storm of opinions. The alleged issue at hand is that the iPad doesn't support Flash. This is a bad thing. [..] The iPad isn't revolutionizing netbooks, it's devolving them back to a fully closed era._

He said the platform is locked to one language in one environment:

 _One environment, one language. A cumbersome, time consuming distribution process.While you can certainly be expressive using Objective-C and with the iPad, the decisions on how a user engages with something we make should be left to the experts._

Which is not even remotely true. (Also, I'm pretty sure he just called Apple non-experts on user interface design, addition to conflating programming language with user interface design.) I have written iPhone applications in Scheme, Haskell, JavaScript, C, C++, and probably some others (in addition to Obj-C.) You can use the Objective-C layer if you want, or call the C functions directly, use the FFI from Python or other languages, etc. He thinks Objective-C is the only way to write iPhone applications because he's clueless.

He makes the claim that they aren't only a Flash company. That they are open to other technologies. And that the iPad should be an open platform for developers to do whatever they want with. Why doesn't he take his own advice? You can develop iPhone and iPad apps using something other than Objective-C. Get to it. Hell, you can even write them in AS3 and compile to a native app. Why isn't he? Why is he bitching about the closed iPad environment? Because that's not what he actually wants. He wants Flash, in the iPhone/iPad browser, so that Flash still seems relevant to corporate marketing departments, so that he can keep getting paid without having to learn something new.

As for your ad hominem attacks: blow me. I don't care what you think about me or what my comment scores are.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair enough.

This is probably what you should have expressed in the first instance, it is what I kind of expect from this community, so don't take offense at my rant. I pretty much agree with everything you are saying, gives me some perspective and it adds a lot of value to the conversation (you also just gave me a heads up on an environment I am about to learn).

<comment><USER6> Here are some things to check out if you are just getting into development for the Cocoa Touch platform. There's probably a lot of drivel out there, now that the platform has become hot shit for marketing and corporate dweebs, so there are people preying on the developer rush.

<http://www.macruby.org/> MacRuby, only works on desktop OS X right now. but I bet it will be on iPhone/iPad within a year. Runs as fast or faster than code written with a lot of Obj-C dynamic stuff in it, much easier to write. Much much easier.

Gambit Scheme builds for iPhone no problem. Basically all of the APIs can be reached directly from C instead of through Objective-C. [http://jlongster.com/blog/2009/06/17/write-apps-iphone- schem...](http://jlongster.com/blog/2009/06/17/write-apps-iphone-scheme/) has some info. At least a couple of commercial apps on iPhone have been written in Scheme.

GHC on iPhone <http://www.alpheccar.org/en/posts/show/94> so you can compile Haskell for iPhone, and then <http://github.com/nfjinjing/mps-iphone> which will help you build stuff for writing with message passing style (Smalltalk) with the iPhone APIs if you don't want to treat them like low-level C functions.

JavaScript 'native' environment, bells and whistles included: <http://www.appcelerator.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this information, much appreciated. My want to develop on the device is nothing more than a hacker wanting to play with his iphone. My business partner does love the idea of me learning it however...

Edit: typo.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


C++ as a teaching language. - <AUTHOR> http://aaminpour.github.com/Blog/2012/05/07/Using-C++-for-an-Abstraction-and-Specification-Course/

<comment><USER2> I took that exact course nearly 10 years ago at Waterloo.

Part of the problem when I took that course was that neither of the two professors who taught it actually knew C++ themselves. Our final exam contained syntax that wouldn't even compile if it had been tried on a real machine. It was a good thing that I already knew the language.

As for the course itself, I think that the problem is that the curriculum is overextended. They try to combine design, lifecycle methodologies, testing, and C++ all into one course.

I think that OP is misguided in his blanket statements about C++ being a poor teaching language to use in university. While I agree that a different language would be more useful for covering the remaining topics in that course, he's going to need C++ in years 3 and 4 whether he likes it or not. It would be a mistake not to leverage this course as an opportunity to learn about pointers.</comment>


VPN client bug in Yosemite? - <AUTHOR>

Yosemite seems to have a serious bug, causing VPN client to break when using static IP (works with DHCP). Can you confirm? <comment><USER2> Not surprisingly, Yosemite is littered with bugs. In fairness, it's still beta, but it feels exceptionally far from a production quality OS.

</comment><comment><USER3> can confirm; wifi configured with static ip, l2tp doesn't work.</comment>


Postmortem on Steambirds and the Flash game industry by Andy Moore - <AUTHOR> http://www.casualconnect.org/content/Seattle/2010/steambirdsseattle10.html

<comment><AUTHOR> There's also a great breakdown of his monetization of the game here:

<http://www.andymoore.ca/2010/03/steambirds-by-the-numbers/>

And of course the game:

<http://armorgames.com/play/5426/steambirds> or

<http://www.kongregate.com/games/weasello/steambirds> with badges</comment>