Sneak Peek Into The Future: Selectors, Level 4 (CSS4) is here - <AUTHOR> http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2013/01/21/sneak-peek-future-selectors-level-4/ <comment><USER2> Cool, the show must go on!

Would CSS4 (much prefer) consider stuff like luminance media queries [1], better contrast/color controls to the designer etc.?

[1] [http://fremycompany.com/BG/2012/Ambient-light-sensors-and- CS...](http://fremycompany.com/BG/2012/Ambient-light-sensors-and-CSS-Media- Queries-971/)

<comment><USER3> See <http://dev.w3.org/csswg/mediaqueries4/#luminosity>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _This will highlight the word being spoken in yellow._

I must be missing something here. What's the point of making something yellow if the user is using a screen reader?

<comment><USER5> One idea: Video + scrolling transcript. Current phrase is highlighted in yellow, future stuff is hidden (let's say this is an online lecture and users shouldn't be able to skip ahead), and past content that's already been watched is faded out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> anyone know what the #important does in this selector from the article?

        article:matches(.active, .visible, #important) {
           background: red;
        }

I understand what it normally does, but I've never seen it in a selector.

<comment><USER7> It continues to do what it normally does:

      article#important {

<comment><USER6> ha, never-mind. I was confusing myself thinking it was some special case a la !important. Just an ID of important.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> so confused at "input.checkbox:indeterminate"

1\. how does it know an unchecked checkbox has not been used? 2\. why was a class of 'checkbox' added to the checkbox?

</comment><comment><USER9> Oh boy this got me excited. Just to quote from the article:

"PARENT SELECTOR!"

I've been wanting this for years. One quibble is that it shouldn't be an exclamation, it should be a < character. A ! doesn't semantically make sense. Alternatively, perhaps ! keeps its current designation, but < means immediate ancestor. This would match with > meaning direct descendant.

Many of the other things, I don't see much point. They can be easily done with CSS as it is now. But, it's good to have new things coming up so lets withhold judgment till then.

<comment><USER10> > A ! doesn't semantically make sense.

Makes as much sense as the rest. ! is an operator of selected element in a selector, not a "parent selector". You can combine `!` with children selectors (`E! > F` will select any E with F children, it's equivalent to `xpath(E[F])` no use of the ancestor:: axis), they don't conflict. You don't actually go "back up" the selection chain, the matching engine simply changes which elements are "kept" during the selection process.

> Many of the other things, I don't see much point. They can be easily done > with CSS as it is now.

For highly varying values of "easily". :matches requires a preprocessor or lots of repetition; :local-link is pretty much impossible without markup processing; time-dimensional elements emulation require a fair bit of markup and scripting; :indeterminate simply isn't available; and grid-structural pseudo-classes require markup support (and potentially scripting as well if the tables are dynamic)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really wish people would stop getting so hung up on version numbers and just call the languages what they are - HTML and CSS. These aren't video game consoles or apple products.

</comment><comment><USER12> Disappointed. We don't need any parent, local link, n-th selector. Give us a lightweight scripting language where we can define these.

<comment><USER13> Isn't Javascript a lightweight scripting language? Plus I've seen some scripting done with CSS3, what exactly is missing?

<comment><USER12> I remember when the parent selector was taboo - this should be handled by javascript, yet here we are, because javascript serves a different purpose. It can be ok as well but not embedded in its current form. I'm not saying that IE got it right with its proprietary inline javascript properties or htc files, but we have css variables. How about we take it to the next step?</comment></comment></comment>


Saudi Arabia Using 140-Year-Old Loophole to Soak Up California's Scarce Water - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/25/california-water-drought-scarce-saudi-arabia <comment><USER2> How is it a loophole?

Is the loophole that you can export food? California exports a lot of food, apparently $20 billion/year worth of it (see [https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/statistics/](https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/statistics/)). Is there a reason why this food should be different?

Is the loophole that a foreign company owns the farms? There's a lot of foreign investment in other industries in California (and everywhere). Is there a reason why this industry should be different?

I'm just not seeing what is unique about this.

<comment><USER3> > How is it a loophole?

The "140-year-old loophole" is the free-of-charge 1877 federal unquantified water rights grant in Blythe, which they (among others) are exploiting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In this case SA isn't doing anything unlawful. Heck, other international companies grow in California too, what's the big deal?

If they want to disallow water to be diverted to farming, that's one thing, but singling one entity in this whole deal seems to be odd.

<comment><USER3> > In this case SA isn't doing anything unlawful.

That's why the article is calling attention to the "140-year-old loophole" that is being exploited.

> If they want to disallow water to be diverted to farming, that's one thing, > but singling one entity in this whole deal seems to be odd.

They are singling out a federal grant from when the part of California involved was essentially uninhabited and the Colorado River wasn't heavily used that gives unlimited, no-usage-charge water to users in the particular locality where the Saudi farm is located.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _The town is home to 21,000 people – 6,000 of whom are incarcerated in one of the town's two state prisons. "The prisons were supposed to bring economic development to the city," Echard told me on our way back from the dam as we sped alongside one of the primary canals. "But it hasn't done much at all."_

Side note, but while prisons don't generate all that much economic activity they count for congressional apportionment while the residents can't vote, so that's 6000 fewer people you need to worry about on election day if you're a politician.</comment>


Pomodoro technique is lame, but here's a cool app - <AUTHOR> http://nerdbusiness.com/blog/pomodoro-focus-booster

<comment><USER2> Exactly why is the Pomodoro technique lame? I used it today and was extremely productive. Here's the app/site I use: <http://tomatoi.st/></comment>


Mystery rays traced to giant black hole at galactic centre - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/milky-way-s-black-hole-may-be-spewing-out-cosmic-rays <comment><AUTHOR> The Nature article:

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature17147.html)

<comment><USER2> Any reason you didn't link to this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because the link I posted provides some less formal intro and commentary, no other reason.</comment></comment></comment>


Anti-Abuse Bus Stop Ad Only Batters Women When Nobody's Looking - <AUTHOR> http://copyranter.blogspot.com/2009/06/high-tech-anti-domestic-violence.html <comment><USER2> Typical "clever" designer wankery.

First, whether it's politically correct or not, the fact is that certain social problems are more prevalent in some demographics than others. There's more domestic violence among high school drop out first generation immigrants cohabiting than there is among married white college grads in Vermont. There's more AIDS among gay drug users than among heterosexual non drug users, etc.

However, it's remarkable that the public service messages are often targeted at the wrong demographics (both in content - e.g. the white middle-class couple in this photo, and in medium - e.g. in bus shelters in middle class areas).

Why is this done?

The vast majority of people involved in organizations that create public service ads are politically of the left, are innumerate, and hate admitting that problems are not spread evenly across all demographics.

So we get anti-HIV ads aimed at safe demographics instead of at-risk demographics.

This ad not only compounds that problem, but goes for the "clever" hook.

The excellent book _Tested Advertising Methods (Prentice Hall Business Classics)_ by John Caples and Fred E. Hahn talks about "clever" hooks - how, when they're A/B tested, they always fail. Creative types love funs, plays on words, etc.

[http://www.amazon.com/Advertising-Methods-Prentice- Business-...](http://www.amazon.com/Advertising-Methods-Prentice-Business- Classics/dp/0130957011/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1246050271&sr=8-1)

...but all the evidence shows that this DOES NOT RESULT IN RESULTS.

The fact that this new poster is deployed is yet more evidence that the people involved in non-profits are innumerate.

The unstated goal of almost every non-profit is NOT to resolve the problem under debate, it is to maximize the span of control and the comfort of the people working at the non-profit.

Phil Greenspun touches on that here:

<http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-retirement/>

So, in conclusion:

BAH! This ad embodies everything that is wrong with non-profits and public service ads.

<comment><USER3> Of course, this advertisement is in Germany. A quick google search for domestic violence demographics in germany didn't pull anything immediately useful (and neither did wolfram alpha). I'm willing to bet, though, that the demographic range for domestic violence there is a little bit different than in the USA (especially considering their racial demograph is quite a bit different: 2.1% turkish, and 6.x% 'other', mostly other european countries).

<comment><USER4> If it's in Germany, then why is the ad in English?

<comment><USER5> Your primary language is English, so when you look at the ad, you see it in English.

When a native German looks at it, it's in German.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Naturally, the man is hitting the woman.

[http://www.metafilter.com/82659/Domestic-Violence-Women- Abus...](http://www.metafilter.com/82659/Domestic-Violence-Women-Abusers-On- The-Rise)</comment>


India has exam system, not education system - <AUTHOR> http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/India-has-exam-system-not-education-system/articleshow/7977172.cms

<comment><USER2> As an Indian myself, let me explain how things work here. Like everywhere else there is a regular mix of people in India. But what one needs to really understand is that sheer volume of people in India highlights the rat race that exists in all societies at a level of contrast that attracts these articles.

In most cases, the people are from humble beginnings or from small towns and cities. And the effects of the pre FDI days still continue to exist. The mentality among parents is that opportunities are scanty, hence need to be treated precious. This leads a lot of conservative thinking. Actually right from early days of our post-independence era, the only way some one could really well off financially was to either be a doctor, engineer or do a real big business with a lot of initial investment. The other options remained joining the military or civil services. Having said all that opportunities, both in terms of jobs and college seats were very little.

Most people in the previous generation have either worked in process based factories, or small time shops like grocery shops or other places. There fore the perception automatically is "study well for a seat in a professional college else you are doomed". Now opportunities being scanty and people looking for them being more, automatically makes people go to the limits to get what they want to get.

Hence just to pass exams there are books, guides and tutorials which focus on only scoring marks! Add to that the IT boom has led to opening of "only on paper" kind of colleges where people enroll just to get a degree. I hope by now most people understand why its important.

Its important as we have linked education to money, jobs and earnings. The purpose of education is to learn and use the learning to add some value or what pg calls create wealth. Whereas by linking education to all the material stuff we automatically create a rat race. The solution is simple, award work not words(Degree abbreviations) next to one's name. Jobs must be given to one's who can 'do', not the ones who just 'know'.

Having said all that, I can honestly say there are a lot of good people who make genuine attempt to learn and build stuff. Its just that our country is really big. And like everywhere else, it will take time to overcome this huge inertia and bring in education reforms.

Government is already working towards that, they have introduced laws to bring in Grades in place of Marks and much more is in progress.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you make big bucks and get out of grinding? - <AUTHOR> Like everyone else here, I work for a tech company. I work and live in Seattle. I make around 130k with nearly 10 yrs of experience.
It seems though, I am grinding without a lot results. I was in bay area before with dieing tech company.
I have tried to see if I can do my own side project or startup, but I have not gone past idea. I don't know frontend development and I don't feel motivated to learn due to 60 to 70 hrs (including  travel) each week.
All I do is get up, go to the work,  go to gym, work again and sleep. No wonder that I am lifelong single person and despite being in shape no woman has shown interest in me or agreed to date me.
I don't know if I am burned out.
I can't figure out how can I get out of rust and daily grinding. I want to make big bucks 300k or more. I know goog/fb pay that much; but I don't have master's degree to command that much salary. I am not a native American as well. I am 31 by the way.
What did you do to get out of rust and how did you do it? Seeking guidance from men and women who have enough experience under the belt and/or successful by any definition. <comment><USER3> Sounds to me like you're unhappy with your personal life. I would suggest to focus on finding more ways to date women (e.g. dating websites, tinder, etc) and maximizing that first. Try to understand why women are not in to you, it might be because how you behave.

The first thing you should figure out is what you want to do in life, what you want to be and to achieve. Then, you will need to build a path towards there. If you plan on getting to financial independence, you need to plan it wisely.

The first option is to build a business. Some options are very safe but most are not, so it would be hard to find the right opportunity there. It is possible (I did it) but it's hard. By the way, if you don't want to do things that require front-end, you can do things like a paid API service or things like that.

The second option is to maximize salary by becoming a rare asset. Special skilled workers can bill 2k/day, putting you at around a 500k annual salary, even for doing things like front-end development. What you need to do to get there is to acquire skills that are considered to be in high demand right now in the market (e.g. front-end development, DevOps) and they don't ask you if you have a masters degree or not.

The third option is to become an executive, and that requires strategic thinking, and mainly showing your organization that they can trust on you. Plus - being super extra friendly to everyone would help.

<comment><USER4> > being super extra friendly to everyone would help.

This is a good idea no matter what your motive. As long as you don't take it to the point of appearing fake, or using your niceness to use or manipulate someone. Be genuine, and be nice.

And I agree about the women comment. Get out there and meet people, ask people out. If things don't go the way you'd like, you can always ask in an honest manner what the issue was, with the intent to use that feedback to improve yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ill give you concrete advice: 1\. you need to be smart

2\. Practice interview questions online on career cup, hanker rank, and the like. Also buy cracking the coding interview. Do all the problems.

3\. Since you are experienced, you will also have design questions in your interview loop. A list of these is harder to find online.

3.a you can read some articles on highscalability.com

3.b think how you'd design the popular products of today: Facebook messenger, Google search, Apache zookeeper, etc.

4\. Get referrals for several top tier companies: Facebook, Google, Amazon. Also apply for companies you don't plan on joining: square, twitter 5\. Sequence your interviews so that your first choice is your last interview.

6\. Before interviews go on glass door and do all the interview questions for the companies.

7\. If all goes right, enjoy your 300k+ job.

This is not theoretical. My friends and I have done this several times now.

As an aside, I don't know why HN always has a houlier-than-thou attitude when these questions are asked. The only reason I work - THE ONLY REASON - is to make money. I don't care about social media, or advertising. If money were no object I'd much rather study CS theory and code for my own enjoyment.

<comment><USER6> if you've pulled 300k in multiple jobs, why is money still an object for you? study Cs theory now! i know a few ex-quants who are self-funding their phds because they have wads of cash and their jobs were boring.

<comment><USER7> Off topic, but what does it mean to self fund a PhD? Does that mean that they don't receive a stipend or salary the way most graduate students do? Does this mean the lab they are working in isn't responsible for funding them?

<comment><USER6> My understanding is that he's getting the normal-for-the-sciences stipend, but is able to do it while not also eating rice and beans. So he's supplementing his nominal pay with his (really very significant indeed) savings.

In non-science PhD programs, sometimes you literally self-fund because those programs have no financial support for their students. This is a problem, since it effectively means that there's a huge selection bias for rich people to be the educated arbiters of, e.g., english literature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > I want to make big bucks 300k or more.

First of all, 130k is already 'big bucks'. If you want 300k+, go to medical school or start your own business. You're upset about the time you spend working, yet you also want to make more money? That is not going to happen soon. You can keep working and make more money, or work less and have more free time.

<comment><USER9> ... start your own business is either negative dollars or $300k or somewhere in the middle with a LOT of grinding (certainly a lot more than 70 hours/week). So if the goal is to make $300k guaranteed, starting your own business is not what you want to do

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What exactly do you want in life? Why do you want more money? You just complained about wanting to escape the grind, but then you want to double your salary and mention fb and google, two places notorious for high hours where you'll have to grind.

<comment><USER11> While the cost of living where the big-4 might be higher. Going from 130k to 300k would still significantly enhance a person's ability to retire very early, thus ending the grind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't understand the comments here. OP wants $300k/year. They don't need to justify why. If that's what they want, then why not go for it? There is absolutely no reason to settle.

I especially don't understand the folks that ARE making this salary but are dissuading the OP from doing so. That's kind of like saying "don't move here; we are full."

As for OP, outside of starting some passive income generating business that generates enough income to meet your needs, you will probably need to start looking outside of making software to hit your goal. While it is possible to command this much as a developer, your skills have to justify this level of pay, and current market forces are strong enough to make this difficult for you.

Most of the people I've met who are making or have made this much either started their own business (risky), went into sales and did well at it (also risky) or had great networks and exploited the right opportunities.

<comment><USER13> There's definitely some "don't move here; we are full" but I think a lot of it is just that many have learned the hard way that if you're fundamentally unhappy in your life at $130k, you may think that more money would solve your problems but $300k is probably not going to and you may have just found yourself at $300k but fundamentally even less happy than before. Some of the things that might happen to also get you there, like changing your specialty, reeducating, or starting your own business, might also address what you're dissatisfied about in life, but they may not if you're not trying to address anything but the money.

A while ago I was quite depressed, and all of the problems in my life that I could've listed for you on a piece of paper boiled down to not making enough money to live where the job required me to. I worked way too hard to address that. It affected my family life, my mental health, and didn't yield the financial benefits I hoped it would. The ultimate fix to my happiness was actually a very big, risky hit to my career. I don't have the job security I used to have at all - but I am happy. I would hate for OP to get to $300k a year and still be unhappy. By all means try, but really do step back and ask yourself if $300k will make you happy. $130k is probably a typical salary in Seattle from my understanding, so not exactly "raking it in" and buying jet skis every weekend, but also unlikely to be the real source of frustration in life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> As someone who has made "the big bucks", let me tell you - it's overrated. At least, in the fashion in which people generally proceed once they have capital.

The thing is, most of the time one finds that expenditures grow to match income and capital - you have shinier toys, a bigger box to keep them in, and the ratio between income and expense stays constant. You find yourself constantly levering up, reassessing what it is to be rich, aspiring to loftier goals - all of which are just a slight rotation of the hamster wheel.

I finally reached the conclusion that the only winning move is not to play. Sold up. Went frugal (feral?).

I'm now travelling the world marvelling at how far how little can go in some corners, and considering the next move. Subsistence permaculture up a mountain is looking appealing at the moment - and the capital outlay is tiny. I can retire, at 32, and enjoy living.

130k is a lot of money, but so is Seattle. In much of the world, it would be a fortune that you could live off for decades, not a year.

Ultimately it comes down to what you want in life. Money is gas in the tank, which can take you places - but like gasoline, having a lot of it sitting around does little for you - how you apply it is what makes the difference - and even if you have no gas, you can still walk.

So - the question is, what brings you happiness? Not money - many think it does because there's a gap in the chain of logic, whereby the means somehow become the ends, but if you think about what you want money _for_ , it might reveal that money isn't actually what you want, but you've spent long enough in the pursuit of it that your true goals have been left by the wayside.

I can't pretend to have the answers, but I can say that I'm having the time of my life on $20 a day, living in a van.

The other thing that has opened my eyes is that I'm not alone in this conclusion. The more I wander, the more I meet disillusioned entrepreneurs who have likewise sacked it all in to be a vagrant.

I write this sat on the terminal moraine of a glacier, watching a little bird slowly edge closer to me, and the shadows creeping over the mountains. The air smells like moss and honey.

You can't buy this, but I feel something I thought I had lost - happiness.

<comment><USER15> Pretty cool. I hope you don't get sick, sincerely. Also, I hope you've done the hard thinking about the years when you are 50-60+ years of age. Life changes as you age.

<comment><USER14> I've had my share of health troubles - and it turns out healthcare is surprisingly good and surprisingly affordable in parts of the world where you wouldn't expect it. I had a laparoscopic cholecystectomy in Thailand for $250.

In terms of the mysterious future - what's the point in preserving a half-life until the bitter end, an enfeebled and intubated shadow of a living thing?

I know plenty of diligent planners who had their plans shattered by fate - <USER2> was one.

If anything, dicing with my own mortality pushed me towards _not_ worrying about a future that may never happen.

If I one day get a serious health nasty, I will likely die. If it's treatable, it's treatable. That will be invariate whether in a hospital in the US, or in a hut in the Andes. I'd rather go out with a nice view.

As a culture we seem to put an inordinate focus on our future selves, while neglecting our current selves. Then we wake up at 60 and realise that ahead of us is only arthritis and gout, and the good years are irrevocably gone.

Talking to octagenerians is an excellent pastime - we young'n's can learn a lot from their experiences and perspective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "All I do is get up, go to the work, go to gym, work again and sleep. No wonder that I am lifelong single person and despite being in shape no woman has shown interest in me or agreed to date me"

you just described a large majority of men who already have a signifcant other.

why do you think you need 300k to be in a relationship?

</comment><comment><USER17> You don't need money to get out of the grind. The best way to win is not to play. Why exactly do you want more money? If you worked at a place that paid you 300k like Google or Facebook you'd likely just become even more dissatisfied. When it inevitably doesn't change your life as you're thinking you'll just wonder how you can have _even more_ money yet people who make significantly less appear happier.

<comment><USER18> It's not easy at all to get paid 300K at Facebook or Google. You need to be in the top 1 or 2 percent of engineers there, with quite a palmares.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> In terms of success with women, I can empathize a lot with that. I used to be extremely unsuccessful with women and I hated it. Eventually I had enough and made a conscious decision to improve my dating life. It took over 5 years to get there, but after putting in a lot of effort by studying material and grinding through failure after failure, my success with women has increased by orders of magnitude.

If you want to date women, earning a lot of money is not the right approach, nor will it actually solve your problem. In fact, trying to attract women by a display of wealth is one of the worst things you can do for yourself. Your problems with dating women come down to two things: (1) lack of confidence and (2) lack of understanding of what women want and how they feel.

It's a very deep and complicated topic so I can't explain to you everything you'll need to know in a forum post, but I can point you in the right direction. The resource that's been most helpful for me in the past year has been Coach Corey Wayne. You can find his material on his YouTube channel ([https://www.youtube.com/user/coachcoreywayne](https://www.youtube.com/user/coachcoreywayne)) and his website ([https://understandingrelationships.com/](https://understandingrelationships.com/)).

His website looks real janky but trust me when I say that his material is the ground truth for understanding women and dating. I've read his book 3 times and am going to read it another 12. It has literally changed my life and I feel so insanely lucky to have chanced upon it last year. I recommend it to every single guy I know, whether they're single or married. If you really dive into what he teaches and, just as importantly, practice it out in the field, you _will_ see results.

If you have any further questions, feel free to email me (contact info in my profile). Good luck.

edit: why the downvotes? He mentioned that he's not happy about his dating life.

<comment><USER20> How did this spam get here?

<comment><USER19> Ummm ... it's not? I wrote it myself.

<comment><USER21> It reads like the kind of spam that will link me to a program that wants 8 easy payments of $12.99 for a few pamphlets by mail and a patented pheremone spray, guaranteed to help pick up women.

<comment><USER19> I can see that. I have no affiliation with the guy at all. I just read his book and it improved my dating life. His online book is free anyway, that's what I read first before I bought the paperback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Similar to you, I am 27. I worked at facebook seattle making 315k a year, I left after 8 months I do not recommend it. I work now with much greater autonomy at a smaller company for half the pay.

I would recommend cutting your work hours and using that time to develop things that you find fulfilling.

<comment><USER18> 315K at Facebook before or after bonuses and accrued stock? I think you need to be a level E8 or more at Facebook to get that kind of standalone salary.

<comment><USER22> That's with stock and bonuses and at e4 it's in the middle for pay there

<comment><USER23> Except you never really got any of the stock if you left within 8 months, right? Couldn't hold out for 4 months more to get all your vesting? You probably also had to return your signing bonus, right? (I'm at fb in new york btw. Also this still seems pretty high to me, 315k total for an E4. 150k base is the higher end of E4, so how many RSUs did you get?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady >> I want to make big bucks 300k or more.

Why? Seriously. Your problems (long hours, no free time, no success with women) are not going to get solved with more money. In fact they might get solved with a salary reduction. Find a job that lets you work fewer hours. You'll have more free time, be able to get out more, and meet some people. More money will not solve your problems. There are many people supporting entire families on less that what you earn and are very happy (i.e. the old cliche, "money doesn't buy happiness").

</comment><comment><USER24> So you want to work less but get paid more than double you are currently on? You don't seem to be motivated to learn anything new, so how do you justify the more bucks you'll want to earn?

<comment><USER25> I hear what you're saying. It's worth noting this person is tired. Hard to say what their motivations would be if they weren't tired. If they had no ambition, or desire to change their situation, they wouldn't have submitted this post in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's totally possible to have a programming job that doesn't consume your life, and leaves you time to _have_ a life. E.g. dating. Or a hobby. Or whatever you feel like.

Here's what you need to do:

1\. Make sure you have 6 months of expenses saved up. This will be much easier if you cut your expenses, since 6 months' worth will be lower _and_ you'll be saving more. This will make sure you have a good negotiating position for next step.

2\. Cut your hours to 40 hours a week. If you can't do that at your current job, time to look for a job where you can do that. There are in fact many companies where that is possible.

3\. With the resulting time, figure out what you want to do with your life.

I'm working on a book, "The Programmer's Guide to a Sane Workweek", with a whole lot more details, tips and techniques. Meanwhile here's a free email course if you're interested: [https://codewithoutrules.com/saneworkweek/](https://codewithoutrules.com/saneworkweek/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Well, I feel like I'm just reiterating what everyone else is saying.

1) What's with the preoccupation behind making 300k?

2) Would finding a less stressful job, even if it paid the same, make you happier?

3) It sounds like there's some other underlying issues to address here. Maybe finding some work-life balance would help you address your unhappiness with other parts of your life?

</comment><comment><USER28> Hi lost traveler fellow! I am living in Croatia, Rijeka. It is a nice climate here, and much cheeper then where you live, with an abundance of beautifull women. Croatias internet bussines is not yet fully developed like in the US-a. There are plenty of opporunities for start-ups and making it big (in termes of a 4 milion population of Croatia, plus 3 BiH, 7 Serbia). I got a small flat here. My brother has a small web dev firm of 4-5 people. We need people like you. We would love you to stay at our home and together we could make something relevant. At least in Croatia. It is much easier to get know and noticed over here. Somebody with your capabilities can make it eazy. Contact me if interested: uberklipan@g __ __.com

</comment><comment><USER29> Being a startup employee is a burnout generally, for the most part most startups will fail so you're getting extreme hard work plus generally undermarket pay and possibly no benefits at all. As an employee for an establiished company you get nights and weekends off to ironically have time to bootstrap your own products and start having extra income streams. In a startup even if it succeeds your equity won't really be on par with what you can earn with your own bootstrapped product even if it takes years to find the right idea.

</comment><comment><USER30> There is only one way you can get out of the grind, let go of the reward and just go and very seriously and scarily challenge yourself. I've made and lost a lot of money in my life.

</comment><comment><USER31> If you want to meet people, you have to free up some time. Even if you don't want to meet people, you should free up some time; that you can't figure out how to solve this suggests you have no energy for imagination and creativity.

Since you're working 60-70 hours per week, your employer probably expects that. So change jobs, and possibly change cities. You don't _have_ to have your current job situation, and it's hurting you.

300K is just a number. You would probably do better to reduce your expenses (more time would allow you to cook for yourself, by the way, which has numerous benefits). Apartment, car lease/payments, subscriptions to stuff you don't use (cable?), all of that should go. Small apartment, small reliable used car, get rid of HBO, etc.

Save as much money as you comfortably can: short term cash savings, medium term CDs and the like, long term index funds and the like, and max out your 401K or IRA.

When you have enough FY money, tell whoever's in front of you to FY (politely), and spend more time working on what you like in a job/activity that allows that.

Live a life that's enjoyable, and you'll find someone that enjoys that life too.

</comment><comment><USER32> As someone in a similar age bracket as you (mid 20s vs 31) and making the money you want to be making, I have a few recommendations:

1\. The scattered complaints you express seem to speak to a deep seated dissatisfaction with your life, your accomplishments and your personal identity. Without going so far as to make an armchair psychoanalysis on the internet, I'd suggest you learn what it is about the money that you think will make you happy. Does it evoke power for you? Control? Social success, or particularly success with the opposite sex? If you resolve your personal unhappiness now, you'll be happy regardless of your salary. If you don't, the money will not solve your problems. Whatever feels out of control in your life now, it is likely a personal hardship, not a financial one.

2\. You don't need a master's degree. Unless you want to do something in research, or branch into an industry you're not already in, more education will not generally be a net win for increasing your salary.

3\. You need to be willing to either learn a lucrative skill or get very close to revenue generation for a business. If you do that, you can make a convincing case for making the money you want. I understand that you feel burnt out, but realistically you have to be motivated to learn something new and invest in yourself in some way.

4\. This might sound tone deaf, but once you make $300k in a year, it will cease to be "big bucks." Realize that you're making a significant amount of money already when compared with the median income of the United States. Pursuing money for its own sake when you are already doing well enough to live comfortably is not a sound plan for increasing your happiness. $300k is an arbitrary number. Think about what you want to do with that money.

</comment><comment><USER33> What I find distressing in your account is not the 130K, which is a good amount of money, but the fact tat you are working 60 or 70 hours a week.

Anyone with your experience should have no problem whatsoever getting a job that pays the same, if not more, and doesn't ask you to work those extra 20 or 30 hours. That's a lot more leisure during the week, which might make you a lot happier. Not only that, but it gives you the time and energy to aim higher in pay. Definitely do this first.

It's true that you can more and also not work so many hours, but the secret there is not a masters degree, but the right contacts. A hidden secret in US software is that we have a hidden class system: Different employers that pay very differently from each other, and also tend to only hire from the same class. You can join the 'top' class early by going to the right school, and using that school to do a couple of the correct internships. That makes your resume register in the HR departments of the right companies.

Once you start your career in a place that pays less though, the one way upwards is networking.

So how do you network? Attend (and speak) at user groups attended by people that work in companies that pay better. Speak in conferences. Write blogs. You have an extra 20 hours a week that before you were using to getting zero extra money to dedicate to this! Building an online presence in 20 hours a week is not difficult.

At some point, someone from a company that pays better will see your value, and you'll get recruited upward. Repeat a few times, and you work for 300K.

If you have the presence, but fail at making the big contacts, there's also consulting. There's a lot of low pay consultants right out of school, but some of the very best paid people in the industry are experts at something, and also make 300k+.

I know this because I am also an immigrant who started making about 50K at a place that had a lot of weak programmers and a few underpaid jewels, and some of us did a long climb to the top together: It took a lot of work, but now I am making great money working on a good product, surrounded by those MIT and Stanford graduates that just had a very easy road just for going to the right school.

The road isn't easy, but it's possible as long as you really have the time to dedicate to it. And that's why you really have to quit that job that takes 60+ hours a week.

</comment><comment><USER25> I used to be a recruiter, and when I did contingency recruitment, I was making the kind of money you're talking about wanting to make. I also was tired, and burned out all the time, which sucked, because I didn't like the work that made me tired.

Now I'm a developer, and I also work a lot. I'm often tired, but I love development, even when I'm tired. I'm slowly figuring out how to be less tired, and it's a lot easier to figure out when I like the rest of what I'm doing.

A couple tips here:

\- if you're tired all the time, it's going to be hard to think effectively about making positive changes. I don't have any specific guidance more specific than "don't forget to take care of yourself, because no one can sleep away your exhaustion for you".

\- If you want to make the big bucks, you have to be what my boss calls a force multiplier [1]. Generally speaking, a force multiple is (in theory) someone who gives you more bang for your buck. A simple example would be hiring someone gets 4x more done for 2x the price, or does 1X of work in 25% of the time is takes a typical 1X-er.

I'm not sure if I have anything else to offer you without more information. What I can say is that if you learn to accept the reality of your situation, and don't let negative feelings weigh you down, it'll be easier to take steps towards the life you think you want.

You could always try recruiting :) If you're any good at it, you can make a killing. I know a good recruiter, and I'm sure he'd be happy to speak with you, if you'd like to explore that option. He has all the first world problems that come with making boatloads of money.

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

<comment><USER34> > no one can sleep away your exhaustion for you.

This is a really eloquent reminder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I recomend the first change you make is to consider working remotely:

[https://weworkremotely.com/](https://weworkremotely.com/)

This will give you a great salary and a lot of freedom which you can use to start exploring other aspects of life that are more fulfilling.

<comment><USER36> Yes. I switched to remote-only in 2006 and never looked back. Like the submitter, I don't live in SV (small-town Canada) and I don't touch front-end work, but I do work for a SV BigCo. So while my salary isn't much more than his, it goes a lot further. I think that's one of the secrets to an effective, if not absolute, high salary.

Also, you get control of your time. Because I have no commute, I can start at say 7 am, take time during the day to work out in my home gym, then finish up around dinner. My evenings are always free.

In summary, Mr. Submitter:

1\. Land remote work.

2\. Live somewhere cheap.

Now you have more money and more time.

Your woman problem will fix itself when you stop caring. Keep lifting heavy, find humour where you can and buy some decent clothes.

<comment><USER23> Are you very high up in the SV BigCo? The only people I hear of working remotely at these big companies are people important enough that they can live wherever they want (for example Kent Beck at FB who lives in Oregon on a farm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> First ask yourself why do you want to make $300k/year. I had that opportunity once, but upon rapidly introspecting on what I wanted during the interview, I decided that I valued my time/comfortableness much more than $350k-400k.

If you already know what you want and it is indeed to make big bucks, then carve out time to study to get to the place where you are qualified. Then demonstrate the ability, i.e. open source, work, etc. Relentlessly iterate on becoming more efficient at all areas you fall short in.

The secret to professional success isn't really secret - smart & hard work gets you there.

</comment><comment><USER38> You probably think that making 300k per year will help you find happiness or woman of your dreams, unfortunately this will probably not happen unless you want her to love your money. You think that making 300k suddenly will make you happy? That making 300k = less work? After a while you will come here and write that you need 600k and:

"All I do is get up, go to the work, go to gym, work again and sleep. No wonder that I am lifelong single person and despite being in shape no woman has shown interest in me or agreed to date me."

You see where the problem is ?

</comment><comment><USER39> I suggest reading Letters from a Stoic.

> "It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is > poor."

$130k is big money by the standards of many people in the United States...

</comment><comment><USER40> Totally made this up, but this served me well: Imagine your happiness balancing on three pillars - work, health and love. In your case, making good money and being in shape probably got the first two pillars covered.

Now, you might want to install a third pillar instead of trying to make the first one bigger in order to provide your happiness with stability - even if that means taking material off the others :)

</comment><comment><USER41> Go grab some self help books. If you don't know where to look, start with something generic like [https://www.amazon.com/New-Earth-Awakening-Purpose- Selection...](https://www.amazon.com/New-Earth-Awakening-Purpose- Selection/dp/0452289963/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1486847475&sr=8-3&keywords=eckhart+tolle)

</comment><comment><USER42> Here is exactly what I tell people like you. In life we're all chasing for the same things. The only difference between the top %1 and the rest is the order of priority.

You, like %99 of the people are looking for 1. Job Security, 2. Comfort, 3. Becoming Rich

The other %1 go like that: 1. Becoming rich, 2. Comfort, 3. Security. It's all about focusing on what you want in life while getting rid of the extras...

<comment><USER20> Making a priority of becoming rich isn't enough. People who put "becoming rich" above anything else risk corruption.

<comment><USER42> You need to think about it more deeply. The perfect "achievable" life is to go to college, get a degree, secure a nice job, live a comfortable life, buy a car and a house for your family. If you made this choice like %99 of the people, then you're probably getting into debt. College tuition, car loan, mortgage, bills, etc. You probably have a 9 to 5 job because you need to pay for all this stuff every month. You're on life support and your paycheck keeps you alive. It sounds pretty dramatic and maybe you can still travel once in a while, buy some random stuff... But here is the trick - you're probably dreaming about becoming rich. You're probably working on a side project after work that will magically save you from all this mess. You're using what ever time and energy you have left during the week in order to focus on your dream. It's your main priority but you don't have enough resources to make it happen because you have other responsibilities - paying your bills.

That's what it really means. Look at successful business people like Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, Jobs, etc. The sooner you work on becoming rich, the better. Don't get trap into security and comfort. Focus on your main priority.

Does it make sense?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> > _What did you do to get out of rust and how did you do it?_

By understanding that "making big bucks" involves a fair share of luck. By not defining my life by my career or money, but instead valuing time.

I mean, I'm still working on it to. But that's what I'm trying to do.

</comment><comment><USER44> Downsizing is easier. Buying a new car isn't required it's peer pressure. Living on 2k a month is possible and not so difficult. It opens up many more possibilities for professional happiness.

</comment><comment><USER45> I don't think you are grinding. You have time to go to the gym :) Pun aside, you should start enjoying life, socialize and forget about getting big bucks. If you are happy then who cares.

</comment><comment><USER46> Success != contentedness, which seems to be your underlying goal.

</comment><comment><USER47> Realistically, I believe you will have to start your own business to achieve the level of success you want. The "system" is just not designed to get people to high levels of financial success by "grinding" working for someone else. The only real way to do that is to live well below your means, and invest your surplus income very wisely over a long period of time. But honestly, does that sound fun?

The problem with the "start your own business route" is that it's not easy. And success, while extremely _possible_ is not _guaranteed_. OTOH, the nice thing about the business world is that you can try over and over again, and - as the old saying goes - "you only have to be right once."

I guess there are some people who achieve financial independence solely through trading (currency|commodities|stocks|derivatives|etc), but I feel like most of the stories you hear of wild success doing that are apocryphal stories, or - at the very least - impossible to replicate.

One other thought is to go into sales. The thing about sales is that you are basically in control of how much you earn (to a point). The harder you work, and the better you get at selling, the more money you can make. Sell enterprise software for Oracle or IBM or somebody, I am pretty sure some of those guys / gals are pulling down some serious dosh.

I'll also throw in a plug for watching Grant Cardone's videos on Youtube. He's a veritable fountain of advice on business/life/success.

As far as the thing with women goes... others have already said it, but it's mainly just about confidence. And it's also something of a numbers game. Honestly, I'd say jump into the PUA community for a while... not with the goal of becoming "a PUA", but just to reset some of your current beliefs about dating and women. Doing approaches using canned routines and what-not and having even limited success, can go a long way towards improving your confidence and help you interact with women in a way that is more productive. Just don't get overly caught up in that world.

Edit:

Let me add this: the very first thing you need to do is quit your current job. Working 60/70 hours a week and doing extensive travel is bullshit, especially for only $130K. You should easily be able to make that with a job with no travel, working 40 hours a week. Make that your first step. That frees up 20/30 hours a week that you can then use to advance yourself towards YOUR goals, instead of working to make the owners of your current employer rich. If you have enough savings, quit on Monday. If not, start contacting recruiters and trawling through job boards first thing Monday morning (or better yet, right freaking now).

</comment><comment><USER48> TL;DR: Money will not make you happy, lifestyle will.

I was exactly like you - work, exercise, sleep, repeat. In a big dirty city. Got so fucking sick of it.

Solution:

1) Work remotely. That, by far, was the best decision in my life. I didn't have to sacrifice a penny. I just told my employer I'm moving to a tropical island, and they agreed to continue my employment. From then on it was just coding and once in a while meetings over the phone. No more boring daily standups. No more daily dumb meetings that waste hours of everyone's time. Just make sure you produce quality work.

2) Stop working altogether. I was making good money for years, in the $200-250K range, and I never spent it on stupid shit like expensive cars or expensive restaurants. I saved up enough, and I haven't worked in two years as of today. Well, I haven't been employed for two years, I work on my own projects that I enjoy. If you live frugally, $100K will last you 5-7 years in a cheap area, or even more if you move to Asia.

<comment><USER49> The problem is what happens when that money runs out? It will be very hard to get back in the tech job market. Things move so fast you will be obsolete in 2 years.

<comment><USER50> I've never allowed myself to believe this. I've taken 1-2 years off 3 separate times during my career. It never took me more than a month to get back in - great jobs at top companies each time. Good programmers are still in demand, and not every company seeks to hire to a specific tech stack.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Step 1 to ending your singleness: STOP WORKING SO DAMN MUCH. Seriously. You said it yourself, you don't have time for anything else. Stop giving your employer so much free work. Take your time back, and use that extra 20 to 30 hours for YOU, not to make some other asshole rich. Take up a new hobby or something, and get out and meet people.

This goes for everyone else, too. Don't feel you have to give your employer so many free hours. The work will still be there in the morning. No one is going to die because you decided to work normal hours.</comment>


Certificate Authority provides free certificates - <AUTHOR> http://www.disog.org/2010/01/certificate-authority-provides-free.html <comment><USER2> The only difference between what they're doing and what every other SSL issuer is doing already is 20 bucks. A cheap-o certificate from GoDaddy or your favorite reseller does no more than validate domain ownership by e-mail as this freebie does.

<comment><USER3> SSL is a messed up protocol, relying on trust in central authorities. SSH did it right: it only ensures that the server you connect with today is the same one you connected with yesterday, and it does not aim to do anything more.

An SSL certificate "verified by King George" does not mean that you can trust the vendor with your money or your data. _I_ have to decide to trust the vendor that much, and nobody else can do it for me. All I want the crypto to do is verify that I am now talking with the same vendor I talked with yesterday.

I don't mind using a certified signed by someone not crowned as a king, for example <https://secure.loom.cc>. Or I could use this one <https://loom.cc/> "verified by Equifax" which means nothing special to me.

I don't care that _someone else_ decreed that "this is the One True loom.cc site." All I care is that the site I initially decided to trust is the same site I'm connecting with now.

<comment><USER4> You can just remove all CA certs from your browser and then it works somewhat like SSH.

<comment><USER3> Yes, it's pretty close. However where SSH warns you whenever you encounter a new server, the SSL in your browser only warns you when you encounter a new CA (Certificate Authority).

For the browser to behave more like SSH, it would have to maintain a list of _individual sites_ which you have accepted as genuine. Then if you get a phishing email asking you to click a fake link such as <https://lo0m.cc>, you will get a warning even if the lo0m.cc site has a certificate "verified by Equifax" or whomever. This is a good example of where the current SSL protocol utterly fails.

When you visit the real loom.cc site which you originally trusted, you should see a happy warm reassurance in the browser bar, maybe including a pet name or avatar. But when you visit lo0m.cc, you should see the entire browser framed in red with a warning that this is the first time you have ever visited this site and you could be the victim of a phishing expedition. Something like that. I'm hand-waving a bit now. And it may get annoying for people at first, as they establish trust in their first 20 banking, gaming, or social networking sites. Kind of like installing a new CA root 20 times right? You don't want it to be _too_ easy or people might just "click through" unconsciously. But personally I don't find this to be a great difficulty with SSH.

Indeed the building blocks are all there in SSL, namely (1) the verification of digital signatures, and (2) the negotiation of a symmetric encryption key. Some may carp about the protocol or the code being a mess, but as a black box it works just fine.

I think browser writers could phight phishing more effectively by thinking outside the box of implicit trust in central authority.

<comment><USER5> Almost no aspect of the phishing problem is rooted in HTTPS.

<comment><USER3> That is precisely why I criticize SSL. One of the primary goals of SSL is to _authenticate_ a site so that Grandma can rest assured she is not being scammed. "Phishing" represents a catastrophically expensive failure to achieve that goal.

Trusted root CAs have "verified" millions of SSL certificates to one degree or another, from simple checks for domain control all the way up to brick and mortar audits. The problem is, any one of those millions of certificates can be used to phish customers of building-and-loan.com and steal massive amounts of their money.

A scammer simply sends Grandma an official looking email saying "We have recently received a request to wire money out of your Building and Loan account. Please log in _here_ to confirm or deny this request. This extra level of precaution is for your safety. Sincerely, [insert signature of CEO here]."

Now when Grandma clicks the link, she is taken to an SSL-protected site called "building-and-loan-confirmation.com", which to Grandma's delight and comfort is "verified by Equifax". This misplaced trust costs Grandma $25,700.

I am thinking the _very least_ browser writers can do is give Grandma a simple way to "confirm" a site which she has visited. Once she has confirmed it, and maybe given it a "pet name", her browser will display an especially reassuring theme any time she visits that site again (e.g. green border, friendly picture, familiar name, whatever).

Grandma still needs to know that she should _only_ log in when she sees that reassuring theme. Any time she visits a non-confirmed site, she will only see a plain looking neutral theme. (Note: NOT alarming red, because then she'd be see red constantly as she browses around. Just neutral.)

Note that the suggestion I just made actually has _nothing_ to do with SSL. Keep in mind that a phisher could easily send Grandma an _unsecured_ link in an email -- no HTTPs at all. If Grandma clicks that link, she will only see a neutral theme, and if she remembers her lesson, she will NOT log in because she does not see the reassuring theme.

Of course, you could also say that Grandma should remember this lesson: don't click links in emails. Only visit sites by (1) typing in the name yourself or (2) using a bookmark. But I'm just trying to suggest a way to help Grandma _after_ she has forgotten that primary lesson.

Here's another idea. You know how Firefox remembers passphrases for you, protected by a master security passphrase. That could help here. If Grandma visits the real building-and-loan.com site, her user name and password will be filled out for her automatically. If she visits a phishing site, it won't. That is another "hook" where browser writers might do something to help dear Grandma protect her property from predators. Something along the lines of: "This site is asking you to log in, but you have never logged into this site before. Are you _sure_ you want to do this?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Huh? Since when does a CA need your private key/passphrase? Any time I've gotten a commercial certificate, I've only had to provide a Certificate Signing Request (CSR). Ahh, it seems the author didn't follow all of the instructions on the page he referenced ([http://www.h-online.com/security/features/SSL-for-free- step-...](http://www.h-online.com/security/features/SSL-for-free-step-by- step-906862.html)):

'After that, StartSSL kindly offers to generate a pair of keys for the certificate. However, since the private key for protecting one's own server should never be given away or generated by someone else, the "Skip" option should be chosen and the Certificate Signing Request generated earlier should be uploaded onto the server.'

This is a bit creepy. StartSSL is providing a "free" certificate using a process where they also generate the private key & passphrase (unless you're smart enough to realize what a terrible idea this is). That's like the hardware store keeping a copy of every key they cut.

</comment><comment><USER7> Only class 1 certificates are free.

This is a great service as it allows me to setup secure IMAP, SMTP, Jabber, etc. without having to pay a third party money for this extra security, and without having to bother my users with installing my self-signed root certificate (StartSSL's certificate is known to OS X and browsers except IE and Opera).

I don't see how free class 1 certificates help scammers, phishers, and similar.

<comment><USER8> Where did you see its not known by IE ?

That is a deal killer..

<comment><USER7> It seems they are now supported by IE judging from this page <http://www.startssl.com/?app=40> which show icons of all the major browsers incl. IE but excl. Opera, and this page <http://www.startssl.com/?app=22> which has the following text redacted (overstrike): _Startcom's certificate isn't trusted by the Microsoft Internet Explorer_.

So I think that it is now supported by IE, question is, which version of IE and/or Windows. I can't find any details about this on the StartSSL's pages (there used to be a FAQ entry iirc with browsers supported which included version and OS).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I tried to get a certificate for my own domain name, but I was not allowed to create an account "pending verification". So really, maybe this is not as easy as the article suggests.

<comment><USER10> I ran into the same problem when I first used StartSSL a few months ago. It seemed like there were some cases where automatic verification would work and other cases where verification was deferred to a human. I believe StartSSL is a small, possibly one man, operation, so you might have to wait a few hours for human verification. Once my account was verified, everything after that was pretty easy and quick.</comment></comment>


Details of the SEAL Raid in Yemen (Jan 2017) - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2017/03/09/women-and-children-in-yemeni-village-recall-horror-of-trumps-highly-successful-seal-raid/ <comment><USER2> From the article: Perhaps the US confused a low-level al Qaeda militant who happens to have the same name: Abubakr al Baghdadi. Or perhaps they were tricked into the raid to help the competing internal factions - which happened in the past.

Yet another perfect example of what an oxymoron the term "military intelligence" really is.</comment>


FlightCaster (YC S09): United trounces Southwest in 2009 on-time % - <AUTHOR> http://blog.flightcaster.com/united-trounces-southwest-in-2009-on-time-per

<comment><USER2> If I'm looking at on-time stats to see if they should have a bearing on which airline I fly, I care a whole lot about the definition of "on-time." I don't care about being 15-30 minutes late, but I do care about not being 2 hours late.

Again, this sort of thing should be adjusted for routes and airports, but depending on your purpose in flying a route (going home, where your parents will pick you up? flying to LAX to catch an intercontinental flight with a tight connection?), a more granular breakdown is important.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it would be cool if they could calculate the "expected minutes late" for every carrier, broken down by route.

<comment><USER4> You would really need to see the distribution as you can plan for a consistently average delay, but unpredictable arrival can be a real pest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I suspect this could be another service that FC offers–choose your desired route _before you buy your ticket_ and find out who has the best on-time %

Partner with Orbitz/Expedia/Whoever so I can see it while I shop ... it would definitely influence me to use that particular travel site.

<comment><USER6> Kayak has this today, though I'm not sure where the data is sourced from. Flights get a little '%' icon if they have less than 75% on-time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder how much analyses like these help FlightCaster get good PR and better search rankings. It seems that (1) these analyses would be of interest to publications targeting potential FlightCaster users (travel-related, etc.) and (2) it would be hard for a journalist to reference such an analysis without providing some background on FlightCaster's services.

</comment><comment><USER8> FlightCaster (and SeatGeek) are a new breed of startup that uses statistical modeling to empower consumers in an industry that they usually have little to no say in.</comment>


California Has the Worst Quality of Life in the US - <AUTHOR> http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/03/01/california-has-worst-quality-life-in-us-study-says.html <comment><USER2> I agree that the headline of the article is a bit misleading. According to the US News ranking where this report gets its data from, California finished #32 overall. Given that, I don't disagree that California's quality of life is terrible. I would think that US News is aggregating this data based on the whole of California, and given that the homeless rate in California is among the highest and that tech constantly pushes up cost of living, it makes sense that California would be ranked so poorly overall. I would assume that most of HN is full of those working in tech, so while you may not personally see California as having poor quality of life in your own lives, that doesn't necessarily hold true for the majority of the state.

</comment><comment><USER3> Fox News says the quality of life in the big liberal state of California is horrible. I hope Peter Thiel creates another conservative news network. Fox News is too much.

<comment><USER4> Should probably click the link before commenting, fox news didn't conduct the study or come up with the rankings - us news did.

It also breaks down into different categories, one of which is quality of life.

<comment><USER3> Is California a "Failed State?" That's the headline on the front page of Fox News.

[http://www.foxnews.com](http://www.foxnews.com)

I don't think you understand how Fox News works. "Bigger than WaterGate!!!!" "Liberals on notice!"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4xF7FW3_MM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4xF7FW3_MM)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And North Dakota has the best? Are you sure you all know what you're measuring?

</comment><comment><USER6> California was ranked #32 overall.

<comment><USER6> If your going call out California probably should do they same for all the last place finishers...

Mississippi Healthcare #50

New Mexico Education #50

Alaska Economy #50

Louisiana Opportunity #50

West Virginia Infrastructure #50

Alaska Crime & Corrections #50

Illinois Fiscal Stability #50

Louisiana Over all #50

<comment><USER7> And you might also want to drill down to the criteria used for measuring the "Quality of Life" rating. [https://www.usnews.com/news/best- states/rankings/quality-of-...](https://www.usnews.com/news/best- states/rankings/quality-of-life)</comment></comment></comment>


Amazon Critics Rally at Bezos NYC Penthouse for Cyber Monday - <AUTHOR> https://news.yahoo.com/amazon-critics-mark-cyber-monday-173815707.html <comment><AUTHOR> >> _Amazon said it has invested more than $270 billion in the United States since 2011 and created more than 400,000 jobs._

It's not that simple: How many jobs were lost in other companies due to Amazon taking over?</comment>


Case Study Series: Google Security Keys Work - <AUTHOR> https://fidoalliance.org/case-study-series-google-security-keys-work/ <comment><USER2> Ironically, I have an NFC-enabled FIDO U2F card that works in Github on Chrome for Android, but when I try to use it with my Google account, it says "Security Keys are not supported on your device."

</comment><comment><USER3> Has somebody here ever made up a strategy how to handle lost or broken hardware when using a solution like this? In a corporate environment it seems feasible to have some kind of central authority that can reissue needed credentials when needed but how should a single user case be handled optimally?

<comment><USER4> Backup codes. I print mine on paper and keep it in a folder with about a dozen other important papers that I rarely access. Kinda archaic, but it is scalable _if_ you consider the fallback mechanism for account access to be user domain. I haven't used a backup code for Google in a while but I think it causes a notification email to be sent to both the account in question and the email account setup for security notices.</comment></comment>


GNOME 3 drops fallback mode in 3.8 - <AUTHOR> https://mail.gnome.org/archives/release-team/2012-November/msg00009.html

<comment><USER2> This is insane. I dont know who takes decisions in Gnome but has to be fired immediately. Gnome 2 was a nice and fast DE, it ran anywhere, it was great. They made so many bad decisions with Gnome 3, stopped caring for the user long ago and now they code only from themselves.

<comment><USER3> I was part of the decision. I'm not sure if you get the concept of volunteers. My influence and decision abilities is not based on "company ideas" as you seem to think.

Meaning: I wasn't hired, I cannot be fired.

<comment><USER4> Drop the fallback mode if it means better quality of the rest. Seriously, Gnome Shell runs fine on my Intel integrated graphics, i suppose it runs fine on nvidia and amd as well, so why fallback mode anyway.

How about communicating to distributions to fallback to gnome2 or xfce or something similar as a recommendation?

<comment><USER5> It may run fine on many, but it runs horrible on so many others. Running both Nvidia and ATI binary drivers often result in absolutely horrid performance with changes to the UI often not being rendered until after the animations are over.

<comment><USER6> Apart from that, GDM itself performs horribly. I can almost always see a lag. Shouldn't happen on core i 2nd Gen atleast!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you're the sort of person that used fallback mode and hated Gnome Shell, you'd have served yourself well by jumping ship a long time ago.

</comment><comment><USER8> All this bodes well for Xfce, which is already an outstanding effort. Nice to see it included in future releases of Debian as default, for some spotlight.

<comment><USER9> This is wrong, see [http://www.debian.org/devel/debian- installer/News/2012/20121...](http://www.debian.org/devel/debian- installer/News/2012/20121..).

      - Most of GNOME fits onto CD#1 again (network-less installation).
      - LXDE and Xfce now live on separate images.

GNOME was removed from CD1 due to space reasons, but this was only temporarily (they've meanwhile fixed the space issues). That GNOME didn't fit onto CD1 anymore and that Xfce would be the future was big in the news. That this change was reverted some weeks later, and no Xfce isn't even on the first CD, didn't make the news though. Guess that's not as interesting as GNOME-hate.

<comment><USER8> Well, if you had submitted it, I'm sure it would get frontpaged here.

I just really wasn't aware of the revert and the git commit message sounded promising. [1]

[1] [http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=tasksel/tasksel.git;a=co...](http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=tasksel/tasksel.git;a=commit;h=2a962cc65cdba010177f27e8824ba10d9a799a08)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That's a shame. I was opting to use fallback mode so I could continue using gnome without gnome-shell.

When 3.8 hits debian unstable I guess I'll move to a different window manager.

<comment><USER9> That's the thing. The GNOME project understands itself more as an OS than just as a "window manager".

Most (not all, but most) of the hate against GNOME 3 is not against GNOME, but against gnome-shell and gnome-control-center. These are just a few (though essential) pieces of the GNOME desktop. If you don't like the shell you can still use GNOME's apps from another WM (Xmonad, sawfish, KWin) or even from another DE (like Xfce).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Makes sense, since no one was interested in maintaining it.

<comment><USER12> When installing GNOME3 I had a little chicken-and-egg-problem. Without installing additional drivers GNOME3 wouldn't work, so the fallback mode was handy to search the internet for the correct drivers for my chipset and install them.

But as long as they have some solution for this problem (and I think it is pretty common, because debian always installs with generic drivers for your hardware), I think it is no problem to remove the fallback mode.

<comment><USER13> Debian Wheezy will default to XFCE (I think), so you can use that instead of fallback mode for this use case.

You may find you just like using it....

IIRC the reasoning was that GNOME Shell is too big to fit on the default install CD, rather than any idealogical thing.

<comment><USER9> This is wrong, see [http://www.debian.org/devel/debian- installer/News/2012/20121...](http://www.debian.org/devel/debian- installer/News/2012/20121018)

      - Most of GNOME fits onto CD#1 again (network-less installation).
      - LXDE and Xfce now live on separate images.

<comment><USER13> Quite a recent change then!

Shame, XFCE would be a good default.

<comment><USER14> I hope that this decision causes them to re-think their position.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I hate GNOME 3, but I agree with this move. If you like classic desktops, and you have been using Gnome-Fallback you are doing it wrong: GNOME 3 is designed to be used with the Gnome-Shell.

XFCE and Mate are both excellent Desktop Environments which follow a "classic" approach. (Or you can try KDE too).

</comment><comment><USER16> So what will people running GNOME in VMware see? GNOME failed to launch?

<comment><USER17> They'll still see Gnome Shell. They added LLVM support for software-rendering about a year ago: [http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTAxM...](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTAxMjI)

Fallback Mode was only still in use by people who preferred Gnome 2 and forced it on, everybody else with Gnome 3 saw Gnome Shell.

Per the link, even back then they discussed dropping Fallback Mode after full LLVM had been added:

> "As said by Red Hat's Adam Williamson on the Fedora mailing list, 'That's > really a policy decision for the GNOME / Fedora desktop teams, not for ajax. > But based on what they've said in the past, I expect that once most hardware > that previously needed the fallback mode is covered, fallback mode will die. > AIUI, fallback mode isn't meant to be a GNOME 2-by-stealth for Shell > refuseniks, it's purely an attempt to accommodate hardware which doesn't > support Shell.'"

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I had to look this up, and it appears in this context, "fallback mode" refers to "sort of a failsafe mode, which should kick in on machines with unsupported graphics cards".

I guess it turns of compositing and such modernities.

[http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/3.3/fallback- mode....](http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/3.3/fallback-mode.html.en)

<comment><USER19> There's a follow up to the linked post that explain the cases where Gnome 3 it's not an option and the fallback mode is OK:

[https://mail.gnome.org/archives/release- team/2012-November/m...](https://mail.gnome.org/archives/release- team/2012-November/msg00012.html)

Basically: some GPU drivers are not good enough to run Gnome (it was way worse about 2 years ago), some old machines can't deal with the software rendering (that is not available for all the platforms, it's only for x86 and ARM -I think-), and there is some performance impact when running 3D apps on Gnome 3 (I've noticed that myself, my laptop fans go berserk!).

Besides the fallback mode was used by some users that were looking for a Gnome 2 alike experience, but apparently that was not the reason of fallback mode to exist.

<comment><USER3> The idea is that by dropping fallback, people can change gnome-panel and metacity as they wish. Meaning: making it work (and look) more like GNOME 2.

I'm not sure if this is entirely feasible in practice. Actually fallback mode consist of various changes in loads of projects. I'm guessing it'll be broken pretty quickly in GNOME 3.7.x. The intention was still that you could still get a more GNOME 2 experience by not needing gnome-panel+metacity for fallback mode... but after all the investigations, not sure if that can still be achieved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> For a brief period of time, I used Fedora and Gnome3. Having a radeon hd46XX, gnome refused to display anything properly, except in fallback-mode. I think this should be its use: not a UX choice, but a mode for when graphic acceleration fails.

</comment><comment><USER21> Xmonad withought a de, thats my cup of tea nowadays. I am content.

</comment><comment><USER22> i wonder if xmonad's Config.Gnome will get ported away from the fallback mode (if this is possible).

<comment><USER23> Unfortunately, gnome-shell desktop components are closely tied to mutter. For example, the fallback gnome-panel [1] and the gnome-shell gnome-panel [2] are two entirely different beasts (same goes for cinnamon, where they've never had a fallback panel to begin with). There's just no way to run mutter and xmonad at the same time.

It is becoming ever so difficult to be an xmonad user who enjoys the occasional niceties of modern desktop environments (panels, widgets etc). The state of component reuse in modern linux DE is just miserable.

Kudos to the KDE people for keeping their desktop 'dissectible' after all this time. I've had great success in using plasma-desktop with xmonad in the past. Unfortunately, KDE looks/feels wrong to me in ways that no theme has ever been able to correct (see [3] [4]). I wish they adopted 'flatter' look & feel guidelines - right now, there is just too much bling, roundedness and qt widget animations for my taste (relying on SVGs for theming plasma is overkill too, imho). I have a lot of gripes (still can't get over Akonadi needing mysql) with KDE, but I really _do_ respect the work they do.

We can't have nice things ...

[1]: <http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-panel/tree/gnome-panel>

[2]: <http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-shell/tree/js/ui/panel.js>

[3]: <http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/KDE_4.png>

[4]: [http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/01/1.2...](http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/01/1.2.0.png)

<comment><USER24> Are you still using plasma-desktop with xmonad? Do you have some pointers on how to do that? As an xmonad user, I'd like to try it out.

<comment><USER23> You could either run _plasma-desktop_ through .xinitrc or set KDEWM to xmonad in .xsession. You will have to send _plasma-desktop_ to the float layer. It's best if you make xmonad act like an EWMH compatible WM by using the _EwmhDesktops_ [1] log hook and I think the _ManageDocks_ [2] manage hook also played a role. The relevant xmonad.hs changes are:

        import XMonad.Hooks.ManageDocks
        import XMonad.Hooks.EwmhDesktops

        managehook = composeAll
                     [ className =? "Plasma-desktop" --> doFloat]

        defaults = defaultConfig {
                 , manageHook = managehook <+> manageDocks
                 }

        main = xmonad $ ewmh defaults

There are a lot of dialogs that pop up in KDE applications that you'll probably want to add to the float layer. I haven't tried it, but there is this plasmoid [3] that can offer you better integration with xmonad's way of working with workspaces (xmobar/dzen2 style).

Good luck!

[1]: [http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Hooks- Ew...](http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Hooks- EwmhDesktops.html)

[2]: [http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Hooks- Ma...](http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Hooks- ManageDocks.html)

[3]: <http://gitorious.org/xmonad-log-plasmoid></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Voting-Machine Vendor Put Remote-Access Software on Systems Sold to U.S - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedailybeast.com/voting-machine-vendor-put-remote-access-software-on-systems-sold-to-us <comment><USER2> There's an HN thread that links to the source article: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17549797](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17549797)

</comment><comment><USER3> Potentially rigged elections. Now that's new.</comment>


Stopping background applications on iOS 4 - <AUTHOR> http://whereoscope.wordpress.com/2010/11/25/stopping-background-tasks-on-io/

<comment><USER2> _> >But how do you stop an application from running in the background?

Delete it. Seriously, that's the only way._

>> _If you hold down the icons until they start to wobble and then tap the red X, you have terminated that application._ _> >But applications get restarted when: the phone reboots_

I think this is mistaken.

I haven't verified this in code yet, but my impression is that the app will not be restarted automatically on a reboot.

After you reboot the phone, you will be able to see previously run apps in your list of "recently run apps" (by pressing the Home button twice). However, this doesn't mean that the app has been restarted. You will have to tap the app-icon to get it to start.

 _[Edit] Thanks for the clarification below about needing to call startMonitoringSignificantLocationChanges. You may want to add this detail to the blog post because the current wording suggests that all background apps get restarted on a reboot._

<comment><AUTHOR> You have to have asked for the Significant Location Update Service.

I have verified this in code numerous times, and Apple representatives have confirmed in the development forums.

<comment><USER3> Interesting. I was under the impression that any application marked with the background type "voip" (such as Skype) was started by SpringBoard when it launched.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, voip apps can also be relaunched in the background.

The focus of this article was location-based apps, but there are also interesting behaviors with voip and audio applications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _Settings- >General->Location Services_

This is one of the reasons I was so glad to ditch my iPhone. They bury shit that you want to access frequently in Settings.

Want to turn your WiFi on/off? It's 2 or 3 menus deep in settings. Same with brightness. I change both of those several times a day.

And there's nothing you can do about it unless you jailbreak your phone.

On my HTC Droid Incredible, I have a power control widget that lets me turn on and off wifi, GPS, and bluetooth, and lets me toggle between 3 brightness settings. It only takes up 1/4 of a home screen. It's wonderful.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm curious about this - I've seen that behavior with Android users as well.

Why specifically do you want to turn WiFi, GPS, and bluetooth on or off? I can think of several potential reasons, but would like a user's perspective.

<comment><USER5> Sometimes WiFi is flaky and turn it off in favour of 3G (maybe the router needs a reset, or cable internet is out).

For some unknown reason Scrabble recommends that you turn WiFi off and BlueTooth on to play multiplayer w/ an iPad as the board. It's an odd request but I do it anyway.

When I leave the office my iPhone can see the office base station even when I'm kitty-corner waiting for the bus, but the signal isn't strong enough to work so I have to turn WiFi off.

In order to check my wireless usage w/ Rogers' iPhone app they require me to be on 3G. It's lame but that's how they roll so I have to go along with it.

Sometimes once it's off I forget about it because I have a 6G data plan which I haven't been able to burn up even using Grooveshark for a couple of hours a day. Then if I want to do something on a LAN at home or work I need to turn WiFi on.

I leave 3G and BlueTooth on all the time. Some of my friends turn BT off when they're not using it and I try not to hassle them about it. It doesn't wear your battery down unless you're using, in my experience anyway. So less savvy users want to do this kind of thing too, not just us nerds. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the insight!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's pretty easy to force quit an application on iOS 4:

1) Hold the power button until the power-down slider shows up

2) Hold the home button until the application exists

<comment><USER7> 3) double-tap home, then hold finger on app you want to terminate. the icons in the task switcher start to dance. click the terminate button.

<comment><USER6> My numbers were steps, not alternatives.

As for your approach: I've seen that fail for locked up apps. I believe that sends a normal quit signal instead of force terminating the app.</comment></comment></comment>


Trump: Microsoft should pay 'key money' to Treasury for facilitating TikTok deal - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/03/president-trump-might-be-easier-if-microsoft-buys-all-of-tiktok.html <comment><USER2> So essentially:

"If you want to buy this thing then you must pay a kickback to the government for _brokering the deal_ and if you don't we will use government power to ban it."

<comment><USER3> It's an election move IMO. Trump can say he either: 1) Banned a spying app from the US to protect American citizens 2) Claim responsibility for acquiring this great app and keeping American citizens safe

Trump is a boring person tbh..

<comment><USER4> Or more likely, Microsoft won't acquire it because sod that, AND they will fail to ban it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This should be a notice to all tech founders, who can shortly expect a massive degradation in global FCPA adherence and may expect foreign reciprocity in key markets.

<comment><AUTHOR> At this point, why shouldn't Russia threaten FB with a ban unless it sells its local operations to VKontakte?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sounds similar to when a US company buys a foreign company and the foreign government requires a minimum number of jobs kept in the foreign country to allow the deal forward. For example Germany. But calling it key money. Wow.

</comment><comment><USER7> Why shouldn't there be a tariff? These seems fair.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is outright extortion ... Shame on Trump and his administration,</comment>


Grep is a beautiful tool - <AUTHOR> http://eriwen.com/tools/grep-is-a-beautiful-tool/

<comment><USER2> Is there something that has changed about grep in the past several years that makes mention of its existence news?

<comment><USER3> For the poor coders that have spent their whole lives in front of dumbed down IDE's... yes this is news. (Show some of these guys a pipe command and they won't see the implications. A sed style global regex search and replace action will be equally mystifying.)

Not everyone has succumbed to the power of the smug Unix weenies yet. And in any case... weekly diet of a few cool sed/grep/find/emacs/vi tricks is certainly in order for "Hacker News".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ack is a beautiful tool.

<http://petdance.com/ack/>

<comment><USER5> I usually end up using

      function tfind {
        find . -name "*.$1" | xargs egrep -n "$2"
      }

      tfind extension searchpattern

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like ack better for searching code: <http://petdance.com/ack/>

</comment><comment><USER7> NB: egrep (where available) has expanded regular expressions, including some extensions from perl.

<comment><USER8> My man pages tell me that egrep is the same as grep -E (--extended-regexp). There's also grep -P (--perl-regexp) which is even friendlier to Perl/Python/Ruby users, in that the parens and braces work the same way.</comment></comment>


Home chores and to-dos for working adults done weekly - <AUTHOR> http://butlerinsuits.com <comment><AUTHOR> All ears on feedbacks! let me know what you guys think. The startup is HQ in SG</comment>