Bitcoin's UK future looks bleak - <AUTHOR> https://www.scirra.com/blog/tom/4/bitcoins-uk-future-looks-bleak <comment><USER2> The author misunderstands the current bank regulatory environment.

Banks are not only obliged not to participate in criminal activity, the way the laws work is that they are increasingly required to do the policing themselves. If a bank does business with some guys and it turns out the guys are money laundering, that can be the bank's fault. For instance, one of the charges against HSBC is that they built up a backlog of fraud alerts. Another charge is that they didn't tune their fraud alert levels in a manner requested by the government. HSBC is also charged with actual money laundering _but these two charges I mentioned are not money laundering_ in the sense understood by most people. And the more ethical reg execs at the more ethical banks have, among their top priorities nowdays, avoiding charges like these. There's even been a sort of reverse regulatory capture: top bankers see among their ethical responsibilities the job of being the world's money police.

This is a natural consequence of voters demanding politicians "hold banks responsible" when their accounts are used for nefarious purposes. Many HN commenters, I've noticed, share the same view. Well, be careful what you wish for. A regulatory environment in which banks are liable if they handle digital cryptomoney from who-knows-where is a regulatory environment in which they will refuse to do so. The knee-jerk urge to paint big banks as shady criminals will only intensify, not mitigate, the regulatory pressure.

<comment><USER3> They also from my reading misunderstand VAT. If they bought BC at £1 and sold at £1.20, then the VAT would be effectively only on £0.20 as they could claim back the VAT from the purchase when they sold. VAT would only scupper them if they were selling BC they had mined themselves, but their talk of trying to set up a bank makes it sound like this isn't the case.

<comment><USER4> They buy bitcoin at £1.

They add a markup of 5%, taking it to £1.05

Then they add 20% vat, taking it to £1.26

The final customer pays the VAT, which is collected from the OP. They reclaim VAT on things they buy, not things they sell.

<comment><USER5> This has always confused me - maybe somebody can help me.

I still don't understand how just re-selling something at a profit is 'adding value' in VAT terms. I thought the 'value' added was not monetary but actually doing something to the product(s) to make them more valuable.

[http://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/valueaddedtax.asp](http://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/valueaddedtax.asp)

<comment><USER6> With a 20% VAT rate, I buy something at 1.20 (1 + 0.20 VAT). So in effect I paid 0.20 as tax. Then I sell it at 1.80 (1.50 + 0.30 VAT). So I have collected 0.30 as tax. But I do not pass on all of the 0.30 tax to the government, I subtract the 0.20 I have already paid as VAT, and give the government 0.10. In effect, the consumer has paid the 0.30 VAT on the final price of 1.50 excluding VAT.

I find the definitions in the investopedia link you provided very confusing.

<comment><USER7> Well explained.

Essentially becoming VAT registered turns you into a tax collector :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a British citizen I admire his interest to operate the business domestically within the UK _(and thus create UK tax nexus)_ , but given the nature of the business and the run-around he's unsurprisingly receiving, I'm surprised he doesn't/didn't incorporate the business off-shore in the Caymens/Luxembourg/etc.

You can still operate it from within the UK, especially if you have the proof from HMRC (UK IRS) that it's not illegal practice, etc.

<comment><USER9> I did consider it. But my first exercise was to attempt to do things in what I consider to be the right way, open and upfront. For example the business name was "bitcoin anchor ltd" when I was repeatedly advised to name it something else to subvert bank flags. I wanted to see what resistance I would run into and I could see no compelling reason why I shouldn't be able to do this.

As events unfolded (slowly) I've become more interested In working to level the playing field instead rather than running a second business that would require far more investment in time than it would if I was as to operate wholly in the uk. Don't mistake this for lack of drive, I have obligations to my current business which take priority.

<comment><USER10> The banks are committed to fighting fraud? What a joke.

Any letter to the banks should inculde a list of all their recent scams and fraud, from interest rate rigging, to mis-selling of products, along with the penalties they've paid.

<comment><USER11> Fighting fraud which loses them money. Fraud which makes them money is fine, because it's not fraud, it's "for your convenience".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> TL;DR British financial institutions would like Bitcoin to go away. Any UK based Bitcoin exchange will be taxed out of existence.

I really admire Tom Gullen for going the extra mile to get answers from those in power.

</comment><comment><USER13> Wow, that was a very in-depth investigation he did.

Kudos, unfortunately outcome, but kudos none-the-less.

<comment><USER9> Author here, thank you! It's tiring meeting all the resistance I do when trying to investigate these issues. As cheesy as it sounds any thanks I do get really does motivate me.

<comment><USER14> Dude, despite not owning any bitcoins myself, it's a depressing picture that you've painted of our institutions' reluctance to accept what could be a revolutionary currency. I hope you keep us posted.

<comment><USER15> > our institutions' reluctance to accept what could be a revolutionary > currency

So, that's a pretty inherent quality of revolutionary things.

UK banks are under a lot of regulatory pressure to not facilitate money laundering. An important part of that is to be able to follow the paper trails of who has when money when. It's not just Bitcoin businesses that can't easily open accounts, there's trickiness across the board.

<comment><USER14> It is simply my opinion that the UK considers itself too much of a financial stalwart in the schema of grandiose capitalism, where it feels as though it has to stand by its archaic principles, in the face of many other much more conventionally strict economies' (such as German) ability to accept a new concept that, for once, is gaining credible traction and interest.

Were it not for the immense usage, support, and extensive literature that I would not take such an issue with the UK's reluctance to Bitcoin as I do.

<comment><USER13> s/UK/City of London and their ilk/g

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think the OP needs to decide if he is going into business or politics. If business then incorporate outside the UK, get a bank account in Poland or Slovenia, and get on with it. If politics then set up a political association, call for members/donations, lobby parliament and organise demonstrations.

Being effective at either requires single-minded dedication. Don't try to do both at the same time.

<comment><USER17> The problem with going offshore are the bank fees for international wire transfers. The UK uses GBP not EUR so that is also a barrier to overcome.

edit: also, don't forget about what happened with transferwise.com. It was used to transfer GBP to EUR to get bitcoins from a Polish bank account. Transferwise then blocked people from using the service to buy bitcoins presumably due to UK bank pressure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think a remaining problem with Bitcoin is that people think it somehow owes them free money, as detailed by this post. (While that may have been true in the early GPU and CPU mining days, now to venture down that road requires serious investment for diminishing returns.) The further away the currency gets from this way of thinking, the more stable and accepted it'll become.

<comment><USER19> Stable? It will crash and rise and crash and rise. Once we get faster tradability we'll start to see flash crashes. That's when the fun begins.

<comment><USER20> Umm, we see flash crashes already. What else would you call the drop from $350 to $310 here: [http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg5zig15-minzczs...](http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg5zig15-minzczsg2013-11-07zeg2013-11-09ztgSzm1g10zm2g25) ?

<comment><USER19> I'd call that a correction not a crash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is there some reason he went to the Office of Fair Trading and not -- say -- to the Banking Ombudsman, whose actual job this is?

<comment><USER9> Is OFT not a suitable first port of call? I believe the banks are abusing their dominant market position, to suppress the competition bitcoin offers. I also suspect that collectively they may be working as a cartel on this issue again which falls under OFTs interest.

They might claim otherwise but in my view they've lost the right for me to give them the benefit of doubt. For me to change my view they need to explain themselves better, certainly the reply from BBA failed on that.

As to why I didn't approach the ombudsman, I'm an amateur at politics and government and this is all new to me. Doing the best I can and I'm well aware some of my choices may be sub optimal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The cynical side of me would like to point out that he future of just about everything in the UK looks pretty bleak. Unless you're a banker or an authoritarian nutcase. And with no guarantee of press freedom, a massive surveillance state internally; etc. etc.

It does not sound like an appealing place to do business.

<comment><USER23> The US proves that a "guarantee of press freedom" means squat, when it's ignored in high profile with other guaranteed rights.

Where in the world is a good place to do business then?

<comment><USER22> You have a valid point; although in the US you will have advocacy groups that can field convincing legal arguments if you are being tortured, prosecuted for espionage for whistle blowing, etc. But yes, in the US the mask is slipping more and more. I mean it's nice that when bad things go down we can point to the bill of rights and scream about it's being violated; even if it is cold comfort to the victims of official malfeasance.

But hey at least we aren't a 1000-year old theocracy with no bill of rights whatsoever. And our guarantees of freedom of the press, means that those who want to know about stories that Very Serious People don't want heard will hear about them; even if they don't break out into open discussion until long after the fact.

As to where is a good place to do business...?

It depends on what your business is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I cannot find a contact address. Please send me an email - see my profile for my address.

<comment><AUTHOR> His email is email@example.com btw.

<comment><USER24> Thanks. Pinged him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Isn't one of the largest Bitcoin exchanges, BitStamp.net, based in the UK? They list a UK address on there website, why don't they have these problems...

5 Jupiter House Calleva Park, Aldermaston Reading Berkshire RG7 8NN United Kingdom

<comment><USER9> Yes, but they run with international bank accounts. This means users of the service are often required to pay international transfer fees (was £25 for us).

On the face of it this seems like a good solution, but it's another barrier for wider adoption. Also observe the gbp/usd value difference on a site like bitcoinaverage.com. It's often ~10% dearer when buying in gbp. This expensive price difference is caused by illiquidity and higher logistical differences when buying btc from a uk point of view. Uk buyers are suffering for it. It's not fair.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Offtopic but I have to mention it: this is one of the worst mobile experiences I've ever had. The text after initial load is too small, and when you try to zoom in it blurs the text until it finally loads, which on a crappy internet connection can take ages. seriously, why go out of your way to make reading text, one of the lightest possible activities on a mobile device, so horrible?

<comment><USER9> I know, and sorry. Me and my brother run Scirra, along with our artist from Brazil. We've got a huge amount of work on our plate and were only a 3 man team.

When I developed the website from the beginning I took the decision to not care too much for mobile friendliness as I'd rather spend the time developing new sections rather than testing on multiply evolving devices for a minority audience. Also consider our app is for desktop so mobile users are a minority. The sites already a lot for a small team, working on better mobile support isn't high on my list right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The BitPrice team has been in discussions with the UK government and regulators about Bitcoin for the past 9 months. Although I share many of the frustrations expressed here, I am much more optimistic about the outlook for Bitcoin in the UK.

As a prospective UK Bitcoin exchange, we have managed to secure meetings with the FCA, HM Treasury and Number 10 Policy Unit - in fact we've managed to get into Downing Street twice to talk about Bitcoin. At the higher levels there does seem to be a genuine desire to engage with and promote new financial technologies such as Bitcoin, and to increase competition in the UK banking and payments sector.

Educating people is still 99% of the battle – explaining what Bitcoin is, dispelling the myths and spelling out the benefits, whilst not ignoring the risks. The VAT issue is an example of the obvious lack of understanding of Bitcoin in some quarters. We were also notified by HMRC that they consider Bitcoin to be a voucher: "most likely a face-value voucher", on which VAT must be paid. For anyone with even a basic understanding of Bitcoin, this obviously doesn't make sense: they aren't issued by anyone, they don't have a "face value" and they can be redeemed for a wide range of goods and services. If they insist on using the "voucher" classification, the "credit voucher", which can be "redeemed at a number of retailers" and on which VAT is not usually due, seems more appropriate. Hopefully this issue can be resolved quickly by simply switching to this classification.

The upshot of these meetings is that we do now have a commitment from the Treasury that they will seriously consider how Bitcoin might achieve official recognition in the UK. In doing this the government is seeking input from Bitcoin businesses, for example through the FinTech Challenger Business Workshop that NewFinance organised a couple of weeks ago. Any interested parties can submit comments, which will be passed on to the government, see:

[http://files.meetup.com/2243521/RFC%20-%20FinTech%20Challeng...](http://files.meetup.com/2243521/RFC%20-%20FinTech%20Challenger%20Businesses%20Workshop%20-%20Oct%202013%20.pdf)

A common concern expressed by many fintech businesses at this event was the difficulty in obtaining bank accounts and accessing the UK payments network. This issue isn't restricted to Bitcoin businesses – at the moment it is almost impossible for any money service business to obtain a bank account in the UK. The current lack of recognition of Bitcoin by financial regulators doesn't help the situation, but it is a wider money laundering issue.

Overall, I am optimistic that the UK will take an enlightened approach to Bitcoin, and that banking and tax issues will be resolved soon. London has become so dependent on the financial services sector that it simply cannot afford to ignore such a revolutionary financial innovation.

Tom Robinson

BitPrice

www.bitprice.com

</comment><comment><USER28> Isn't bitstamp a UK incorporated company?

<comment><USER29> Incorporating isn't the problem. The problem is obtaining a bank account which is why Bitstamp doesn't have UK accounts.

<comment><USER28> Sorry, I was wondering more about the VAT issue alluded to in the blog.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Hi there,

upfront, the disclaimer: I'm the product manager for Bitcoin business at Fidor Bank, Munich (The bank, operating with the marketplaces Bitcoin.de and Kraken.com)

The discussion in the article is interesting, though it misses the point (in my opinion).

As what i've heard from the Bitcoin industry, indeed it may be a problem in getting support from banks.

But the denail of this support is not in the sense as mentioned in the article; and yes, big sorry for that, this article obviously smells to me like conspiracy+aliens+nazis-on-the-moon+"guys-meeting-in-a-carpeted-room-and- having-a-cigar-and-a-bottle-of-wine-to-decide-whom-to-support".

No one ever has asked and discussed the role of banks in the whole thing.

#1: I haven't checked the banks the colleague in the article has tried to work with. But: For "big banks" (whatever this may mean in your perspective), it may be somewhat problematic to support companies on a level beyond a regular bank account, because if you need regulatory consulting, this is something that doesn't work straight-through - instead, it involves a lot of tailormade solutions (and country by country, in the worst case)

#2: If you do a business, that a bank can't judge, the bank is free to deny support. Classic business, a standard banks understands it. But Bitcoin? Since this is new, and since no body has real(!) experience with it, they do not know how to evaluate. Plus: If the police/government/regulatory-authority finds out that you are supporting a big money-laundering-factory (by giving a bank account to them), there are people at the bank who may be put in jail, just because they didn't understand/didn't know. (And if you are not specialized in those new things, and if you have no experience with this new phenomena, its very likely that you do not understand whats going on! People in good-'ol corporate banking come from a completely different background, so they _can 't_ have the experience) And thats the rub: Instead of complaining why someone doesn't get a bank account, try to imagine -for a second- if anybody of you would be in that position - and i guess, no one of you would take the risk, right? :-) So, the most simple thing is just to deny the application for a bank account, instead of spending hours and hours of investigating and jumping into the materia...

#3: The above mentioned #2 is evebn more important, if you consider how many requests you get from people interested in running/starting a Bitcoin- whatever-business: Since market is new, there is a gold rush, barriers are low (at least it seems like to most people), and every kid today thinks of running an exchange is that easy. In fact it is not. (and i confirm this to you since i do have a lof background/insider informations). So, imagine the position of the bank: \- You do not have the people & experience yet \- You get tons of requests from startups, most of them will never survive \- If there is a business opportunity for your company, you just don't know - but you have to invest a lot of money(!) to get something on the road Now the magical question: WHAT do you do? :-))

#4: For most Bitcoin businesses out there, its not that you just need a simple bank account; if you want to operate in the current scenario, you need a lot more, depending on the country and the opinion of the regulatory authority. This involves a lot of work, a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of uncertainty etc. (By the way: If you want to exchange money, you need a license - but in Bitcoins, everyone thinks having no regulation is good? Maybe you wanna think about that twice) And since all of these costs, most banks just say no, because its the easier and more efficient answer.

#5: Here is now the conspiracy-theory part: Why, ever, should any bank deny a startup because it works with Bitcoins? Its just a too simple thought, because every bank is interested in doing & expanding business, so why would they have a interested in shuting-down you just because you use a new currency? Most people think, banks do not support it currently, because its a new currency which will attack "the power structure" of the current monetary system (which is, obviously, somewhat flawed and i can tell you this because i'm working in this sector ;-) But maybe you wanna read #6.

#6: Biggest problem is to think, that even if Bitcoin will rule the world tomorrow, that there are no more banks. Even at T(0) after Bitcoin has taken over the world, there will be "banks" \- maybe not what you think a bank is today, but even then there will be banks. Why? Its just not practical for your parents in their 50's to carry around a USB stick with all their assets on it. Its just a dumb idea. And even if the todays digital natives have reached their 50's, and even if they are "native with Bitcoin", also then its a very very bad idea to have all you assets in your pocket or at your apparment.

No comes the advertorial of my post ;-) Since Fidor Bank is a very young bank, we are able to support those types of business and we are proud to work with our partners www.bitcoin.de and www.kraken.com in the area of Bitcoin exchanges. We do this, because we think that the financial sector needs innovation and disruption. And yes, even if we are a bank (see #6 above), we do not belive that banks will be passed away. We have an optimistic approach on that.

Regards from Munich,

Florian

<comment><USER31> Thats a really nice answer to the article!

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I hold a fair amount of bitcoin as both a speculative investment, and because I support bitcoin in principle. I've long suspected that the biggest threat to bitcoin's long-term survival will be the power structure - banks or government or both - but I hold out hope that the will of the people to use this currency will overpower the will of the powers that be to suppress it. I've put my money where my mouth is, and I appreciate good articles like these which delve into the subject in detail.

<comment><USER33> "I hold out hope that the will of the people to use this currency will overpower the will of the powers that be to suppress it."

What makes you think that such will exists beyond a fringe of extreme libertarians and anarchists? Excluding that fringe and excluding speculators, what you are left with are people who want to avoid the fees associated with electronic payments. Those people are using Bitcoin via intermediaries as a way to send and receive their local fiat currency. In other words, Bitcoin itself is irrelevant; _any_ electronic payment system with lower fees would do, regardless of how it is structured.

<comment><USER34> There are a lot of people who live in countries like Argentina where there is no confidence in the currency as a store of value. Bitcoin provides a way for people in these countries to bypass unpopular capital controls.

There are also a lot of people who live in countries with a high rate of fraud or don't have access to banking services or credit cards. Bitcoin, as an extremely cheap and irreversible payment method, would allow them to participate in e-commerce.

It's true that the average law-abiding middle-class American isn't going to see much benefit from Bitcoin but they're a small subset of the population of the world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Are there any securities, like stocks or mutual funds, tied to the price of BTC?

<comment><USER36> This is one: [https://www.secondmarket.com/company/bitcoin-investment- trus...](https://www.secondmarket.com/company/bitcoin-investment-trust)

There may be more. I remember reading about the Winkelvoss' trying to do something similar.</comment></comment>


Cisco advisory: Ethernet cable may press factory reset switch - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/09/07/this-hilarious-cisco-fail-is-a-network-engineers-worst-nightmare/ <comment><USER2> I'm lost on why any enterprise kit at all has a reset button. This isn't a Netgear router where the ISP regularly asks people to "press reset" when they forget their password.

I was happy to use a console cable and send a break when I rarely needed to reset Cisco kit. Why these sorts of buttons ever existed I don't understand.

<comment><USER3> General idea here is that when you have a problematic piece of gear in somebody else's DC across the country, it is usually easier and faster to ask "remote hands" to press and hold the button, compared to asking to get a laptop, serial cable, fire up a terminal, join webex with his laptop and only then try to send break or whatever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Paper clip reset buttons are so 1990?

</comment><comment><USER5> > The cables, which are sometimes accidentally used in datacenters, feature a > protective boot that sticks out over the top to ensure the release tab isn't > accidentally pressed or broken off

Is this just a typo (misplaced "accidentally"?), or is there really a reason such cables shouldn't be used in datacenters?

<comment><USER6> It just seems like a poorly written article. Later on it says

> _Such a situation could cause a problem in any size datacenter, where these > switches and cables are commonly used_

which seems to contradict the "accidentally". Similarly, this bit is ungrammatical:

> _It's amazing that Cisco didn't catch this before the device was released, > let alone that the 'fix' for the problem which suggests using a different > cable or cutting off the boot._

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This sort of stuff happens all the time. Usually people just facepalm and get on with it rather than making a headline...

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure. There might be two design issues here:

1) placing the reset button directly above a port, making it easier to be hit by anything that happens to poke up above the port. Moving the button to one side would be logical.

2) making the reset button stick out. On consumer routers, the reset switch is usually recessed in a hole to make it harder to accidentally hit. Of course, the requirement for a reset switch for a device in a datacentre might be different.

Doing 1) or 2) would prevent the problem.

<comment><USER7> Of course. However DC kit has a long history of fail. Even old sun kit would drop to the monitor if you yanked the console cable. This on one occasion killed an entire e4500 cluster we had running oracle which failed over and then resumed crashing both instances. This happened due to a port glitch on the console server.

Perhaps I'm just desensitised to the issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Cisco Field Notice implies that it is a problem with excessively large protectors: "Numerous types of snagless cables are available. However, most are designed in such a way that the protective device is less prominent and/or held more tightly to the tab, which prevents the aforementioned drawbacks."

</comment><comment><USER9> It's an advisory from 2013. I wonder why this is surfacing nearly two years later.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I am also curious about this.

[http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/field- notices/636/...](http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/field- notices/636/fn63697.html)</comment></comment>


Garbage collecting stop the world for about 10 seconds in Go - <AUTHOR> http://grokbase.com/t/gg/golang-nuts/12bhd17s43/go-nuts-garbage-collecting-stop-the-world-for-about-10-seconds

<comment><USER2> > _It has been discussed but there is no plan as far as I know [for a latency > free, precise GC]. It has been estimated that it would take months (probably > a year) before a usable version would come out (if someone works on the > subject of course)._

That's the best Google can do?

I'd take old time SUN any day...</comment>


8km2 massive pyramid over Tokyo Bay in Japan - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shimizu_Mega-City_Pyramid

<comment><USER2> I have always thought that the best way to tackle lack of housing in developing countries (e.g. India) is to work on the supply side. I mean if we could do something drastically to reduce the cost of construction and not rely on near impossible land acquisition process in some countries. The best alternative is a project like above made with some advanced future materials and constructed near the coast. Solar panels , desalination etc could be used to take care of part of the energy and water needs (these are the two biggest problems). Also rapid construction kind of the like seen in China using rapid assembly of parts on site can be very helpful. I really think this would be the most important solution that would make the world more equitable and sincerely hope something materializes within 20 years.

10x cheap, 10x less land, energy from renewables etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hey it might beat MarsOne in term of credibility / feasibility! But would love to see both of them anyway.

</comment><comment><USER4> That makes me think of Tokyo-3 from Neon Genesis Evangelion.</comment>


Rubx: Twitter's Ruby shell - <AUTHOR> http://axiombox.com/rubx/

<comment><USER2> It's funny how everyone's first instinct is to try to "hack" it. Check out all the replies, everyone's trying out infinite loops, shell commands, fork bobs, sandbox breakers. Freedom to tinker all the way!

<comment><USER3> not too surprising for "hacker" news. it's a puzzle, first to hack it wins a book!

<comment><USER2> Agreed, pretty clever way of getting some serious penetration testing done.

By the way, apparently this snippet does the trick:

      @rubx f = Hash.new {|h,k| h[k] = h[k-1]+h[k-2]};f[0]=1;f[1]=1;f[1000000]

It looks like it calculates the 1,000,000th fibonacci number, with decent runtime complexity (not so much with memory). I don't know Ruby though, is there anything peculiar about the snippet?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's official: Twitter is the new IRC.

 _edit: except Twitter is currently down. I guess that's the equivalent to a netsplit._

<comment><USER5> The difference is that IRC can be useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think it would be harder to stop the near infinite loops / long running calls than it would be to make it secure in terms of file access and user escalation.</comment>


Why Jeff Bezos Should Push for Nobody to Get as Rich as Jeff Bezos - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/technology/bezos-amazon-rich-concentration.html <comment><USER2> Plus, then he'd be the richest person in history forever!</comment>


Ask HN: Compensation for Remote Developers - <AUTHOR> I was going through job listings on stackoverflow. I saw a lot of job listing for remote positions.
I find it hard to believe some of these listings are offering 5x to 8x my current compensation for the similar role and experience (I am from a developing country).
I was wondering whether the compensation offered by   these companies are dependent on location of the developer? If so how much would it matter?
I just want to clarify before I apply.
(sorry for my bad english) <comment><USER2> One thing that would put you in a stronger negotiating position would be to get multiple job offers for remote jobs that you are willing to take. Then you are less likely to need to accept a salary that is high compared to local job market but low compared to international remote job market.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not always but many big company scale compensation to local cost of living including Elastic, GitLab and Buffer. See here [https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/global- compen...](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/global- compensation/)

<comment><USER4> Yes unfortunately they do. Lest regular working folk can get any kind of edge!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There often are lower salaries based on where you live, yes. But you still come out ahead. I make less than my counterparts who work out of the NYC office, and way less than FAANG salaries... but am near the top of my market for Utah. I'd have to imagine that coming from a developing nation, you would still be doing quite well if you got a remote job.

And you definitely won't get a good salary if you don't apply. So apply.

</comment><comment><USER6> Most remote positions I've seen offered are US-only. In fact, many only want folks both in the US and on the Pacific Time Zone. ymmv

</comment><comment><USER7> I work all-remote at GitLab as an Engineer and interviewed for other remote positions before deciding to come onboard, so I believe I'm qualified to answer this question.

Yes, those remote positions and compensations are most likely real.

Companies go/explore/allow all-remote in order to profit, usually in three ways:

\- by getting access to talent pools otherwise not available to them due to geographical constraints.

\- by getting access to talent pools and markets where they may get a similar output/value for a similar or even lower salary to that expected in the markets where they have a physical presence.

\- by being active in the conversation about remote work and the future of the workplace and wherever those conversations happen.

So, even if your salary at one of this companies is 8 times your local rate, if you're good it'll most likely be worth it to them. Especially since:

\- if they hired someone in NYC, Amsterdam, Tel Aviv or SF they'd be paying much more.

\- they most likely don't need or want "a rockstar", whatever that is.

\- they've interviewed you and have verified, to a certain extent, that you can perform well and can get you to comply with their standards, their expectations and needs; different as with an overseas contractor/outsourcing agency.

If your profile is impeccable and it screams "this person is a potential amazing hire", I'd suggest you aim for being compensated on the value you provide at the highest possible market rate the company you're interviewing with has access to.

If you're a good professional in a not-so-great job market in a developing country aiming to break the ice with remote work and big/interesting tech players, I'd suggest you aim for at least 1.5 your possible local compensation.

As someone pointed out in another comment, you can use GitLab's salary calculator to benchmark your country of residence and you job family in different scenarios.

[https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/global- compen...](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/global- compensation/)

[https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/global- compen...](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/global- compensation/calculator)</comment>


Censorship By Glut - <AUTHOR> http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/01/1643227

<comment><USER2> Web 2.0 often thinks its solved problems it hasn't and this is just another example. The only people who will be surprised by this are the people who bought into the hype that "everyone's opinion is equal in the new social web"

The truth is you have to work hard to be listened to and sometimes you have to keep repeating your good idea over and over and over again until someone listens. There was a flurry of posts just a few weeks ago (started off by Paul Buchheit: [http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/overnight- success-t...](http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/overnight-success- takes-long-time.html)) that pointed out how "Overnight Successes" are often things someone has been working on for many years. But it was only when they'd been around long enough to be trusted that people started actually paying attention.

But if you work to establish yourself you will eventually be listened to and that is why this isn't censorship.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Censorship by Glut" is a very bad equivocation.

It compares censorship (by force) to not being heard (no force used). It takes a word that means force, and applies it to a situation with no force.

<comment><USER4> The victims of both "soft" and "hard" censorship suffer a similar loss of voice and power. One of the author's implied points is that "Censorship by Glut" has the same societal effect as "Censorship by Edict."

<comment><USER3> Force and freedom have different societal effects!

<comment><USER5> please explain.

<comment><USER3> e.g. compare censorship via china's internet firewall thing to "censorship" by America's total lack of internet firewall thing. isn't it pretty obvious the resulting internet communities are different?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am not sure the slashdot author understand the paper he read, he says:"the best often rise to the top, the very worst rarely do," yet the paper says: "In general, the 'best' songs never do very badly, and the 'worst' songs never do extremely well, but almost any other result is possible." [http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full.p...](http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full.pdf)

Namely, the paper does not say that the best often rise to the top, simply that they are unlikely to do badly.</comment>


Avoid JS callback hell with 'yield' (example of a new WebDriver library) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jlipps/yiewd

<comment><USER2> Where's the error handling?

The `yield` calls are definitely simplifying the no-errors case, but it looks like any of those yields can throw an error back to the enclosing function. All the errors from all the yields end up in the same function? If you care about some or all of them and want to tell where the problem occurred, you'd need to wrap each `yield` in a try/catch?

<comment><AUTHOR> You could wrap the whole thing in a try-catch and catch the first error to occur.

In my experience, running this with Mocha, errors are handled automatically by it()</comment></comment>


Chinese man caught by facial recognition at pop concert - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-43751276 <comment><USER2> Watch Dogs 3 sounds great.</comment>


Python daemon ate my syslog message - <AUTHOR> http://prgmr.com/blog/2020/08/29/python-ate-my-log-message.html <comment><USER2> Ironically, this is yet another example of why "dæmonization" is a fallacy. Closing all open file descriptors broke the library code that was using a private file descriptor to send things to the syslog server. It breaks that, other forms of logging, and indeed other library functions that might hold on to private file descriptors for whatever reason.

Had one thrown away the fallacious idea that one has to, _or even can_ , "dæmonize" from a login session context to a dæmon context, this entire problem wouldn't have arisen, irrespective of whether one logged to syslog or to standard error (which is another factor in its own right).

It looks like daemon.DaemonContext() is the function to recommend avoiding here, not just os.close() of arbitrary file descriptors.

</comment><comment><USER3> A fun bug to track down, I'm sure. Personally I would prefer not to daemonize by forking, but instead set up a systemd unit for the service. The program will be simpler, and administrating it will be simpler too.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wrong title: it was not python, it was third-party "daemon" package.

Closing random file descriptors in complex systems is extremely dangerous practice, and I had to debug the same bugs in C++ programs as well.

(The ancient advice to close all file descriptors on demonization only applies to simpler programs where the programmer knows each file descriptor used. Once third-party libraries come into play, this is no longer safe)

</comment><comment><USER5> This blog post has been changed to clarify the context for why daemonization is in use (the service is very old, meaning it predates systemd) and also gives an even more simple sample program that illustrates the underlying issue without use of daemonization or syslog.

<comment><USER2> Pre-dating systemd is no excuse. People have been explaining not to do "dæmonization" since 1995.

* [http://jdebp.uk./FGA/unix-daemon-design-mistakes-to-avoid.ht...](http://jdebp.uk./FGA/unix-daemon-design-mistakes-to-avoid.html#DoNotBackgroundise)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why not just log to stderr?

<comment><USER3> If you just log to stderr, you must have some other system hanging around to read that output and put it in the system log files for you. syslog doesn't do that, but systemd does.

<comment><USER2> Such systems have been available on Linux-based operating systems since the middle 1990s. It's not a new systemd thing by a long chalk.

* [http://jdebp.uk./FGA/daemontools-family.html#Logging](http://jdebp.uk./FGA/daemontools-family.html#Logging)

<comment><USER3> Of course, I didn't say otherwise.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Releases AJAX API Playground - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/learning_ajax_made_easier_google_api_playground.php <comment><USER2> so cool - already discovered new things about the apis i use. for example, i didnt know the feed api offered historical feed content. thats pretty cool!</comment>


Reservoir computing - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservoir_computing <comment><USER2> "Reservoir computing" taken very literally: wave interference in a bucket of water computed a simple speech recognition task (differentiate "zero" and "one") [1].

[1] [https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-540-39432-...](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-540-39432-7_63)

<comment><USER3> PDF: [https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/af34/2af4d0e674aef3bced5fd9...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/af34/2af4d0e674aef3bced5fd90875c6f2e04abc.pdf)

Also the Liquid State Machine paper they cited, "Real-Time Computing Without Stable States: A New Framework for Neural Computation Based on Perturbations": [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.5.8...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.5.8123&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

Fascinating idea. If I understand correctly, it's like an extreme version of data pre-processing. If you're trying to figure out whether an audio clip is saying "zero" or "one", analysing the raw amplitude data is pretty tough going. Instead you could run it through a Fourier transform in the hope that the clip's frequency content would be easier to analyse. If that doesn't help, maybe a wavelet transform, or something more fun like, uh, the "inverse Fourier transform of the logarithm of the squared magnitude of the Fourier transform"

In a sense, it doesn't really matter what pre-processing you do, provided that the differences between "zero" and "one" are more distinct in the output than the input. This is the "separation property" that the papers mention: important differences get magnified at the expense of unimportant ones. If that's true, your final analysis will have a lot less work to do.

What's cool about this is that "anything that magnifies important differences" is a pretty open-ended requirement, leaving you free to choose pre-processing that's easy to implement in hardware. In this case, fluid dynamics has the desired properties, and the laws of our universe make it very easy to implement a fluid simulation using actual fluid in an actual bucket.

Perhaps there are other systems with similar separation properties that are even easier to implement in hardware. Maybe something with electromagnetic waves, like in time-domain reflectometry? Even if such a system's behaviour is uninterpretable to us, it might still provide useful pre-processing to a machine learning algorithm.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There are a few interesting resources about this[1]. The concept of "microelectromechanical neural network application" [2] is super interesting. We've been hearing about memristors for a while, but has anyone seen them being widely deployed anywhere?

[1] [http://www.physnews.com/nano-physics- news/cluster1837307157/](http://www.physnews.com/nano-physics- news/cluster1837307157/)

[2] [https://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.5038038](https://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.5038038)

</comment><comment><USER4> After writing the following, I realized it might come off as more critical than I meant it. I'm genuinely curious, I just wasn't able to understand the motivation for this idea from the Wikipedia page.

First, let me attempt a summary in language that makes sense to me. You want to interpolate a function f:R^n to R^m. So you pick a "random non-linear dynamical system", and compose f with the output of this. To be concrete, let's say you pick a polynomial map F: R^n to R^n of degree at most k for some fixed k with random Gaussian coefficients. Let g(x) = h(1), where h' = F(h) and h(0)=x. Now, given training data (x_i, y_i), let z_i = g(x_i), and interpolate the function f* on the training data (z_i, y_i) using whatever method you like (least squares or a Neural net or whatever). Given test data x, guess f(x) = f*(g(x)).

Is this correct? Why is this plausibly a good idea? Why have the function g be the output of a dynamical system, and not a random matrix? Or if you want g to be nonlinear for some reason (what reason?), the output of a random polynomial or a random Fourier series? What happens if two clusters in the initial data which are well separated and map to different well-separated outputs in the codomain get mixed after composing with the dynamical system map g? Or what if g is not even one-to-one?

</comment><comment><USER5> What I don't understand is if you can train a final layer on the reservoir's random representation, why is this better than just training the final layer on your data directly? I assume the answer has something to do with dimensionality reduction?

<comment><USER6> The reservoir can compute non-linear functions of the input over time. So, with a reservoir, you can train a linear projection of the reservoir state that responds non-linearly to the input. Without the reservoir, the output projection can only be linearly related to the input.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> FYI, if you analytically determine the recurrent connections, you get way better results than setting the connections randomly. [http://compneuro.uwaterloo.ca/publications/voelker2018.html](http://compneuro.uwaterloo.ca/publications/voelker2018.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> You should be aware that echo-state networks are considered special cases of recurrent networks. One variant of recurrent networks, LTSMs, dominates state of the art on a wide variety of problems.

They're expensive to train, in computing time and data-requirements, but they're the closest thing we have to trained programs.

<comment><USER9> As far as I know, reservoir computing (liquid state systems) works with Spiking Neural Systems, which are different from "classic" artifical neurons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> eli5?

<comment><USER11> I am simplifying it to a level where it becomes borderline useless/wrong, but it should give a gist of the idea: it turns out that frequently you do not need to train anything but the last layer of a deep neural network, if all the other layers are sufficiently big arbitrary and weird. In reservoir computing you replace all but the last layer of the network with a "dynamical system", i.e. a large and meaningless map.

<comment><USER12> So treat it like a basis expansion?

<comment><USER13> If I understand the question correctly, ie is a reservoir computing approach simply projecting an input vector into a higher dimensional space, like a wonky support vector machine, then I think the answer is: unclear.

Reservoir computing approaches usually have the intermediate layers be recurrent, eg they implement a dynamical system. Theoretically, this is actually Turing complete, although good luck programming it. But in any case, the range of behaviors — transformations in the data — that a dynamical system can implement is much more powerful than just a basis expansion. However, whether this is what is happening in actual practice is really, really unclear to me. A lot of recurrent neural networks aren't doing anything more than an equivalent feedforward network, and the same thing may be true here: reservoir approaches might, for the most part, really just be performing nonlinear projection to higher dimensional spaces, and then the output layer is being trained to classify those patterns.

<comment><USER12> Thanks, that makes sense.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Lean Startup sucks for startups.  - <AUTHOR> http://klinger.io/post/69794653694/why-lean-startup-sucks-for-startups <comment><AUTHOR> OP here. HN is very critical towards Lean Startup. Imho that's right but often it's not for the right reasons. Hope my post clarifies my thoughts a bit.</comment>


Ask HN: Is Anyone Living "The 4-Hour Work Week"? - <AUTHOR> A book popular in our industry is now a decade old.
Has anyone put the advice from the author Tim Ferriss into practice?
If so, how did you manage to do it and what have you learned from the experience? <comment><USER3> No, but my grandfather owned a successful restaurant. Invested all the profits into real estate. Built an empire of 5mil+ as a Mexican immigrant. Towards the end, he had everything pretty automated by people he hired. Property managers for the rentals and a mix of family and a good restaurant manager for the restaurant. He would just come in on Sundays to count the money/accounting.

Side note. Our entire family has been destroyed by fighting over money. Money isn't everything. :)

<comment><USER4> That turned dark real quick.

<comment><USER5> It definitely did. I feel for OP – my family has also had its issues with money. Particularly money grabbing individuals who don't mind walking over bodies, family or otherwise, to get what they perceive as "theirs" by some metric. Whether or not these people are technically correct doesn't really matter when in the end, people who truly used to love each other are now sworn enemies. Cliché as it may be, it's very sad to see and be close to.

<comment><USER6> My mother's family went through the same dispute over my grandparents' real state and destroyed the family. Keep in mind that it is a lower middle class family in a developing country (Brazil), not that much money. One of the most vicious aunts in the dispute had actually the same or more wealth than my grandparents.

Money has a way of being the perfect "excuse" for vicious people to expose their viciousness.

<comment><USER5> My case isn't very different from yours, except we're in a well off country and individually pretty well off also. Goes to show vicious greed isn't necessarily a class thing.

In my case, a certain person did things so despicable that in my view until they atone for their crimes (actual crimes, not just wrongdoings) in prison, I will never be able to even start forgiving them. Instead, they're living the high life. It's very sad.

I hope you and your family are ok, if nothing else the ones you still care for. These episodes in my life have certainly made me appreciate my immediate family in a different and stronger way.

<comment><USER6> At the end it was for the better (except for my mom's and grandmother's - <USER2> she was alive - deep suffering of course). We divorced from the vicious part of the family, no contact at all with a few aunts and cousins, my parents fortunately could afford to give up of their part of the inheritance and it was totally worth to buy our freedom of any need for future contact with them.

For me, it was a lesson that absurd unethical behavior within a family happens in real life, it is not a thing of soap opera.

Fortunately, there was no crime committed in my case. "Only" obnoxious behavior, greed, and extreme selfishness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The book is about being "the new rich". The new rich is not about having a billion dollars in your bank. Its about having enough money and most importantly the time and brain space to enjoy your time.

In the book Tim, emphasises that burning through 90 hour work weeks are pointless if you are not able to enjoy the $$$ it will bring in. Rather spend some money to reduce your workload and focus on things that excite you.

While most the examples he cites are not very useful for me. (I am from India and outsourcing the boring jobs to India isn't very effective ). It helped me focus on what I want in my life. And what is the $$$ amount which will help me achieve that. Its a hard conversation which most of us don't have with ourselves.

I sum up the book as; "There is no point in feeling like shit in your 20s and your 30s for a great life in your 40s which might not even come." Its not exactly YOLO as it emphasises to have a great time and not just let life happen.

<comment><USER8> I've never tried to work less tbf; I'm 31 years old and if I was given more free time, I wouldn't know what to do with it. I'm not the hipster adventurous type, traveling somewhere exotic doesn't appeal to me (I'd be more afraid of getting robbed and scammed), I'm not very social, etc. I prefer my 9-5 life so far. Just bought a house too.

<comment><USER9> Obviously spend your life however you like, I just want to put it out there that it sounds like you don't like to put yourself outside of your comfort zone (like pretty much everyone, even the hipsters).

There is nothing 'hipster' about doing something outside of your normal routine, like travelling or yoga. I'd recommend you try it more often, you'd be pleasantly surprised at what sort of things (good and bad) will happen.

I recently went on a trip, and when the plane landed my first thought was that I wished I stayed home. Good and bad things happened on this trip, but boy am I glad I did it.

<comment><USER10> While I am sure it comes from a good place, I wonder why there is a prescription being given when he states he is happy the way he has it and has no interest in living any other way? Coulent he be genuinely happy with his life and in no need of change?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I saw a flash of it once. I was in the middle of vagabonding in the philippines (Cebu) where breakfast on the corner was $1 and a private room $15/night. I got a contract for 8hrs at $120/hr = $960.

So I rented a desk for $10 overnight (EST hours) and billed the hours after 2 nights.

In Cebu, $960/month is more than enough to live comfortably. So I realized I made an entire months living (traveling) expenses in one day of work. That's almost like the "2 hour work week"

<comment><USER12> I'm fairly sure you'd have broken the terms of your visa doing that.

<comment><USER13> Yes, but so would checking work email on vacation abroad. It's all a matter of risk tolerance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The point of this book like many other books "get rich quick and work less", is to make the author richer. If you're successful, people will most likely listen to you. So, you need to be successful in some way in real life and if you do, Tim showed you how to leverage a success into a great business model. This helped him generating more income by documenting his journey to a larger audience. So, the content of his book is not the point I think. It's the existence of that book in itself. So, to me it's still about luck and about taking risks in life. It doesn't answer the question: "how to become rich?". More like "how to create a business model based on your success".

Like any other book... There is no recipe for success. But there are a lot of techniques on how to maximize your income.

<comment><USER15> I think the main value of books like these, including books on diets or exercise, is inspiration. After you've read 4 hour work week you probably come away with an increased determination to run your own business. That more than any concrete advice it contains would be what recommends it to readers I think.

<comment><USER16> I've certainly "fallen victim" to this. I label it as that because -- for me at least -- the determination fades very quickly. Maybe I just have to find enough of these books to read consistently so I can keep my determinism up for long enough to succeed?

<comment><USER8> Except then your main determination is to read more books, not to "succeed" whatever your definition of that is.

The problem is that people read books and get a short spurt of inspiration and desire, but said inspiration / desire is for the end goal - to get there you need to do a journey first. Ferris didn't write his book overnight or even in a few weeks (maybe the summary), nor did he just have the ability to write books - that stuff takes time. It's just that looking at people who got to the end result make it look easy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> For a lot of people, 4WW was a "think and grow rich" kind of pressure cooker. Sure, you may be able to do with if you combine the highly marketable skills of being a certain kind of programmer with a low-rent country. Those folks are corner cases. The main beneficiary of the book was Ferriss, who's just selling the dream, like a lot of people in the "information business".

<comment><USER8> The TL;DR of the book is basically "If you want a 4 hour work week, write a book about achieving a 4 hour work week"

<comment><USER18> And even that will take more than 4 hours per week.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I lived it for a couple of years based on the framework from the book. Living on an island in Thailand diving everyday, hanging out in Bali or Barcelona.

Eventually I got a little bored with it and wanted to create bigger companies so I dove back in, but I still attribute a lot of my success to stumbling across that book one day.

<comment><USER20> As a somewhat obsessive relationship with that book, I'm looking to get into entrepreneurship soon. From everything I've read and researched about the 4HWW, people say its better to first have a working business and/or income stream, then focus on ways to automate or make single processes more efficient; As opposed to trying to start a business using the 4HWW from the 'get-go'.

What would your advice be? As someone who's lived the success, do you think its possible to start from the ground up with 4HWW in mind?

<comment><USER19> No I don't think that is usually possible. I think your first idea is correct. Work like crazy to get something working and profitable, and then work to automate it (which is frequently harder than you might think).

Doing this has helped me create bigger things as well. I create a business, more or less automate it, and then use that cashflow to work on other businesses. Eventually creating a portfolio of cashflow businesses, with a few exits in the middle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I have lived the 4 hour work week for the last 2 years. I created a course online and earned half a million dollars from it in the first year alone, after spending 3 months creating it (I was 29 when I created it). Many of the ideas from that book (4hww) were ideas that came naturally to me prior to reading that book. I think anyone who considers themselves resourceful (particularly with utilizing Google search) would say the same thing. Most of the world's information is on the web, so if you want to create a lifestyle that optimizes for high earnings and low work hours, you should start by searching Google.

It's striking to me how people seem so baffled about anything anymore these days. Is there a God? The best framework humans have discovered for figuring things out is the scientific method, and according to that, the answer is: not as far as we can tell. Why is this even a question anymore and why do religions still exist, 20+ years after the internet has been around for the public? Again, the answer to that is on the web as well (the answer probably has to do with how longstanding institutions take a long time to die without meteoric disruption - and physics research/the discovery of the Higgs boson clearly wasn't enough to disrupt religion, nor was the recent rise in popularity of Nick Bostrom's simulation theory which happens to be my favorite theory about what this universe is, etc.).

Anyway, I digress...the point is that nearly anything can be figured out via Google. Want to become a rocket scientist? Google it. Read the best books out there. Don't sell yourself short. Want to be an engineer? Google it. And then do it. You can also learn almost anything with very low cost, thanks to the Internet.

I just gave you the secret to the 4 hour work week. Google + determination.

If you're struggling with accepting this answer - start with getting better at searching Google. You can get good at it like any other skill.

<comment><USER22> Cool, was it a video course or some ebook?

How did you do the marketing?

<comment><USER21> It was a video course. Without divulging too much, I Googled around and found some sites that had massive audiences that were similar to the audience I was targeting with my course. I contacted them and they cut me a deal to distribute my course to their audience. That brought in tens of thousands of students in the first year alone.

<comment><USER23> How much was your course priced at and what was the split like?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I have not, but I know a friend who did this for a while directly out of high school. I've never read the book, but most of these types of books say "create passive income using ____________" he made a pdf and charged 15 bucks for it. Sold it on his own website and made ~$1500-2000 a month. the money he used to live and built some other not so successful websites. We were straight out of highschool though so this was enough money to live on and he didnt TOUCH the webpage for like 2 years steady income. Sometimes people just get lucky I guess.

<comment><USER25> Out of curiosity, what was the topic of the PDF?

<comment><USER8> And how were payments handled? Taxes? I find that to be the most daunting part, I mean there's distributors like leanpub and co but I'm afraid they take a huge cut.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm not living the 4HWW but that book kickstarted my journey from employee -> full time freelancer -> part time freelancer + working on my own products -> 100% my own products.

I'm currently transitioning into the part time freelancing phase.

<comment><USER27> Why are you transitioning in to freelancing phase? Products business is slowing down?

<comment><USER26> I'm not there yet, I'm currently transitioning from full time freelance to part-time freelance combined with launching some products of my own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm living 4 hour work week and it's one of the best books that ever helped me. Just use the advices in the book, pretty simple. I spend most of these days working on side projects, feels great! This also allowed me to earn a lot of money, so definitely not downshifting.

Actually kinda amazed that there aren't many similar people in the thread...I can email you from a public address, it would prove I have a real reputation and not just Tim's paid commenter.

<comment><USER20> As the other request said, please post more information. I want your lifestyle and hope one day I can come up with an idea and put it into action to achieve it.

<comment><USER28> Dig deeply into some area, become a professional.

Then hire other people and try to optimize your business to work without your control. It's very important to be able to manage the company remotely.

A lot of people are trying to get to some huge expertise to achieve "bigger salary" or something. But no one really focuses on earning a _small_ regular no-hassle income.

That's mostly it...Focus on 20% of stuff which gives 80% of results, like the book said.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I work one hour or two every morning to pay the bills. I spend an additional 3-4 hours working on things I want to see happen in the world. The hardest part is self-discipline, so I cut out all social media (no reddit outside of work-related stuff and limit HN). No movies and no porn surfing.

No internet at home helps me stay on track. When I need internet I walk to the coffee shop with a to-do list.

<comment><USER30> What do you actually do during those couple of hours to pay the bills?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This story is a good example:

[https://www.indiehackers.com/@yvo/how-ive-lived- the-4-hour-w...](https://www.indiehackers.com/@yvo/how-ive-lived-the-4-hour- work-week-for-a-decade)

Also I have a couple of friends who have done it for a while.

</comment><comment><USER32> My biz partner and I lived it for about 2.5 years. We finally sold the network we had built up for 7 figures and ended up buying a company with 25 people, so the opposite of 4 hours :)

</comment><comment><USER33> I wish I had read it sooner, but I have made small adjustments to my day job to improve things.

For those that cannot work remotely, you can still improve your productivity. I have a DND button on my phone that goes right to voicemail after one ring. I funnel everyone into creating a Jira task instead of trying to email, call, or ask in person for some work.

I document commonly asked questions like his FAQ in Confluence so I can point all new hires in other departments to this introduction training material.

</comment><comment><USER34> Not exactly a '4-hour work week' but after reading the book, I have put in a lot of effort into automating a lot of daily recurring browsing activity for which I used to waste time daily. Since I prefer email as the main mode of communication, I have developed automation to extract and send all the important information (for which I used to browse) to me via email daily or hourly. Activities like tech news updates with word cloud, real estate searches, stock prices of interested stocks and many more. This saves me a ton of time by not randomly starting to browse. I attend to only important emails from these email updates.

</comment><comment><USER35> 4-hour work week no, but I know pretty many people that wait to vest on 4-hour workdays.

</comment><comment><USER36> I really don't think there are many people at all who are in a position to make use of the advice in the book, and of those who are I really don't think there are any who would actually benefit from it.

Gotta milk that survivorship bias though!

<comment><USER37> Any success story is going to have survivorship bias. But yeah, 4 hour work week is really the worst example of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Yvo Schaap, the creator of Directlyrics.com, recently wrote a detailed article on Indie Hackers about how he's been living the 4-hour work week for the past decade: [https://www.indiehackers.com/@yvo/how-ive-lived- the-4-hour-w...](https://www.indiehackers.com/@yvo/how-ive-lived-the-4-hour- work-week-for-a-decade)

He created product where the brunt of the work took place in the first few months/years, but the SEO traffic paid dividends for years to come.

<comment><USER39> "Early in 2010 I made the decision to become fully licensed, which significantly cut into my revenue. MetroLyrics did the same before me, and AZLyrics eventually followed suit."

...is a key two lines to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I have two friends who did, independently. I surely doubt that they are still running things as they did way back then. But, at the time, and for almost a decade afterward, it enabled them to travel freely around the globe and have a relatively luxurious lifestyle.

Interestingly, both eventually got married and settled down back in the states. They each seem to be doing well - but have more conventional lifestyles now (i.e. Living in the burbs with kids).

</comment><comment><USER41> Yes. The book sent me in a treacherous path and it wasn't easy but today I can say I'm working remote, 3 hours/day (minimum though) and earning a good living. Problem is, I am ambitious and end up working the whole deal, and investing every bit of earnings while preparing for the future. But happily. Still, I can say this book sent me on the path.

</comment><comment><USER42> It gave me the dream to work remotely from abroad. I'm relatively poor and working a lot, but almost 2 years in Japan now.

<comment><USER43> Do you just use a self-sponsored visa? I jump back and fourth but work for a US based company on salary. Curious if I could do the same?

<comment><USER42> I'm on a cultural visa and am learning a martial art under the guidance of a teacher. I pay taxes in the origin country, but it's not optimal. If you have enough money, found a company, then you won't have any problems and can renew easily.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> A friend of mine is - she trained to become a Pilates instructor a number of years ago. Now she does 2 group classes a week (corporate clients) of 1 hour each, earns about $300 per class. That's enough for her to live on.

<comment><USER45> Where in the world can you change $300 an hour for pilates and live on $600 per month?

<comment><USER13> Same question, except $2400/mo.

<comment><USER45> Aha! That's more understandable, though still somewhat surprising.

<comment><USER46> They're group classes, so each participant is paying only a fraction of the $300.

<comment><USER45> Even so ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> No, because most of these books are bullshit allowing their authors getting rich by selling them to people who look for some kind of "magic success formula" :)

</comment><comment><USER48> Yes, i can do it tomorrow with my side project

</comment><comment><USER49> Yes, but it's about 6 hours.</comment>


The Startling Link Between Sugar and Alzheimer's - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/01/the-startling-link-between-sugar-and-alzheimers/551528/ <comment><USER2> So can we stop poisoning the food supply you fucking morons.

</comment><comment><USER3> No mention in the article of the possibility of mouth bacteria being the vector.</comment>


When Ransomware Cripples a City, Who's to Blame? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/22/us/florida-ransomware-hacking-it.html <comment><AUTHOR> Surely the I.T. manager is to blame. At the very least, he should be able to recover lost data from backups, whether the cause was ransomware or a hurricane.</comment>


Qtile 0.5 released – pure Python tiling WM - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/qtile/qtile/commit/dd52b52fb8713b5b983c1a034a67bfc6fa269573

<comment><USER2> <http://www.qtile.org/> is a more useful link than a commit diff

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice to see the project is not dead.

Edit: I am sold, awesome job. If you want to try out, check <http://docs.qtile.org/en/latest/#installing>

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow, it looks great. xmonad got me hooked on tiling WMs but I had to switch to i3 because my haskell-fu sucked. At first it did not bother me and I was content with jgoerzen's default config plus a few minor tweaks. As I became more knowledgeable about xmonad it was obvious that my haskell handicap was preventing me from achieving the workflow that I wanted.

The one thing that worries me is the xrandr support borked[1] bug. Can anyone comment on xrandr and qtile?

[1] <https://github.com/qtile/qtile/issues/32>

<comment><USER5> It looks like if there is a problem, you can restart qtile and be OK. Also, you might be able to get away with setting your monitor configuration with xrandr _before_ starting qtile.

If you like tiling and multiple monitor support, I suggest you check out Wingo. [1] It's a hybrid window manager written in Go, and configured in simple INI-like files.

Disclaimer: I'm the author.

[1] - <https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo>

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good point - you can script saving/restoring your windows, do your xrandr stuff, and restart qtile and it should work just fine. Admittedly not ideal, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Criticism: I'll note that after reading both the README and the copy on the frontpage of qtile.org, I still don't know if this is for X11, Windows or OSX. I assume X11, but it's not really explicit.

[ Note: the screenshots give it away, but you have to click first because the thumbnail screenshot on the front page isn't big enough to tell. ]

That said, it's nice to have a tiling WM in a language I know well. I've fiddled with XMonad in the past, but have a very thin knowledge of Haskell (a few times I've tried to do complex things and muddled my way through using the compiler as my guide).

<comment><USER7> It mentions XCB in the overview, which gives it away as X11 pretty well (at least it did to me).

<comment><USER6> I don't think that everyone that knows about/uses X11 knows what XCB is. I didn't off-hand. I knew that there were C bindings for X11, but I didn't know they were referred to as XCB.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> can someone explain what the advantage of a tiling wm is? here people talk about not using the mouse, but i don't use the mouse with kde most of the time (maybe i am already "tiling" as as i have my xterm and browser side-by-side, or an ide window that's full screen, and simply alt-tab).

also, when i look at tiling wm screenshots, they often look terrible, with things like huge clocks, apparently because of horizontal/vertical stacking. are there any that are flexible enough to look attractive?

finally, can i still use applications like amarok (the kde music player) in a tiling window manager? what about all the kde infrastructure for sound management (phonon etc) that amarok depends on? what starts that? does the tiling window manager run in kde?

sorry for probably clueless questions. have used linux/x for decades, but always with a "normal" wm.

update - this seems to have some answers (not great - i am starting to think it's mainly a group signalling thing, which is cool - i am writing this wearing a band t-shirt..) [http://superuser.com/questions/52082/why-use-a- tiling-window...](http://superuser.com/questions/52082/why-use-a-tiling- window-manager)

edit: another q - how do things like vms work? is there some way to integrate windows from a vm?

<comment><USER2> > also, when i look at tiling wm screenshots, they often look terrible

the explanation on the rat poison page <http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/> probably says everything about that.

tilers are not for decoration, they are for functionality and performance. there is an option to replace xfwm with xmonad in xfce to get good tiling and save the looks, but I didn't have time to try it. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4722201> (btw that x-tile app is crap)

<comment><USER8> i'm sorry, but that doesn't explain why you'd want to use one, unless you have a really slow machine. it just says that they use few resources and you don't need to use the mouse. but i have a decent machine and, as i said, already alt-tab between windows.

i realise appearance isn't everything, but if you had the choice of dating two people, otherwise equal, one who was ugly and the other cute, what would you choose?

i also realise i may be coming across as a troll (that wasn't my intention, but your reply seemed to wilfully ignore what i asked). i really am interested in what the advantages of one of these would be (since if the reason is convincing i would try one).

<comment><USER2> > wilfully ignore what i asked

I answered what I knew the answer for. I have no idea about kde and its apps, never used it, as I said, I use Xfce. And on my laptop I use Openbox. On both of them I too switch between desktops/windows with my keyboard. I tried AwesomeWM once for a moment (very hyped recently), but pure tile seems too crazy for me and by their nature those wms are very raw out of the box (read: nothing there. DIY).

> i'm sorry, but that doesn't explain why you'd want to use one, unless you > have a really slow machine.

It's one of those things where there isn't one true answer, it's just a matter of preference - good looking 'desktop metaphor' or highly script-customizable tiles. There should probably be some religious battles about it in the deep meanders of the interwebs. The most flagship usage of decent tilers is those sysadmin dudes with 40 terminals on 5 monitors rotating them all around between a dozen of workspaces like mad. I use 4 to 7 workspaces tops on a single monitor in xfce and openbox, while f.ex. awesomewm sets default workspaces to 9, I think that says pretty much about the workflow of the tiling userbase.

tldr: idk, whatever floats your boat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been thinking about trying a tiling window manager, since I despise using the touchpad on my ThinkPad and Emacs and my MBA's touchpad have spoiled me on never really moving my hands from the keyboard. I thought about xmonad but now is not the time I want to spend diving into Haskell.

This seems like a great middle ground. I'll be trying it this week.

<comment><USER10> XMonad is very good, but is only a window manager (eg, no toolbar), so you need to fiddle with configuration files to integrate it with a third-party toolbar (eg, xmobar or taffybar). You can try awesome, which I found much easier to use out-of-the-box. It's fairly mature by now, features a clickable toolbar, and a library of additional widgets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I avoided qtile awhile ago because of performance issues I read about when compared with awesome and xmonad. Anyone know about a change on that front? As someone who spends a lot of time in python I would prefer a python tiling wm, but I cannot find any performance benchmarks with the latest versions of qtile.

<comment><AUTHOR> What kind of performance benchmarks are you looking for? There used to be some memory leaks in xpyb (the X interface qtile uses), but 1.3.1 addresses most of those I believe.

Other than that, I'm not sure anyone has ever reported any performance problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What would be the main advantage over awesome? Does it play well with KDE? I like the pager from kde and awesome integrates well.

I might be too invested in awesome to try it, don't have time. Shout if it's really a quantum leap :)

</comment><comment><USER13> Can someone explain why they want to do this in Python and not judt C and Xlib?

<comment><USER14> Window managers aren't very computationally intensive so a person can use whatever language he is most comfortable with.

Although I haven't seen a WM written in Brainfuck yet.

<comment><USER13> Well, I think I'll try it, I need to practice some python.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> dwm is my favorite so far, does the job very well, but as python dev I should give qtile more attention again. Looks interesting.

</comment><comment><USER16> Is this only for command-line guis?

<comment><USER17> No, it runs on top of an X server like any other desktop environment (GNOME, KDE, etc)</comment></comment>


JUST EAT delivery robots - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-36723089 <comment><AUTHOR> I can't see these surviving for long....

<comment><USER2> Not in Philly, at least.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/04/us/hitchhiking-robot- safe-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/04/us/hitchhiking-robot-safe-in- several-countries-meets-its-end-in-philadelphia.html)</comment></comment>


URL Shortener Analysis - <AUTHOR> http://ewencp.org/blog/url-reshorteners/

<comment><USER2> There's a simple reason that Twitter always pushes link through their shortener - it means that if a link is deemed hazardous to your health, they can kill it.

This happens all the time with spam accounts, but I've seen it happen on real accounts as well. Twitter takes exception to something you've lunk to and "Bam!" - the link doesn't work any more.

Good practice? Or simply evil. You decide.

<comment><USER3> I think there are other reasons as well (e.g. analytics, as mentioned in the post, when links are consumed through third party clients), but I don't buy this one. Wouldn't this only be useful in breaking spam links when they are spread beyond Twitter? On Twitter itself, they don't need a URL shortener, they just need to remove the offending tweets. It might be a nice side effect, but I doubt it's the real motivation for shortening everything.</comment></comment>


Visual profiler for Python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nvdv/vprof <comment><USER3> You can also just use Python for Visual Studio[0] if you're on Windows.

[0] [https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/features/python- vs.aspx](https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/features/python-vs.aspx)

<comment><USER4> Is it just me, or running programs under PTVS slows them down by quite a bit? Even when I turn off debugging, it still seems to be slower than when I run the program from the terminal.

<comment><USER5> It is slower for me as well, but the debugger is excellent.

<comment><USER6> perhaps hitting F5 instead of ctrl-F5 (run w/o debugging)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> TL;DR; it's a visualizer for cProfile (with all the cProfile problems)

DISCLAIMER: I'm an author of cProfile competitor, vmprof

</comment><comment><USER8> [http://www.pyvmmonitor.com](http://www.pyvmmonitor.com) also provides a nice visual profiler.

<comment><USER9> I noticed that PyVMMonitor is built on PyQt. Mind if I ask you some questions about how you licensed the underlying tech stack to be able to sell it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> We did something similar at Nylas, but we built it to run in production across our entire fleet: [https://nylas.com/blog/performance/](https://nylas.com/blog/performance/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Intellij-based PyCharm uses yappi[1] or cProfile to provide similar visual profiling functionalities.

[1]: [https://bitbucket.org/sumerc/yappi/](https://bitbucket.org/sumerc/yappi/)

</comment><comment><USER12> I like the flame graphs. Reminded me about the Netflix JavaScript Talks - Debugging Node.js in Production[0] talk, 11 min in.

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1YP8QP9gLA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1YP8QP9gLA)

<comment><USER13> Just as an FYI, youtube links support a time bookmark at the end of the URL with `?v=CAFEBABE#t=11m0s` (in your example); the "share" widget on the site will encode the bookmark for you, if you prefer that method.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have just recently discovered chrome://tracing and wrote a quick python profiler [1] to output in its format.

[1]: [https://github.com/oxplot/crprof](https://github.com/oxplot/crprof)

</comment><comment><USER11> How do I use this visual profiler to profile a Flask app?

<comment><USER15> You'd just run the flask app under the profiler and send requests as you normally would, right? Am I missing something?

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't profiled any webapps yet, but you can profile functions inside your Flask app.

First you start profiler in remote mode

        vprof -r

and then use vprof.profiler.run function:

        profiler.run(foo, 'cmh', args=(arg1, arg2), host='localhost', port=8000)

(replace host and port if you run your webappp on another maching with address of machine you run "vprof -r" on).

This will run profiler and send stats to server in JSON format.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Neat-- wish I'd had this a few weeks ago when I was trying to track down some performance issues.

(Ended up getting what I needed out of cProfile, which this also uses on the backend. Would've been nice to have the nice visualizations, though.)

</comment><comment><USER17> Is there a similar tool of the code heatmap but for JS?

<comment><USER18> Lots of info on that here: [http://www.brendangregg.com/flamegraphs.html](http://www.brendangregg.com/flamegraphs.html)

<comment><USER17> I mean the code coverage tool, not the flame graphs. To e.g. know what paths of the code are never executed. Chrome and Firefox already show flame graphs in their profilers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "RuntimeError: maximum recursion depth exceeded while calling a Python object "

When installing.

</comment><comment><USER7> I would like to complain about name similarity to vmprof (my project)

<comment><USER20> You're kidding, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> KCacheGrind relies on using valgrind, which gives you extremely detailed information on runtime information by wrapping your execution context at a very low level. For this reason, it can track individual memory allocations, function call statistics, etc. However, for Python, that can be a bit overkill; usually you're just looking to measure what parts of your code are taking up executing time and heap space.

This package uses cProfile, psutils, and pstats go get runtime information on your code as it's running. It's doing what valgrind does but in a much "higher-level" fashion, in pure Python. This means that it can give you more relevant information about your Python code.

<comment><USER22> > It's doing what valgrind does but in a much "higher-level" fashion, in pure > Python.

Valgrind is essentially a VM, this uses cProfile - I wouldn't call that doing the 'same thing' at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Looks like an awesome piece of technology, but why, whenever I see headline xxxx followed by "(github.com)" do I get a slight feeling of despair - <USER2> feeling that this project has a high chance of being future abandonware. Is it that having a proper, dedicated, expensive-looking, website, away from github, is a signal of access to resources, willingness to do proper marketing and documentation, and therefore, by correlation, longevity?

<comment><USER24> Like with almost any open source project nobody promises you anything. But it's not framework, you don't lose much by not using it and you don't have to rewrite your code in case it would be abandoned.

<comment><USER23> yes I realise that I'm looking a gift horse in the mouth, and I love git(hub), but I'm just pointing out that "(github.com)" might just be a net-negative marketing point for people looking for robust software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Does it work with Django? If so, how?

</comment><comment><USER26> Cool!</comment>


Judge rejects $324.5M settlement of tech wage case - <AUTHOR> http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2024274873_apxtechjobssettlement.html

<comment><USER2> From a different article - To match the earlier settlement, the latest deal "would need to total at least $380 million," Koh wrote. That is disturbing a judge suggesting an amount. The original case called for 3 billion. The attorneys did not take it to court because of the triple damages clause in US Law. Also what is the Sept 10 next meeting supposed to decide.</comment>


Twitter to buy Summize.com - <AUTHOR> http://joshchandlerblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/twitter-to-buy-summizecom.html

<comment><USER2> He who thinks twitter is acquiring summize for the technology is foolish.

<comment><USER3> Care to elaborate?

<comment><USER4> I'd guess he means they are buying the people, not necessarily the tech.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seems to be an odd purchase. They already have access to all the data, how hard is it to write a simple search layer?

<comment><USER6> I'm always a little surprised at comments like this regarding a software/technology acquisition. This sort of thing is rarely about whether or not they "can" reproduce the technology, but how much value it would be for them to have versus the opportunity costs of working on it.

Right now, Twitter is flush with cash from their recent funding. They need to continue their growth and their best engineers are obviously working to keep the site alive rather than designing new features.

As such, it makes lots of sense to add features through acquisition given their circumstances. This particular feature has been tried and tested to work with their existing infrastructure. Because it builds on their API, they also don't have to worry about the design breaking during their internal scalability refactoring.

This deal makes lots of sense to me and I would expect to see more of this from them as they fight to keep aloft.

<comment><USER7> its search not rocket science. Unless the acquisition is in the low 5 digit figures, it's probably a waste of money. Acquisitions are usually about getting the seller's user base or some unique piece of technology/patent, which is not the case here.

<comment><USER6> 5 digit figures? How are you getting that? How many full-time engineer "months" do you think Twitter would need to pay to get something as scalable as Summize? Who will test that it's ready to go live before the patience-thin Twitter user base?

How much money would be spent on the scalability testing to see if the service can handle an Apple WWDC without crippling the rest of Twitter?

I think you're greatly underestimating what they did with Summize. It's not rocket science, but there's real (and tried-by-fire) value there for Twitter. Summize didn't get $750k in angel funding to sell to someone in low 5 digits.

We're talking about live search over a medium completely made up of small, frequent text messages. Real-time searching increases Twitter's value as the instantaneous information source it has become. They don't have a lot of strengths to build on, but that's definitely one of the most valuable things Twitter has to offer and Summize augments that.

No brainer: buy Summize for a 2-4 million, add their search tools, get some of their engineers helping in the scalability problems, improve the API based on their feedback, have some of them continue working on their lab prototypes, and keep growing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Summize is a trivial feature given Twitter. But if you think about it, Twitter is also a trivial feature given Summize. Summize is WAY more reliable. Let's hope that the technical leadership goes in the opposite direction as the cash!

<comment><USER9> Bummer. You made me realize that I'll never get to search Plurk, identi.ca, etc. with Summize.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why bother purchasing a search layer when they can't even scale right...they're not prioritizing

<comment><USER11> They are probably worried about what happens if they continue to not be able to scale. If they add search, perhaps they can charge money for people data- mining tweets, and get some cash to continue to focus on scaling.

Right now Twitter needs to keep current users excited, because we're all really tired of Twitter's downtime. The only thing keeping us on Twitter is the other Twitter users. If a critical mass of users leaves, Twitter becomes a distant memory. They are probably trying to avoid that by adding features that don't kill their current database.

Just speculation, of course. Sometimes it's a good idea to assume that they are making a good move instead of thinking that you're clearly smarter than them and they are "teh fail" for doing this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Unsubstantiated?

<comment><USER13> pics or it didn't happen</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Has anyone heard of an ICU doctor getting an autopsy report on COVID19? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> It seems odd that you would ask this question in a forum like HN. Why here? Just asking.</comment>


Show HN: A Jewel Game That Plays Itself - <AUTHOR> http://max.io/jewels.html <comment><AUTHOR> Continuing my hobby of coming up with ways for machines to entertain themselves. If humans get bored, machines (eventually) will too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Kids version: [http://max.io/jewels24.html](http://max.io/jewels24.html)</comment></comment>


13 Philip K. Dick stories – free - <AUTHOR> http://www.openculture.com/2012/01/free_stories_by_philip_k_dick.html <comment><USER2> The Internet Archive also has some audio books:

[https://archive.org/details/audio?and%5B%5D=philip+dick&sin=](https://archive.org/details/audio?and%5B%5D=philip+dick&sin=)

I liked this one, read by William Hootkins:

[https://archive.org/details/WeCanRememberItForYouWholesaleBy...](https://archive.org/details/WeCanRememberItForYouWholesaleByPhilipKDick)</comment>