Ask HN: Feedback on project? - <AUTHOR> http://ego-project.eu/

<comment><USER2> Your landing page is beautifully designed, but from it, I have no clue what you do. You comment below[1] is hardly better - full of fancy words, buzz words, and very high on the "Ginger Factor".

It's full of marketing-speak - and if you were to ask my advice I'd suggest you change it for a quick graphic that shows what it actually does, along with some text.

Is this accurate?

"eGo: wear it as a ring, pendant, watch, or other item, and a simple touch of the finger will provide your credentials to unlock a service."

As it stands it takes too long to figure out what this does, and what it's for. I still can't work out what services can be accessed using this.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4437638>

_Added in edit: I take it there is in fact_ nothing _it can be used for at the moment. There's part of the problem - it might be great technology, but you have to get someone to adopt it. Am I right? So then the question is - who is the page trying to sell it to? Airlines? Telecoms? What service industry will be first to adopt it? How, and why?_

</comment><comment><USER3> Looking the site quickly, I could not understand the proposal. What's ego- project?

<comment><AUTHOR> By simply touching an ego-compliant object with any part of your body, you initiate a wireless pairing between the said object and eGo using the Intra- Body communication technology. eGo is a highly secure device you wear that can be produced in any form factor (e.g. watch, belt, jewel,...) All it needs is to be in close proximity to your body.

<comment><USER3> Well, that sounds good, but should you not make it obvious and clear on the homepage?</comment></comment></comment>


Creating widgets - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone,
This might be a silly question but how are widges actually created/deployed?
I am interested in creating a tool that would allow people to create and embed a widgeton their webpage. The widget will basically collect responses from individuals and store them in our database. The widget will also show all responses that have already been entered in the database. You could say its something like the widgets created by PollDaddy.
I understand the HTML part necessary to display the widget. However, how do I get the dynamic part (mainly interacting with our database) working without making it too complicated for the widget user to embed.
Any suggestions will be helpful. Thanks! <comment><USER2> One simple way is to use javascript.

Have your users add a single


The virtualization mistakes everyone makes - <AUTHOR> https://www.hpe.com/us/en/insights/articles/10-virtualization-mistakes-everyone-makes-1808.html <comment><USER2> This goes to show that HP itself doesn't know what they're doing.

On over-provisioning resources:

Your CPU load won't be 100% on all VMs all the time; if it is, you need to scale out anyway. Unused CPU is wasted CPU. With memory, KSM reduces burden anyway; and again. Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

SSD vs Spinny:

> the host's fast SSD was pretty much useless, as it had to wait for the > 10-times slower HDDs

Huh? Host SSD is meant for the host, not guests, so why is there any 'wait'?

Hold on...

> My examples primarily use Windows

Well... There's your problem...</comment>


Jack Dorsey morning routine experiment - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-morning-routine-experiment-2016-7?utm_content=bufferf27e7&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer/#-7 <comment><USER2> I don't think the reason for his success is the morning routine. On the contrary, I'd say he started doing his morning routine because of his success: he probably has more time, a more flexible schedule, and given his position he probably has a lot of things going on in his life - hence a greater necessity for meditation.

<comment><USER3> Well said! All these journalists need to read 1) Thinking fast and slow, and 2) Black Swan. The reporting these days is tabloid level garbage.

<comment><USER4> It's Business Insider so I expect this kind of drivel</comment></comment></comment>


China's President Xi wants country to 'take the leading position' in blockchain - <AUTHOR> https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/44646/xi-jinping-says-to-let-china-take-the-leading-position-in-blockchain <comment><USER2> A blockchain-based national currency with accounts tied to national IDs could be used to track literally all transactions made with the currency, a government's wet dream.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> How will other countries respond?

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there anything else remaining where he didn't want to take "leading position" in?

</comment><comment><USER4> How convenient this comes one day after Zuckerberg's show trial</comment>


Why are software development task estimations regularly off? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Engineering-Management/Why-are-software-development-task-estimations-regularly-off-by-a-factor-of-2-3/answer/Michael-Wolfe?srid=24b&share=1

<comment><USER2> The fundamental reason is that we start with a fallacy, that you can predict with any accuracy how long it will take to build a complex and likely poorly specified system in its entirety.

On top of that, there are two common development environments. In the enlightened one, management asks you or your team to go off and create an estimate. You come back and tell it to them, and you're informed that it's crucial to deliver to an important customer by date N. So you go back to your desks, lie to yourselves, then come back and tell management that you've recast the problem a bit and you can bring it in by the required date. Then you either blow the date, or deliver garbage by the date.

The more common environment, management either baldly states or subtly telegraphs the required date. You go back to your desks, then come back to management and show them the estimate, which will be done by the required date. Then you either blow the date, or deliver garbage by the date.

I've heard that some people don't do it that way.</comment>


Rob Pike on "Go" - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKnDgT73v8s <comment><USER2> This is actually a great Google Tech Talk on the language, definitely worth watching for anyone interested in Go.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> My 100ms Story:

100ms. Perceptually, the time it takes for a newline. I was really struck by that. I've felt that waiting for 5 seconds for an ant/java compile was too long (use _time ant_ , like Rob - ant under-reports) but thought I was just being impatient. I mean, it's not enough time to even _start_ a sword-fight. However, hearing Rob Pike (who, by the way, looks _way_ too young to be the C/unix legend from the beginning of time that he is) say _100ms was their target for compiles_ in this talk made me take it seriously.

So, I hacked together a "javac server", that accepts filenames and compiles them. It doesn't exit between compiles, so it only pays the java-start-up cost once (about 2.5 seconds), and then it drops to about 0.5 a second or so. And then, after a few executions, JIT kicks in, and gradually gets even faster - typically between 100ms and 200ms for a compile (though quite often below the magical 100ms barrier).

Bonus 1: In unix, I used _rlwrap_ , which gives you bash-editing features (from readline) to your own programs, and I discovered that the "-c" option enables tab-filename-completion! It becomes almost as easy to use as the shell. This made me so happy, I had to clap for joy, _rlwrap is amazing._ The only lack is no * , ?, [], {a,b} etc.

Bonus 2: I made it also run the code. A problem I found was that in Java, a class is only loaded once, so if you recompile the source, and reload it... you still have the first one. The only way to overcome this I found was to create a new classloader each time, that hadn't already loaded that class (a gotcha: be careful that this new classloader does not delegate to classloader that already has loaded that class).

Including bonus 2, this gave a combined compile-and-run time average <200ms (about 190ms). Basically negligible. In fact, the first few times I used it, it felt like nothing had happened, and I had to carefully check by deleting the .class file etc... that it really was compiling in that eye-blink. It was amazing. I'll stress this: _it is actually_ faster _than just_ running _the code_. I found java takes 450ms on average, and now it's running _and_ compiling in 190ms (it's because java also has that startup cost). That is, it's now twice as fast to both compile and run as just running it.

The magic I discovered is that there's now no need to have separate text files for input, and the infrastructure of parsing, reading directories, etc. You can play with your code by writing snippets of code, and it feels instant. It feels as responsive as an interpreted language like Python or lisp in a REPL.

Going from 5 seconds to <200ms has really made me happy - not just the figures, but the _feel_ of it - and brought more joy into coding. I guess x20 faster is going to have an impact.

10ren</comment>


Ethereum is top public blockchain, Bitcoin No. 13 in China's new index - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-crypto-currency-index/ethereum-is-top-public-blockchain-bitcoin-no-13-in-chinas-new-index-idUSKCN1II2R9?il=0 <comment><USER2> well this buy from one month ago is looking good</comment>


'The story of a weird world I was warned never to tell' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-42951788 <comment><USER2> Reminds me of the family of my highschool girlfriend. They were constantly in danger from magical and spiritual attacks coordinated by agents of satan.

When her eldest brother got his girlfriend pregnant, her mother learned from a vision that the girl was a witch, and had used mind control to force him into sex in an effort to infiltrate their christian stronghold. There were stories about how the youngest brother had once, foolishly, brought a piece of fantasy art (a picture of a dragon) home. And sure enough, in the middle of the night, the dragon came out of the picture and tried to slither into the boy's bed. His cries woke his parents, who investigated, and sure enough there was an evil aura coming from the picture. They burned it while praying, and then had a preacher come bless their house ASAP the next day. There were several other stories, equally silly but not as entertaining.

One difference is, it seems that Stan from this article worked mostly alone, but my girlfriend's family was part of a large church community who ate all this shit up and asked for seconds. When I visited their church, it seemed like everyone had their own stories to tell about personally witnessing supernatural assaults. The community all fed off of each other, and they got so excited at having a new person to share their stories with.

I guess that's why the DSM, when describing delusional disorder, specifies that "The belief is, at the least, unlikely, and out of keeping with the patient's social, cultural, and _religious background_." Don't want it to seem like they're starting a holy war.

The funny thing is, when I was telling my mother about the things I heard at my girlfriend's house, I literally described it as a "whole weird world".

<comment><USER3> My mom has paranoid schizophrenia and growing up it was always fearing that the FBI is listening in or poisoning the water. I remember the first CD I ever bought (a Smash Mouth album) was taken by her and broken multiple times. She considered any shiny surface to be a potential camera/microphone. This story is so close to home I wonder if there might be some schizophrenics in it.

<comment><USER4> Both of my paternal uncles had paranoid schizophrenia. In the 50s, the police were called and confiscated their rifles, after they went on a (bloodless) rampage around the neighborhood.

One was convinced that the other had control of cosmic rays, and was bombarding him with them. Sadly, he was so out of touch with reality that even when he did have actual problems, nobody believed him.

These days, my father's showing many of the paranoias they had - mostly fueled by external sources, such as Trump's incoherent rantings and the utter bull from Infowars.

A note to anybody who takes exception to this: I don't care. I'm not interested in a political debate. I'm much more concerned about my father's ranting about gangsters ('banksters') behind the scenes orchestrating a move to a one world government, conspiracies to hide alien governmental contacts (including the recent bout of pneumonia that Buzz Aldrin contracted while visiting the aliens in Antarctica, the same ones he'd met when he landed on the Moon), the secret Muslim army that's building up in Australia to wrest control of the nation, and how someone showed on YouTube that he'd managed to build a perpetual motion machine that the evil "oil companies" had bought and were keeping secret so that they could deny free energy from the people of the planet. Also, global warming is a conspiracy by the evil socialist liberal neo-socialist left commie neo-commie elites who control the universities, the media, and weather forecasting groups and the only ones who can set us free from this conspiracy are the oil companies and Trump, who are the only good guys left.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Pauline contacted the author of the paper, a psychiatrist at Harvard > University. He was very excited to hear her story. Stan had all the > hallmarks of a person with delusional disorder, he said. Another academic, > the leading expert on the disorder, agreed.

Obviously they are experts and I am not. But I don't see how this can all be put down to just delusion.

>Pauline and her mother also received dozens of letters from people inside the weird world - from her father and godfather, for example, who were being held in a top secret prison there, Stan said. The handwriting always looked authentic, and the letters talked about things from their shared past.

How were these letters forged then? Was Stan in some sort of dissociative state when he forged them?

It seems much more reasonable to suppose that while Stan may have been delusional, Stan may have also been actively deceptive in an attempt to convince Ruth and her family to believe in his delusion. The kind hearted reading is that this was done in a misguided attempt to protect Ruth and her family. The less kind hearted reading was that this was used as a means of controlling Ruth and her family, especially given the extramarital feelings/affair between Stan and Ruth.

<comment><USER6> 1\. Stan starts making up the story to control Ruth.

2\. Ruth believes Stan's narrative and adds to it, working in her experiences.

3\. Stan represses forging the narrative, dissociating and rationalizing what he's making up.

4\. Both adults believe, and the delusion is bootstrapped.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > "The story was that some people who had been around us during my childhood, > who were involved with organised crime, had been picked up - arrested, > killed or otherwise disappeared - and then replaced by doubles," Pauline > says.

One name for this phenomenon is Capgras Delusion:

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

</comment><comment><USER8> This reminds me of Scientology.

</comment><comment><USER9> Spoiler:

A possibly delusional Minister misleads a wife and child into moving across Canada repeatedly because "the mafia is trying to poison them".

How Very "You won't believe what happens next".

WHY is it here on Hacker News? 20 Points???

<comment><USER10> What I like about it (the horrible meaningless title aside which gives you no idea of what it is about) is that:

1\. it demonstrates human brains can break in very weird, specific, long-term ways. Same reason HN loves Oliver Sacks.

2\. it provides an interesting case-study of a self-consistent worldview which could convince several people for decades and had explanations for all its anomalies, and yet is totally absolutely wrong. Like religion, but more novel and modern a delusion.

3\. the way she rationally broke out of it is interesting: not by reading a book on the Mafia and realizing that they would never engage in a persecution like that (far too expensive, requires capabilities they've never had, huge distraction from their many more pressing problems, and goes wildly beyond anything they've actually done hunting the most harmful defectors), but by running a very simple experiment with a negative control. It would not be going too far to say that scientific methodology saved her life.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Feeling that my work does not affect people in need, what should I do? - <AUTHOR> Hello fellow HNers, I am a software developer who seems to be stuck somewhere in time. I started my work life more than a decade back with dreams to bring positive change to our world. I still want to chase that dream but I am just stuck in the very reality of our capitalistic world.
I understand we need money to run our world, but I want to work for people who need it the most. Software for really small businesses or communities, non profits, etc. would be way better than my recent companies. I work well, but in my free time I always go back to the feeling that I am not contributing to our society.
I am not a seller, but a good team builder, hands on developer. So I am unable to start something on my own, but I have lots of energy to drive things with others. Does anyone have a suggestion for me?
If anyone needs: I am from India, currently live and work in Germany. <comment><USER2> I'm spending my weekend with 20 people working on OpenStreetMap. While the administrative boundary fixes or UTF8 issues or test failures for libraries might not sound exciting we know our volunteering has an impact around the world, e.g. [https://hotosm.org/projects](https://hotosm.org/projects)

Subscribe to [http://blog.openstreetmap.de/](http://blog.openstreetmap.de/) (weekly newsletter). At some point there will be project or local meeting interesting enough to participate.

Also check out [http://codefor.de/](http://codefor.de/) (German) [http://codefor.de/en/](http://codefor.de/en/) (English) for local groups of technical (but not exclusively) folks working on community projects.

If you're into networking have a look at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freifunk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freifunk) with many local chapters [https://freifunk.net/wie-mache-ich-mit/community- finden/](https://freifunk.net/wie-mache-ich-mit/community-finden/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Have you considered contributing to an open source project?

It allows you to bring a positive change to the project and/or world of your choosing.

I personally would love to work on FOSS the whole day... but yeah.. I guess we are all stuck somewhere :)

Just start small and maybe you'll become one of those damn lucky developers with a fulltime FOSS developer job.</comment>


DIY Exoplanet Detection with a DSLR - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/hands-on/diy-exoplanet-detector <comment><USER2> This is promising. Obviously, it's easier to use this method to detect a known exoplanet (one that is big, with frequent transits, across a bright star) rather than detect a new exoplanet (even a big one with frequent transits across a bright star) ... but it's promising all the same.

Especially since it's a proof of concept, and I suspect small hardware upgrades would make it more effective (thus, more able to detect new exoplanets, in the right conditions).

</comment><comment><USER3> I found these instructions on how to make a barn-door tracker a little better. [http://www.garyseronik.com/?q=node/52](http://www.garyseronik.com/?q=node/52)

I suppose the micro-controller is nice, but if you only need one speed why bother.

Now I just need to get a DSLR instead of my Canon AE-1 Program.

<comment><USER4> You can just buy a Pentax DSLR which has a internally-moving sensor, and then buy the Pentax GPS unit that acts as an astro-tracker. Then the sensor moves with the stars according to GPS coordinates.

Also, if you're looking just for better image quality, a DSLR isn't anything special. It's just a camera with a mirror. You can get any APS-C or larger- frame sensor nowadays that aren't DSLRs.

<comment><USER3> You mean something like the mirror less offerings that Samsung and Sony have?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I did the same thing last week. We used a rotating telescope with a dslr on the end. We also had a little gizmo that tracked arbitrary moving objects in the night sky and told the telescope which direction to move so as to keep the moving object in the same place.

Using 5-10 minute exposures, we were able to take the same kind of colorful astronomical pictures you would expect to see in NatGeo. It was truly amazing. You really don't pick up on the beautiful colours of the stars with the human eye.

<comment><USER6> Any details about the setup? I live in a suburb of a mid-sized city, but I can be in pretty dark skies in an hour or so. This seems like something that would be really neat to get into.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not sure you need tracking for this: if you let the camera still, you should obtain a stripe that will vary in luminosity as the planet passes, which basically integrates the sampling point for you. (This of course is limited to short period planets, and stars with sufficient luminosity to actually produce a stripe)...</comment>


For those who aren't quite sure why these media layoffs keep happening - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/JeremyLittau/status/1088503510184927233 <comment><USER2> > Classified ads were a damn boondoggle. $500 in a mid-metro to place a car > ad.

A friend's parent just passed away. There is a state law that says that a death notice must be published in the local paper so that unknown creditors can be found. The paper charges $750 for a three-line notice that is published weekly for four weeks. The executor/executrix must retain copies of the notices as proof for the court.

</comment><comment><USER3> Right. The problem is _anything at all_ other than _people who had credibility as their only asset have demonstrated repeatedly that they no longer have credibility._

They will always come up with _absolutely anything_ other than "we stopped objectively reporting on current events." _Anything but_ "we started generating pages of entertainment-oriented crap and snarky opinion pieces that a sophomore in college could have (easily) written."

</comment><comment><USER4> I feel so weird saying this at 32 but I'm new to Twitter. And I find these tweet chains to tell a larger story really weird. We solved this problem already.

</comment><comment><USER5> More or less a dup: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18994760](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18994760)</comment>


Interview with a Pornhub web developer (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://davidwalsh.name/pornhub-interview <comment><USER2> Back in the day I did work at a group of one of the largest adult websites.

Tech was PhP, MySQL, memcache and similar vanilla stuff running on many Linux servers - pretty simple stuff.

The trick was performance. Simple stupid mistakes that would not be detected in sites that have low traffic become enormous problems in a high traffic server.

Pretty much nothing was dynamic and we wrote scripts to create static pages for almost everything except search and authentication.

Things like logging just could not be done. It was easier to load a bunch of data in memory on a request and process it instead of running a slightly slower SQL query, since a ton of those could kill the database.

And yes, there were no placeholder images or videos. After some time you just get used to it and code. But I have to say you get pretty desensitized to it and when I resigned from that job my life in that area improved quite a lot.

Highlights were p*rn stars and random celebs visiting the office - but after some time that got kind of meh.

The job itself was just a programming gig and very professional except for the images on the screen which we learned to ignore.

On the whole, the guys who ran the thing were a pretty solid and great bunch of people and it was one of the best dev experiences in my long career.

<comment><USER3> > after some time that got kind of meh.

When I was younger, I used to while away time by browsing exotic vacation destinations (that I couldn't nearly afford) on travel websites. One day, I got an offer to work at one of them. After about a month there, the last damned thing in the world I wanted to spend my free time doing was looking at travel website destinations. Made me re-evaluate what sort of jobs I'd want to do day in and day out.

<comment><USER4> Work ruins everything. I helped a friend set up a dance studio and it ruined dancing for me for a little bit. Some career advisors say "If your hobby is your job you'll never work a day in your life". Bad advice IMO.

Now if you could figure out how to do it without either customers or bosses...

<comment><USER5> Best advice I ever got: Do what you like, not what you love.

If you do what you love, what you love becomes work.

Is you do what you like, then you like your work, go home, and have energy for the things you love.

<comment><USER6> I am a non native English speaker. Whats the difference b/w like and love ? Both seem synonymous to me. If i love a person or thing i definitely like them.

<comment><USER7> Usually a difference in intensity. Love is what one feels towards their dog. Like is how they feel about their brand of dog food.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > We actually don't use placeholders when we are developing the sites! In the > end, what matters is the code and functionality, the interface is something > we are very used to at this point.

Interesting... 5 years ago I was contacted by a recruiter for a job offer in a (sic) "non-standard industry". Back then, "fullstack development" was the job trend for "people who deal with computers".

During the first call, she told me her client was the biggest adult website in my EU country of origin. She insisted that the working environment was (sic) "clean".

I raised that topic during my interview with their CTO. He told me the opposite of this post: devs were running the website locally with place- holders and innocent cartoons videos. He was straight-forward about it and mentioned "of course, once in a while you have check an issue on the live website, the way we handle this is by joking about the live content between us."

For those interested, they had a pretty standard stack for such a high volume website. Postgres, Django, Redis and RabbitMQ with an HAProxy frontend.

<comment><USER9> I am actually very curious what adult website uses Django? My understanding was that most of them are written in PHP and re-used across various domain names.

<comment><USER10> Jacquie et Michel, which is a very popular site in France, uses Django.

<comment><USER8> I'm the top comment poster. And, yes, the company in question was the company behind this website.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I stumbled into a meet and greet with these guys a few years ago. The recruiter invited me to an event for one of the world's largest content distributors. The role actually sounded really interesting and I assumed this was a corporate edition of CloudFlare but upon entering the social... ...well they had pornhub signs everywhere.

They ended up being a really cool group to meet. Very interesting people with a lot going on in their lives. They had a strong entrepreneurial culture and many employees had their own companies on the side. Their home base is Montreal; it sounded like it didn't pay as well as other areas... but they were quick to point out that the cost of living is among the lowest in North America and that Montreal is a really cool city (This is true).

The most significant thing I remember is a surprising number of people walking by tried to get into the event. :)

</comment><comment><USER12> I did a small contract involving scrapping pr0n websites (top ~20). Most are using very similar back-end infrastructure (similar/same apis, storage structure, data formats), leading me to believe there might be maybe 3-4 owners and the rest is just branding/business siloing. Obvious one is the titan MindGeek and its pronhub tube8 youporn redtube xtube, but even smaller ones are run in this way like porntrex/shameless. Then there is user facing tech stack, with majority using [https://videojs.com/](https://videojs.com/) player, HLS is very rare, pretty much >90% just serve mp4 files.

<comment><USER13> There is most definitely some kind of porn site white-label thing going on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wrote something similar for Quora some years ago. Since Quora links seem to be a faux pas on HN, I'll paste it here in its entirety:

\-----

 _What is it like to work on the development team for a porn site?_

I was the Chief Technology Officer of Kink.com 2006-2007.

I will say in advance that every company is different and my experience will not necessarily resemble the experience you will have at another company (or even Kink today). There's more variation among companies than among industries. Still, here are my observations:

* There's a lot of really awful technology in the porn business. It's the content that sells, not the technology. You'll be amazed by how many thriving businesses are "my first PHP project".[1] When I arrived at Kink, the core infrastructure was essentially a system that processed credit cards and inserted a username/password into an apache dbm file. No CRM, not even any idea if bob123 on one site is the same person as bob123 on another site. Most porn sites start like this, so expect to deal with a lot of legacy code.

* Third-party tools and services generally suck. The really great payment systems like Stripe and WePay won't touch adult content, so you're left with third-tier processors who can barely keep their sites online. A disproportionate amount of your concentration will focus on reliable (and redundant) billing, because your provider may suddenly decide to exit the industry with almost no warning. Some variation of this same problem exists for most of the cloud services you commonly take for granted - CDNs, email delivery, support desk, etc. It has gotten somewhat better over the last seven years, but you will often feel hobbled compared to developing "normal" software.[2]

* It is hard to hire good people - yeah, even harder than it is for normal development jobs. This surprised me. I have a large and talented social circle to draw from, but a couple key individuals rebuffed my intense lobbying. These are progressive, sex-positive Bay Area folk who would have loved to come work with me, but couldn't accept the inevitable explanation to their mother-in-law what they did for a living. Some of my team hid their employer from their extended families.

* The salary is good, but there is no other long-term upside. Adult companies don't go public, and the few that broke this rule have been fiascos. You won't get stock options, and even if you did you couldn't sell them. Unless you're a founder and getting a direct share of the profit, negotiate hard for cash.

* If you're in a production house like Kink, technology is not at the top of the totem pole. My department was 10 people out of a 100-person company and remember, it's the _content_ bringing in the customers. Combined with the pay differential between production staff vs technology staff, it can produce ugly politics. At one point the head of production got a list of all the salaries in the company and _exploded_ at me. I had to patiently explain to her that we pay six-figure salaries because that's what you have to pay to get technology employees, and we still had unfilled job openings. I'm sure there are politics at department head level at all big companies, but the cultural gap between unrelated fields didn't help.[3]

* Speaking of a 100-person production shop, a significant part of your responsibility is to support internal users. It's not nearly as glamorous or fun as building customer-facing software, especially when you start with a rotting pile of hastily-developed internal tools. But this is just as important for keeping the porn flowing as managing the data center. On the other hand, internal users would have your entire team perpetually building software for them and the paying customers wouldn't get any new features. Marketing has an agenda too. It's a balancing act very different from life in a startup where all you do every day is add features to your product.

That probably sounds more grim than it was. There were some fantastic things:

* Building software that millions of users around the world actually use. Gigabits of traffic, zillions of hits per day. It wasn't Google traffic, but it was a hell of a lot more interesting than business apps or yet another game that EA was going to cancel on me. If you work in the porn biz, you will almost certainly get enough real users to feel like someone cares.

* Working with fun, creative people. The set builders and directors were making art cars and art flicks in their spare time. Kink was a very hair-down kind of place - it was actually fun to go into the office. To me it felt like a big family - sometimes warm, sometimes squabbling, always chaotic.

* Office parties... oh, the office parties. Friday after work was happy hour for employees and friends of employees in the Bar Set, which conveniently was also a fully stocked bar. Guest listing was coveted and most nights ended in the massive Hot Tub Set on the roof of the building. I met a lot of great people at these parties, including my wife. I'm not saying this will happen at every porn company (it doesn't even happen at Kink anymore), but it's hard to imagine it happening at nonporn companies.

* I loved the moment when you meet people at cocktail parties and they inevitably ask you what you do for a living. "Pornographer."

In case you are wondering:

* Yes, porn gets boring. The novelty of looking at your coworkers naked wears off fast.

* Most pornstars are pretty much just like everyone else out of costume. For some it is a hobby/thrill and a convenient source of extra spending money (maybe $1-2k for a day). Most have what I would call a healthy attitude about pornography and BDSM, but there are a handful of damaged ones.

* If you're considering working in porn, the main question I would ask is: Would you be embarrassed to put it on your resume? Some people are very self conscious, worried what future employers might think. IMHO those concerns are overblown. If you can "own it", don't be afraid of the industry. That said... there are definitely some awful companies in the industry (as there are everywhere) so do your due diligence.

[1] This is not criticism. The hard problems in porn are 1) marketing content and 2) producing content. If you solve those two problems, you have a thriving business no matter what your technology stack looks like. #1 is _way_ more complicated than you imagine.

[2] In 2006 there was _one_ CDN which would handle porn - Limelight Networks - and they were getting sued by Akamai over patents. It cost $30/Mbit (95th percentile) at volume. Now you have your pick of dozens, at rates a small fraction of that. This chart is what allowed the explosion of tube sites: [http://drpeering.net/AskDrPeering/blog/articles/Ask_DrPeerin...](http://drpeering.net/AskDrPeering/blog/articles/Ask_DrPeering/Entries/2012/1/3_CDN_Pricing_Trend.html)

[3] It's also possible that Type A personalities naturally rise to the top of a BDSM company.

<comment><USER15> > It's also possible that Type A personalities naturally rise to the top of a > BDSM company.

 _teeheehee_ you said top

I read all that morbidly curious about actual D/S relationships infesting the work culture. I'm a little surprised, and relieved to hear how professional it sounds.

<comment><USER16> > I read all that morbidly curious about actual D/S relationships infesting > the work culture.

This is why #MeToo is a thing. I say that as someone who has mixed feelings about #MeToo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Some things I'm curious about are not addressed in the article.

First, how does the pay compare to industry standard?

Second, for people that have moved out of the industry how did it impact your future opportunities?

I feel like it would be more difficult to find new employment outside the industry due to the negative stigma attached.

<comment><USER18> > I feel like it would be more difficult to find new employment outside the > industry due to the negative stigma attached.

I don't share this feeling at all. None of my peers would have any stigma attached to anyone we knew worked in this industry. In fact, if anything the opposite would be true. The porn industry deals with scale that most others don't, and often leads innovation on things like video players. It's not uncommon to see youtube copy features that showed up first on a porn site.

<comment><USER19> I don't care whether my peers feel any stigma. I care about what the hiring manager feels.

I'm convinced that the mid/upper management at the B2B companies I've worked at (and the one defense contractor I've worked at) would not be pleased. OTOH, Google, Facebook, and Amazon probably wouldn't care.

Of course, I've never worked for an adult entertainment network, so I don't actually know.

<comment><USER20> You'd be wrong, I worked in public sector, for defense and other corp related gigs and it's never been an issue.

What I've learned in my years at Pornhub is invaluable and has made finding a job stupid easy.

<comment><USER21> Agreed. I would add that the other way around is harder (from defense to other tech industries). There is bias in US tech circles against working in defense and you can't talk openly about what you did depending on the project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Most interesting bit for me was to hear

\---

Most of our sites use the following as a base:

Nginx

PHP

MySQL

Memcached and/or Redis

<comment><USER23> Another former developer here [1][2]; the memcached cluster is what keeps the entire thing afloat.

We used to have dedicated 50 Gbps fiber connections straight between the web and memcached nodes, but now the caching is done locally on the web servers with a lot more of them. I would say there's probably something like 100+ servers, 128/256GB RAM each.

All the pages are server-side rendered. Every DB query, every DAO object instantiated, every partial/full page HTML render, even some functions at times, gets put into cache. We weren't really afraid of high traffic, that scaled almost on its own... instead we were afraid of infrastructure maintenance or bad manipulations, because too much of the cache could disappear at once.

The most incredible part to me was the storage and delivery of the video content. Try to picture 7000 petabytes [3] :)

[1] [https://www.pornhub.com/humans.txt](https://www.pornhub.com/humans.txt) [2] [https://github.com/nitrix](https://github.com/nitrix) [3] [https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2019-year-in- review](https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2019-year-in-review)

<comment><USER20> > All the pages are server-side rendered

I should add that this wasn't out of optimisation, just "old-school" PHP+Html with an MVC framework to serve the rendered page.

Still can't beat that in my view.

> The most incredible part to me was the storage and delivery of the video > content

That was the fun bit, I still remember the logistic of opening a new origin for the CDN back in 2010 (11 maybe?). Flying hard drives, can't beat that bandwidth.

(Former developer here as well, however from before this humans.txt was introduced)

<comment><USER24> Former Ashley Madison here with basically the same tech stack.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Looks like it was hugged to death. Internet archive link here: [https://web.archive.org/web/20200724225904/https://davidwals...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200724225904/https://davidwalsh.name/pornhub- interview)

</comment><comment><USER26> YouPorn made a big-ish article about their stack, ten years ago or so. The backend in particular was of interest for me. For that time when clusters just started getting popular, they were rather exceptional in their scale and thus performance requirements: notably they put HAProxy in front of multiple replicas of Redis, for the throughput—while for me Redis was the second- fastest thing around after Memcached. Also apparently they were massively into using syslogd for logging and statistics—with a multi-tier setup where nodes aggregate entries from other ones. Again, that's before logstash and such plus Elasticsearch became widespread.

</comment><comment><USER27> _I'm very proud to work on these products, those close to me are aware and fascinated by it. It's always an amazing source of conversation, jokes and is genuinely interesting._

I wouldn't say porn sites are the most regressive (or otherwise evil) thing in the world, by any stretch. There's much, much worse stuff going on out there.

But the complete absence of _any_ introspection as to the obvious negative side effects of the product he helps push -- not to mention the notoriously exploitive aspects of the industry that creates that product -- all wrapped up in an almost sheepish "What's not to like?" attitude --

is, sadly, quite typical for Big Tech.

</comment><comment><USER28> Am working in the online casino industry and was always told that porn sites are at the forefront of technology but based on this interview it seems that pornhub are clearly not

<comment><USER29> It possible that they are using the best current tech and what is fashionable right now is actually garbage that would never work for a high volume, easily maintainable site.

<comment><USER30> I'm relieved to see others with this sentiment. I enjoyed full-stack (including front-end) development back when JQuery was just starting to be a thing. Now when I have to dig into these layers where you have an Angular components wrapped inside some React stuff that's all part of an Elm app I just hit a mental block too fast. I don't understand how anyone can reason about their code in such an environment...

<comment><USER31> Angular inside React inside Elm??? Does such a thing really exist or did I miss the hyperbole?

<comment><USER30> Angular and React intermingled, yes. Elm in the same project, yes. I'm still unclear on the relationship between what was Elm's responsibility vs. mainstream JS framework's responsibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I had a brief stent at a company that hosted some adult sites - it was really awesome because there were people constantly trying to hack the sites and get the restricted content, it really kept you on your toes.

My dream job would be someplace like pornhub. Even if their stack isn't the latest and greatest, the challenges that come with their scale has got to be over the top amazing. Like Cloudflare level amazing.

I'm on the wrong side of the country for both, but I can still dream...

</comment><comment><USER6> How about the ML stack ? Looks like porn sites has improved the recommendation systems a lot over the years.

</comment><comment><USER33> Can't access the interview at the moment.

Was this trafficking topic discussed [0], i.e. the site hosts criminal content and the owners apparently didn't do anything about it.

[0] [https://traffickinghub.com/](https://traffickinghub.com/)

Criminal Content = child pornography, rape videos and filmed exploitation.

Edit: Clarity

<comment><USER33> Wow - quite a few down votes on this one.

Care to explain why you felt to downvote the parent comment that highlights serious issues with PH?

<comment><USER34> Because a lot of people watch porn and have a ton invested in the notion that it is a completely normal and healthy human activity. The 'normalization' of porn is an emperor with no clothes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> If you think about it, the adult-media field is scalable by design

<comment><USER36> Are you saying they know how to grow their content to show users? And they have no problem handling any load dumped on them?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> >We are generally at the forefront of trends and big changes in tech as they roll out, which keeps it fun and challenging.

Still phasing out jQuery and using php and mysql. I'm sure their streaming tech and video player are cutting edge, but otherwise their stack sounds like a large, legacy webapp.

<comment><USER38> I guess I should do more of my own research (I am security ops, not dev) but when did jQuery become legacy?

<comment><USER39> jQuery provided a lot of quality-of-life functionality that is now part of the native Javascript language/runtime on modern browsers.

The most famous likely being the selector querying functionality, and the event management (and I'm sure others I am not thinking of).

jQuery still works, but under the hood it's just proxying those native methods, so you might as well just use those native methods directly.</comment></comment></comment>


Googling Bend, Oregon's ZIP Code 97702 results in an internal server error - <AUTHOR> https://www.seroundtable.com/google-97702-25349.html <comment><USER2> I hope someday to have created an app where the mere existence of a reproducible 500 lands you on the front page of hacker news. That's an app that's demonstrably reliable and useful.

</comment><comment><USER3> Less clickbaity title: Googling Bend, Oregon's ZIP Code 97702 results in an internal server error.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, the author of the piece may have agreed with you and has updated the title of his piece, so I have done here also, to match...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This vaguely reminds me of the old bug in 8-bit Microsoft BASICs when you input 35072121 as a line number (the real bug is when the line number is six digits or longer, and the first five digits are in the range 35072-35327, of $8900-$89FF).

</comment><comment><USER5> Looks like it has since been fixed.

Edit: ...or, at least, it works for me logged in and logged out. Weird.

<comment><AUTHOR> Still failing for me:

Server Error We're sorry but it appears that there has been an internal server error while processing your request. Our engineers have been notified and are working to resolve the issue.

Please try again later.

<comment><USER6> It works for me but I'm using google.ca if that makes a difference.

Edit: It worked about ten times in a row but now I have the error: "Server Error We're sorry but it appears that there has been an internal server error while processing your request. Our engineers have been notified and are working to resolve the issue.

Please try again later."

Edit2: I just realized that using the link in the article works but typing the zipcode in the search box or clicking the magnifying glass next to it in the result pages will not work.</comment></comment></comment>


The Cyprus bail-out: Unfair, short-sighted and self-defeating - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2013/03/cyprus-bail-out <comment><USER3> Funny thing is - this is likely just a test run.

BCG wrote the scenario up back in September 2011: Back to Mesopotamia? The Looming Threat of Debt Restructuring <http://www.scribd.com/doc/130778664/BCG- Back-to-Mesopotamia>

It describes exactly the case for one-time haircuts across all citizens, neatly laid out per country. The money needed to turn those deficits around needs to come from somewhere, just printing it does not work. Certain finance bloggers are already going apeshit about this.

And for those of you in the US, snickering at the European victims - it lists the US as well, with the need for a 26% haircut to balance its books.

Sleep well.

<comment><USER4> Fascinating read, thanks for that. For those that like scribd as much as I do, here's a direct link to the report (PDF):

<http://www.bcg.com/documents/file87307.pdf>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought." -Rudiger Dornbusch

If I was Greek, I wouldn't have money on deposit at a Greek bank. It surprises me that at a minimum the Greece financial system hasn't ice-nined already. We're witnessing history.

<comment><USER6> Can you shed any light on the practicalities of moving one's money beyond local government's reach? This is something I've wondered about for a long time.

<comment><USER7> Not too hard. Just go to a country that is known to not depend on your country (say, if you're from the States, choose China). Go there, open a bank account, mission accomplished.

<comment><USER8> I probably would have picked a different country in that regard.

That being said, it's not all that simple to open up shop in a Chinese banking office. Though I guess if you have the kind of money you would want to do this with, it becomes easy enough.

<comment><USER9> Anyone who has that kind of money already has it offshore in the Cayman Islands. Why pay Chinese taxes on it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm Cypriot, and today I've seen 6.75% of my family's savings disappear.

<comment><USER11> It's theft from your family, plain and simple.

You still have a chance to stop this outrage, as it must pass your parliament, and then other Eurozone parliaments too.

Good luck.

<comment><USER12> _It's theft from your family, plain and simple._

I feel very sorry for the parent poster. But, no, it's not that simple. We as Europeans have been spending too much, we have added countries to the Eurozone that were not healthy enough financially so that France's finances would seem relatively ok. For years we the ignored tax evasion and corruption. We as voters and citizens were all part of the problem, and now everyone is going to pay.

If the EU didn't bail out Cyprus, his/her savings would be worthless, since their economy would've collapsed. If Cyprus' population is not going to pay heavily, the next bail-out may not be possible, because the populations of the countries lending the money might revolt. I live in The Netherlands, and there's not much solidarity left (which I think is stupid, but anyway).

Obviously, it is not a very good manner to seize funds, because the citizens of the next country that needs to be bailed out, will withdraw their savings beforehand.

<comment><USER13> But for some who dearly counted on those savings to pay rent or medicine, to be taken without their consent or knowledge, it is theft, plain and simple. No matter what opinionated armchair economists like you have to say.

<comment><USER12> _But for some who dearly counted on those savings to pay rent or medicine, to be taken without their consent or knowledge, it is theft, plain and simple._

Again, what's the alternative? Without the bail-out, government employees will lose their jobs, foreign assets are frozen, they'll be removed from the Eurozone, the economy will collapse, and they cannot buy medicines either. Sure they could increase taxes, freeze or decrease wages, etc. But the net effect will be the same - people will lose money.

 _No matter what opinionated armchair economists like you have to say._

This has little to do with armchair criticism. My pension fund has been downgrading as well, there is a lot of uncertainty on what will be left when my generation retires. The thing is, we have to blame ourselves as well: in electing populist leaders rather than visionaries, for our unbounded consumerism, and for participating in corruption. E.g. in my country:

\- People are obsessed with this populist right-wing politician (Geert Wilders) who dominates every discussion, always shifting the attention to muslims, Eastern Europeans, and how we are wasting money on Greece. In the meanwhile we have a mortgage bubble that is almost bursting and a healthcare system that becomes unaffordable. Moderate politicians, that get relatively little attention, have been warning the electorate for years.

\- People buy expensive gadgets and phone subscriptions, without really having the money.

\- Although there is relatively little government corruption, lots of people try to evade taxes at every possible occasion (e.g. through unreported employment of painters, construction workers, etc.).

\- We dislike the banks and bonuses, but refuse to transfer our money to more ethical banks.

<comment><USER14> _Again, what's the alternative?_

Take it from the >100k bank accounts. _Only_ from the >100k bank accounts.

<comment><USER15> No, and the reason is very simple. The whole discussion shows, that you can have zero trust in national governments. It is therefore save to assume, that you can not count the slightest bit on any retirement plans that have some form of government involvement. Even if you only get some modest apartment in a European metro area as you personal retirement plan, you are way beyond the 100k. Do you really want to steal the money from people who saved money all life just to have some decent retirement? (The "bank account" argument doesn't really count, as the BCG report outlines how they are gunning for real estate owners next).

<comment><USER14> _Do you really want to steal the money from people who saved money all life_

You seem to be arguing they should not have taken any money at all, which I of course agree with.

My point was that _if_ they take money (which they did) then they should at least have spared the <100k accounts. I was trying to give the simple answer to the rhetorical question "what's the alternative?".

They overstepped _two_ red lines here. Applying a sudden-tax to their citizens is the first, and taking it from the people who can least spare it is the second. My response was only concerned with the second line, because that is the really explosive one (civil unrest, bank run).

<comment><USER15> I personally find it great that they didn't spare the <100k accounts. It would have been much easier to do otherwise, as the "let's just take it from the rich" perspective is easy to sell nowadays in Europe. But taking it from those with under 100k accounts takes the fight to the streets and let politicians "feel" the backslash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> CYPRUS. That is the name of the country. What you typed is a completely different thing. I thought the semiconductor company was getting bailed out.

<comment><USER17> In case anyone is confused, the original title was "Schumpeter on the Cypress Bailout."

Incidentally, to those who complain about mods changing titles: we fix stuff like this constantly. All day long we quietly fix breakage, and every month or so we revert a title that someone was attached to, and we get an indignant mob bitching at us.

<comment><USER18> I suppose I'm a member of that indignant mob, though I have no problem with fixing spelling errors or linkbait or inflammatory titles.

But the flip side of the loud indignant mob is the quietly indignant mob; a few days ago I submitted an item that I thought might be worthwhile, except that the best-formatted (easiest-to-read) source, nbcnews, also happened to be the one with the worst title. So, I used the title for the same article from the AP instead, and within a few minutes a moderator had mindlessly changed it to match the crappy, inflammatory title from the article.

I didn't bitch to anyone though, because it's clear that nobody's mind is going to be changed, but I wondered why HN doesn't just automatically pull the title from the submitted article. There's really no point in my putting any effort at all into a title.

obtw, a good rule of thumb in customer service is that for every complaint you get, there were 10 other people that had the same problem but didn't put the effort into telling you about it.

<comment><USER19> The other weird thing is that until about a year ago, the guidelines said writing better titles was ok. Now, it doesn't. So a policy changed there for some reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Where does this put the trust in banks? What will the reaction be from people in other countries with money in the bank? They could start fearing that one day their money will be locked away from them and that the bank is going to take percentages off of their savings. This is a decision that might push others over the edge.

<comment><USER21> My thoughts exactly. How can they justify simply taking deposits?

<comment><USER22> Fact 1: Deposits are loans from depositor to bank. Fact 2: Deposits are accounted for as liabilities on the banks' balance sheets. Fact 3: Banks write multiple loans against each dollar deposit; it has a fancy name: fractional reserve banking. Fact 4: Most countries are now on zero reserve banking and only manage their loan portfolio size by the amount of capital they have on their balance sheets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Important part here:

> The second error is one of equity. There is an argument to be made over the > principles of bailing in uninsured depositors. And there is a case for > hitting everyone in Cypriot banks before any taxpayer in another country. > But there is no moral imperative for whacking Cypriot widows and leaving > senior bank bondholders untouched.

Typically, as you impose losses for burden sharing, you start with equity as the most highly risky capital, move to debt, and after that move to depositors. The reasoning is that this underlines basic choices about who is taking risk; equity investors have the most risk capital, bondholders are right behind them (based on the structure of the bond) and depositors are the lowest; philosophically this is because as an investor in equity/debt it's your job to evaluate the bank's chances of failure. As a depositor, you just want somewhere to park your savings.

Bad deal.

</comment><comment><USER24> It is, again, a matter of a point of view.) In theory, no one benefits when, say, Russian criminals or politicians (which is actually just an alias) park stolen money there. Money should work (flow) which means - getting invested. If they just stolen, evacuated from the original country and parked in a bank which cannot even invest them properly - no one benefits, except bankers and criminals.

There is also nothing special in that EU elites want to break the scheme - <USER2> should they care about Russians laundering money? They would prefer their own schemes.)

So, nothing to see here. Parking money abroad is a risky enterprise, so, just take some loses and diversify better next time.)))

<comment><USER25> Not everyone who's being hurt here was "parking money abroad". They're stealing 6.75% of ordinary people's savings. That's shockingly unfair and stupid.

Does anyone know why they didn't restrict this to accounts over the insured 100K limit? It makes no sense to me why they would take the political hit of doing something this evil. If it's about taxing Russian criminals' billions as we're hearing, why would they need to raid average citizens' accounts?

<comment><USER26> _They're stealing 6.75% of ordinary people's savings. That's shockingly unfair and shockingly stupid._

Who is stealing? Certainly not EU. It sucks for the people involved but the country has no money. So instead of having an extra tax on real estate or income they added a tax on this and they can collect it in a minute. Others would have complained about an extra tax on their income, electricity, property etc as well. At least here outsiders pay too, otherwise the Cypriots would have paid a larger share.

<comment><USER25> To me the word "tax" includes some expectation that the funds be used (however imperfectly) for the public good. But the bailout-and-austerity regimen seems to be about protecting financial institutions at common people's expense. For example, it wasn't the Greek people being bailed out, but rather the banks who lent to Greece. Yet we don't hear about that, we hear about irresponsible Greek bus drivers and the like. (As a side point, such fanning of nationalistic flames has served its diversionary purpose well in this case, but is really playing with fire.)

It seems to me the bottom line is clearly: are the bondholders of insolvent institutions expected to take a hit as well? If the answer is no, as it mostly has been throughout this crisis, that's "heads I win tails you lose" — rotten both morally and from a market point of view. The bondholders in this latest case are not touched at all, according to [http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2013/03/17/cyprus-stability- levy-a...](http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2013/03/17/cyprus-stability-levy-another- sad-euphemism/).

(You make a good point that this surprise tax isn't the worst way they could do it, but that's what makes it so puzzling politically. The way they're doing it is so naked, so brazen, that it's bound to cause a larger backlash. Everyone can understand someone reaching into their bank account and taking a fistful; that's political poison. Why didn't they find a worse way (if need be) to do it, cloak it in complexity, and exempt the poorest citizens to mitigate criticism? Something along those lines would be standard political practice, and it's puzzling why they didn't do it in this case. Is it simply that Cyprus doesn't matter? Edit: I now see that the Economist is asking the same question.)

<comment><USER27> > The way they're doing it is so naked, so brazen, that it's bound to cause a > larger backlash.

Quite right. The more I think about it, the more I believe there's an extreme risk that this could be the first domino in a catastrophic chain reaction. All because of a few lousy billion dollars that surely could have been borrowed and paid back in a more reasonable fashion.

I don't get it. I don't understand how the people involved here could be so enormously stupid. Just as it looked like the Euro crisis was ebbing, they're set to reignite it in a whole new way.

<comment><USER28> "borrowing to pay back in a 'reasonable fashion' later" is exactly how all this started in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> German bankers sending a message to people to move their money to Germany because it isn't safe elsewhere

<comment><USER30> Singapore. Germany is the last fucking place I would put my money. Income tax around the 50-55% bracket. Good luck.

<comment><USER11> One view is that if you have Euros, the safest place for them is Germany, because if the single currency does break up over a weekend, at least your Euros will be converted into Deutsch Marks.

<comment><USER31> If Germany is not safe enough for your money, nowhere in the Eurozone will be. Recent history shown that German banks are safer than USA or UK ones.

As a small saver, if I was a Cypriot, I would move all my remaining (i.e. not- yet-stolen) money to Germany ASAP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is nothing more than a warning for the rest of the countries with "failing economies".

Banks can afford destroying people's lives to simply increase numbers in excel sheets.

Greed is human kind's drive force and it's unstoppable.

</comment><comment><USER33> This grab from domestic savings is a new item.

Yet will anyone outside Cyprus, EU or small niche communities like HN take notice ? It is hard to say.

Portugal seized money from pensions (2.5%) and hardly anyone noticed. They called it a "Solidarity Tax"

[http://www.portugaldailyview.com/whats-new/press-review- gove...](http://www.portugaldailyview.com/whats-new/press-review-government- injects-e100m-to-save-tap-treasury)

There has been a lot of head-in-sand citizen behaviour. This lack of alarm is aided by shockingly bad press reporting of the issues.

</comment><comment><USER34> Insured deposits being raided? Bank runs anyone?

</comment><comment><USER26> The Germans have had enough of this and when they can (couldn't in Greece, even though the population suffered) they let others share in the pain.

Cyprus along with Dubai is known as a place to send your hard stolen billions so you could understand the goodwill towards them.

Edited to add: Cyprus also doesn't make it easy for EU. EU has master plans, namely more or less to get along with Turkey to the extent they can, and to start the remaining Eastern European countries in the EU path. Cyprus were let in EU as a divided country, only after Greece (their sister /mother country) threatened to veto any new other members unless.

Once Cyprus got in they threatened veto against cooperation with Turkey, the other part of the island etc., making work much harder for EU and especially NATO. US would like for EU and NATO to cooperate but Turkey is a member of NATO but not EU and Cyprus is a member of EU but not NATO. Both can veto but Turkey has a million man strong army, and has been a NATO asset for 60 years.

In other words, they were in for some payback. A tiny country played the entire EU for fools for a long time. [http://www.bing.com/search?q=Turkey+eu+cyprus+veto&](http://www.bing.com/search?q=Turkey+eu+cyprus+veto&);

<comment><USER35> I'm just curious, are you Turkish? Not that I disagree with you, but it does seem to be one of those issues that seems to be charged by one side or the other.

<comment><USER36> I am Turkish, so I might be able to offer some commentary. What is said is essentially correct, but I'm more reluctant to assume this is the reason why. Turkey has a long way to go and many other problems to solve before it can become an EU member, and Europe has its own problems too. Cyprus is too unimportant for both sides to care about right now. When Turkey's time comes for the full membership and agreed by both parties and if the Cyprus remains the only roadblock, the heat from Turkey and EU can sink the entire island in one day so it is likely that they will cede. In the meanwhile, it's a convenient excuse. However the other issues facing EU membership of Turkey are pretty serious, so they'll be able to play this game for a while. The problem facing Turkey is, essentially, when or if the country joins the European Union, it's going to take around 1/4 of the chairs in the European Parliament (it's based on population, Turkey is about the same size as Germany population-wise), effectively becoming an instant major player in EU decisions alongside UK, France and Germany. This upends the power balance in Brussels. While on paper Turkey looks like an another regular Eastern European acquisition for EU, it is in effect a larger process than the entire history of acquisitions combined because of political, cultural and populace implications.

Even then, Turkish population has largely soured by the 30-year-long waiting at the gates game, and they are not as likely to accept then shown the financial implications of an EU membership. Considering Turkey has largely been impervious to financial perils of the EU (chugging along with a fine 5% growth rate through it all) and also considering GDP wise it is now one of the Top 20 economies in the world, with the second largest army of NATO after the United States, an EU membership, once a dream, is starting to look like not that good of a deal.

Turkey is essentially the thing that stands between perpetual war and dictatorships of Middle East and "civilised" Europe.

<comment><USER37> I am not Turkish, by birth, but I am Turkish by choice (I currently live there)...

This is a really good summary, but I think you're downplaying the importance of Cyprus a bit. Yes, Cyprus is a bit of a pawn, but it's an increasingly dangerous pawn. The other angle to the Cyprus question is the discovery of gas reserves off the coast, the debate over who has rights to exploit those gas reserves (since the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus controls the north, but is only formally recognized by Turkey), the deals that the Greeks and Greek Cypriots have struck with Israeli firms for the exploitation of said gas, the recently soured relationship between Turkey and Israel (who have been traditional allies), and the desire of the current Turkish government to become a champion for the middle east and/or (depending on how you spin it) the Muslim world.

Cyprus may just be a tiny island, but it increasingly seems to become the focus of so much of what is going on in the region. That said, I agree that the whole relationship between Turkey and the EU has become...complicated. It is interesting the reversal of fortunes that has led to the situation going from one where the EU was reluctantly working with Turkey on accession in 2005 to one where Turkey is the reluctant partner today. As distasteful as it might be to some in the EU, I think it's become clear that Turkish accession to the EU would be the _best_ outcome for the EU.

<comment><USER36> I never met a foreigner deciding to live in Turkey before, it's interesting! I'm currently living in the States, so I am also an expat. The question of gas reserves is a serious one, but as the saying by Mao Tsetung goes, "You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone", and Turkey has many (way too many, in my opinion) guns.

Souring of relationships of Turkey and Israel was only a matter of time, I believe. The populace is overwhelmingly against Israel and the government played that hand for votes. It is also important in the area which Turkey wants to assume leadership, Middle East, in that any action, words or whatever against Israel gets many applauses. I personally believe future of the country lies in the West, not the East, but I am of a dying breed of Turks that identify with the West rather than Middle East.

<comment><USER37> My wife is Turkish, and over the years of visiting Turkey, I fell in love with the country. Also, given the state of affairs in the US (especially with respect to education), we figure we're no worse off raising our children in Turkey. Of course, we also have a number of contacts in Turkey which make it easier (we plan on sending our kids to private school)...but that's a whole different topic for another time!

I think it's definitely interesting times in Turkey. I know a lot of people are worried that a turn to the east is a foregone conclusion, but at the same time the growth in places like Istanbul and Izmir is hard to ignore. Just a few weeks ago there was a major meeting of tech startups and VCs in Antalya. There's no guarantees, of course, but I think it's not impossible that Turkey could become a major player in the world economy in the next 15-20 years...

<comment><USER36> One potential downside: I personally could find no satisfactory career paths in Turkey—that's why I decided to come here to the States to study. Any place that would accept me as a designer were paying below $1500 start-up salary per month, which is ridiculous in a city like Istanbul, which has traditionally been one of the more expensive european cities. The living cost in Istanbul and New York is pretty much the same for me, at least, while in New York, as what I strive to be, I am far more confident in that I can make a living out of it.

Turkish public high school education is far better than the U.S. public education, and the private schools, provided you pick carefully, should be up to par with their european counterparts (which is pretty good). But for the universities, definitely send them abroad.

I didn't even know Turkey had VC's! Interesting. If you do such things, we can meet up for a coffee somewhere in Istanbul this summer, I'll be back for a short break. Meanwhile, enjoy the country!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Japan's Unprecedented Warning to UK Over Brexit - <AUTHOR> http://news.sky.com/story/japans-unprecedented-warning-to-uk-over-brexit-10564585 <comment><USER2> "With regard to unskilled workers, Japanese businesses rely on inexpensive labour from Eastern Europe in the manufacturing and agricultural industries in the UK"

What a hypocritical demand from the Japanese. They have one of the strictest set of immigration policies in the world, largely for the sake of national homogeneity at the expensive of their economy. They believe that is a worthwhile sacrifice for them, why not us?

<comment><USER3> > They have one of the strictest set of immigration policies in the world

[citation needed]

My experience is that Japan has very permissive immigration for skilled labor (anyone with a college degree) or social ties (marriage). Far more so than e.g. the USA or Europe. They just don't have a green card lottery for unskilled labor (like the US) or open borders for refugees (like Europe).

<comment><USER2> The numbers speak for themselves

[http://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/nenkan/1431-02.htm](http://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/nenkan/1431-02.htm) Section 2-14

[http://www.dir.co.jp/english/research/report/others/20150529...](http://www.dir.co.jp/english/research/report/others/20150529_009776.pdf)

But you are right, I should have said first-world countries, I am not familiar with developing countries policies. Compared to the US and Europe, Japan's immigration policy is far stricter (and sensible as you state for skilled labour) and a significant driver is a desire for homogeneity.

A large number of those in support of Brexit wish to have a similar approach. Very supportive of high-skilled immigration, against extremely high low- skilled immigration.

<comment><USER4> > A large number of those in support of Brexit wish to have a similar > approach.

They wanted control. The EU didn't allow that and there was no negotiation about it.

<comment><USER5> Control as an euphemism for restriction of free movement for xenophobic reasons.

It was discussed a hundred times (and your answer shows partly why Brexit won: the message didn't get there) that the UK is not in Schengen (hence they control their borders) and can stop and/or kick out any EU nationals that are a security issue or a burden to the system. Other countries have exercised this right previously (Spaniards kicked out of Belgium, English hooligans threatened to be kicked out of France during the last Eurocup, etc).

The only reason to kick foreigners people think of when they talk about control is fear. They fear foreigners. That's what "the EU didn't let them".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> People supporting bad policies like to say there are no bad consequences.

You hear this about Brexit, climate change, bankrupting the government, violence and war, etc. It's the same rhetorical tool used for a lot of propaganda: You can lie in a moment; it takes hours or days for people to gather the evidence to disprove it.

(To disarm this propaganda: It's easy to construct nonsense that sounds plausible - even to you, smart person; don't let your ego be your weakness - and professionals make a study and art of it. Don't take anything seriously unless it has serious evidence and research behind it in the first place; the first claim has the burden of proof. Also, notice that their real argument is in the unspoken assumptions behind it, how the issue is defined and framed.)

Here's why I think it works: Most policy consequences are difficult to notice if you are uninformed. You can't know nationwide unemployment, GDP growth, or climate change by looking around (with some exceptions). Western economies and societies are huge and complex; often changes are subtle and slow; often they affect one set of people - probably not you - more than another set of people. Finally, in an environment that complex, it's hard to provably connect outcomes to actions (is that hurricane due to climate change? did people get cancer because of the factory's carcinogen or because of bad luck?), and the propagandists can pump out enough lies to raise doubts in people's minds (look up "FUD").

<comment><USER4> Most people I talked to were well informed. I think a lot of people were happy to stick it to big business, most of who pay less tax than a local chippy.

We felt Brexit was about control, we wanted more of it. When the USA told us off for wanting more freedom it felt a little weird... but, but, you're the land of the free. We just want to be able to control immigration. We want control from Brussels.

<comment><USER7> I am extremely uninformed about Brexit (because I live in the US and don't have any connection to the UK or EU and don't care to read possibly false information regarding it.) So, in my simplistic and limited view on Brexit, I support it as it looks to be more freeing than being a part of the EU. ((Also, I tend to find that those currently in control of the US want to limit personal freedoms and grow government.))

<comment><USER6> > it looks to be more freeing

There are many other factors, and it depends on what you mean by "freeing". Political power, like energy and matter, is generally conserved; the question is, who controls it.

* The ethical, generally accepted solution is for the people to control political power, via democratic government. (Undoubtedly it's very imperfect, but that's inevitable for every large human institution.)

* When you reduce government control of political power, you usually simply transfer it to someone else and often that's not 'the people'. Lacking a systematic, rules-based way to control and express that power, it often becomes might makes right, which dis-empowers most people.

* As a simple example: Less regulation by government often shifts power to big business; most consumers lose power: Government is responsive to them, and regulations often empower consumers.

* Regarding Brexit, intra-European issues and power won't go away. If there is no EU, who determines trade rules? Border laws? Security issues? The fair way to do it is to take a vote. Sans the EU, it's might makes right. We've seen how that works out in Europe (and everywhere else), and in fact the EU was created to prevent a repeat of those scenarios. Now the UK is essentially refusing to respect the votes of their neighbors and will return to the stone-age doctrine of power in a state of anarchy (which is what international relations is widely regarded to be). They also don't get a vote now.

There are other factors too, of course. The UK used to be a major world power; then they became a second-rate one, but allied with the U.S. and Europe. With the rise of billion-person economies in China and India, and with the U.S. already five times larger (320 million), the 60 million people in the UK become an afterthought on the world stage, with limited ability to affect the world's or their own destiny. A united Europe, however, with ten times that population is a player.

The UK is 'freer' like Hawaii would be if they left the United States. Sharing government with other people is not prison or a lack of freedom, it's simply respect for others.

<comment><USER8> > Sharing government with other people is not prison or a lack of freedom, > it's simply respect for others.

But that respect between countries under the guise of the EU doesn't necessarily lead to a more effective system of government.

With 28 member states all vying to promote their own wares it means trying to form trade deals is a multi year process that leads to no tangible output (see the failing Canada trade deal as a prime example).

You argue that 60 million people might not make a global super power but it's going to be a lot easier for one nation to form new trade agreements that one conglomerate made up of members with completely different ideas and opinions.

<comment><USER6> > But that respect between countries under the guise of the EU doesn't > necessarily lead to a more effective system of government.

Nothing "necessarily" leads to anything. See my comment above about FUD like this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12425125](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12425125)

> With 28 member states all vying to promote their own wares ...

They'll be vying regardless. That's the nature, indeed the whole point, of democracy: To provide a system of rules for doing that fairly, rather than might makes right.

> it's going to be a lot easier for one nation to form new trade agreements > that one conglomerate made up of members with completely different ideas and > opinions.

More FUD. They need to deal with those other nations' interests one way or the other; who would choose anarchy over democracy?

The EU regularly makes trade deals among its 28 nations, far more quickly and flexibly than any other trade block. That's because, rather than stone-age international anarchy, which requires painful, undemocratic treaty negotiations that are so difficult that they can't be updated and revisited, they operate with normal laws and regulations.

How will the UK make deals now with those 28 nations? Certainly not as easily. How will their 60 million have the leverage to get the deals that an entity ten times bigger gets? Would the individual U.S. states be better off negotiating international trade deals absent the federal government? After all, then they wouldn't have to deal with all the other interests.

The ideology is naive. You have to deal with other people and their interests; that's part of life. You can do it by fighting them or by cooperating to create the best possible outcome. It also is moral, because we need to respect that others' interests are as important as our own, another element of maturity. It is called 'civilization' and even 'enlightened self-interest'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's really incredible that three months after the vote, we still haven't the slightest idea what post-Brexit UK will look like. Will they go for the EEA (the least destructive option), or will they - as Theresa May threatens - sacrifice everything just to limit immigration?

Three months after the biggest decision in decades, and the subject is barely even being talked about seriously in the UK. I don't understand it.

<comment><USER10> GBP stopped falling though. Dunno if it's because brexit stalled or because the market thinks brexit will be fine.

<comment><USER11> The GBP stopped falling because the UK government spend about 250bln GBP to stop it from falling further.

<comment><USER10> Was it reported in mainstream news ?

<comment><USER12> If you count the Financial Times as mainstream, yes.

<comment><USER10> Not my radar but mainstrean indeed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Indeed the most likely scenario appears to be the 'Norwegian model', where the UK in essence remains in the single market and thus will have to follow European regulations but will have a much smaller say when it comes to the future direction of the EU. They will, however, have officially left the EU so the leave camp can pat their shoulders over their Pyrrhic victory.

<comment><USER14> UK Will never be allowed to have 'The Norwegian Model' set up by EU. That would have lot's of other countries asking for the same. UK is in for a long winter on GoT type scale.

<comment><USER15> Why would other countries want that model? It seems to be strictly worse than full membership.

<comment><USER16> I also wonder why Norway wants that model?

<comment><USER17> Most likely fisheries. The EU's fishery policy is traditionally held as horrible, and Norway and Iceland both have relative large fishing economies and better-maintained fisheries than the EU CFP.

<comment><USER18> One wonders if Norway could join the EU and get special exceptions to the CFP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The full text can be found here. [http://www.mofa.go.jp/files/000185466.pdf](http://www.mofa.go.jp/files/000185466.pdf)

Japans request is basically "Please don't Brexit or if you must pretend that you did, but don't really..."

Brexit, will lead to an unforced reevaluation of the UKs governmental system by its people. The entire Brexit concept is the most radical development ever started by a conservative party in government.

</comment><comment><USER20> TL;DR: if japanese companies suffer losses in EU or other markets that import from the UK, since Brexit might have impact in taxes, they might reconsider the headquarters location and then move to continental EU.

</comment><comment><USER21> Thinking about this from the perspective of the Japanese, they've got little to lose by making this kind of threat. Either the British government give them a deal that is just as good or better than they have now to encourage them to stay, or they give them a good excuse to move their manufacturing elsewhere.

The real issue is when a community is overly reliant on jobs from a small number of employers. That gives the employers more leverage when it comes to extortion tactics like this.

<comment><USER20> Don't think this was some kind of extortion. More a previous warning, like "don't think that japan is in some retaliation by moving our companies, we just asked about taxes earlier and you didn't care"

<comment><USER21> It's not like this is pre-Brexit. The decision to leave the EU has already been made. The decision can't be ignored by the British government as it would be political suicide. I'm sure the Japanese government are aware of this. The question is then, why make these statements at all? The only explanation that makes sense to me is opportunism on behalf of Japanese corporations. Threatening to leave gives you bargaining power you wouldn't otherwise have.

<comment><USER22> Not really, there is still plenty of room for manoeuvre as to what exactly should be prioritised during the brexit negotiations. The Japanese are well within their rights to warn about the potential implications of a hard brexit.

<comment><USER21> I'd argue that the Japanese corporations don't care what form of Brexit is followed, so long as it doesn't hurt their bottom line. Mitigation against potential losses could come in the form of tax breaks or other benefits negotiated with the British government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Guardian analysis: "Japan's Brexit demands range from possible to fanciful" ([https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/04/japan- brexit-d...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/04/japan-brexit- demands-range-from-possible-to-fanciful))

</comment><comment><USER24> Do people who keep talking 'trade deals' and 'single markets' actually know what they're talking about? This video is instructive [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leKEUT1TiLU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leKEUT1TiLU)

</comment><comment><USER25> They really should have produced a television drama like 1984's Threads before the referendum, but substituting worst case economic Brexit implications for nuclear holocaust.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is sad for the UK, but scary as an American facing an election where people want to build a wall and "make America great again." Like Brexit, the rhetoric sounds good to some, but those speaking have no idea how to implement what they are talking about or the likely consequences.

I am not trying to make an argument for or against conservatism. I am saying we need to ask politicians to explain their policies in detail.

</comment><comment><USER27> Are there any Japanese lobby or interest groups in the UK like the case in the USA?

Any Brits to provide input about this point would be highly appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER28> No way that the EU is going to remove the UK from its single market; the rest of EU is far too dependent on demand from the UK economy.

<comment><USER19> I think that the EU will. The UK economy is a significant part of the EU economy but the interests of continental governments are now aligned against the UK. They are basically all thinking what can we get out of the UK, their horsetrading has started and the UK has a lot less horses to trade. There are just to many people the UK has to please at once to make the exit smooth for the UK.

But for the next 2.5 years you wont really see it. In 2.5 years the crisis will start. Just like the Swiss are only now starting to sweat.

<comment><USER29> could you clarify what you mean about the swiss?

<comment><USER30> The Swiss have a more direct democracy than most, and recently voted to limit free travel - trouble is, free travel is a condition of free market access, and with this vote, they're going to lose that.

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/03/eu-swiss- singl...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/03/eu-swiss-single- market-access-no-free-movement-citizens)

<comment><USER31> The Swiss still try to find a compromise that is compatible with free movement.

[http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/immigration-vote-_sommaruga- admi...](http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/immigration-vote-_sommaruga-admits-major- eu-concession-is--unrealistic-/42420448)

<comment><USER32> freedom of movement shall entail the abolition of any discrimination based on nationality between workers of the Member States as regards employment, remuneration and other conditions of work and employment.

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

<comment><USER31> As I understand it, even though the "informal proposal" is about "prioritising local workers over foreign ones" the _actual_ proposal only requires informing the regional unemployment offices of open jobs, which might(?) not violate freedom of movement.

<comment><USER32> The issue is the following:

In February 2014, the Swiss voted in a referendum to introduce quotas for all migrants in Switzerland. The referendum, which requires Switzerland to have annual quotas for immigrants, does not take effect immediately but requires the Swiss government to implement a quota system within three years.

Nothing to do with regional unemployment offices.

<comment><USER31> Right, the current proposal tries to implement that referendum in a "light" way. The regional unemployment office measure would be step 2, and only in step 3 might the actual quotas come up, with explicit approval by the EU only.

[https://www.parlament.ch/en/services/news/Pages/sda- spk-n-20...](https://www.parlament.ch/en/services/news/Pages/sda- spk-n-2016-09-02.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> this "warning" was totally unnecessary and those kinds of acts go without saying anyway. Whoever wrote it up doesn't realize that this attempt at posturing makes them looks weak rather than strong.

<comment><USER13> I wouldn't say that this was a move to make them look strong. Its a plain reminder to British decision makers as well as people that there will be economic consequences if they decide to leave the single market. This is not a threat - pure and simple, companies that operate from the UK now will have a harder time post-exit.

<comment><USER33> Didn't say it was a threat. The headline said it was a warning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> _A Modest Proposal_

brexit means brexit: since English is not native to any remaining EU member country, drop it as an EU working language. With special regard to the European Central Bank (banking passport system). Irish could still remain as an official language^1, but the semi-official Welsh would need to go too.

^1 For Preventing The Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and For Making Them Beneficial to The Public

<comment><USER34>
        > since English is not native to any remaining EU
        > member country

Might be worth doing your research.

<comment><USER32> Don't be so _Swift_ with those downvotes^1.

You are suggesting, that Malta^2 is to command the ECB?

^1 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_European_Unio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_European_Union) \-- working is not the same as official

^2 or Ireland for that matter...

Second thought: maybe English could merit a semi-official status though (if May succeeds). But most certainly not a working language (neither an official one).

<comment><USER34>
       > Don't be so Swift

It wasn't that funny the first time.

        > working is not the same as official

English is both an official language of Ireland, and a native language of Ireland. Irish is the third most commonly spoken language in Ireland, after English and Poland. A full 60% of the population of ROI considers itself to be incompetent at speaking Irish.

Malta is indeed represented on the ECB's Governing Council.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> A few thousand jobs that Japanese automakers bring to the UK is nothing compared to the jobs that can be created as a result of a successful Brexit. Jaguar Land Rover continues to go from strength to strength... how about turning the tables so we are actually selling more cars to Japan than they sell to us? Scary thought eh? That's what Brexit is about. It's about daring to think big. Like Great Britain used to do for centuries.

<comment><USER36> Yup, that's how jobs are made. Make some good cars. Back out of the single market where you can sell them easily. Hope the Japanese will buy more to offset the losses in EU sales.

I don't think the reason more Japanese cars are sold to the UK than vice versa is the single market.

<comment><USER35> Sarcasm; the lowest form of wit.

<comment><USER36> Aww you could have made that sarcastic e.g. with

"Sarcasm. Just great."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The knuckle-draggers who voted to leave the EU won't care about threats like this - they'll just use hate speech to dismiss it. Downvote me by all means :)

<comment> open-source-ux I voted remain, but completely agree. The Brexit politicians and the nasty Brexit-supporting right wing press in the UK will completely spin the situation as proof of how vindictive and mean everyone is for not giving into the UK's demands. It's embarrassing.

By the way, Sunderland (in the North East of England), home to Nissan who employ over 6000 people, voted 61% in favour of Brexit. A key reason Nissan expanded operations in the UK was for access to the European market. One has to wonder what people in Sunderland were thinking when they voted.

 _" UK officials reacted with astonishment that Japan had chosen to publish this list of concerns and demands."_

The fact that UK officials reacted with astonishment shows how so many Brexiters live in a fantasy land where they think Brexit is simply a matter of picking-and-choosing all the rules and regulations that suit them.

<comment><USER38> > A key reason Nissan expanded operations in the UK was for access to the > European market. One has to wonder what people in Sunderland were thinking > when they voted.

I can't read their minds any more than you can, but maybe they prioritize sovereignty or their idea of the UK over money. It sometimes disturbs me how everything has to be reduced to an economic decision. You need money to live, sure, but there's more to life than money.

And besides that, what I'm reading from Krugman and other economists is that the economic consequences being published in the press are dramatically overblown.

<comment><USER39> When Nissan's workforce are all at the jobcentre, I'm sure they'll agree with you there - I prioritize paying the mortgage</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Y Combinator community to improve ideas - <AUTHOR>

I found YC community where people were helping each other to improve idea or proto. Does anyone remember URL? <comment><USER2> It was Idea Sunday: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Idea%20Sunday&sort=byPopularit...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Idea%20Sunday&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

It was killed, with good reason.</comment>


How Jasonette Went from an Esoteric App to a Radical New Way to Make Native Apps - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jasonette.com/2016/01/12/Jasonette-2016-in-review?hn <comment><AUTHOR> A couple of months ago I released Jasonette with a Show HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12879179](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12879179)

We've made a lot of progress since I open sourced it, so I thought I would share my experience.

This is my first blog post to share my experience working on Jasonette.

Would appreciate feedback!</comment>