The LM383 Story - <AUTHOR> http://www.idea2ic.com/LM383/index.html <comment><USER2> Load dump is not about connecting two batteries in series to achieve 24V. It's about (accidentally?) disconnecting the battery while charging from the alternator - which is an inductive source. When the load taking the current is disconnected that current is going to continue flowing through the vehicle electrical system which will cause a voltage spike until the current goes down.

On a related note, I heard this 2nd hand from a guy who was talking to CAT about a module they wanted to have 80V over voltage protection for a crazy amount of time (minutes). My friend asked what scenario required that and it was something like this: Guy at a construction site can't start his bulldozer. He doesn't have jumper cables, but he's got an arc welder... I don't know if that actually happened but it would not surprise me.

<comment><USER3> Yes, that was a weird mistake for someone in the author's position to make.

That said, I may not understand what a 'load dump' condition is, myself -- I always thought it referred to the common case where a high current load is switched off abruptly, causing the voltage to spike until the alternator's regulator circuit can respond by reducing the field coil current.

Disconnecting the battery would not be expected to cause such a condition, since the charging current is not all that high most of the time compared to other loads. I wouldn't expect much of anything to happen when disconnecting the battery from a running car. It should just keep running.

<comment><USER4> In old cars it was a quick test to see if the alternator was working so some people still think that this is a good idea, IT IS NOT! newer alternators are controlled via LIN bus by the BCM so to generate more current when needed not just using battery voltage as a reference, if you disconnect the battery the voltage can go up to 30v even a bad battery or one with very low charge can make the charging system either shut off or go nuts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have great memories building small guitar amplifiers out of its little brother the LM386.

Adding just a transistor to handle the high impedance of the guitar and a few cents worth of resistors and capacitors, one could build a tiny amplifier that once plugged to a 12" guitar speaker could make some serious rock'n'roll!

I remember taking most design ideas from this gold mine: [https://www.sonelec- musique.com/electronique_realisations.ht...](https://www.sonelec- musique.com/electronique_realisations.html) (unfortunately only in French)

<comment><USER6> It's widely known ad the "noisy cricket" amp I believe :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a fantastic read. At the risk of being the guy that needs the joke explained, I can't make sense of following paragraph:

> _While the -6 volt supply spec caused little trouble for the LM383, it meant > that all the other electronics in a car needed to voltage regulator that > could provide protection._

The other components need protection anyway. What is the connection to the LM383?

> _Some one made the joke that the lateral PNP 's were so bad that even delco > would not be able to destroy them._

Why are bad lateral PNP's hard to destroy? Is he talking about PNP's inside the LM383 or inside other power supply circuitry that's supposed to provide protection?

> _A skunk works layout of a lateral PNP regulator ultimately made its way to > delco. And sure enough, they could not destroy it. They loved it. And > National Semiconductor got into the business of making PNP output > regulators._

<comment><USER8> I think the -6V connection was simply that the LM383 designers were able to trivially integrate something the automotive industry considered non-trivial due to historical reliance on discrete processes and "build it sturdy" engineering. Nowadays chips are so highly integrated, so cheap, and so ubiquitous that it's hard to imagine dealing with messy power any other way, but it wasn't always so.

I have vague intuition that p-type silicon has lower mobility and worse ohmic- junction performance than n-type silicon. A real semiconductor engineer should verify, but I believe the core of the dig is that the low performance acts like intrinsic protection: the PNPs simply couldn't conduct enough current to destroy themselves, at least not in the multitude of spectacular fashions as the NPNs.

<comment><USER9> Electrons are the majority charge carriers for NPN vs holes in PNP which does mean that NPN transistors are faster, they also are usually a _bit_ better than PNP in other specs (beta, etc).

However I don't think this was the main part of the joke, rather it's that lateral transistors are _way_ worse in pretty much every conceivable metric than vertical transistors save two - they are hard to destroy and cheap. So add 'lateral' to 'PNP' and you basically have 'worst possible transistor', so bad that you can't kill it.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for clarifying. I chalked up the difference between 'a bit' and 'can't kill it' to mitigations that have happened since the LM383 was designed but now that I'm reading up on lateral transistors it looks like you're almost certainly right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> When I read things like this it amazes me that computers work at all. As person who spends 99% of the time working on software, I so much take all of the EE level for granted.

<comment><USER11> Well, a computer is basically a handful of gates, instantiated millions of times. So you only have to optimize those basic gates, and because they are (supposed to be) small, the design-space is small as well which simplifies optimization.

The hard part is actually the parasitics that come into play (capacitive/inductive coupling between signal lines and the bulk), and dealing with that when synthesizing the design.

<comment><USER12> Digital circuits also add the joys of clocks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So the new LM386 is the Nsiway NS8002. This chip is better in that the output capacitor it not required (it has two LM386s making an h-bridge). On lcsc.com, they are $0.0329 each for QTY=10, or $0.90 for boards (each) on eBay. They are nice if you don't want to deal with class-D switching noise.

Cheap clock radios use them. They also use an 8-pin AM/FM digital radio IC: pins for 32 KHz crystal, I2C, antenna (loopstick for AM), and audio out. No coils, inductors or filters needed.

<comment><USER14> I wonder if I can get my hands on the radio IC - I'd love to do an "overkill breadboard" radio - connected up to a bluetooth transmitter or USB microphone so I could have it dump into a Raspberry Pi for LAN streaming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "My neighbor had just got a dog that was always barking. So I got tweeter, built up a simple 30kHz oscillator using a LM324. Set the two LM383 to swing rail to rail. Got a lantern battery that could put out the power. Then connected the tweeter."

Paging Steve Gibson: somebody reinvented your dog silencer[1][2]!

[1] [https://www.grc.com/tqc/TheQuietCanine.htm](https://www.grc.com/tqc/TheQuietCanine.htm)

[2] [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/portable-sound- blast...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/portable-sound- blaster/4LI77KQM6xw)

<comment><USER16> I think nearly every budding ee has built a variation of this at some point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I love the part about how Chrysler somehow managed to defeat the thermal protection and destroy the chip via a heatsink that had just the right amount of thermal resistance to cause the transistor to heat up above its safe operating area and cook itself whilst keeping the thermal protection circuit cool enough not to trip.

<comment><USER18> The paper from Chrysler is also fascinating. It's the first time I've seen "Side of a submarine" as an element in a circuit diagram.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Fans of this article will also enjoy Ken Sherriff's talk at Supercon last week: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKi1xX7KKOI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKi1xX7KKOI)

<comment><USER20> Somehow I expected him to be about 30 years older.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I love the design (or lack thereof) of this site. Courier font plus the old scans of photocopies make it feel like i'm reading an old xeroxed white paper (in a good way).

<comment><USER7> I like it as well and find it delightfully easy on the eyes.

Funny thing is that I remember that back in the day I hated those Courier- font-style publications. They always seemed hard to read compared to well type-set documents. And I never understood screenplay writers obsession with Courier 12[1]. I guess the web is so noisy and cluttered today, that even harsh black Courier on a white page is a relief.

[1] Screenplays are usually written in Courier 12. I only know that because I sometimes read screenplays, for movies that interest me. It's fun and doesn't take as much time as it does to watch the movie.

<comment><USER22> >I only know that because I sometimes read screenplays, for movies that interest me. It's fun and doesn't take as much time as it does to watch the movie.

I don't know why I find this as hilarious as I do, but thanks for sharing.

Personally, I haven't read many screenplays, though I did read the original one for Monty Python and the Holy Grail and it bears very little resemblance to the final film. There's a whole section about buying pet ants from Harrods.

<comment><USER7> It wasn't in the Holy Grail, as far as I remember, but they actually did that sketch:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmKped3yARQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmKped3yARQ)

<comment><USER22> It was in the first draft of the Holy Grail screenplay. Mr Arthur King finds the grail at the Harrods ant counter.

I am guessing that the Harrods sketch is from the fourth series and is repurposing some of that material.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Either 45Watts to one or 90watts to both appears to pop the plastic off the silicon with out any apparent damage to the chip"

Oooh, found my project for the weekend!

"Now it is no longer possible to do this since the packaging department had redesigned the package"

aww shucks

<comment><USER7> You can pop LED's. Maybe not quite the same but also not as expensive.

<comment><USER23> Careful - many years ago one just missed my eye and cut my brow (unplanned overload; no dicking around involved)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> OT but it seems like a good place to ask:

this week I've been looking into making a wireless speaker similar to a Sonos play:1. In terms of the streaming mechanism is was going to use a raspberry pi running as a snapclient, wired to a class-d amp board and a, say, 3" driver. I thought I would find a load of projects using a pi + amp + driver in a small box combination, but I must be looking in the wrong place.

Does anyone have any top tips of examples of setting something like this up? What amp / driver combination to use? I'm not looking for anything amazing, and I'm sure round 1 will be a learning experience, but any help appreciated.

<comment><USER25> If you want a box with two tweeters and a woofer for some really legit sound, here's a design from a superstar of the DIY speaker design world:

[https://sites.google.com/site/undefinition/isetta](https://sites.google.com/site/undefinition/isetta)

He mostly just lays out the speaker and crossover design; but as he mentions a search for "TPA3116 2.1 amp" will give you lots of results on Amazon, AliExpress, and Parts Express.

PE's forums are good, lots of people have tackled similar projects:

[http://techtalk.parts-express.com/forum](http://techtalk.parts- express.com/forum)

For anybody else interested in this hobby, there are lots of fantastic kits out there, primarily for bookshelf/tower speakers and subwoofers.

[https://www.diysoundgroup.com](https://www.diysoundgroup.com)

[https://www.parts-express.com/cat/speaker-kits/286](https://www.parts- express.com/cat/speaker-kits/286)

The product page for the C-Notes (a fantastic value at $100/pair!) kit has a build video which gives you a great idea of the process and the tools you'll need. Process is similar for any flat-pack kit.

[https://www.parts-express.com/c-note-mt-bookshelf-speaker- ki...](https://www.parts-express.com/c-note-mt-bookshelf-speaker-kit-pair- with-knock-down-cabinets--300-7140)

Of course you can also go as far down the DIY hole as you like, designing your own electronics and selecting drivers, etc.

<comment><USER26> I would love a C-note or the _Overnight Sensations_. Unfortunately UK shipping is a bit pricey! $90...

<comment><USER25> The C-Notes are still a bargain at that price!

There's about $80 worth of drivers in there, which is _bonkers_ for a $100 kit that also includes crossover parts and MDF cabinets.

For comparison, the $130 Overnight Sensations kit contains about $55 worth of drivers. That's a good deal, and consistent with other DIY kits... and it illustrates what an outlier the C-Notes are.

(The reason why the C-Notes are so affordable is because Parts Express and Dayton share corporate ownership, so presumably they're about to source those Dayton drivers for next to nothing)

FYI there's an MTM (two woofers, one tweeter) version of the C-Notes coming in ~45 days for $100/speaker ($200/pair)

<comment><USER26> I need to hunt around for a cheaper shipping forwarder I think...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> ha! make sure you read the last paragraph

<comment><USER28> Apparently, the dog, who was prevented from barking, found some other way to have fun...

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> As a kid, the LM383 had particular appeal: it was the highest-power amp chip available that ran off a 'safe' voltage. I didn't need to do any mains wiring.

<comment><USER30> I was forever trying to find enough old car batteries to get more volts when I was a kid for precisely this reason.

That was until I nearly burned the shed down charging one up. I was confined to alkalines then. Boo hiss.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> > _" But it is humorous when the TDA2002 is often referred to as a replacement > for the LM383. As a matter of fact, the LM383 is really a reverse > engineering of the TDA2002. Credit should be given to the design engineer > Bruno Murari who was working for SGS at the time. He was the one who came up > with a way to do an automotive power amplifier using only five pins."_

This first paragraph is almost gibberish to me. In a good way. I just find it humorous that there are so many in-the-know words here.

<comment><USER32> Please don't be proud of ignorance.

TDA200 and LM383 are obviously product or device names. Bruno Murari is obviously a person's name (a design engineer, as the sentence points out!), SGS is obviously a place where one works, likely a company.

You should have no issues with the term "reverse engineering" if you are on Hacker News. So that only leaves "automotive power amplifier using only five pins". You probably know what "automotive" and "five pins" means, though, so even less than that.

And then it's absolutely obvious that you won't know what a "power amplifier" is if you don't have _some_ connection to electrical engineering, but it's useless to point that out. Imagine if every electrical engineer did that on articles on biology, chemistry or economic sciences.

<comment><USER33> Or to put it another way:

These are names of things. The sentence structure makes that clear, and makes it clear how they relate. They are not "in-the-know" terms that are lacking definitions. It is not gibberish, just like the sentence "Jane gave Sue a letter from Bob" is not gibberish, even though nobody defined "Jane", "Sue", or "Bob".</comment></comment></comment>


The music industry finds another way to shoot itself in the foot - <AUTHOR> http://reprog.wordpress.com/2011/04/20/the-music-industry-finds-another-way-to-shoot-itself-in-the-foot/ <comment><USER2> Yep, happens far too often, it's even more annoying when a legal mp3 download is geo-restricted for a period of time.

While in LA a couple of weeks ago, I saw a fair bit of marketing for the MLB 2011 video game, published by 2K. (I was out there mainly to see the Dodgers play, so no surprise there.) When back in the UK I was unable to buy a hard copy _or_ a digital download, so I torrented it. Last week I was at a big consumer event called Gadget Show Live (~100,000 visitors over 5 days), and one of the companies we had sold space to was 2K, promoting Duke Nukem. While chatting to one of the higher up guys in 2K I mentioned that I had been forced to pirate it, and he showed no surprise. He did tell me that they were expecting the game to arrive in the UK fairly soon.

While it's not quite the same situation, as an MLB game is obviously going to find 99.99% of its audience outside the UK (in countries where they actually play baseball, such as the US), it still goes to show that, even when being distributed/marketed in different regions by the same company, sometimes the release dates won't match, not because they have a reason for some people having to wait, but simply because it's easier for them to deal with that way.

<comment><USER3> Same deal with Football Manager in Germany. Not available at all, though they're still able to include the Bundesliga in the game, unlike the J-League. Judging from their podcasts, sports licensing seems like a crazy nightmare.

Lesson learned: try not to create anything involving someone else's IP, unless you enjoy spending lots of time with lawyers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My band released an album mid-2010 through Disc Makers and part of the package included Disc Makers publishing the album through multiple online music vendors.

We set a specific release date, and all of the online music vendors respected that release date, EXCEPT Amazon. Amazon made the music available for sale exactly 13 days prior to our desired release date.

Since we aren't a super-commercialized band, the early release by Amazon was more of an annoyance to us than a marketing strategy blunder. But, I guess it was annoying enough for me to want to comment about it on the Internets.

<comment><USER5> Sorry to hear about your bad Amazon experience. I looked around a bit more, though, and the late UK release of Paul Simon's album is not an Amazon thing, it's UK-wide: HMV and Sainsbury both have the same release date in the UK as Amazon does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Come on people, do some research:

This is because Paul Simon is what is typical of an artist of his age:

He is handled ex-US (International) by Universal Music Domestically, as of last year he is Sony Music

Worldwide until last year, he was represented by Warner Bros Records (WEA Distribution).

What you are seeing is called "greed" on the part of all parties involved (Simon and management included).

Another band that operates this way? Metallica: Warners in US, Universal ex- US. Although the band made sure they were universally released on the last record (Death Magnetic).

<comment><USER5> ethanks says: What you are seeing is called "greed" on the part of all parties involved.

But how? I simply don't see how NOT MAKING THE PRODUCT AVAILABLE TO BE BOUGHT can possibly help to line anyone's pockets.

I know I must be missing something here. But what?

<comment><USER6> Likely its some hack eyed windowing strategy that someone thought of. Just like with the last REM record (which was the last I worked on), they did 3 different singles in different territories.

It could be because: \- Retail exclusive partnership \- Something to do with local radio promotion \- Tour scheduling

Any number of things. Somewhere, in someones brain, this idea made sense because it made someone more money in the long run, even if it hurts fans, etc in the short.

Trust me, any time I heard the term "geoblocked" with a video exclusive I wanted to scream. Still do!

<comment><USER7> Same principle: The original Tron being essentially impossible to find (I think I saw a DVD for like $300 on ebay) on any service... until... The Tron: Legacy blu-rays came out. Then suddenly, the original Tron is easy to find. And the crappy 480p torrent that I may or may not have downloaded now may or may not have been replaced with a (purchased!) 1080p rip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This doesn't even touch on the fact that albums now seem to leak months in advance of their release date. I don't doubt that this means that people in the UK can be listening to albums 2-3 months in advance of when they can legally purchase them. I can't help but imagine this is one of the leading causes of music piracy these days.

Why wait 3 months to listen to an album if you can get it today?

<comment><USER6> It is not hard to keep a record from leaking: just don't allow pre-releases, or watermark them, or MSI them (MSI makes the disk violate redbook so it can't be ripped). The whole reason that NPR and the like get a record one week before street is because once the records are on trucks to retail (1 week out) it leaks without fail.

The REM record I just worked on never leaked. Why? We protected the prerelease distribution and people honored that. We also didn't put out the full record early to anyone, only a sampler.

Leaks are always from carelessness or are deliberate. Either or.

<comment><USER8> I was impressed with this, which I saw (ironically) about 15 minutes after I posted my earlier comment:

[http://ninjatune.net/article/2011/apr/19/amon-tobin-isam- ava...](http://ninjatune.net/article/2011/apr/19/amon-tobin-isam-available- digitally-now)

This is the best response I've seen from a label to a leak yet.

<comment><USER9> Huh? I don't get it. I mean moving the digital release date is a cool reaction. The description is a bit weird.

> "not everyone realises how much is invested in ambitious, groundbreaking > tours"

How many people would see those? Hundreds? Thousands? Probably not one percent compared to sales. Then again fans would still like to buy it. Whoever wanted to hear the tracks at a gig, will wait for the gig before buying the album. I don't see how tour timing is related here. Tour posters will be visible anyways to remind people about the artist - it's not like they got cancelled.

> "collaborations with brilliant artists"

Again - what does it have to do with the release date?

> "lovingly designed packaging"

Not related to digital sales at all.

> "All that happens is a lot of great ideas and music come under threat."

To me it translates to: We were waiting so you can all experience the release in a way we imagined it, but apparently all you wanted was the music, not our tours, designs and marketing campaigns. And because of that the music came under threat. The horror!

<comment><USER8> You're pulling things out of context. The full quote, which answer most of your questions:

" A nameless person has decided that he, not us, is best placed to release the new Amon Tobin album, and to do so for free, online via a watermarked promotional copy. We know these things happen, and we know that not everyone realises how much is invested in ambitious, groundbreaking tours, collaborations with brilliant artists and lovingly designed packaging... It still hurts."

The point they're making is that it costs them a lot of money to produce an album, and someone deciding to leak it early sucks. An obvious point, but one that's probably written more out of frustration than out of a desire to communicate something people don't already know.

The translation that I took from it, is that they want to offer a full package on a given date. That package includes the option to digitally purchase the music, or buy a physical disc that includes things that they feel are important to some people. By having it leaked a month+ early, most people are just going to acquire it they only way they currently can -- by downloading it for free. Offering a digital download a month early is obviously not the ideal scenario for them (it means people who would have otherwise purchased a physical copy will now just purchase a digital version) but it's better than just losing all the sales that will otherwise result from people being 'finished' with the album before it's even released.

<comment><USER9> I didn't try to handle it out of context. I don't understand what is the problem with releasing digital version early. There are mostly 2 groups - people who will go only for the media in the format convenient to them (either CD, or a download) and those who will get more products because they're more involved fans.

How does releasing one product early affect any of those groups? How does it affect sales in a bad way? Maybe I am missing something obvious, but I cannot imagine a bad result here. Fans will want to go to a gig anyways. Amon Tobin is bound to fill venues - it's not like they're fighting for customers there. If the worry is that people will buy only one format and not both, they could always offer pre-orders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The problem isn't "the music _industry_ " the problem is "the music _industries_ ".

Each country has its own little equivalents of the RIAA and MPAA.

And that is one of the 'secret sauces' underpinning the success of Apple's iTunes store... because nobody else had the sheer bloodymindedness (or resources) to sit down with and browbeat a hundred different "national music unions" into submission (read as: accepting that digital music wasn't going to go away if they stuck their head in the sand).

<comment> T-R On this specific matter, as far as I can tell, (and I'd be happy to be corrected if I'm wrong) Apple hasn't beaten them into submission at all.

If I want to buy music from another country, I need a separate account for that country, and I need either a credit card or an imported iTunes gift card from that country. Using multiple accounts on a single iPod, while now possible, isn't exactly fun, since I have to switch accounts to even get _updates_ for _free_ apps, much less make purchases. All this, of course, wouldn't be an issue if the same music was available in all regions.

Don't get me wrong, I give Apple credit where it's due in getting the RIAA and MPAA on board, but as far as I can tell, they haven't done anything to fight region-based market segmentation - not that anyone else really has.

<comment><USER11> Region based market segmentation is a whole different problem. How about just being able to sell digital music in Latmonroviastan in the first place? It was a good two years from the opening of the iTunes music store in the US before the iTunes music store in Canada opened - and that's Canada! We're practically the 51st state! Last I checked, none of the really cool music services like rdio or pandora were available outside US territory.

Update: I was wrong. Rdio made it here. Yay!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting... Now I wonder how easy would it be to create a service which on request buys any geo-restricted mp3s from amazon (from servers / account in a specific country) and resells them at cost + profit to any place in the world. I know there were many attempts to make reselling music illegal, but I don't think anything was ever proven. Would there be any big problems with a service like this?

</comment><comment><USER12> Don't worry, self-publishing for musicians will gradually become the norm.

<comment><USER13> Gradually? I'm an independent musician and though I may form a label (read: trading company) it's all DIY. My friends are the same - some of whom have been quite successful. I live in New Zealand, if you think the US industry doesn't get it, the Australasian arm is worse. It's been like this for a while too.

</comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra For some perspective: it's already available for streaming in Russia, <http://music.yandex.ru/#!/album/216636> (but you can't see it from outside four CIS countries)

It looks like that having a powerful music industry in your non-US country makes your chances of getting music you want on time worse, not better. That industry would buy out rights and sit on them.

</comment><comment><USER14> Can't our brethren across the pond buy direct from amazon.com? About 7 years ago, I bought an entire series on DVD direct from the amazon.co.uk because the DVD rights in the US hadn't been negotiated (or something). Sure, it was the wrong region, but I watched them on a PC anyway.

The entire global scheme for rights of various media needs to get sorted out. I mean, in spite of _huge_ demand, it took many, many years before _Twin Peaks_ got released on DVD. When I take the time to think about it, I still get pissed that I can't buy/rent _China Beach_ on DVD.

The whole system is indeed shooting itself in the foot, and I can't fault anyone who uses illegal downloads to fulfill a demand that the media industry cannot (or will not) supply for.

</comment><comment><USER15> They're running out of feet to shoot.

</comment><comment><USER16> There are bunch of online music labels springing up. What really needs to happen (at least from my limited point of view) is for some of those to wind up in the Pandora (or other) feeds and then it's game over for the traditional labels. Or so I hope.

<comment><USER6> Explain how the traditional label structure is killed by online labels showing up in Pandora.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If it's any consolation, the (e)book industry is even worse.

Try finding _A Game of Thrones_ as an ebook if you live outside the US. It's _only_ been out for 15 years, so I guess I shouldn't expect too much.

I had imagined that maybe publishers would like to make money from people attracted by the new HBO series. But I guess that's why I'm not in the book publishing industry, because I obviously understand _nothing_ about how to make money.

Edit: looks like I might be able to get a Kindle version. I don't have a Kindle, but given the inability of anyone except Amazon to deliver I might have to switch platforms.

<comment><USER18> The kindle/amazon is not always a solution either. I live in Canada and there is nothing I hate more than being given a suggestion (from amazon) about a book for my kindle, only to find that it's "not available in your area" when I go to purchase. I normally rage a bit, then find a torrent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> And music's not the only industry.

I'm from Romania, and we're literally begging Apple and Microsoft to take our money. To no avail.

As for the buying the CD and torrenting the MP3`s in the meanwhile, I do the same thing and the CD just ends up... sitting there.

But hey, I have the impression I supported my favorite artist.

</comment><comment><USER20> There are a few people who profit from this silliness and lack of efficiency. But these artist don't realize it hurts them more than their management, it hurts the artist image and limits their exposure to new fans.

</comment><comment><USER21> What's the difference between this, movies(both theatrical and DVD release), video games, or books? All of those usually have different release dates for different countries.

<comment><USER22> This can be sold as a digital download negating any geographical boundaries.

<comment><USER6> So can they. The answer is: its the music industry, which welcomes broad generalizations and rash judgement.</comment></comment></comment>


VMware Confirms Layoffs as It Prepares for Dell Acquisition - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/26/vmware-confirms-layoffs-in-earnings-statement-as-it-prepares-for-dell-acquisition/ <comment><USER3> Inflated and leveraged equity assets seem to be driving a M&A spree. This isn't limited to domestic affairs in scope, as Chinese companies with high earning multiples are leveraging their equity to buy out assets abroad (ex: one such company bough a GE business unit for ~$2b).

Ee should expect more such events to come. I wonder how much of the Yahoo! Workforce will be laid off once they spin off their core assets.

<comment><USER4> Found a post on another website today that sums up the developing economic landscape quite well (edited to be more appropriate for HN):

>The [austerity/ free market advocates] need to quit [complain]ing and just accept that we need to stimulate the demand side of the economy. The US and Europe are currently headed down the same course that Japan went down, and they're stuck in an inescapable stagnation. We've implemented the same QE and austerity policies that they did years before us, and now we're beginning to experience the same stagnation and gradual decline they did. Just like Japan we're propping up large, [poorly managed], decaying businesses at the expense of everything else in our economy, all while starving our economy's consumers of money.

>We've printed tons of money to fund big business, and cut back on social services so businesses won't have to pay as many taxes, and yet we only have a worsening economy to show for it. Unless you want the stock market to be the only segment of the economy that doesn't collapse, quit [explative] complaining and just hand people money.

<comment> Altay- Your blurb seems to contradict it self. It claims we need stimulus then it says the West & Japan tried this already and it hasn't worked.

Maybe we need to allow the free market to function. Who cares if house prices drom from $250,000 -> $50,000 and the Dow from 16,000 -> 3,000? They will eventually be snapped up by someone at some price, thus fulfilling 'demand.'

So much debt will be wiped out through defaults in this process as well, it will be great for the average person who will finally be able to afford to meaningfully participate in the investment world. Dividends yields of 2-6% mean nothing to a small time investor, but 20% is something that we could very well see in a liquidation market.

<comment><USER5> You need perpetual growth because all math models used in financial industry are based on perpetual exponential growth - imagine insurance companies, profitability, attractiveness of financial services, hedging etc. is based on the assumption the amount of wealth (money) increases in time. This is nowadays done basically with inflation only (the profits in trading are more- less inflation these days).

Now somebody said that the humanity's greatest shortcoming is the inability to understand exponential function...

<comment><USER6> This has always confused me. Now, I'm not an economist (I have a M.S. in CompSci and do security research), but isn't the correct model for growth in a majority of businesses sigmoidal as opposed to purely exponential?

For example, let's imagine a company that sells toasters. At some point they're going to reach peak market saturation where everyone in the world has a toaster. Now during this process right when growth in it's peak we see an almost ethereal phenomenon that capitalism delivers. We see the most optimized form of an idea materialize which everyone can benefit from and gain wealth. Wealth in this case would be owning a toaster in it's most optimal form according to the laws of physics and current engineering processes.

The problem is that once this epoch takes place the projected exponential growth for the business just vanishes. Instead we see gradual decline until the new market cap (replacing broken toasters etc.) is reached and an thus an equilibrium in the market is reached. During this process we see the nasty side of capitalism as the toaster company fights tooth and nail to prevent this inevitable conclusion. We see monopolization, deliberate weakening of the integrity of the product to increase time to EOL (which wreaks havoc on the environment), absurd patenting and copyrighting, digital rights management, lobbying and bailouts. This not only hurts the customer, but the economy as a whole as our political system is set up to encourage this type of behavior.

Now, one of the main themes I'm seeing in this discussion is the problem of demand. It seems like a lot of "things" that our economy has relied on consumers purchasing has hit this market saturation point and is being limited by technological advancement.

I think that we are at a point where we need to change our financial structure to one that helps create demand. With the minimum federal wage remaining relatively stagnant for the past few decades along with more and more low level jobs being replaced by automation people simply don't have the money to buy things let alone make investments. The only real solution I see is a push for a universal minimal income. But then again, what do I know? Like I said, I'm not an economist..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A little late. I got the call yesterday

<comment><USER8> Are there more layoffs than usual now or am I just imagining things ?

<comment><USER9> What departments/roles are these targeted at? Are they more support roles - HR/Training/IT or are they more engineering/products - engineers, PMs etc?

<comment><USER10> Well, for starters...

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10976579](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10976579)

<comment><USER11> That is sad. Desktop virtualization is incredibly useful. And vmware are the only one that can pull off a macos virtualization in windows host decently so far.

But workstation was for long left on the backburner - we haven't had there a lot of killer features since '07 probably. So I guess it is not a new decision.

Clarification: I mean that workstation was deprioritized by corporate, not by the team that worked on it.

<comment><USER12> Workstation was heavily developed up until, well, yesterday really.

I personally spent 2 years of my life, starting in 2008, bringing Unity to Workstation on Linux and making it work with every combination of Linux and Windows I could throw at it. That work was continued by a teammate for several years.

I spent 3 years rewriting most of the foundation, UI, and server infrastructure for Workstation 8, bringing the ability to connect to remote VMware ESXi/vSphere servers, along with the server component of Workstation 8. This work allowed VMs to be hosted on any server and accessed from any other server, and allowed VMs to be pushed between servers. 3 solid years on this feature alone, given just how much was needed to make that happen.

In the same release, we replaced the old Teams feature (a single feature that provided a multi-VM UI along with software-defined networking segments) with a series of more independent, more useful features. These were just a couple of the major features released in Workstation 8, and with all this came cleanup in the UI to keep the experience sane, not bloated.

That came out in 2011.

Workstation 9, released in 2012, came with a web-based UI for interacting with VMs called WSX (a feature I dedicated a bit over a year to). It also added UI refinement for the features that come out in Workstation 8, more remote VM support, hardware improvements (USB 3, Hyper-V, OpenGL for Linux VMs, nested/Inception-like VMs), locked down virtual machines for IT, and probably more that I can't remember.

Workstation 10 followed that a year later, and brought guest hardware support for tablets, enhancements for Windows 8 hosts, more remote VM improvements, better command line automation for remote-controlling/creating VMs, and a bunch of other things. UI-wise, it was a smaller release, but it did a lot for the hardware support.

I left around this time to focus on Review Board ([https://www.reviewboard.org/](https://www.reviewboard.org/)) full-time.

Since then, they released 2 major versions: Workstation 11 and 12. From what I can tell, these were largely about hardware improvements and performance improvements, less about major UI changes, but there's a lot that has to happen for these improvements. Hardware improvements are crucial to keeping the VMs useful in many situations. Performance was also a focus. While building these releases, the team was also busy helping out the View team by helping them consume bits of the Workstation/Fusion codebase. They also begun development of AppCatalyst and Flex.

There's also work that happened on Player, Ace, and other things, all throughout.

So that's a lot of killer features in my opinion :) I barely scratched the surface of 8, and didn't go into all the stuff we did in 6 and 7.

We were all very proud of the product, and often spent our free time working on it. I should point out, this was _not_ a large team by any means. It was an amazing team, though. A family. One that will survive these layoffs, one way or another.

<comment><USER11> For me killer features would have been -PCI pass trough, higher and better performing 3d driver, better work with hardware disks - that feature never quite worked on Windows at least. Remote/connect/management and so on - <USER2> are nice to have.

These features may have been prohibited by corporate management for some reason since ESXi have passtrough. And yeah - I view it from strong power user/developer/gaming angle, not sysadmin.

<comment><USER12> Hmm, I don't think management really ever forbid us from doing anything. I'll have to think about that, but that's not my recollection. It's more that we had a lot of customers in different segments wanting different things, and our own list of what we thought would make a good release, and only so much time and personnel to make things happen :)

A teammate just told us he's bummed he didn't have just a bit longer to work on Workstation, because he had a few things left he wanted to fix and rework for the next release. Our personal todo lists were so long, we could have filled another 10 releases... Shame we didn't have that opportunity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am so curious why dell is buying EMC/VMware. What position/product do they hope to achieve ?

<comment><USER14> They would own the datacenter, theoretically. People could come to Dell, and Dell would supply all of the hardware, from the storage to the virtualization to the servers. With VMWare owning Nicira, I guess that also including the virtual networking as well. It could be a compelling story, except IBM has already talked about how datacenter sales have dropped, so the US at least is probably overcapacity at this point. Bad timing, but not unexpected for a company like Dell, some this knuckle-headed is expected more from HP.

The funny thing is, virtualization is dying. All of the large private datacenters these days are non-virtualized bare metal on commodity hardware. Virtualization is an unnecessary overhead when it comes to datacenters these days. And enterprise storage is also not "web scale" since it's faster to shard data across 100k servers than have a single huge database with a single point of failure.

<comment><USER10> > The funny thing is, virtualization is dying. All of the large private > datacenters these days are non-virtualized bare metal on commodity hardware.

Well, you sound like a Google employee, because that's pretty much their party line.

Of course, reality doesn't mesh up with that when you step out and look at other data centers.

<comment><USER15> This is a very, very wrong, and unnecessarily harsh and personal in its wrongness, comment. The person you are replying to is dead on and I suspect you are conflating "I support a lot of virt environments in my profession" with the state of the industry.

At scale, in prod, virt is legacy. Aside from Linode where I obviously ran virt, the only virt I've ever touched in private datacenters is relegated to labs or testing farms. We have a lot of tech, both from supercomputing and the new valley stuff which is inexplicably rewriting all of that, that makes virtualization completely unnecessary outside of a multitenant situation with separate paying customers and security domains. Even there multiple vendors are working on it, notably Intel, who is pushing VT-x into containers with multiple efforts.

Don't be so confident to talk about reality, because yours is very different from mine. The original poster was unguarded with their claim but in terms of winds of the industry, they couldn't be more correct, and if you think I'm wrong you're on the wrong side of the shift that is coming, nigh already here.

Example: We bought space in Virginia for Foursquare and didn't deploy a single byte of virt. My current employer has dozens of facilities and virt is a lab thing. No prod, anywhere, across dozens of products and lines and organizations, uses virt. Google doesn't, right you are. Nor does Twitter, who is deep into Mesos (same for everyone who is also deep into Mesos or its many friends).

You might scoff and say well, my CIO says, and you'd be correct today, but the state of the art for resource utilization at scale moved away from virt because we figured out that running full operating systems next to each other as a bandaid for bad CD and provisioning and resource allocation stories is a shitload of overhead for zero gain. There is absolutely nothing that virt gives you, aside from a perf hit and unpredictable low-level behavior (some of us care about cache lines and context switches), which cannot be implemented with tooling atop bare metal platforms. Virt makes your hot aisle hotter so you don't have to figure out bare metal provisioning. You should care about that, then figure it out. It's not hard.

If you are strongly convinced that I'm wrong, much like your neighbor posters, the state of the art simply hasn't made it to you yet. Sorry. You should be willing to consider, however, instead of sniping at change like your tone will keep it at bay. There is a lot of denial in this thread, and it's trivial to deduce why that is.

<comment><USER10> > This is a very, very wrong, and unnecessarily harsh and personal in its > wrongness, comment.

In other words, you are ~very~ (edit:) Exceptionally offended that your opinion is different than mine from your experience, whereas most of the paperwork on the industry as a whole does not agree with your experience.

I get that you're mad, but you should take your emotions out of the equation and look at the numbers published by literally every industry analyst.

<comment><USER15> No. Your quote does not support your rewording in the slightest. You are interpreting me as angry and offended because it makes dismissing me easier, and because it is mirroring your own feelings, for what it's worth. It's completely irrelevant, but I am not malcontent at all even despite your downvoting me for a well-argued counterpoint.

Perhaps it is not me who should step back and reevaluate.

Part of the problem here is a lack of specificity on the industry. Since you invoked analysts, Gartner and the typical HN view of "industry" are wildly different, but I would posit what happens in what we typically call the "industry" is in the pipeline for the Gartner side in about a decade. However, tickers I would normally put in the Gartner/CIO bucket are aligning with me on this, more than you'd expect. Even Manhattan finance.

And yes, I am aware of CAGR forecasts for virt, but a big driver of the market's growth is expansion of virt deployment footholds thanks in no small part to momentum fueled by opinions like yours. There is also an incentive to sell virt by hardware and procurement vendors, because you need more fleet to do the same work under virt, unconditionally. The market will level off because fewer new projects and companies are reaching for virt as evidenced by, yes, Google, and half the other household names in the valley.

Thought exercise: Google published Dataflow out of their work on streaming architecture and said they are moving on from MapReduce (for the most part). If you got research that says the Hadoop market is growing, wouldn't you look at it objectively in context since the very organization who defined the technology has moved on from it? Market research and analysis often lacks frontline context, much as it does here.

<comment><USER16> How about some references, all I see are some assertions being thrown out there?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if the GPL lawsuit had anything to do with this? I guess it's not a good sign when a company will not fulfill its GPL obligations.

[https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vmware- lawsuit...](https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vmware-lawsuit- faq.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> The first version of VMWare server was great

Then apparently version 2.0 was handed for the Java and XML fetichists to be developed and it was a huge bloated mess. It worked, but badly.

It looked like they knew what they were doing at first, but today we have virtualization services built into the processors and in the OS, making things easier

<comment><USER19> The founders (who were married) left the company, the staff went to other startups: there's a few at ElasticBox and some went to Microsoft IIRC.

They 'won' virtualisation, but then virtualisation changed to 'cloud' and they never hung on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> On the Mac, I will be looking into Veertu and xhyve to replace Fusion.

[http://veertu.com](http://veertu.com)

[https://github.com/mist64/xhyve](https://github.com/mist64/xhyve)

<comment><USER21> Can they boot the bootcamp partition?

<comment><USER20> No, I think that only VMWare Fusion and Parallels offer the ability to use a bootcamp partition to boot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Ouch I have a friend that works for VMWare (didn't lose his job, well yet) but he was complaining that the restricted stocks he was getting (and well paying for because it's under the Employee Stock Purchase Plan) lost 60% of it's value already. Unlike stock options there isn't a guaranteed buyback price you just get the stock at 15% discount based on the market value at either the beginning or the end of the ESPP purchase cycle (the lowest of the 2) so while he hasn't lost actual money yet he most likely will get stuck with quite a bit of stock which might be impossible to offload and very well be worthless by the end of the ESPP.

<comment><USER23> > he most likely will get stuck with quite a bit of stock which might be > impossible to offload and very well be worthless by the end of the ESPP

Neither of those are possible. The _worst_ case scenario is a 15% return on your money, even if the stock does _nothing_ but tank over the entire period. You purchase the stock at a 15% discount at the lower of the price at either the beginning or end of the period.

If the stock was at $100 at the beginning and $120 at the end and you put in $1000 you would get 11.7 shares of VMW stock (purchased at $85 each) with a current market value of $1411, you can sell that on the open market the next day for a 41% return.

Likewise if you put in $1000 and the stock went from $100 to $80 over the period you would get 14.7 shares (purchased at $68) with a market value of $1176, a 17% return. It doesn't matter how much the stock goes down, you're still buying a thousand dollars worth of stock at 15% less than market value, even if the stock went from $100 to $10 you'd buy 117.6 shares for $8.5 (which would be worth $1176 at $10 a share).

<comment><USER24> Factually false. I know people who lost money on ESP, granted it's rare. There is a non-zero delay between determining purchase price and when you can actually sell it. Stocks can and have fallen more than 15% in this window.

<comment><USER23> > Stocks can and have fallen more than 15% in this window.

Possible, but not common or likely. The shares are granted at the end of one trading day (which will be the close of that day if that's lower than at the beginning of the period) and are available for sell the next trading day. e.g. my last ESPP grant was on a Friday and I sold my shares at the open on the following Monday.

So for someone to _lose_ money through the ESPP the stock a) would need to be lower at the end of the period then the beginning and b) drop 15% at the open. Let's say such a move happens once a year to the average stock, there are about 250 trading days in a year so you have a 0.4% chance of that happening. (realistically it's probably even lower than that since drastic moves like opening down 15% are much more likely to occur following an earnings announcement than on an average day and ESPP grants and earnings aren't aligned)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> for VMs on a personal computer, is there any reason to use VMWare over Virtualbox?

<comment><USER26> Mostly serial or usb interface speed and driver issues when running windows hosts. Virtualbox is certainly getting better and better in that regard though.

There is also better gpu support from anedotal experience.

<comment><USER27> Related question: What about VMware/VirtualBox vs qemu-kvm?

Obviously its UI etc is much more raw - I'm curious how it compares performancewise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Missed opportunity for HP.

<comment><USER29> Maybe, but they have their own storage lines, and have been investing heavily in OpenStack.

HPE may have been free'd from some restrictions, but I think many would have drawn HP-EDS-Compaq-Digital comparisons, and rightly so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The notion of Dell acquiring EMC (and VMW as a result) is a little misleading.

This is private equity acquiring EMC because that was the company's last resort and it should color one's perspective appropriately.

</comment><comment><USER31> vScrew 1.0

</comment><comment><USER32> Good news for Ericom?

</comment><comment><USER33> Why use vmware's stack over proxmox?</comment>


Ask HN: MailChimp not working - <AUTHOR>

Has anyone had experience with MailChimp failing to verify your email domain?
I have collected a list of email signups and the first time that I am trying to send a campaign I am prompted to verify my email domain before I can send the campaign. The trouble is that MailChimp claims to send me a verification code but I am not receiving it on my end. Needless to say that I have contacted MailChimp support over more than 24 hours ago but no response..
I basically have an account that I can do nothing with it. Anyone with a similar experience? <comment><AUTHOR> RESOLVED - so this is the response I got from MailChimp:

[Thank you for contacting Support. We can certainly understand your concern. It is recommended to not use a generic email such as contact@. Instead use an address more in the likes of firstname.lastname@example.com, or email@example.com. Sometimes using contact@, info@, sales@ will not push through delivery for an initial domain verification. Also, it may be a good idea to whitelist MailChimp first. Here are our current IP ranges. Have your IT set these to your server. 22.214.171.124/27 126.96.36.199/27 184.108.40.206/27 22.214.171.124/24 126.96.36.199/21 188.8.131.52/21 18.104.22.168/20 22.214.171.124/18 If you have any further questions, please let us know. We are happy to help]

Their first point actually resolved the issue. I wished I could have kept contact@ but instead I replaced it with myname@ and it now works.

</comment><comment><USER2> (shameless self-promotion)

While you're waiting for them to get back to you, maybe I can tempt you to give our email campaign service a look? [http://www.directmailmac.com](http://www.directmailmac.com). If you have any questions, we have live chat support available starting 7 AM PT tomorrow morning. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks I actually dont see this as shameless as you title it :) however I still think the quickest for me to get an email out to my subscribers is to sort Mailchimp first I'll check your product for future emails based on my Mailchimp experience (pretty bad so far..)</comment></comment>


Going from MVP to Product Hunt Launch - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sendsonar.com/2015/02/03/getting-from-mvp-to-product-hunt/

<comment><USER2> Actually a good post. Wish it had more analytics screenshots.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Co-founder here, happy to answer any questions.</comment>


How to Bypass the Great Firewall of the United Kingdom - <AUTHOR> https://bypassukcontentfilters.neocities.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> I want this to be an easy resource for anyone in the UK to stumble across and be able to bypass the ridiculous proposed censorship measures being proposed by the government.

I'll be watching for feedback and suggestions.</comment>


Ask HN: How to validate webapp idea before mvp? - <AUTHOR>

If my idea takes a considerable amount of time to implement, is there an easy way to validate it before I develop an mvp and prevent people from implementing it before I do? <comment><USER2> People sometimes put up landing pages and collect signups as if the thing already existed/was done, and market it as if it were.

I don't know how most feel about this tactic, I think it's a little disingenuous, but it seems to be a thing. Also, if you build the thing (or have started building/designing it), that seems fine

</comment><comment><USER3> You can just ask for feedback about your idea to random people at meetups, on reddit or with small talks at hackerspaces for example.</comment>


Digital Ocean exposed customer data after it left an internal document online - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/digital-ocean-says-it-exposed-customer-data-after-it-left-an-internal-doc-online/ <comment><USER2> Sad to see this... :( Digital Ocean is still my favorite Cloud Provider. The managed Redis/Postgres/MySql were the killer feature. The whole design brings in refreshing simplicity compared to AWS. Linode has similar prices but lack the managed databases is show stopper.

<comment><USER3> Mistakes happen. I kinda hoped I got the email as I reckon DO would give a couple of free months or some type of discount anyway.</comment></comment>


Gos: Armed Golang - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/storyicon/gos <comment><USER2> Comets of the author in the duplicate submission: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19969644](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19969644)

> _gos is compatible with all go commands and has go mod /get equipped with > smart `GOPROXY`, it automatically distinguishes between private and public > repositories and uses `GOPROXY` to download your lost package when > appropriate._</comment>


Ask HN: How long do you take to digest a Hard Programming Text? - <AUTHOR>

This question probably isn't the most useful, but it's always been a curiosity of mine. A recent look at Rick Hickey's Clojure bookshelf (http://www.amazon.com/Clojure-Bookshelf/lm/R3LG3ZBZS4GCTH/ref=cm_lm_byauthor_title_full) while trying to decide which book to tackle next prompted this question.
First, some definitions.
By digest, I mean to internalise all the core concepts of the text. I'm not just talking about practical implementation here; one recent personal example was the implementation of Hume and Sunday's Tuned-Boyer-Moore algorithm. I could express the algorithm pretty easily, but never knew what "unrolling the inner loop" meant until exploring and staring at various sources for a month. That represented probably about 30 hours of total time, something which, on the surface, seems like a horrendous waste of time (I learnt a lot while researching that of course - but it doesn't feel like it.).
By Hard Programming Text, I mean any document (book/paper/etc) which requires that you understand a completely new paradigm, or that changes substantially the quantity of your knowledge. So for example, a book like "Lisp in Small Pieces", which taught me the concept of Continuations, was considerably hard on the conceptual side. This also took at least a month of conscious connecting the dots between what was in the text, tail-recursion, and those funny callback functions I've been writing in nodejs, before i "Got it".
Naturally, that process is a little draining, but brings with it it's rewards. Still, what immediately follows is the reflective stage, when which I question whether I'm wasting my time, bringing to mind the images of first-hand experiences with people who just seem to internalise novel concepts like a sponge.
Anyway, TL;DR - understanding a programming text is really difficult, how long does it take you to internalise the concepts in that text, and what do you do to speed it up (if possible)? <comment><USER2> I find it takes about 3 weeks if I start reading the text with a real-world use in mind. A week into it I'll try to write something towards that real- world goal and it will be horribly broken, but it will force me to really research what I'm not understanding as I'm going through the book instead of going back to re-read it 2 months later when I'm trying to use the new language/technique/etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> I suspect you're going to get very different answers depending on what people consider "hard".

Continuations took me _months_ , as did monads and typeclasses. Largely because there were preconceptions about programming that I had to unlearn before I could learn them. Continuations essentially require that you descend to a level of abstraction below structured programming and think "what is the computer actually doing", and then re-ascend the abstraction ladder with a new way to structure that. Monads require that you understand typeclasses, and typeclasses require that you think in terms of sets of types and the relations that govern them; it's not enough to import familiar OOP concepts.

A bunch of papers use such obtuse mathematical language that I couldn't hope to understand them without a grad degree in math.

OTOH, reading something like Lisp in Small Pieces (or even SICP) _now_ is considerably easier, because I'm familiar with the basic concepts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. What you've said is true, and I should have included a clause asking what the answerer's background was.

Personally, I started out programming with Lisp, and hence got introduced to the functional style early on. So that was 2 years spent with Lambda's, and a year with laziness, type classes and purity (Haskell) before being introduced to Continuations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's been 10 years since SICP was assigned to me for a class, and I still find that it has previously-undiscovered truths waiting for me every time I open it up.

<comment><AUTHOR> I should probably take a second run through that classic now. =P</comment></comment>


How to become a millionaire web developer - <AUTHOR> http://guyroutledge.co.uk/blog/how-to-become-a-millionaire-web-developer/ <comment><USER2> This article is full of crap. More precisely, it's full of extremely naive ideas.

> invested it in a fund with a 6% return - which is nothing special

There's no (close to) zero-risk investment at the moment that yields 6%.

> If you invest in a pension

That's nice, but it's usually only tax-free when you spend it as a pensioner, not as a lump sum when you're 50 years old.

>property prices double every 10 years or so

Yeah, they do. Except when not. And you also spend money on maintaining the property.

> This is a return of 100% on the initial investment. That sounds a bit better > than 6%, right?

OMG, did he just compare a yearly return with a return 'over a few years'?

... and it goes on and on. If you want to have 1M, then first learn the _very fundamentals_ of investing and finance.

By the way, I have an advice: if your dream is to open a restaurant, do it now.

<comment><USER3> > _There 's no (close to) zero-risk investment at the moment that yields 6%._

Aside from FDIC-insured savings accounts, nothing has close to zero risk. On the other hand, something like Vanguard's VTSAX is fairly safe and is currently doing about 20% YTD: [https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundId=0585&...](https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundId=0585&FundIntExt=INT#tab=1)

If we have another financial crisis things are going to suck, but other than that, since this fund tracks the entire stock market, it's pretty stable by design. Mix in some bonds and you should be in good shape. (Note: I am merely repeating advice I've run into on financial advice forums.)

With FDIC-insured savings accounts, the best you can do is around 1%, which doesn't even beat inflation.

<comment><USER2> The VTSAX index is nice, if you're not unlucky. If you invested into VTSAX in mid-2007, then until today your annual return would be somewhere around 3.5%. Not horrible, but not 6% either. It does not matter that this year it's around 20%.

What I'm saying is that you cannot simply take 6% return as granted -- it's similar to saying that property prices double every 10 years. Yes, usually they do raise, but not all the time.

>If we have another financial crisis things are going to suck

We tend to have financial crises in every decade. .com-bust, property crisis, Russian crisis, Black Friday, Japan stockmarket crash... they happen all the time.

US Treasuries are practically zero risk, but obviously there are a lot of other risks - if you store your wealth in USD, then you have FX risk for example as most of your gadgets are produced in other countries like China, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Personally, I hope he fails. Which sounds selfish but is driven by an anti- selfishness. The housing crisis in the UK is made worse by buy-to-rent schemes taking advantage of the incredibly low interest rates and government supported incentives to reduce the cost of housing.

Buy-to-let housing, as an investment vehicle, is fairly sickening in the UK. It traps the less wealthy into an almost indentured existence, with them spending the majority of their earnings to pay your mortgage and give you your profit. Their lack of future buys yours.

I'm all for people earning wealth, but do it by enriching their lives in some way. As a software dev able to create things that could help provide value for others, isn't that a better way?

<comment><USER5> Came here for the same exact thing, I was wondering if it's actually legal to take a mortgage on a house and then rent it out to third parties.

<comment><USER6> "I was wondering if it's actually legal to take a mortgage on a house and then rent it out to third parties"

Of course it is legal - why shouldn't it be?

Mind you - you have to tell whoever gives you the mortgage that it's a "Buy to Let" mortgage - but a lot of mortgage providers offer them e.g.

[http://www.halifax.co.uk/mortgages/buy-to- let/](http://www.halifax.co.uk/mortgages/buy-to-let/)

<comment><USER7> A lot of people are buying houses on regular mortgages moving out of the property and then renting the property out.

You are _supposed_ to inform your bank when you do this - but many do not because banks will increase interest as you are effectively converting to a buy-to-let.

I don't know anyone that has informed their bank and non-enforcement of this rule is allowing people with 5-10% deposits obtain buy-to-let mortgages when normally they would require 25%.

Oh and it's not legal. It's a breach of contract if you do not inform your bank.

<comment><USER6> I don't think it's usual to describe breaking a contract as "illegal" \- that's generally used for something that breaks laws.

<comment><USER7> I suppose in certain cases it might be classed as fraud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So you'll slowly save a million pounds to lose it on a restaurant?

6% returns are not so easy to get by if you want to keep your money liquid. Performance in the past etc, funds can go down just as easy as they can go up.

You forgot to include the payments for those mortgages, upkeep of the buildings, the potential of a housing market crash (not that that would ever happen).

Also, you forgot to correct for inflation. A million pounds in 20 years is not the same as a million pounds today.

If you want to open a restaurant, go work for one today, live, eat, breathe and sleep restaurants for the next 5 years, save every penny you've got and offer to buy out your employer.

All in all, I appreciate your attitude and the effort that went into writing it all up but there are some bad holes in your reasoning and I think that it would be quite risky to follow your advice the way it stands right now, especially in combination.

Best of luck with your plans though, I hope that you will open a restaurant one day.

<comment><USER9> Just a few days ago someone on Reddit opined about the failure rates of food establishments quite eloquently:

"If your goal is to build your ideal cafe, set that. Be aware these are usually called "hobby cafes" and are mostly just a way for the moderately wealthy and idle to fill their time and reinvigorate their need for real employment by pissing money up the wall."

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Coffee/comments/26el3b/what_do_you_l...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Coffee/comments/26el3b/what_do_you_loveloathe_about_your_local_coffee/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Guy, this plan is like giving public transit directions to Superman. I love that you're lifestyle hacking and I love the dream you're going for, but if you're a web developer, you have a present day super power that is not only in really high demand itself, but you can put it to work for yourself to create derivative works for which there is a substantial demand.

My recommendation is this: If you're currently salaried, find out how to become an independent consultant to free yourself from full-time employment. If you do this wrong, it's worse than full-time employment. If you do it right, you'll make the same amount of money working half as many hours.

From there, identify pain points that still exist across multiple clients or leverage some insight you have into an industry you've worked in to create a business-to-business software-as-a-service product that generates recurring revenue.

It may take a couple years to figure it all out, but I have no doubt you can eventually launch a product that is bringing in the £4166.67 a month you want to save £1,000,000 over 20 years while also doing 20 hours a week in consulting if you still need that to cover your ongoing expenses. (I know a serious lifehacker who has that number down to 5 hours a week with a spouse and two kids, and he doesn't have a SaaS product yet. They're currently driving around the U.S. in an R.V. on a hunt for their perfect town to live in.) That would be on the low end of success in this space. It's also quite likely, you'll make much more in monthly recurring revenue and you can get out of consulting entirely if that's what you want to do.

There are a handful of people who have done this one way or another who are super open and transparent about it, which may be really helpful for you and other people who are interested in doing the same. A couple that come to mind are Patrick McKenzie and recently Josh Pigford. However, if you connect personally with other people who are doing this in chat rooms and such, you'll find that many people are quite open and willing to share numbers, tactics, advice, etc. if they feel it will help someone drum up confidence and help guide them along the way.

I think the first step is transitioning from full-time employment to consulting, because then you can scale your time commitment to people paying you up and down as you need to in order to build your business. And you never have to kick the coffee and wine habit you enjoy... just do another hour of work every two weeks.

<comment><USER11> Just curious, are you a consultant yourself? If so, could you elaborate what "doing it right" means?

<comment><USER12> Won't speak for GP, but to me it means:

\- charging what you're worth to your client, not what you think you'd pay; (made this mistake for years)

\- doing enough networking to keep business coming in. When you've got too much business coming in, see my first point.

\- doing enough self promotion to keep business coming in

\- learn something new frequently. New language, new toolkit, new mode of hacking (hardware vs software, for example)... Something that keeps you interested and engaged, and keeps you valuable. This is one of the harder ones, and probably the most important to future-proof yourself as you get older and have a family or other obligations. And it's damn hard for me to do if I don't follow #1.

There's a few other threads on HN about this subject that are worth reading, lots of good advice there. I don't always follow my own advice (and the above certainly isn't comprehensive) but I can say I've got a pretty good idea that I know what it takes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> While I appreciate the writer's dedication, this article contains exceptionally bad advice. Unfortunately, the writer is choosing to use the absolute best case scenario in each of his points. This is dangerous.

Consider his spreadsheet showing his rental income. First, the spreadsheet assumes that 100% of his units will be occupied 100% of the time. Second, he says that most property owners will be looking for a 10% ROI from rental income alone. In practice, a 10% cap rate would be considered exceptional. Some very, very large real estate companies get close to 10% because they can take advantage of economies of scale. But, that is a horrible estimate for planning purposes.

In the real world, investing in rental properties requires either hiring a company to manage a property for you, or doing significant amounts of work yourself. When a tenant decides to throw a big party when they leave, you're on the hook for all the damage they do. And, you won't have access to a steady stream of income for all 12 months of every year - vacancies are extremely common.

If rental properties were as safe as he assumes and truly offered 10% cap rates, there would be too much demand, prices would skyrocket and returns would plummet. The invisible hand is an asshole.

Then, there's his talk about free money from the government. The program he references is for retirement.

If the numbers worked, this plan would be amazing. Alas, they simply don't.

</comment><comment><USER14> I really admire that you are capable of thinking that long term but 20 years is a ridiculously long amount of time. You're on hacker news - what lean approaches can you take to test out ideas for making your dream come true now? Can you open a pop up for a weekend with a landing page to market it? Buy a food truck after saving for 6 months? Take the money you're saving and invest it in yourself, maybe you won't be guaranteed the mil, but at least you will move toward your goals now.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've heard of some people successfully getting into passively buying and renting property. How easy is this to do in reality? By my calculations, it's pretty difficult to break even on mortgage when you're starting out, and that's if you decide to play landlord — which may very well end up being a full-time job! And if you want to live somewhere else, you have to hire somebody to do the landlordy stuff for you, which is even more money down the drain. How do people do it?

</comment><comment><USER15> There is no mention of tax on any of the interest gained when calculating the compound gains.

I think he would be extremely lucky to average 6% if he kept it all in savings accounts: [http://swanlowpark.co.uk/savingsinterestannual.jsp](http://swanlowpark.co.uk/savingsinterestannual.jsp)

Regarding stocks + shares: "For most of the past century, anyone investing for a 30-year period has been rewarded with a return in excess of inflation of between 4pc and 8pc a year if they were sensible about re-investing the dividend income from their holdings." [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/tom- stevenson/846...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/tom- stevenson/8469660/What-history-tells-us-about-returns-over-the- next-30-years.html) (just from a quick search)

You then take into account management fees, tax, relative currency value etc.

</comment><comment><USER16> I stopped reading after counting how much you would save if you'd cut your daily coffee. In 2034, £1 million will be worth way less than today anyway.

<comment><USER17> I stopped reading when the ridiculous statement that property will always rise in value and doubles in value every 10 years came up.

Simple (and I mean really simple) mathematics would make it obvious to anyone (who didn't really badly want to believe otherwise) that nothing can continue to rise in price over inflation indefinitely. There will always be a correction at some point.

Especially, nothing can double in price every 10 years consistently and indefinitely.

Sooner or later, the bottom falls out of the market for one reason or another and people get burnt.

<comment><USER18> While I agree with your sentiment about property values, your statement "nothing can continue to rise in price over inflation indefinitely" is not true, unless I'm misunderstanding something.

It is possible for an asset class to have greater returns than inflation (in fact, most do), but with increased risk. While this increased risk does mean 'corrections' will happen, returns for most asset classes (especially equity) are significantly higher than inflation in the long run. A world in which no asset class could outpace inflation would require zero economic growth.

<comment><USER17> I guess if the asset class is divisible it can rise in value indefinitely. But simple logic says that if anything rises in real value every year, eventually no-one can afford to buy it. Of course, this assumes that the average earnings don't rise alongside it, but that's the definition of inflation.

The London property market has been around for about 2000 years, more or less in its current form. If property prices really doubled every ten years indefinitely, and assuming it cost 1 penny to buy a London townhouse in 0ad, then ridiculousness ensues.

The last thirty years have been atypical of property prices. My theory, bolstered by little other than observation and deduction, is that we're seeing the effect of women entering the workplace. House prices are constrained by affordability (or the availability of money, which is why interest-free loans from Japan enabled Northern Rock to give 100% 100-year mortgages to people who couldn't normally afford houses) and over the last thirty years we've gone from most families having a single income to most families having a double income, so house prices rose consistently over the period and will settle at this new high. It used to be that your house was worth roughly 3x your annual salary, logically it should settle at 3x your combined annual salary. It'll be interesting to see if it does that.

<comment><USER18> Interesting insights into a market that I have little experience with. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> sean-duffy After reading this I was interested to read on his about page that in the past he was in the business of exporting "Audis, Aston Martins, Porsche and Japanese performance cars" to the Far East. Unless there's something I'm missing, surely something like that would require an amount of capital comparable with what you'd need to open a restaurant?

</comment><comment><USER19> Easy if you choose not to have a family, or a social life spiced up with things that cost money to enjoy. The reason why most people decide to get rich is they enjoy spending money. If you live like a monk, you might as well say goodbye to the concept of prosperity, as there won't be any difference, and in 20 years your plans may well have changed.

</comment><comment><USER20> Most people who open restaurants don't have all the required capital in cash, they get a loan from a bank. Then you can pay the loan back slowly over X years from the profit of the restaurant (or, more likely, since something like 90% of restaurants fail in 5 years, the profits from his next job).

</comment><comment><USER21> My path: Become CTO for a startup, join an accelerator, accelerated companies have a 70% chance of success, if company can get to 10 mill and you only have 10% of shares, guess what, you're a millionaire! -- if it fails, rinse and repeat w/ other startups and accelerators.

</comment><comment><USER22> >property prices double every 10 years or so

Prices yes, value? no. Try measuring a property value in quantity of gold or oil barrels (or a highly traditional commodity mix) and see an almost flat valuation for most properties.

It's inflation magic baby!

AKA, Governments playing tricks with your currency.

<comment><USER23> Interesting point. When I used to make 50K a year, nice houses used to cost 300K. Today, I make x2.5 that amount and houses cost x2.5 that. Definitely not going to be able to afford a nice house in my area :'(

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Best of luck. Saving money is always a good idea. Just make sure to have some fun along the way.

</comment><comment><USER25> How to become a millionaire web developer?

See web development as more than a means to an end.

</comment><comment><USER26> perfect example of what's wrong with our society. The best part was for me the "property prices double every 10 years" part. Some people never seem to learn</comment>