An abandoned lifeboat at world's end (2011) - <AUTHOR> https://mikedashhistory.com/2011/02/13/an-abandoned-lifeboat-at-worlds-end/ <comment><USER3> Comment from March 2016 by "quasi-libet":

> Finally, I have found out the end of the text on page 129 of "Transactions > of the Oceanographical Institute".

"The scientific reconnaissance vessel "Slava-9" began his regular 13th cruise with the "Slava" Antarctic whaling fleet on 22 October 1958 … On 27 November she got to Bouvet Island. A group of sailors landed which couldn't leave the island in time because of worsened weather and stayed on it about 3 days. The people were withdrawn only by helicopter on 29 November".

The mystery is resolved. The answer turned out to be a quite prosaic one. I am even feeling kind of regret for it.

<comment><USER4> So pretty much what the author suspected - it was a soviet vessel, and the details of the adventure were most likely hidden deep in an ex-soviet archive somewhere, almost impossible to find(until someone did, obviously).

<comment><USER5> Well, with the completely unexpected addition that the mysterious flattened copper sheet may well have been left by a ham radio operator who made an expedition to the island just for the purpose of making radio contact from there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As luck would have it, there is an expedition to Bouvet right _now_ and yes, you can see their progress live and read updates on facebook. I've read about this mystery years ago, it's fascinating that there are people there right this second as I write this.

[https://share.garmin.com/bouvet](https://share.garmin.com/bouvet)

[https://www.facebook.com/groups/639362206232014/about/](https://www.facebook.com/groups/639362206232014/about/)

<comment><USER6> So from what I can gather, they're going all the way to Bouvet Island to bounce radio waves off the Moon and back to Earth. Why??? To say they did it? I don't understand this hobby.

<comment><USER7> Twofold - minimum!

First of all - many amateur radio operators take great interest in having been in contact with lots of countries and territories.

Some are trivial - I just checked, so far this year I've got some 80 German stations in my log - some are exceedingly rare (Like Bouvet. Or North Korea, as the authorities there have a less than enlightened stance on individuals communicating with the outside world.)

The din you'd hear if you tuned a radio receiver to a frequency used by the Bouvet exoedition would be similar to what you'd hear if you ventured into a stadium packed with tweens and yelled that you had tickets for a Bieber meet and greet to whoever wanted them the most - literally tens of thousands of operators calling them at once - some for the associated bragging rights, some for testing their station's capabilities...

More specifically about the moonbounce thing - that is HARD; you blast as much power as you can get hold of into the biggest, most badass antenna you can afford, and then, if the stars align, the gods smile &c - your signal is strong enough to get reflected back to earth where someone else may hear it (if they, too, went through major inconveniences to hone their antenna badassery enough to pick up a gnat's fart from half a million miles away.

There's hardly any rational reason why one would do such a thing, but the sense of accomplishment once you nail it is indescribable.

<comment><USER6> >There's hardly any rational reason why one would do such a thing, but the sense of accomplishment once you nail it is indescribable.

Ah ha! Some people just have waaaay more money for their hobbies than I do.

<comment><USER7> Oh, it can easily be mindbogglingly expensive, but it can be done on a (relative) shoestring, too. (Though arguably, to some extent, going cheap just means you are leeching off someone else, as the guy at the other end will need a bigger everything to make the signal to noise ratio acceptable at both ends.)

I've tried it a few times, out of pocket expense was way less than $1k - <USER2> software to generate smart modulation schemes like JT65b, you can get performance orders of magnitude better than what a human ear can pick up - leading to orders of magnitude less impressive - cough - stations.

Costs were more or less like this:

Computer - $0. (Already had one for other purposes) Software - $0. (Gotta love freeware!) Soundcard interface - $30 in parts Transceiver - $250 (Early nineties vintage) 150W solid-state amplifier, 2nd hand - $40, needed fixing. Low-loss feedline - $65, plus a couple of hours in the car to pick it up. Mast - $0 (Repurposed an old flagpole) Antenna - $180 (DIY 2x12 element yagis. Cost of materials)

Now, this is a bare-bones setup - more power and more antenna would make life a lot easier. Also, it would be nice to be able to rotate the antennas (Now I just aim for where the moon will rise and wait for it to whizz by)

However, it works. After a fashion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I absolutely love good writing like this. If this was a journalist's quick report or a Wikipedia article, it wouldn't be as riviting as this is, and I might have lost interest partially through.

<comment><USER9> A rare instance of fascinating writing in the "long-form" genre. I would expect a long-form article on this topic to begin with an intriguing paragraph, then, immediately upon mentioning the name of explorer Jean- Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier, diverge into a dozen paragraphs describing in the floweriest language Bouvet's grandmother's lifelong love of daffodils.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _" A speck of ice in the middle of a freezing fastness: a few square miles of uninhabited volcanic basalt groaning under several hundred feet of glacier, scraped raw by gales, shrouded by drifts of sea-fog, and utterly devoid of trees, shelter, or landing places."_

Makes me think of:

 _" I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts."_

</comment><comment><USER11> Not only that remote island has satellite imagery in Google Maps... _it is in 3D_.

</comment><comment><USER12> Great read. If you enjoyed, you may also like Island of the Lost. [https://www.audible.com/pd/History/Island-of-the-Lost- Audiob...](https://www.audible.com/pd/History/Island-of-the-Lost- Audiobook/B01DCNHXGA)

"Auckland Island is a godforsaken place in the middle of the Southern Ocean, 285 miles south of New Zealand. With year-round freezing rain and howling winds, it is one of the most forbidding places in the world. To be shipwrecked there means almost certain death."

</comment><comment><USER13> Why is it that we get so affected by symbolism like that? Is it just because telling stories is such a big part of our culture, or is it something deeper, more physiological than that? Does anyone know of a good book that can shine more light on humanity's strange relationship to symbols?

<comment><USER14> It's all we ever do. Clothes with symbols, as symbols. Computers doing nothing but manipulate symbols for us, all day long.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> slight tangent - but I've never heard of the 'Roaring Forties' \- Turns out it's the name for a particular set of winds - Fascinating stuff

<comment><USER16> Open a browser window to windy.com and scroll down to the lower Southern Ocean latitudes. You'll see the complex weather patterns that exist down there [0]. Further south is the Furious Fifties.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This reminds me of The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne.</comment>


Show HN: My first open-source project release – RandomJson - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mangatmodi/RandomJson <comment><USER2> Congrats on the release!

I'd recommend mentioning "fuzz testing" and "fuzzing" in the description to help people find it.

Simple and Sample are very close in spelling.

The sample makes sense, but a big use case for this would be testing APIs, and in that case, a JSON object is commonly modelled after the attributes of a class. So in that scenario, simply randomizing the keys would just blow up, which is not useful for testing. The kinds of errors you usually want to catch are small glitches.

I needed to describe the patterns that JSON could take when converting to and from native types, and I did that here [1] so it might be a useful structure to consider. But, roughly, you have several common cases:

1\. atoms

2\. homogenous arrays (same type of all elements)

3\. heterogeneous arrays (element X has type Y, bounded length)

4\. homogenous objects (same value type for all elements)

5\. heterogeneous objects (key X has type Y, required + optional keys)

6\. alternatives

Implement those and you probably cover any structure someone could throw at it. You'll also want to make it easy to distinguish between required and optional keys.

If you take a page from QuickCheck[2], it's nice to be able to implement a "reduce" feature. The idea is you produce something complex that breaks it, and simplify it to find a minimal test case.

You might go both ways... generate a valid pattern and add crap to it to see how tolerant it is. Or possibly start with reasonable length strings and make it possible to make them longer and longer.

[1]: [https://github.com/UnitedIncome/json- syntax/blob/master/json...](https://github.com/UnitedIncome/json- syntax/blob/master/json_syntax/pattern.py)

[2]: [https://hackage.haskell.org/package/QuickCheck](https://hackage.haskell.org/package/QuickCheck)

Versions of QuickCheck exist in many languages, e.g. [https://github.com/HypothesisWorks/hypothesis- java](https://github.com/HypothesisWorks/hypothesis-java)

<comment><AUTHOR> @ben509 thanks for amazing suggestions. I plan to add multiple features in next few days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice work!

I'd recommend adding a license to make it easier for other people to contribute (if that's something you'd like): [https://help.github.com/en/articles/licensing-a- repository](https://help.github.com/en/articles/licensing-a-repository)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I have added MIT license now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Congratulations, I hope you'll release many more projects! A small suggestion: show examples of generated JSON alongside the source code.

<comment><USER5> Agree completely. When it comes to OSS I'd say: documentation, documentation, documentation. Specifically in your case, a detailed explanation of the API would also be really handy :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with you both. Developers hate documentation but I would add plethora of documentations and examples in next few days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been using [https://github.com/yields/phony](https://github.com/yields/phony) lately for my random JSON needs.

</comment><comment><USER7> Looks interesting. It would be helpful if you could show more examples of the JSON this produces. I can guess from the code, but it would be nice if this were explicit.

</comment><comment><USER8> See also [https://www.json-generator.com](https://www.json-generator.com) for random data from a JSON schema

</comment><comment><USER9> Mods: Can you remove the anchor from the link?

<comment><AUTHOR> My bad, I should have been careful when I submitted the post

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great, I'll use it for testing :-)</comment>


This site is best viewed with Internet Explorer 4.0 (Click Here) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomsnroses.com/

<comment><USER2> LOL'd at [http://www.bloomsnroses.com/site/product.cfm?id=0CAD1021-E6E...](http://www.bloomsnroses.com/site/product.cfm?id=0CAD1021-E6E9-0CEF-903E25A38BEC9A1B)

</comment><comment><USER3> Viewed in IE 4 (800px x 600px):

<http://i.imgur.com/9NZgc.png>

</comment><comment><USER4> Sites like this give me a warm nostalgic glow. I'm glad there's still some of these kicking around the 'net.</comment>


Slack offers option to turn off WYSIWYG editor - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/1201955273667158023 <comment><USER2> Thank heavens. I was afraid Slack was going to take this the direction of the 3.5mm headphone jack and never look back.

I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to insert non-code text right after an inline code block.

And are you supposed to close a multiline code block with ``` or with the down arrow? Or is it the right arrow?

Bah, it was just so annoying. They took something that worked perfectly fine and broke it.</comment>


Ask HN: Web Developer with Sales Experience? - <AUTHOR>

I was in sales from 2007 until January 2013 when I made the jump to software development. I have since been a consultant working on Rails/NodeJS/Backbone/React, and I spend a bunch of free time writing code because its so damn fun.<p>Curious if anyone can share their experiences of being a sales person and becoming a developer?  Have you found new opportunities that weren't available without having both skills? Have you found that you had to choose one or the other? <comment><USER2> I had a few sales jobs before starting to code fulltime. Nothing major. It never really helped me at my fulltime jobs, but it definitely helped as a consultant. The ability to be "good in a room" is rare for technical folks. You'll be a hot commodity for agencies or dev-shops; anyone who routinely needs a technical voice to step in and woo the client before closing the sale.

I realized years ago that being in this middle-ground was my strongest asset. Not the best salesman, not the best coder, but can exist comfortably in both worlds. I'd recommend cultivating both skillsets.

</comment><comment><USER3> That skill set can open the door to a sales engineering position for a software company. It's decent money and you can often take part in both worlds doing technical stuff but still taking part in sales calls and prospect interaction.</comment>


The Tesla Model 3 reminds me of the times the electronics failed in my first car - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/20/16063728/tesla-model-3-electronics-mini-cooper-concerns <comment><USER3> I assumed the article was written by an owner, or at least a reviewer - <USER2> and behold it's someone filling article quota? He purports that he thinks the electronics in it might break down on him, if he bought on. This article is thin as it is, and makes no point.

</comment><comment><USER4> I do t think a pure electric vs pure gas necessarily has more electronic components to fail. A modern gas engine has many electronic parts that allow it to work and an electric drivetrain isn't exactly complicated. All the other aspects of a modern car are going to be the same; electric Windows, navigation, safety stuff. So I don't think there is anything inherently more likely to break, electronics wise.

Now the big difference is that it seems we have decided electric cars = autonomous cars. And I would agree that autonomous function opens the car to a whole host of electrical problems (sensors, computers, etc). But this would be the same in an autonomous gas powered car.

<comment><USER5> I think what the author was getting at was things being _unnecessarily_ electronic, such as door locks or even the glovebox (seriously, why do we need a push-button to open that?). Manual, mechanical devices are fairly reliable and if they fail, you can poke a screwdriver into the mechanism to get around the issue. Now imagine a bad firmware upgrade breaks the glovebox button on your Model 3 and your AAA card is in there...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My question is whether these systems will still be receiving support in 10-15 years time.

Yes, autonomous vehicles are on the horizon, so all vehicle lifespans should be considered limited, but cars generally don't suit the gadget life cycle of being discarded after a few years when the new model comes out.

What was the last piece of technology you purchased that has survived 10 years intact or without replacement by the newer and better?

I'd argue that it's much easier to maintain a supply of mechanical parts than of 10-year-old electronics; unless there's been some serious consideration of future-proofing in the design process?

<comment> King-Aaron They probably will. Most vehicle manufacturers offer support for a fairly long time post-production, and there's always a plethora of aftermarket alternatives for most cars.

Even in terms of computers, there's a massive range out there (from companies like Adaptronics, Link, Haltech, etc) when you have to move away from an OEM unit.

Already if you look at the EV scene, there's a huge variety of motor controllers/inverters/etc to choose from. I think keeping older EV's running in the future won't be too hard for people.

<comment><USER6> As someone who is far from knowledgeable about the field, I'm glad to hear it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yes, when the main electronic of a Model 3 fails, the car is broken, until the failure is fixed. On the first glance, it is somewhat a concern. But then, it is not so that more conventional cars are much more useful if some important electronic component fails either. With the Model 3 the switch to electronic control comes with a huge simplification of the whole car. Most of the components that can fail beyond electronics in a "normal" car, the Tesla just doesn't have.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think the only thing here that would concern me is the (apparent) lack of a mechanical door opener. If there is a critical failure in the electronics _and_ you have an urgent requirement to exit the vehicle, that seems like a dangerous thing to me. That's assuming there actually isn't a mechanical door latch release.

</comment><comment> King-Aaron Things break down, all the time. Trying to unbind a mechanical window winder mechanism that's jammed in the down position can be a nightmare... So can trying to release a tailgate when the tension wire snaps half way between the release handle and the rear door.

I don't know if it's really justified saying that electronic parts can fail more often or not - My first-generation mx5 has electrically operated popup lights, which are still going strong nearly 25 years later. I once had a 1985 Nissan Bluebird that had an LCD Digital dashboard, still working fine in the early 2000's.

Treat your equipment right, maintain it well, store it correctly, and you'll get a good long life out of it. Leave it out in the weather, never check the condition of things like batteries and terminals, and just run the car forever on hopes and dreams and sure... things will break.

</comment><comment><USER5> One of the reasons I love my 1985 Supra is for its mechanical and electrical simplicity. There's no CANBus. Wires and switches operate all the electrical (not electronic) components directly. The tailgate has a mechanical lock. The door locks are mechanical with electric actuators. The only electronics are in the engine controller and the beautiful digital dashboard (with VFD meters for speed, fuel and temperature, and LEDs for the tachometer). Probably a very good reason why the car's electronics are still working 30 years later is because they are very isolated. The engine ECU doesn't need to talk to anything, just receive signals from the engine sensors and send fuel/spark data to the components. The dashboard sends a simple speed signal to the cruise control ECU and nothing else. In isolation, any of these components can fail and it will only disable the related systems. I have had a complete failure of the engine controller, but that turned out to be a very simple electrical relay cutting all power intermittently. I can trace any failure with nothing more than a multimeter.

Modern vehicles are not just computers on wheels, they're entire _networks_ of computers on wheels. And all these systems are intrinsically interlinked. A failure in any one system can be enough to either stop the car working, or forcing it into limp-home mode. And you as the owner have no hope of fixing it. Even if you can plug a diagnostic computer into the OBD interface, the best you can usually do is poke around the engine controller. You need specialist hardware to interface with the other systems such as brakes and airbags. My Supra is long past the point Toyota will support it (although to their credit, I can still get a surprising number of parts). Looking at smart devices these days, manufacturers stop caring the moment the product is even released. Support gets pushed to one side and the successor takes priority. Cars have a lot more established history with this, but I'm sure that, with almost every major manufacturer having their cars purely electronic (even the ICE-powered ones), by the time the car gets to be the age of my Supra, there is going to be no hope for maintaining them. Some people view any consumer product more than a few years old as 'antiquated'. I don't get this mentality; the sign of a quality product should be longevity. Sure, there needs to be improvement, but as manufacturers basically tell us 'no, only we can support this car for you, and it's going to be expensive', and then five, ten, fifteen years down the line, 'nope, we don't care any more, buy a new one', people who like to get the most out of their vehicles are going to hate living in this era.

</comment><comment><USER9> Weird article, as the Model S is already free of mechanical controls and has been around sine 2012.

<comment><USER5> I think the point of the article is that the Model 3 is aimed at a considerably larger market of people who might not have the same budget to support the repair costs of a purely electronic car when something goes wrong; the Model S is mostly owned by people with considerably deeper pockets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The point of all of this is to disrupt Uber, and not to be cool.</comment>


Why Do You Need Secure Messaging – And How Do the Apps Stack Up? - <AUTHOR> https://surfshark.com/blog/why-do-you-need-secure-messaging-and-how-do-the-apps-stack-up <comment><USER2> Fluff piece article to sell vpn services with a chatbot that pops up about 5 seconds after you get on the site.</comment>


Ask HN/PG: Bug report for "pending" - <AUTHOR>

Hi, in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7482033 I posted a link - and the comment immediately went to "pending", despite me having over 1000 karma points and the parent thread totally empty... <comment><USER2> Oops, not sure how that happened, but I've turned it off.

<comment><USER2> FWIW the way it happened was that I entered the latest changes to the pending comment code via the repl. So when the server restarted, it had the initial version of the code, which enforced pending comments sitewide instead of per thread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Having over 1000 Karma does not give immunity to having comments being pending.

Looks like the entire site is in pending mode now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Together with the 502/504 errors in the last hours, I guess this is an instance of Update Gone Wrong(tm).</comment></comment>


How I went from programming to consulting (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consulting_1 <comment><USER3> Perhaps other people here shared the same assumption that I did - that this essay was about moving from tech development as a contractor/employee to tech (development) consulting. It's not.

It's about moving from developing to marketing. There's nothing wrong with that, but it was a let-down to me to discover that the path to riches meant mingling with the group of people I tend to like the least in a company.

Also, I think it's fair to say that amongst departments in companies, marketing is much more likely to pay (and pay a lot) for a consultant, whereas IT is only likely to pay a lot for outside help when things are really, really desperate.

Marketing is seen as revenue generating, and at many places, IT and (ironically) product development are seen as cost centers.

This might as well have been an article about how to 100x your income by moving from your current job into a similar job in a fintech company. That's a bit like moving from serving tables at Denny's to Del Frisco's steakhouse. Most Denny's waiters are not prepared nor capable of making that transition.

<comment><USER4> How about if you invert it. If somebody came to you and asked for a system that can send emails when certain conditions are met in a database and track the results, would you assume that to write the program you would have to hang out with sales people? The actual work (in the two weeks to implement it) is development.

<comment><USER5> It's still fundamentally development for the marketing side of a business though, rather than development for the product side. I think the problem that people are struggling with is that they can't see how this information relates to them if they are software developers looking to do consulting work on software. Patrick's article really is from a marketing angle, even though there is a software development component to it.

That said, I think people are missing the key takeaway from the article. I think the most important thing in the article is right there in the heading "Clients Pay For Value, Not For Time". This is saying that you should frame your services in terms of a value proposition for the client. That is, how much money will you save them if they hire you to do X. Maybe X is "rewrite the backend to process transactions quicker" which will save them Y hours of compute time and reduce their AWS bill by Z a month.

<comment><USER6> If you're interested in value based pricing, Jonathan Stark has a pretty decent free ecourse on it: [https://expensiveproblem.com/](https://expensiveproblem.com/)

<comment><USER5> That's awesome, thanks! The Freshbooks co-founder wrote something similar once too: [https://www.freshbooks.com/ebooks/breaking-the-time- barrier](https://www.freshbooks.com/ebooks/breaking-the-time-barrier)

<comment><USER7> Let's not forget Alan Weiss, who started this whole 'value based' consulting business. [https://www.alanweiss.com/](https://www.alanweiss.com/)

<comment><USER6> I loved Value Based Fees!

<comment><USER8> I second that emotion!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> To this day, I'm still not quite clear about what a consultant actually does. I mean, beyond some vague idea ("goes to some company, talks with people, gives some recommendation"). I'd really love for someone to give some example or describe in a tangible way what the work of a consultant entails, what skills one typically needs and actually employs, what a typical gig looks like from beginning to end and so on.

If anyone here on HN could share some insights, I would highly appreciate it.

<comment><USER10> My modal engagement was with a SaaS company with $20 million a year sales, a few dozen employees, and 1~3 very strapped people wearing the marketing hat.

"How much email do you send?" "We have a newsletter." "What else?" "Welcome to free trial email. "What else?" "Nothing."

 _I write proposal._

You should:

1) Have a pre-sales drip campaign positioned as a "free course about X delivered over email" w/ 8 emails arriving over the course of a month. This will push people at purchasing the product in 2 of the emails.

2) You should email people 4 times during the trial depending on their level of engagement with it. Here's a decision tree.

3) You should email people within 80% of their monthly quota offering a discount to move to the next higher plan.

4) You should email your entire userbase and upgrade as many as possible to annual billing for a 10% discount to the cost of their current plan.

You can tell your engineering team to do this for you, but there is 0% chance they schedule this because it is boring scutwork and they'd rather do those features you have scheduled this quarter. Or you can have me just do it. I need a commit bit and probably two weeks. It will cost you $30k per week.

Probabalistically this makes you $2 million in next 12 months but your results are your results; you keep all the upside and my invoice is due regardless.

<comment><USER11> Making the company money is the not the only factor is it? Any engineer at google/facebook/etc are probabilistically making the company multiple millions per year too (terrible estimate from revenue divided by headcount). But probably only a handful of them would ever be able to demand the rate you charge because they are replaceable.

How do you make sure the company won't just take your advice and hire a guy to do this for 90k/yr instead of letting you work on it for three weeks?

<comment><USER12> By far, the majority of consulting engagements I've seen or participated in (Big 4 and freelance) are things that could _easily_ be done if the company hired a few folks, for much less pay than this. Simple number crunching, tedious paperwork review, trivial integrations/dev work.. I would hazard a guess that at least 50% of all enterprise consulting spend goes to these tasks.

However the indisputable fact is that these companies _are_ willing to shell out for this stuff, whether because they think it's temporary work (cheaper to hire Patrick than an FTE who you then have to keep paying or dispose of) or they're paying for the top-of-Hill expertise (eg. paying a Big 4 where you get 10 hours of a partner's time/expertise at 1k/hour and then 300 hours of 23yo grunt labor).

<comment><AUTHOR> Who is the 23yo?

<comment><USER13> From the age - a fresh college graduate recruited into the consultancy employee/meat grinder.

<comment><USER12> Exactly. And not just one, each partner had a battalion of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> _I have an Internet buddy in Chicago named Thomas Ptacek. [...] I decided to invite Thomas out to coffee.

At the end of the conversation, Thomas said something which, no exaggeration, changed my life.

Thomas: Some food for thought: If this hadn't been a coffee date, but rather a consulting engagement, I'd be writing you a check right now.

Me: Three hours at $100 an hour or whatever an intermediate programmer is worth would only be $300. Why worry about that?

Thomas: I got at least $15,000 of value out of this conversation._

Does this really happen in real life?

<comment><USER14> To some people, probably.

I'd wager most people don't have someone like tptacek as an internet buddy or knowledge that would interest them, though. They literally mentioned HN karma rank titles... so much for fake internet points? Does this sound odd to anyone else or just me?

There's likely some small percentage of people who can go on to do consulting and charge lots of money. That this applies to a greater amount of people remains to be seen and is not proven by this post.

<comment><USER15> I don't know what this even means. I think Patrick and I might have exchanged a total of one (1) super secret Internet friends secret messages before we met for coffee and me and Cory kidnapped him for the day. If you're in Chicago and you haven't made a hobby out of calling me an NSA shill (or if you can credibly claim that you've done so only out of irony), we're "internet friends" enough that I'll grab coffee if you have something you want to talk about.

<comment><USER14> I guess I had higher expectation for the term "internet buddy" than what is used here. I generally figured it's a term implying some familiarity, and that getting emails from randoms is unwelcome. But perhaps the other commenter makes a good point regarding cold-introing. I always read various people say "I get thousands of emails..." and assume there's no reason for them to read mine.

I don't think I ever called you an NSA shill, although I did commit the grave offense of suggesting that Firefox is a secure browser, which I imagine is even worse. :P

Sadly, I'm pretty far away from Chicago and likely will be in the foreseeable future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Addressing several of the threads here:

If you're doing contract development that can be done half as well for a quarter of the cost by an offshore team, you are not doing consulting. You are competing in an arena that you will never be able to win.

If you want to consult for good money, you have to create your market and you have to have the confidence of that market. You have to be able to give C-level execs advice that they want in a language they understand to solve the problems that they deem important. The vertical market is just as important as the horizontal one. In other words, a CRM expert is generally valuable. A CRM expert that can provide technical, management, and executive strategy solutions in the healthcare space is extraordinarily valuable. The very strong technical guy can be worth $2-300 an hour if he knows the right software and knows enough to put himself in the right position. The vendor that has brand recognition and a consulting team built around their product is worth more. The consultant who knows the ins and outs of the vendor relationships and how they fit into the big picture of solving the customer relationship problem and can throw together a comprehensive multi-year strategy that differentiates the client from their competition and will have a positive effect on the stock and market position is the consultant that makes good money.

You don't get to be that guy by being the best developer or by having a history at one of the big three. You work your way up the ladder, make a difference, and then offer that difference to someone in a parallel position. You build out a team, a strategy, and a marketing plan that puts you in a position to drive.

<comment><USER17> I'm sure you meant nothing by it, but I just want to point out that using the word "guy" here is needlessly exclusionary. I'm personally working to grow beyond similar habits in my own speech.

<comment><USER18> I am in a similar but but now in UK and US vernacular in think "guy" or "guys" is becoming less gendered especially amongst younger workers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Patrick is a charismatic and compelling writer, and he writes in such an earnestly nerdy way that you think what he's saying _must_ be true. Similar to the guy who wrote The Gervais Principle posts. It sounds great and you feel like you're hit with a series of epiphanies. But it doesn't pass the smell test. The author isn't a wealthy consultant. He's a full-time salaried employee at a YC startup (where he assuredly makes less than $x0,000 per week).

<comment><USER20> It has "2012" right in the title, so I don't see what the author's position _today_ has anything to do with it. And that "YC startup" has raised $440M and has 500+ employees... You're intentionally making the author sound less credible.

Besides the ad hominem, what other "smell test" does he fail to pass?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> One of the problems I've always had with patio11's advice is that the skills he brought to a job was something that could easily be measured, e.g. he mainly did sales funnel optimization so it was easy to see the before and after of the direct impact on the bottom line.

As somebody who is a skilled backend developer the value I provide is not as measurable. How can I justify charging a large weekly rate, when almost nobody can provide an objective number of the value I provide?

<comment><USER22> > As somebody who is a skilled backend developer the value I provide is not as > measurable

Learn to do something which is more measurable, or figure out ways to measure some particular aspect of value you can bring. In back-end software, it will most likely be around performance or security. Doing a security audit then proposing remediation... if the company has already been hacked, they (should) understand the value rather quickly. If not... it would be a harder sell.

Performance? Would be hard, I think, without being a brand and people seeking you out. Speeding up an ecommerce site can definitely have measurable impact on bottom line but... if a company is big enough where that would have meaningful impact, they probably already have a team of people to navigate through to convince them of your value/skill/ability.

<comment><USER23> It's not hard in my experience. Not as easy as convincing CEO to do two redesigns per year, but not hard.

I work with companies operating at a large scale. Downtime costs $xxx,000/minute.

Developers cost lots of money, improving their productivity by a little bit pays huge dividends.

If the company has big events like Black Friday or Superbowl commercials, keeping the site up during those events is worth paying for.

Many not so big companies spend 6 figures per month in AWS bills.

Lots of work for a backend consultant.

<comment><USER22> If you have the experience and/or brand/name already, it wouldn't be hard. My thinking was not so much the work, but the finding people and convincing that a) you can do the work and b) they need it done. If you're successfully doing this now - props to you! If you have any specifics you can share about how you got through a and b above... would love to read more.

<comment><USER23> They usually reach out to me or are referred to me via a friend. One time I had a friend doing some work for Vodafone Australia, and he just asked me to come out for a month long engagement to help them get ready for the iPhone 5 (which turned out to be the 4s iirc). Another time I co-founded a Meetup group in a relatively new technology and a startup wanted to leverage that so they wanted some help getting started and having some good patterns to follow.

So I guess I would counter what you said with experience/network rather than a brand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Reading this just reminded me how lucky we are to work in tech and have the ability to extract so much money out of the companies we serve. My girlfriend works as a copy editor at a major online news site (it's in the US top 100 on Alexa) and her salary is essentially half of mine, even though her job seems more stressful and taxing. I'd love to make more money, but I also think it's ridiculous that people in other fields are getting screwed while we prosper. I wish there was a way that we could apply our skills toward fixing this injustice.

<comment><USER25> Enjoy it while it lasts. In less than a decade you will be replaced for sure for a younger one no matter how good you are.

[http://worrydream.com/#!/MeanwhileAtCodeOrg](http://worrydream.com/#!/MeanwhileAtCodeOrg)

<comment><USER26> This seems like an unproductive rephrasing of the comments made in the linked piece, ironically not unlike how people unproductively rephrased Papert's paper. (And even those comments are strawmen of what's posted on code.org, especially considering they're brief snippets of marketing material and not parts of a research paper.)

<comment><USER25> Once there were coal miners. Today they are SW programmers. The INDUSTRY needs you!!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> A question that has bugged me about consulting:

Why aren't there (afaik) consulting agents in the same way comedians/actors/musicians have agents?

Find me a gig, negotiate the payment, accept the payment, and pay me. Also interface with the client for me.

Ultimately the agent works for me doing all of the work I'm bad at.

Does this exist? How do I hire somebody to do this sort of thing for me?

<comment><USER28> > in the same way comedians/actors/musicians have agents?

Many reasons for this. One reason though is simple logistics in terms of how the world has changed since that system was in place. And for what reasons.

In the 'olden' days there was no internet. So if you were a performer you needed an agent for one thing you probably had little business or negotiation skills and no source of information to figure it out (nor the knack or desire). And also there was no easy way for 'customers' to get in contact with you. (Now it's trivial to go direct to a developer by email).

Also with performing the product is pretty much always the same. If you are going to book a comedian for a certain night at a certain rate you know the product. With programming it's all over the map in terms of length and deliverables.

Above just a few reasons.

That said it's not a bad idea not to mention it is almost certainly being done but maybe not on a major known scale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I charge between $2-3K a day. But i have 20 years experience and worked for large clients and at big companies.

My best advice is the find an industry which have a lot of consultants working (so you know clients have the money) and then offer yourself as a consultant with a design, tecnical, financial etc approach. I.e be a niche player in a large industry and never grow bigger than 10 people and instead start charging for things that are scaleable and which clients can use even after they move on.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your agency has 10 people? Was you the first person in your agency?

<comment><USER29> No we are two looking to hire 4 more. Have freelancers do some of the work until we find the right people. My first agency was 80 in its peak, but its just too much people handling imo.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you start the first agency? What was its niche?

<comment><USER29> I started both yes and in its time it was niche (but expanded into much more traditional type company). We were focused on web-app and product design (started in 2005) when everyone was focusing on web design.

Did a ton of projects for Adobe and their Lighthouse division who were pushing their flex platform back then.

This time we are focusing on something quite different but again in an area with few people who can offer what we do but who still are used to paying for consultants.

We get great clients but they get someone who is very experienced and know a lot of the typical pitfalls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> A relevant side note: If you're getting into consulting, here are my suggestions for writing a good Statement of Work [https://kirubakaran.com/blog/consulting- sow/](https://kirubakaran.com/blog/consulting-sow/)

<comment><USER31> Your example reads like a programmer wrote it instead of a consultant.

\- Would not expect to see a "such as" in statement of work in the locations you used them.

\- Would not expect typos in statement of work.

\- Consultant will push commits to source control.. I have other employees to code, I would pay an consultant to consult. Define strategy, architecture, coach. Not type code, you are way too expensive for that. Are you taking yourself serious?

What I read is a freelance software engineer.

<comment><USER32> Except in the real world (also at Google) the people who "type the code" also do the actual design work.

I quess Perelman was also just "typing a proof".

The amount of clueless people here is astonishing.

<comment><USER30> Hey, just fyi, this comment was flagged to death but I vouched for it to undo that, as I think you mean well and you make good points. I'm guessing the flaggers were reacting to the "clueless people" line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> A couple hundred comments, some from patio11 himself, in 2012:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4805091](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4805091)

</comment><comment><USER22> > Long story short: programmers can do things which meaningfully affect > marketing outcomes

And... while much of it's been said before... if you call yourself a programmer, very likely you won't be at the table when decisions about marketing are made in the first place. Might even be on the page linked above, but one of patio11's big suggestions is not to call yourself a programmer. I probably still use the label for myself in some situations, but often when coming in to new consulting projects (solo or with someone else), I'll say something technical, then answer some questions, and I usually get "you don't _look_ like a programmer" or "you don't sound like a programmer", in a 'disbelief' sort of tone.

As trivial as it sounds (and it's not, it took years of fighting the 'jump to tech' habit/comfortzone), talking to people about 'the project' at a business/operations/value level is where to start out. "How does it work now? What are you trying to do? Where are the pain points?" etc. Being able to jump down in to the technical weeds when appropriate is a huge bonus - you can talk to their technical staff as well as the rest of the staff and be a bridge.

Was doing some work for a company with a main office and mobile workers (mobile folks are out in trucks doing outdoors work - delivering, planting, landscaping, etc). Each dept head knows their stuff, but I was actually a bit surprised that one of the core office staff - been there more than 10 years, and is the main point of contact for the field workers - had _never_ been to their loading dock to see how they worked. (the dock was, for years, about 1000 feet from her office). As I'm asking questions and trying to determine best approaches for some rework, there was almost no one outside of the owners and one other person who'd actually been to all parts of the company. I went out in the truck with one of the field guys for a few hours... but I'm also a "programmer"... this was revolutionary for them (no one who'd pitched solutions to them had ever been in the field before).

If you want to be treated like a programmer, call yourself a programmer and behave like one. If you want to be able to give more value to a company/client, do more than a programmer would. But... it's hard to do that in most companies as an insider - you're tasked with XYZ, and your intruding on others' territories when you poke around too much (that was my trouble when working at traditional companies). I want/need to know how the whole thing works, but info sharing is sometimes the only way some people can exert control over their areas.

<comment><USER34> Dumb question — you bill for this "non-programming value-added" work, right? Even jumping into a truck for a few hours?

I fully understand the value in "doing more" but still occasionally have to fight the feeling that I need to be coding as much as possible.

<comment><USER22> This gets back to "hourly" vs other type of billing. In some cases, that sort of "learning" work (riding in a truck, visiting a site) may be part of a sales process, and not directly billed for. In some cases, it might be part of a paid review/analysis prior to any formal work being done.

> occasionally have to fight the feeling that I need to be coding as much as > possible.

Fight that as much as possible. The more you learn about the entire project/deliverables/system/needs, the more you'll find there's less code to write, or the initial code can be built for more optimal reuse, etc.

That doesn't necessarily contradict writing initial code up front, but very much prototype stuff early on. I always wish I'd done more prototyping - <USER2> UI screens with some action buttons, etc. - just to get something in peoples' hands. Almost everyone reacts better to stuff they can touch and use (even with fake data) vs abstract data and/or stuff that's far removed from the end product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Consulting fees certainly make the work more attractive than it would otherwise be, and I have been tempted to go down this path before. That aside, part of me thinks that the culture around consulting is masking bigger problems. I've seen consultants being brought onto projects where the main development staff would've been better placed to do the work (more knowledge about the intricacies of a business, better awareness of the pitfalls of the current systems). However, due to being snowed under maintaining legacy systems, in-house teams may not have the spare capacity to take on more work. For consultants this is a good situation as they can come in, do some greenfield development and leave the maintenance to someone else, but you've got to wonder what goes through the head of business owners who would rather pay high consultant fees than invest in extra staff and training for their in- house team, which is frequently better for the long term health of a company.

<comment><USER36> In my case my company has a terrible product development process, and it's a big reason why our app sucks, it doesn't deliver the key value customers and the company need.

I have said as much to everyone up to the VP level, and provided detailed recommendations (I am a Sr Dev, but in prior jobs I successfully managed dev groups of 40+ people). The response I've gotten has been coaching on delivery (stop being so blunt) and crickets on any actual changes.

If a $30K a week consultant came in and made the same recommendations at VP level, they'd be prized for their directness, and people would be having fires lit under them to implement most of the changes. And the actual staff would benefit as much as the company.

<comment><USER37> A huge huge part of it is just persona, profile, reputation and perception.

A fancy consultant with a laundry list of "credentials" will be automatically trusted.

When Joe Schmoe developer says the same thing it will be dismissed.

You can see a variation of this happen with books, particularly self-help books.

A nobody author writes lots of valuable stuff and people flick through it and go mehhh.

A famous self-help personality writes a pretentious 50 page book rehashing cliches (probably actually written by someone else) and give it a title like "the pink monkey that was red" and it will "blow up" because everyone talks about it.

Nothing wrong with that. That's the game, I get it.

The point is if you ignore this or don't understand it you are going to be disappointed.

<comment><USER35> > "The point is if you ignore this or don't understand it you are going to be > disappointed."

You can recognise it exists whilst still being disappointed that it exists.

Someone I work with suggested "Perception is the only reality", which seems to fit here.

<comment><USER37> > You can recognise it exists whilst still being disappointed that it exists.

Yep.

To me an interesting contrast to what I said is Bitcoin.

It has legs of its own to stand on and therefore does not need to borrow credibility from the author.

Imagine if books and blog posts and movies and art work didn't have the author/creator next to it. Interesting to think how people's reactions would change.

<comment><USER35> > "Imagine if books and blog posts and movies and art work didn't have the > author/creator next to it. Interesting to think how people's reactions would > change."

I find this interesting too.

Generally speaking, people are drawn to creating narratives about the world around them. I'd suggest that even if the creators of art become nameless/faceless, the vacuum would get filled by a cult of personality around taste makers. For example, in the world of electronic dance music there's a high volume of music producers without public recognition. However, the DJs that play this music then become the "face" for this music, and it's their reputation which is more prominent than many of the artists making the music.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> The way it reads it sounds reasonable, but ultimately it seems more targeted at aspiring consultants who were already pretty entrepreneurial minded than at the general programmer crowd. Apart from doing things 'right' (proper rates, selling yourself, networking and so on, we've all read that on HN), I think it surely requires a much different mindset towards work than what your average developer might have. I can't imagine getting into the grandstanding mindset (not meant in a negative way) required to sell myself as a consultant really, and I'd also first have to adjust to quantifying everything I do in terms of money.

But definitely good for all the people who can do it and use the corporate structure of the world for their benefit. Pretty cool. I could see myself get the required competence to consult some time in the future (though not yet), but I doubt I'd ever get the character for it.

</comment><comment><USER39> This gig economy propaganda results in a race to the bottom. Instead of $4,000 a week one is more likely to end up without income and working full time on take home assignments. It's a trap.

</comment><comment><USER40> I think an important note is that this sort of work is a lot of sales and not a lot of programming. You have to hustle and know how to sell a narrative and have the credentials/data to back it up. You make money through scaling, which means selling a lot of clients the same solutions which might be easy for marketing but for other niches it can be difficult because it can take non- trivial effort to adapt an arbitrary software product to a given strategy/solution or require certain organizational culture shifts for meaningful success. Also clients don't want to share and generally want 100% of your time so work/life balance and 'scaling' to many clients can be difficult.

</comment><comment><USER41> This post seems to discount his experience over eight years. $X0,000 seems to suggest it's on the lower end, so that's like a 3x salary bump. I would hope over eight years of work you'd get better at your job... So, what's the real impact of switching to per week billing? My guess is that this post is overselling it.

<comment><USER42> I switched to weekly billing about 5 years ago. Life changer really.

<comment><USER34> Can you describe why? Curious for a second opinion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Step 1: Be popular/famous enough that people know your name.

Step 2: Be good/accurate enough at opining in ways that make sense.

Most people won't have either 1 or 2 going for them.

There's one more thing - charging a lot is how to signal value, which is a a huge thing. I know a guy who used to manage an A-list rock band (everyone knows their songs) who went into consulting, and started out lowballing people, for $1k/week or something. People didn't take him or his advice seriously. After increasing his rate to $20k/week, people were hanging on his every word.

The advice didn't change, only the perception of value.

<comment><USER44> IMO it's a mistake to focus on his particular fees, that's what he managed to make for himself. You need to find your own realistic path. For instance I, living outside of US, will probably never be able to charge $100+ hour my clients, I'm fully aware of that. But no matter who you are, you probably still can push for a little bit more, and that's where Patrick's advices are solid. Often, it's just a matter of asking for more, as simple as that.

<comment><USER45> If you're in Europe and a programming consultant, you can (and should) charge usd100 and more. Like, double, or triple.

Edit: actually, first thing you need to do is stop charging by the hour, and charge by the day, or better, by the week.

<comment><USER46> When I was an employee, I _knew_ my company's clients were charged $150/hr for my work. I also knew my company was switching to offshore workers so they could _pay_ $5/hr.

Based on my past experiences, I'm not sure making lots of money is my goal, but I have the nagging feeling that it should be possible, just because it was no secret that people will pay that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> If I'd have stumbled upon that shady-looking website ([https://training.kalzumeus.com](https://training.kalzumeus.com)) anywhere other than HN, I wouldn't have spent a minute on there.

</comment><comment><USER48> Is this possible if your tech skills are not in marketing/ecommerce?

What about graphics, audio, embedded systems, networking?

<comment><USER49> Of course. I still take on clients for branding and marketing. And, thanks to pation11 I'm able to negotiate higher project rates using a weekly rate rather than hourly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Nobody ever shows up at your door and says "Welcome to the Illuminati. You can now charge $20,000 a week. Here's a list of clients."

Back to the drawing board for me. :)

</comment><comment><USER51> I made a bet with myself that the top comment on here would be a very intelligent person using said intelligence to argue all of the reasons why none of the (excellent) advice in the article was applicable to him/her.

I won the bet.

<comment><USER50> Yer mom must be so proud of you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> > "This is stunningly not the case for programming, due to how competitive the > market for talent is right now, and it is even more acutely untrue for folks > who can program but instead choose to offer the much-more-lucrative service > "I solve business problems -- occasionally a computer is involved."

Very true. But also easier said than done. I'd add that problem identification is problem even more valuable than problem solving. That is, get the problem wrong and even the greatest solution is irrelevant.

</comment><comment><USER53> The problem with patio11's blogs is that he seems to exist in a different world from most programmers, I feel.

> So $100 per hour, even though it is not a market rate for e.g. intermediate > Ruby on Rails programmers

Uh, $100 an hour is $208,000 annually full-time. Unless Patrick is referring exclusively to the Bay Area upper crust, I don't know how he reaches the conclusion that $100 an hour is "not even market rate for intermediate programmers."

<comment><USER54> $100/hr is only that much if you bill 40 hrs per week, every week. It does not account for non-billable time, vacation, sick time, etc. You are also taxed higher and have to provide your own benefits. You are taking on higher risk due to the temporary nature of most engagements.

If you're billing $100/hr you're not making bad money, but it's nowhere near equivalent to a $200K W-2 job.

<comment><USER18> consultant that wanted to aim for the same as a 200k pa job would be charging around the $500 an hour rate to allow for down time holidays etc

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Can someone explain to me why when paying weekly people would not turn the discussion on slashing the rate in contrast to paying hourly? I don't see the disconnect between the two and why it shouldn't be possible to also go "My rate is 100$, we need 40 hours, you can only pay 30, okay, what do we slash?"

In fact, that is what I am doing right now.

<comment><USER56> People will compare hourly rates to people's salaries in a way that don't really compare weekly rates.

$200/hr seems rediculously expensive to pay a dev. but a $8k/week will intuitively be compared to the value they get from the project, and 16k to increase wbesite traffic 30% seems like a steal.

<comment><AUTHOR> What if it's not website traffic or ecom sales you are increasing? What if the payoff is 6 months down the road?

<comment><USER57> Up to you to sell the benefits of the projects. 6 months is medium, it's not difficult to project that far.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> The answer always involves being interested in marketing, which I find incredibly tedious and dull.

Which kind of makes the person writing it seem dull. Until you realize that's not the content or the purpose of the writing at all. The whole thing is actually, itself, marketing, i.e. somebody's sales pitch for himself. Well no wonder it's a bore.

</comment><comment><USER59> The money someone is willing to pay you, is roughly what it would cost to get the job done by someone else. If you have a good relationship of always on time, etc, that's worth some extra, but they wont pay you $1000 if they know someone else will do it for $100. But if everyone charges $1000 and you only charge $100 they will think there's a catch, even if you do a much better job. So the real trick is to find a market niche that people pay a lot for. Then go do that, and charge market prices. When reading success stories, like in Indie Hackers, the best info is how much they pay for different services. If you see something that is outrageous expensive, that you could do for 100 times less, then that is probably a good market for you. For example $500 for a single balloon ...

</comment><comment><USER60> Patrick,

How do you view and approach "productization" of consulting services that are primarily information/education-based (vs. coding something)? Specifically with a mind towards scaling beyond the limits of your available time?

</comment><comment><USER25> Well lets make more NOISE That was the original title we commented on _How I went from $100-an-hour programming to $X0,000-a-week consulting_ Refers to 2012 and certainly the dust has settled since then.

</comment><comment><USER61> I'd like to know how does he make his clients millions? I feel like consultants are pretty worthless (no offense, never really saw one at work), and thus I'd feel worthless as a consultant. What could I bring in a few weeks to a company that would bring them millions in benefits? Is this true? Or is that also part of marketing yourself as a consultant, to give the impression you bring millions in value, and change the business in ways it wouldn't have had they never consulted you?

<comment><USER3> It's about impact, and impact (in a short time) is about influencing big decisions made by upper management. Consultants are specifically hired to guide upper management to theoretically better decisions.

Here's an example from a data analytics company I worked at. (I was crunching data and analyzing it, and my company was delivering "simple", actionable guidance).

Our deliverable would be a tidy presentation showing that telco X was running all these different marketing campaigns, but that a few of them were generating lots of billing errors but few increases in sales. Cutting some of the messy, under-performing campaigns would save money (which was a lot of money at the scale these companies were operating).

The company would pay us 20-50k for that advice, and I would personally earn a typical hourly wage...

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> So, are you a developer who's good at sales or a sales guy who's good at programming? Nothing wrong with either but one has to take priority.

</comment><comment><USER63> I have heard " If this hadn't been a coffee date, but rather a consulting engagement, I'd be writing you a check right now." before.. Cannot remember where but your buddy read that in a book I think =)

</comment><comment><USER64> If you charge by week, how do you keep your consulting pipeline full? Do you engage in contract negotiations while working for someone else?

<comment><USER65> By the week of work performed, not by the calendar. This is 3 weeks work. It starts Tuesday and will conclude mid February.

or yes, take an hour out of your work day for non-client stuff, and work an hour longer so it is not at your client's expense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Lets mix some Popcorn NOISE _patio11_ should certainly consult _putnam_ on how to improve his business. _about: schedule your 15 minute strategy session for growing your 6 figure consulting business to 7 with sam putnam samputnam.com_

</comment><comment><USER66> People still charge only $100/hour? standard Professional Services tech consulting rate is $250

</comment><comment><USER67> This guy's greatest achievement is Bingo Card Creator... huh?

<comment><USER3> Well, if he can market that into the success he has now, then his information is probably pretty valuable!

<comment><USER50> Using that logic you should interview all lottery winners and try to get their expert advice on winning the lotto. Not saying the OP did nothing, but sometimes time and chance cometh to all men.

<comment><USER3> I think comparing his situation to lottery is reaching a lot; so no, I'll take a pass on interviewing those folks.

What I would do is interview tech employees who figured out how to take their ideas and build entire businesses out of them. Actually this is already provided somewhat in indiehackers.com. Unfortunately, it doesn't always provide useful guidance as much as highlight that right place/right time is still a big factor in success.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Personally i would not spent a cent on the services of the poster. IMO he just earns his living by making NOISE lots of NOISE

P.S. Why to advertise the way you earn your living especially if it is so profitable?

</comment><comment><USER68> This is by a wide margin the most bourgeois shit I've heard on here apart from the constant cryptocurrency posts. "Make disgusting amounts of money by doing nothing instead of your actual job!"

<comment><USER69> You'll probably find your comment downvoted because you expressed yourself using language which isn't kosher in the HN community, and you aren't praising the writing of HNs most well known and well liked member, but I generally agree with your sentiment.

I felt gross and kind of disappointed while reading the article. I need more time to think deeply about why that is and communicate it in an effective way.

<comment><USER36> You feel the worker should give more of their value to the employer for free?</comment></comment></comment>


Richard Stallman – Free Software Song Lyrics - <AUTHOR> http://rock.rapgenius.com/Richard-stallman-free-software-song-lyrics

<comment><USER2> Still not sure what to make of this guy. He's done some great things but has such extreme opinions about everything I find it hard to trust his judgement. And frequent appearances on RT aren't helping.

<comment><USER3> >extreme opinions about everything

People keep claiming this, but just as reliably, history keeps proving RMS right. The clarity of vision that he displays in understanding the significance of certain developments in computing well before the rest of us is astounding.

The fact that he approaches things logically and with consistency should only add to his credibility. Instead, he is dismissed as a kook because his personal habits are peculiar by some people's standards. It is a flaw in human nature that enables this to happen, and when it does, it is to our collective detriment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For the sake of users' freedom, would you please take care to ensure that all the features of the web site work without running JavaScript code? And that any JavaScript code which does get sent to the user is free software (i.e., is explicitly and clearly marked with free software licenses)?

See [http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript- trap.html](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html).

For the sake of users' privacy, it would also be good to make sure that nothing is loaded directly from any other site, so as to avoid giving anyone else information about the people who visit your site.

</comment><comment><USER5> do they also have the openbsd ditties?

[edit: nope; at least searching for openbsd reveals nothing

for your delight: [http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html](http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html) ]

<comment><USER6> Even more obscure: the open firmware song.

[http://www.openfirmware.org/1275/misc/ofwsong.au](http://www.openfirmware.org/1275/misc/ofwsong.au)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Would anyone be shocked if Richard Stallman had the voice of an angel?

<comment><USER8> Yes.</comment></comment>


Tracking the Silk Road – Lessons for darknet services - <AUTHOR> http://shadowlife.cc/2013/10/tracking-the-silk-road-lessons-for-darknet-services/

<comment><AUTHOR> \+ On Silk Road (translation from Russian original) [https://www.facebook.com/notes/daniel-a-nagy/on-silk-road- tr...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/daniel-a-nagy/on-silk-road-translation- from-russian-original/10151660500172121)</comment>


The Antagonism of Human and Nature in Factorio - <AUTHOR> https://molily.de/antagonism-human-nature/ <comment><USER2> I think the developers are really smart about those design choices. Pollution and alien relations are not something you can control in the game. They are just an effect of playing the game. You are focused of producing more stuff in order to unlock tools to allow you to produce even more stuff.

If you could somehow manage the pollution levels, the ecological message would be weaker. It would mean that you can still increase your production as much as you like and still keep the planet peaceful and green. In factorio the only way to keep a peaceful environment is not to play. If you want to launch a rocket, you will need to destroy forest and alien nests.

The game commentary about pollution & colonialism is stronger because those elements are inevitable. Want to expand to get this new iron mine? First equip a flamethrower and burn down the area.

<comment><USER3> > Pollution and alien relations are not something you can control in the game.

You can (besides using the map creation settings). I've build a big factory without suffering attacks. You can control pollution by using solar (exclusively), efficiency modules and strategic building (build near forest, don't destoy them, they absorb pollution). I did give myself a headstart with a big starting area and lots of forest. And since the requirement to farm aliens for resources has been removed a while ago, there is no reason to attack and agitate them, reducing their agressiveness and expansion.

It does make the game harder and more fun in a way.

<comment><USER4> solar is late game tech, last time I played you couldn't possibly have been 100% eco play-through (feasibly)

<comment><USER3> Solar is pretty early/mid game. Only red/green science is needed and for construction coper, iron and steel. Of course before you get to solar you need steam first. But with a bigger start area and enough trees, pollution can be managed until you can go solar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is reading way too much into the game. The game is not a didactic device that aims to teach a lesson about ecology, conservation, and the peaceful coexistence with nature, just like plenty of works of fiction do not address anything in the real world—they are simply figments of the author's imagination.

> Also, a game is not a lecture in economy or ecology.

Okay good, because this sentence invalidates pretty much all of the author's criticisms.

I feel that the whole article is just like the people who say shooting games are harmful because they promote violence in real life (they don't). Why not write about them? "Shooting games actively ignore the basics of human-human interaction, and ultimately the basics of life."

Also, I don't think the author played this game where pollution is turned off:

> As a game device, the aliens force the player to build a machinery of war. > If one would take out the products, the buildings, the technology research > etc. directly or indirectly connected to military, there is only a fraction > left. So for a great deal, this game is a war game, with little strategic > value I might add.

When you turn off pollution, you turn off the militaristic aspects of the game, and I can assure you there are plenty of interesting things to explore without the military. From basics like fully utilizing the two-sided nature of conveyor belts (you can totally have each half delivering completely different products and prevent them from mixing up, therefore saving space), to intermediate stuff like fluid mechanics (how many pumps and where), train station design (how to load and unload efficiently) and railroad planning (train signals are surprisingly rich), to advanced things like circuit networks and combinators.

<comment><USER6> Regardless of the intentions of the author, any piece of art can be read by some as a reflection on the real world (perhaps one of the best examples that is not post-modern is the often touted interpretation of The Lord of the Rings as an allegory for WWII, which is very explicitly against Tolkien's wishes and intents).

Especially in a pseudo-naturalistic game, it is interesting to observe which aspects the game chose to model and which aspects it chose not to model, and discuss the implications to the comparison between the game world and the real world. This is as valid for Factorio as it is for Conquistador or Monopoly or Civilization VI. If the reader believes that "important" (to them) aspects were left out, they may legitimately criticize this reading of the game and point out why viewing some aspect as realistic would be wrong, regardless. Of course, it would absolutely NOT be legitimate to automatically extend this criticism to the game itself, or even more so to the author, it is just a criticism of a certain reading of the game.

There are cases when this type of reading can be seen as an explicit intention of the game design, and in those cases it starts to become more acceptable to criticize the author(s) themselves. For example, while pollution was a major problem in early Civ games, it was removed from the newer ones (until the latest expansion for Civ 6). Given the known importance of pollution in recent human history and discourse, and its presence in the other games, this omission can naturally be seen as intentional and can be criticized or praised based on the message it sends. This would not be correct for Factorio.

<comment><USER7> but often enough the blue curtain is just a blue curtain

<comment><USER8> That doesn't matter! Art is about what we, the readers, make of it.

<comment><USER7> no, that's the interpretation of an art piece, art in itself exist as an expression of a singular intent (well, potentially from a collective of authors)

further reflections are independent thoughts which exist because of the interaction with the art piece, but not within the art piece itself.

as such, these are observations of one's self, and not of the art.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was all set up to hate on this.

The remark about "If one would take out the products, the buildings, the technology research etc. directly or indirectly connected to military, there is only a fraction left." particularly struck me as untrue - yes there are some technologies that are military, but the vast majority are not. I have played several games with no pollution and no aliens, and if you remove those then there is a significant game left. This game is not "about" killing bugs.

But, I also get the comment about interacting with the bugs. They do feel like cardboard-cutout characters left over from the first implementation and not touched since. They don't seem to interact with the world, and they do feel like a missed opportunity.

It _would_ be cool to be able to trade with the bugs instead of destroying their nests to get materials. Having to manage pollution because it affected trade, etc.

I do feel bad when my filth-belching factory causes the bugs to attack me, and my only response is to destroy them. Hence playing games with this turned off. It would be great if there was an option to include them without inevitably getting into conflict with them.

<comment><USER10> Some mods worked to make it worth to manage pollution by cranking the military to 11 so that the conflict couldn't be easily solved by just more military.

Nauvis Day + Rampant, while unfortunately broken code, was a very interesting setup (I think we also did Angel+Bobs with it), which led me to start building complex reprocessing plants so that instead of deep underground release the captured pollution could be used to recreate raw materials - we had a lot of pollution mitigation because otherwise we probably couldn't defend despite seemingly impregnable defenses.

<comment><USER9> yeah, interesting. I haven't looked at the mods much (still haven't got the perfect factory setup on vanilla yet!).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am deeply concerned about human impact on our planet, but I actually liked that aspect of the game. We have games to provide escape, so it's not morally wrong to play a villain in a game (I guess in Westworld it gets blurry, but we don't have that technology yet), as long as you recognize that the game is not the real world.

That being said, I would love to see a (kind of educational) game somewhat similar to Factorio, or Civilization, that would realistically show the proper impact and scale of industry and agriculture to our planet and ecosystems (and also properly account for laws of conservation of mass and energy). It would probably be on a bigger scale than Factorio, with map squares larger than 1 km^2. I was fascinated by the montage in Michael Moore's Planet of the Humans, which showed how many different resources and industries are required to create solar panels (or anything really).

(I suspect in some sense, it would have to be a "hyperproject" \- like Wikipedia or OpenStreetmaps, something that cannot be expected to be completed by a single organization.)

</comment><comment><USER12> As another comment pointed out, the game Eco has a very similar premise to Factorio (accelerating technology to achieve an important goal) but includes a complex environmental simulation that encourages players to work together. Worth checking out for those who got hooked on Factorio. Here's a link: [https://store.steampowered.com/app/382310/Eco/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/382310/Eco/)

</comment><comment><USER3> > The fact that the aliens look like insects and live in huge groups suggests > they have a eusocial structure, like ants, bees and humans.

The aliens have a pathfinding algorith [0] and a function to calculate aggression and evolution as product of polution over time. They are just as much a social society as mold on the ingredients of a cooking simulation game or algea in your Sims swimming pool.

That said, the creators are aware of the narative the game portraits [1]. I just think they want to focus more on the complexity of factories to provide the player with a challenge requiring a spreadsheet just start the lategame [2] and the aliens are just a vehicle for statistics in that case.

But it's generally understood that trees are the real enemy [3].

[0] [https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-317](https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-317) [1] [https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-69](https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-69) [2] [https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/curn9m/if_a_game_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/curn9m/if_a_game_doesnt_need_a_spreadsheet_to_solve_it/) [3] [https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/8ee3d9/trees_are_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/8ee3d9/trees_are_the_real_enemy/)

</comment><comment><USER13> > As a game device, the aliens force the player to build a machinery of war. > If one would take out the products, the buildings, the technology research > etc. directly or indirectly connected to military, there is only a fraction > left. So for a great deal, this game is a war game, with little strategic > value I might add.

I think this author is simply oblivious to what makes factorio interesting. I'm pretty sure I've played hundreds of hours of factorio, the proportion of that time spent dealing with the aliens was negligible.

Saying there is little strategic value to factorio without the aliens is preposterous. Toward the end of my factorio playing I simply turned them off all together because it was just a mild annoyance to have to deal with the aliens.

I think the real purpose of the aliens in the game is much simpler: the early- mid game in factorio can be kind of boring, because your factory won't be consuming all of your time. The developers needed something to make this part of the game more entertaining, and so the aliens provide something to do during this phase of the game. In the late game, there's no need for a distraction, your factory will be providing plenty to do by itself. _Coincidentally_ , around that point the game gives you ridiculous firepower and automated weapons so you don't need to deal with the aliens.

<comment><USER14> > I think this author is simply oblivious to what makes factorio interesting

To me this is a text by someone that treats the game as if the game authors have created factorio by a series of deliberate choices, that is they treat it like a serious creative work.

> Saying there is little strategic value to factorio without the aliens is > preposterous

What they actually say is that the wargame against the aliens is very shallow: "this game is a war game, with little strategic value I might add". I don't know from where you get the idea that they talk about the factory building part.

Whether the aliens are for the just parts of the game or not, it is fact that the authors state in the gameplay trailer that the aliens are there to force you into making weapons: [https://youtu.be/KVvXv1Z6EY8?t=88](https://youtu.be/KVvXv1Z6EY8?t=88) and this is the trailer on their homepage mind you

<comment><USER13> > To me this is a text by someone that treats the game as if the game authors > have created factorio by a series of deliberate choices, that is they treat > it like a serious creative work.

I think factorio is utterly genius. As a creative work, it is more sophisticated and interesting than I think any game I've played. I personally appreciate it as a harnessing of emergent behavior, which tends to be my favorite kind of gameplay.

It's just that the aliens are a really small part of that. The aliens have basically no impact on the game after a point not too far into it. Resources consumed by weapon production become negligible compared to other objectives.

> Whether the aliens are for the just parts of the game or not, it is fact > that the authors state in the gameplay trailer that the aliens are there to > force you into making weapons: > [https://youtu.be/KVvXv1Z6EY8?t=88](https://youtu.be/KVvXv1Z6EY8?t=88) and > this is the trailer on their homepage mind you

Both things can be true at the same time. Yes, the aliens force you to make weapons.

But of course they aren't going to just tell you "at first, the game can be a bit slow, so here are some aliens to keep you busy until your factory is more interesting"...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The gameplay is building a factory. An example of a more sophisticated interaction with the in-game "nature" is Minecraft: there the living things just become a part of your factory.

The simulation in Factorio isn't "harmful", it's just incomplete (in a way the author of the post doesn't like) because the implementation has started from the factory, not from the world (like Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress did).

<comment><USER16> The author believes the game is harmful because it doesn't teach players to think the right things - the things that the author thinks.

Imagine someone wrote a blog about how Space Invaders encouraged militarism and xenophobia. It sounds like a parody, but then so does this blog post.

<comment><USER17> See Ken Ishii's music video "Space Invaders 2003":

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-- dHQIeagE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p--dHQIeagE)

It's super cute, and also hits like a truck. Detroit techno is a really inspired musical choice for this kind of thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I read it as a very cynical message about the inevitable destructiveness and cruelty of human nature.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm not going to dismiss the author's comments on the game but I do feel it's reading a lot into what is just a game. A game that I've sunk almost 2000 hours into and have only played with enemies/pollution on for <30hrs. They weren't fun mechanics since, as the author points out, there are no options but to fight and pollute. I've even tried to play with mods that let you clean the air but they don't work well even once I've gone full-solar. I'm willing to have my beliefs challenged but I'm not grasping how this game is inherently bad or promoting bad/harmful ideas. I don't find the pollution or alien aspects of the game well thought out but thankfully I can turn them off and just play a factory-builder game.

As for the opening quote. I've seen the YT video of these comments being made and I'm struggling to understand the line being drawn between a person with a disability and AI/ML models trying to move. I'm not saying it's wrong but I just don't understand. If someone can summarize it better I would really like to better grasp what Hayao Miyazaki means by this.

</comment><comment><USER20> I would also like the aliens to be depicted as more peaceful. Would be nice if they just started with protesting in front of your factories with a little act of sabotage here and there.

It should only escalate to fighting after you mowed down protesters with your tank and zapped saboteurs with laser towers.

Wouldn't mind a diplomatic expansion where you can trade democracy for oil and help aliens get rid of terrorist cells and their backward religious believes.

</comment><comment><USER21> I agree with the observations that you are pitted against nature in factorio, have to kill the bugs and claim territory from them. I've made those observations myself. I disagree on the conclusion though (seems to be a half sentence at the end that they indicate it's harmful).

This concept makes the game more truthful about what's actually happening here on earth. Because this is what we currently do. We are an extinction event for a large number of species (except for the subset of hemerophiles), and have been for large parts of our existence (why did the megafauna suddenly disappear? because we LOVED to hunt them).

I think the game is very helpful in teaching people this relationship, and every individual can draw their own conclusions from that.

Also, the main story of the game is actually good for nature in the long term. The TLDR is that you are stranded on the planet and want to build a rocket so that you can leave it and get home. If you believe that humans are a threat to nature, there is no better solution for it than us leaving earth and turning it into a national park, like Bezos suggests. If we build our rockets one day, we can leave earth behind and let nature recover.

</comment><comment><USER22> The opening quote is in reference to this; [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngZ0K3lWKRc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngZ0K3lWKRc)

</comment><comment><USER23> Factorio is incredibly addictive and I've had a lot of fun optimizing my conveyor belts.

Whether it's intentional or not, the game really does show how convenient it is to depend on fossil fuels, pave over forests, and just kill all life standing in the way of unustainable expansion.

The ultimate end of the game is factory engulfing the whole planet, using up all natural resources, and making the planet a graveyard of steel and concrete.

</comment><comment><USER24> The beautiful contradiction of this article is that it's a Marxist critique of a game which represents a reality which is congruent with Marxist critiques of our own. The issue is not that the game doesn't provide an opportunity for paradise but instead that the player inhabits the role of evil without an opportunity for reflection. Games can do this. Brenda Romero's Train is a well-known example where the player is unknowingly complicit in evil until the reveal. While I'm not a fan of the increasing politicisation of games, it seems to me that gamer's insistence of total amorality in gameplay is a barrier to games becoming a serious art-form.

</comment><comment><USER7> it's an interesting take of the state of aliens as they exist in game today, but there's also a very down to earth reason as to why alien feel an afterthought: 2012-2013 had a huge surge in tower defense genre popularity, while logistic optimization games were relatively niche.

</comment><comment><USER25> Another example of mild outrage culture.

I wonder if the author would blame Robinson Crusoe for thoughtless capturing of goats and interfering with the locals.

</comment><comment><USER26> Well, that was a waste of time reading...

I have spent nearly 1000 hours in Factorio and to me this game was about planning, optimising, getting perfect ratios, then you hit hardware limitations and start experimenting on how to get things more optimised.

So yeah, you take from the game what you want to take, if you will try hard enought you can make Tetris look like an evil game about destroying bricks...

<comment><USER27> I recall a Mario vs Sonic article where Sonic is described as peaceful and freedomish (Sonic only hits machines to free animals) whereas you could twist Mario's story around from Bowser's POV where he defends against a relentless invader that stomps, fires at, and overall kills everyone in his path.

<comment><USER28> By that same token, Sonic is destroying Robotnik's personal property wantonly, where Mario is trying to rescued his kidnapped friend.

Sure, if you eliminate parts of the plot, you can twist is around. But if you include the kidnapped princess and trapped animals, it's pretty clear what side each of those characters is on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The author might be interested in trying out Eco. It plays like a mix of Minecraft and Factorio, but with ecology and economy added in - you need food and other resources from nature, which you can preserve or cultivate, and pollution causes natural resources to dwindle. There's less automation than Factorio - instead the game is intended to be played by a community of players working together (in a more or less capitalist way depending on what you're into).

</comment><comment><USER30> The game is, just as the author says, basically a model of our own capitalist system. Or maybe a model of the conquest and exploitation of the new world. It features conquest, growth, exponential expansion, -and resource depletion. I'm not sure that makes it bad though, from the sounds of it the game creators were quite conscious of what they were doing- in fact they may have been subtly making the same sorts of points as the author of the article. After all the game of universal paperclips is not supposed to leave you with the impression that converting the whole universe into paperclips was a _good idea_. Exponential expansion is fun and feels like winning, even though from the point of view of the people on the receiving end of historical examples of such projects, it was no doubt no fun at all.

</comment><comment><USER16> It was only a matter of time before Factorio got cancelled.</comment>


Silicon Prairie: Tech Startups Find a Welcoming Home in the Midwest - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2015/03/12/392136573/silicon-prairie-tech-startups-find-a-welcoming-home-in-the-midwest

<comment><AUTHOR> Related discussions:

Inside the Midwest's Secretive and Scrappy Start-up Scene [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4111680](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4111680)

In Defense of the Midwest [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9168608](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9168608)

</comment><comment><USER2> I know Kansas City won the Google Fiber race.</comment>


Open Source Revenue Models in the Cloud Era - <AUTHOR> https://storj.io/blog/2018/10/open-source-revenue-models-in-the-cloud-era/ <comment><USER2> Timely discussion in light of today's news from Mongo and recent news from Redis. More restrictive licensing isn't the only answer.</comment>


IPhone 4 loses reception when you hold it by the antenna band - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5571171/iphone-4-loses-reception-when-you-hold-it-by-the-antenna-band?skyline=true&s=i

<comment><USER2> I'd hope someone would test the WiFi reception too. The left-side antenna should be the one for WiFi.

This seems pretty serious design flaw. Usually antennas are placed in the way that normal holding position doesn't interfere with them too much. In addition, antennas should be insulated. Probably a thin layer of insulating material would help in this case too.

</comment><comment><USER3> So that's why iPhone 4 failed at WWDC. Steve was holding it.

Simple explanations are always the best. Now, time to sell my 3GS.

</comment><comment><USER4> This headline is begging for the old joke:

Man goes to a doctor. Says, "Doctor, it hurts when I do this." (Holds up arm as he explains.)

Doctor responds, "Simple cure: Don't do that."

</comment><comment><USER5> Coming from any other source, I'd consider this news. Seeing how it's from Gizmodo though, I'll wait until other people corroborate the story before believing it.

</comment><comment><USER6> I tried to replicate this myself and I couldn't. NYC.</comment>


3D Cellular Automation (3D Conway's Game Of Life in html5/JavaScript) - <AUTHOR> http://gameoflife.samuellevy.com/

<comment><USER2> All of the examples that I tried reached steady state extremely quickly. 2D game of life can often go for quite a while before reaching steady state.

I do not know if this is because the rule used for 3D isn't very good, or if this is a problem with all rules for 3D games like this. It is actually very hard to find good rules that don't just explode or die off or reach steady state quickly.

Searching for "better rules of life" was a project of mine a while back, and I looked at all possible rules for 2D that are of the same format as the standard except using 5x5, and although I did find some that had better stats for not reaching steady state/exploding/etc, none had that "character" of conway's game of life of unpredictability, it really is a remarkable game.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, the rules don't scale as well as I would have liked. I started with scaled rules based on the original rules: Loneliness: sqrt(1)^3 = 1 Breed: sqrt(3)^3 = 5.196152423 = 5 Overcrowd: sqrt(4)^3 = 8

That didn't work out so well, so with a little trial and error, I came to the final: Loneliness: 2 (having 1 caused checkerboard walls everywhere) Breed: 3-5 Overcrowd: 8

In due course, I plan to build in some form of "editor" because currently it just randomly places squares. I think that if you can specifically place some squares, it might produce some more interesting patterns.

<comment><AUTHOR> Turns out I had a minor bug in my logic. Fixed it, and returned to the original rules: 1, 5, 8.

It tends to either die out quickly, or bloom and take up most of the grid.

It also runs a lot slower now.

<comment><USER2> Cool, it would be neat if you could allow user to control the values for the rules.

<comment><AUTHOR> Another friend has been bugging me to make a slider/some other control for the rules.

It may happen. It'll probably be behind a level/position editor, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Strange coincidence, but I was playing with the idea of a 3D game of life a few weeks ago and put the quick-and-dirty project up on GitHub. <https://github.com/jl2/LifeAutomata>

One interesting version I came up with was to have the 2D version "grow" upwards: [http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7029/6461000807_8c06428bb1_b.j...](http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7029/6461000807_8c06428bb1_b.jpg)

I remember having similar scaling problems with the "real" 3D version, but don't remember off hand if I came up with a solution.

<comment><AUTHOR> I had spoken to someone else who had added "time" as a third dimension (and I suppose that that's pretty much what you've done there, too).

I have, in my head, some interesting shapes that I think might react well given the rules I have. I might put a few of them in and see how they go.</comment></comment>