WebKit gets a new JavaScript profiler courtesy of 280 North (YC W08) - <AUTHOR> http://www.alertdebugging.com/2009/04/29/building-a-better-javascript-profiler-with-webkit/

<comment><USER2> Add a "displayName" property to anonymous Javascript functions, then hack the WebKit debugger to show that in the profiler and debugger. Simple, yet brilliant.

There's a lesson here in seeing a problem and solving it instead of complaining about it. I had heard recently about the problem with FireBug (for example) not having a name to show for anonymous functions, but I considered it an annoyance to be coped with, rather than a bug to fix.

Also a big win for open source. This process is not possible with IE.

<comment><USER3> > This process is not possible with IE.

It seems like the IE developers already implemented a trick similar to this last year: [http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/09/11/introducing- the-...](http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/09/11/introducing-the- ie8-developer-tools-jscript-profiler.aspx). For all we know, this WebKit improvement is inspired by the IE8 profiler. Accordingly, this is a bad case to use as an example of the alleged benefits of open source over closed source software since the closed source implementation came first and costs no more than the open source version.

<comment><USER4> Actually, it's not really the specific enhancement that makes it a good example of the power of open source, but the fact that this is possible at all. It's not as if there aren't plenty of other features that could be added using this same process that IE _doesn't_ already have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The title here is completely inaccurate. Francisco Tolmasky fixed a few bugs in WebKit's existing profiler, he did not contribute "a new JavaScript profiler". Many kudos to him for taking the time to fix these issues, but lets keep things in perspective.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I certainly don't want to argue about semantics, but I don't think the title is "completely inaccurate". The code did not work at all before. It almost always reported incorrect information. You can consider those bug fixes if you like.

Additionally, the "heavy" mode was in fact rewritten (and moved from C++ to JS). The old one wasn't computing any information that was useful.

<comment><USER5> We clearly have very different understandings of the term "at all".

The "heavy" view in the profiler reported incorrect information when recursive function calls were involved. The default view (top-down) of the profiler worked fine, and the heavy view worked correctly when recursion was not involved. The core of the profiler, where the real work is done and the data is actually collected, also functioned correctly.

Rewriting the display-related code for the heavy view in JavaScript, addressing the bug in the process, is a definite improvement and it's great to see third-party developers contributing to the improvement of WebKit's tools. That said, I fail to see how you can refer to this as contributing a new profiler while keeping a straight face.

<comment><USER6> I hate to have to step in here, but I feel that I should now. The entire purpose of this blog post was to show how cool the WebKit profiler is, highlighting some of its new features that we all worked on together and at the same time teaching people how to better use a tool they probably weren't familiar with. However, the highest rated discussion here on news.yc is now quibbling over who deserves credit for what. The worst part is that no one seems to be arguing that the post itself was unfair, its simply the title of this particular News YC posting that is of such great concern.

If its that important to "set the record straight", then I have to say that the heavy view was indeed completely broken prior to this change. The heavy view used to completely miscalculate _all_ child nodes, adding up there corresponding individual times instead of how much time the root node used. This is completely opposite to both the way gprof works as well as Shark. On top of this, as you mentioned, recursive times were counted several times over, never reporting them correctly and often resulting in profiling times of over 1000%. This is not a trivial matter since most of the major javascript libraries contain recursion or call cycles of some sort. The end result is that the heavy view could not be trusted at all when measuring a script's runtime. This is important because the heavy view is what is closest to Firebug's current behavior, so it was not feasible for someone to make the switch from using Firebug to WebKit before this point since they couldn't ask trivial questions like "which function is taking the longest" and expect a correct answer. Thus, the logic for this feature was completely rewritten and behaves 100% differently than before. True, most of it was done in JavaScript instead of C++, but it wasn't "simply display code". We actually investigated the implementations in gprof and asked our buddies over on the Shark team what the correct behavior should be and coded it up. The reason we chose to do this almost entirely in JavaScript instead of C++ was to make this code more accessible to existing JS people who might also want to pitch in. I think this is really key because a lot of people contribute to Firebug because its in a language they already know and are familiar with. JavaScript code should not immediately be assumed to be a "trivial" portion of a program.

All in all, I think boucher's reasoning behind this seemingly crucial title was to get people excited about the "enhanced" WebKit profiler, not to somehow imply the WebKit team has never done any work on this problem before or something. I'm not sure that many people would have cared that much if he'd written "minor/some bug fixes to safari profiler", especially if they had already encountered some of these bugs in the past and had been turned off by them initially, not to mention that the changes were indeed pretty significant.

Trust us, we know the frustration. We love WebKit at 280 North and are constantly saddened to hear that a lot of people don't even know about any of WebKit's truly great debugging facilities.

<comment><USER5> Your post itself was entirely fair, and the improvements to the profiler were great. It is only the title of this posting that I take issue with. If the title had been "280 North makes WebKit's JavaScript Profiler Useful!" I don't think it would be any less dramatic and would have been a lot less contentious. It can be a little irksome knowing that someone put a huge amount of work into the profiling infrastructure in JavaScriptCore and the UI in the web inspector while the title, and the dozens of tweets it spawned, imply that is all 280 North's doing.

We're all better off if we focus on doing great things and set the sensationalism aside. Thanks again for the contributions to WebKit, and I hope there are more going forwards!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think it's high time for Apple to break out the giant checkbook in the sky and make these guys millionaires. These guys are literally inventing the future of Apple's platform. The 280 guys look unstoppable to me.

<comment><USER8> These guys are hackers of the old school. Every time I see something new from those folks it puts me to shame.

All in all, I am terribly jealous.

<comment><USER7> I feel the same way, I feel even more that way about the AppJet guys. I try to use my envy of their obvious ability to motivate myself to work harder. It seems to work. ;)</comment></comment></comment>


Ballmer's Offer Letter to Yahoo's Board  - <AUTHOR> http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/01/microsofts-letter-to-yahoo/

<comment><USER2> From the comments on that entry:

      From: Microsoft
      To: Yahoo
      Subject: Be evil!

Succinct! :P

<comment><USER3> Yahoo recently received a similar email from China.</comment></comment>


The big data dump - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12010377 <comment><USER2> another reason for companies to not store your data forever.</comment>


Unroll.me: Unsubscribe instantly from whatever you don't want - <AUTHOR> https://unroll.me/ <comment><USER2> This is something Google could bring in instead of letting users report everything as SPAM. Sometimes it's easier to click SPAM than clicking on unsubscribe and then close an extra browser tab.

They have bundles now, but this is also a bundle bundler!

<comment><USER3> Gmail does have a feature like this; many times when marking things as spam I've been prompted to unsubscribe instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Giving a third party access to my email makes me uneasy. Plus marking spam in gmail now also gives you an option (though not always) to unsubscribe from the link too.

</comment><comment><USER3> This service has been around for a few years; why post a link to their home page now?

<comment><AUTHOR> I just found out about it and thought there might be others who could use it but did not already know of it.</comment></comment>


Members of D.C. National Guard have tested positive for coronavirus - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/axios/status/1270521059670818818 <comment><USER2> The tweet links to this page:

[https://www.axios.com/dc-national-guard- coronavirus-995a03c8...](https://www.axios.com/dc-national-guard- coronavirus-995a03c8-1cb5-4a46-a362-2168a9bea14d.html)</comment>


Ask HN: What do you use for viewing log files? - <AUTHOR>

There are so many services out there, both paid and free, for searching, analyzing, and viewing log files on your servers.  What do you use? <comment><USER2> Mostly grep on a single server. But Kibana, Elasticsearch and Logstash work well in a distributed environment.</comment>


The Desktop and the Developer - <AUTHOR> http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/31714.html

<comment><USER2> Interesting read as a developer who just switched from a several year old MacBook to a home-built Linux desktop. For a few days I was running Debian, but I quickly ditched that in favor of Linux Mint Debian Edition because of its superior user experience and more up-to-date packages (it is based off of Debian Testing rather than Stable).

While Debian is a great choice for servers because of its stability, what I want on a development workstation are the tools to write code effectively and deploy it there.</comment>


Ray Kurzweil - Immortality Only 20 Years Away - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/6217676/Immortality-only-20-years-away-says-scientist.html <comment><USER2> I'm suspicious of anything said to be 20 years away. It's far enough in the future that you can be a little hand-wavy about how it's going to happen, but not so far that no one would care. A variant of Occam's razor implies that when something is described in a news article as 20 years away, the 20 came from the demands placed on news articles rather than the nature of the subject.

<comment><USER3> Sustainable nuclear fusion has been twenty years away for the last fifty years or more.

It still is twenty years away.

That's a long twenty years.

<comment><USER4> Saying a research project is X years away is silly, given that you could get it done faster by throwing money at the problem.

The moon landing should have been 30 or 40 years away from Kennedy's famed announcement, but it was given a high priority.

Nuclear Fusion hasn't gotten enough funding, imho. Solar too.

<comment><USER5> Somewhat true, but there's an important difference between an _engineering_ challenge and a _research_ challenge. I know next to nothing about nuclear science, but I guess that fusion will require breakthroughs. Moon landings - while not particularly easy - simply require a lot of quality engineering. Engineering like that is mostly a function of the bags of money you throw at it.

<comment><USER4> From my limited understanding, it is just iterative improvements in fusion that are required. You shoot a laser at something compressed in a strong magnetic field, and use the dissipating heat from fusion to boil water to spin turbines to power the laser and magnet. This whole process already works, but doesn't net energy gains. Improvements in efficiency of the laser, magnets, or power gen could make it tip into net energy gains. It's still an engineering problem from then on, as you need to compete on $/Kwh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The drug approval process alone would take up most of those 20 years. This means that the methods for making us immortal would have to be perfected in 10 years, at most. The only way this is going to happen is if human-level or better AI is finished, like, next week.

Meanwhile, in the real world, medicine has made only incremental advances in the past few decades. Witness the fact that pharma is falling off a cliff because they haven't come up with many blockbusters recently: [http://www.fiercepharma.com/story/bail-faster-patent- cliff-a...](http://www.fiercepharma.com/story/bail-faster-patent-cliff- approaching/2009-01-03)

Kurzweil is 61. He's fantasizing that something will be ready in 20 years, which is about his life expectancy at this point. Sad.

<comment><USER7> >The drug approval process alone would take up most of those 20 years.

That's for U.S. regs only, right? They could (dangerously) release for broader testing in other countries.

<comment><USER6> They could, but AFAIK they don't (not that I pay much attention to the drug market in Lower Elbonia). Roughly speaking, the looser a country's drug regulations, the smaller its market.

There's not really that much time to be saved here anyway, not compared to the time frame we're talking about. Look at figure 2.1 here: [http://books.google.com/books?id=zlzwOEtDu4IC&pg=PA11...](http://books.google.com/books?id=zlzwOEtDu4IC&pg=PA11&lpg=PA11&source=bl&ots=NE1UZ-k6dT&sig=Q2GTPTS- TZ0ky9WiUFV2qQtfCw8&hl=en&ei=x0i5StKVM9ev8Qb548meDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8#v=onepage&q=&f=false)

If you skip the Phase III trials and the red tape, you save maybe 5 years. Probably not enough to do much for a codger like Kurzweil, any more than it did for a couple of other dead people who loudly proclaimed that they would live forever.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM-2030>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Anton_Wilson>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Would be a pity if Kurzweil's predictions follows the path of fusion energy - always, eternally, twenty years away.

At any rate, I question the practicality of /physical/ immortality. If we're swapping out blood and organs with effectively superior equivalents, why shouldn't we reexamine the necessity of a fully human-equivalent body? If the entire purpose is to establish life support for the brain and preserve and augment the human sensorium, then why keep blood? Or the liver? Or the stomach?

<comment><USER9> I agree... I think it's quite likely that once we have the tech to replace all the components of the human body the possibility will also exist to do away with it entirely.

I would definitely opt-in for a robotic body! I think I would prefer if it still looked human, but we can debate that in 30 years or so!

<comment><USER8> People'll pay for a humaniform body for at least the first few decades.

Then the Grinders get involved, and the cultural body image paradigm starts to shift ever so slightly...

<comment><USER10> Grinders?

<comment><USER8> Grinders, modders, etc - "Grinders" is Warren Ellis's term for it, and I've been rereading his stuff recently, so...

Basically, anybody who starts tinkering with the physical form itself - whether by small modifications, such as improved eyesight, or large modifications, like swapping your legs out for a tank chassis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _Writing in_ The Sun, _Mr Kurzweil said:_

This is the UK equivalent of 'Writing in the _National Enquirer_...'. I like Kurzweil, I own a few of his books, but most _Sun_ readers think a transhuman is a man who wears dresses.

Here is the _entire_ Sun 'story'

 _Robo-swot 'will arrive' by 2028

MACHINES will "soar past" human intelligence within two decades using a combination of computers and biology, a visionary scientist claimed yesterday.

Dr Ray Kurzweil said nano-robots – microscopic units of artificial intelligent hardware – will eventually become "deeply integrated" in the environment, our bodies and brains, he told a meeting of top boffins in Boston, US.

Speech recognition pioneer Dr Kurzweil said two dozen regions of the brain had already been modelled and simulated by "reverse engineering" intelligence._

Better informed now? No, didn't think so. BTW, a swot is a nerd and a boffin is a professional scientist, in UK gutter-speak.

</comment><comment><USER12> In 20 years i'll have my own jet pack and rocket car too. Rosie, can you get the door please?

</comment><comment><USER13> Although he hasn't proposed a total replacement of human parts the hint is there, consider this:

\- the inevitable happens and technology has progressed to the level where everything in one's body has been replaced by 'cyborg parts'.

\- You are now living past 500 years.

\- After 500 years your brain has a total revamp and replaced by chips, it is now more powerful and would only need replacements every x years.

\- eventually your total brain is replaced with new technology, ensuring all memories are kept etc.

\- In 1000 years there is nothing original in your body except some old 'data'.

\- Now that the 'original you' is totally replaced IMHO you have d i e d and a Cyborg took over your identity! As a corollary this Cyborg has now took over your consciousness also!

One consolation would be that if these events materialize at some point the Cyborg would try to use some of your Lisp stored 'data' and suffer infinite recursion and die too! :)

</comment><comment><USER14> This quote speaks to the validity of the person making this claim. From TFA:

 _Within 25 years we will be able to do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath, or go scuba-diving for four hours without oxygen._

BATBOY FOUND!! Page 33! NEW PICS!

<comment><USER9> If your blood replacement (whatever it might be) was able to store 50 times the amount of oxygen per volume vs real blood then there's no reason why things like this might not be possible.

They've already made headway toward something like this with artificial blood substitutes: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxycyte>

<comment><USER6> You would have to have a way to get rid of the carbon dioxide or you would die of respiratory acidosis.

CO2 + H2O -> H2CO3 -> H+ + HCO3-

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This kind of scares the shit out of me.

To me, the human condition seems like a very fragile thing; more so than many seem to appreciate. With predictions like Mr Kurzweil's, I wonder and worry that our possibilities will grow too large too fast and beyond control. I usually assure myself in optimistic spirit that "the humane will prevail". But it's no absolute truth.

I'm reminded of an interview with Douglas Hofstadter that I think was posted here on HN, on a similar topic.

<http://tal.forum2.org/hofstadter_interview>

</comment><comment><USER16> Hmmm, we barely understand how human biology works, and won't be able to cure most current deadly diseases in that time. The more we learn about human genetics, the more we realize the less we know. In other words immortality is only 20 years away in the minds of those who believe in their own hype.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think the best argument contra Kurzweil's timescale is that business organization and the human element in infrastructure processes is incompressible below a certain threshold. I make this argument here:

[http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2005/09/reading-the- sin.p...](http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2005/09/reading-the-sin.php)

and here:

[http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2005/09/nanotechnology.ph...](http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2005/09/nanotechnology.php)

I don't think there's a good argument to be made contra what Kurzweil expects to happen. At this point a transhumanist society of enhanced, long-living humans+ seems fairly inevitable, arriving in probably three to four decades rather than two.

<comment><USER18> Please. This is such an outrageous claim to make that you need evidence to back it up, calling anything on this scale 'inevitable', let alone to stick an upper limit on it less than two centuries into the future is not very realistic.

So, instead of looking for all the excellent arguments that have already been made 'contra' Kurzweil, the biggest of which is that nobody can predict the future, let's hear some of the reasons why this is 'inevitable' that do not contain any qualifications or build upon other technologies that we do not have today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Psychology is yet to answer how brain is capable of simulating future, how does it work with time or just the "simple" question—why we sleep among other things. Kurzweil overestimates our understanding of how we work.

</comment><comment><USER20> Seems like with technology, each of our life spans can be maximized. So if any organ fails, it can be replaced (or maybe preemptively replaced so it lasts longer). However, the biggest problem is going to be our brain cells. After 100-120 years, our brains are just about used up. Doubt its worth persisting much longer after that.

Maybe in 500 years they'll figure out a solution to that, but I wont hold my breath.

</comment><comment><USER21> The organisms currently composed of organic nanobots (cells) are a beautiful, complicated mess. It'll be some feat to augment that mess in the ways he predicts and as quickly as he predicts.

A human is like a giant software package that's been patched for billions of years. It's had a long time to get pretty complicated and to take advantage of every physical phenomena we've yet to understand.

</comment><comment><USER22> Seen on a T-Shirt: Ray Kurzweil must die.

</comment><comment><USER23> it's gonna get crowded.....</comment>


Disney almost bought Twitter in 2016 - <AUTHOR> https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/06/12/disney-twitter-bob-iger <comment><USER2> A decision more guaranteed to nuke both brands is hard to think of. As the article says, the hate speech problem is extremely difficult to solve, but Twitter _also_ has all sorts of NSFW, queer, and activist communities that are the exact opposite of Disneyfication.

<comment><USER3> Yeah there was no way that that union would have worked.

They might as well have contemplated buying Reddit.

Imagine if it became a sanitized family friendly microblogging platform where it was all pure, clean, fun conversation, anything not sparkly clean got knocked off. That would have ensured its death and would have shrunk to maybe 10MM users total.

<comment><USER4> Disney owns extremely diversified portfolio of companies, including, for example UFC and ESPN. They would manage Twitter just fine.

<comment><USER4> (To clarify, Disney owns ESPN, which has exclusive distribution deal with UFC.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> TIL Jack Dorsey is on the board of directors at Disney.

This on top of being the founder/ceo of both twitter and square.

I wonder what his secret is.

<comment><USER6> Arrogance.

<comment><USER7> Jack Dorsey's been pretty active on the podcast scene recently, and I feel it's harder to fake your personality in multiple long form conversations. I never got a hint of arrogance from him.

On a side note, why do people love to paint being the CEO of two companies in such a bad light? How is it different to a CEO of a conglomerate having responsibility for multiple divisions?

<comment> dan-robertson Generally shareholders would prefer a ceo whose incentives are aligned with those of the company. On the one hand maybe it's good that Dorsey could fuck off from twitter if things went bad and not suffer too much from it: it allows him to take risks and ceos not wanting to take reasonable risks as much as shareholders would like (because they have a undiversified interest in their company doing well but more importantly not doing badly whereas shareholders are typically more diversified and so can accept a bigger loss) is a known issue with many public companies. On the other hand, if he can fuck off and do ok if things go bad, maybe he is less motivated to stop them going bad.

A second issue is that people may feel that he will not be able to do the job properly if he is splitting his time between companies, and twitter have to care about the opinions of their shareholders and their users and their advertisers and their employees. Any of those groups may feel this. A main part of the job of the CEO will be deciding what the companies values are and making sure they are reflected by the firm's actions. For Twitter at the moment this seems like a harder job than for many companies so possibly it would be even harder than usual to be a part-time CEO.

<comment><USER8> He's uniquely qualified to run the company:

1) he founded it;

2) he doesn't depend on it for his own livelihood;

3) he has enough time and space; physically, mentally, financially, and computationally to have proper distance from the company; and

4) Twitter is essentially feature-complete.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If Disney had bought Twitter it would have gone away just like Tumblr.

<comment><USER10> what if salesforce bought it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's easy how Disney and Twitter would be a bad fit, but don't forget that Hasbro (toy company) owns Death Row Records home to a group N.W.A. where the "N" stands for the "n-word". [https://nypost.com/2019/08/25/hasbro-acquires- gangster-rap-l...](https://nypost.com/2019/08/25/hasbro-acquires-gangster-rap- label-death-row-records-as-part-of-4b-deal/)

<comment><USER12> Hasbro owns Death Row because it bought another entertainment conglomerate with lots of natural-fit-for-Hasbro properties that happened to also own Death Row.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > But: maybe? Presumably a Twitter under Disney would be a very different > Twitter today.

We might have had to sign over to Disney copyright of all our tweets for 999 years?

<comment><USER14> Disney would relentlessly astroturf shill their latest productions on Twitter? Oh wait

I wonder if part of the calculus was that Disney could get a lot of marketing value out of the platform by participating in it as Millions of Totally Real Human Users without actually owning it. Ergo these PR liabilities gain relative weight in the decision. Perhaps owning it would be a liability in itself. Curious that Dorsey is on their board too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's hard to imagine why the board thought that was a good idea. They should've bought Twitch or something Twitch-like that could be more easily molded to be "on brand".

<comment><USER16> I understand why they saw fit, if you don't look at their media tab, a lot of influential content creators on Twitter are also Disney fans.

If you do look at their media tab, the story changes completely, but if you don't, the statistics solo should look beautiful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Google also almost bought Twitter. I guess the year was 2009.

<comment><USER18> I expect they planned to shut it down in 2011.

<comment><USER19> Not quite. More likely they'd rebrand it, make some minor cosmetic changes, then neglect it until only a hardcore group of fans remained. Then they'd forget it exists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Ahhh hence that bullshit #Hastag based ownership of tweet thing</comment>


Frequently Asked Questions from YC Applicants - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/frequently-asked-questions-from-yc-applicants/ <comment><USER2> Is this FAQ still valid as of 2018?

In particular, is the following still true?

> Q: Can you apply to YC with just an idea?

> Yes. We accept companies at a wide range of stages into the batch. Cruise, > for example, had been working on their idea for just two weeks when they > applied to YC.

and

> Q: Can you apply if you haven't launched?

> Yes. Fewer than half of the companies we fund have launched before they > apply.

Looking at the list of YC companies in the recent batch, it seems like many of those companies have significant traction by demo day, significantly more so than YC companies in batches from a few years ago. Obviously, there are many factors that may contribute to this:

1) Advances in development tools as well as SaaS for startups: e.g. Stripe, Stripe Atlas, Clerky, etc.

2) YC's brand name / perceived value has gone up + YC's deliberate outreach efforts. This could mean more and better companies are applying to YC so the bar has gone up.

But even controlling for those factors, it seems like many of the current companies are still further along by demo day compared to previous batches. Are there any examples of YC W18 companies that applied pre-traction or at the idea stage?

I guess the more common question than

> Q: Is YC just for early stage companies?

is probably

> Q: Is YC just for companies that have already found product market fit / > have shown traction?

<comment><USER3> Yes, we absolutely fund companies at the idea stage, and often companies will pivot mid-batch -- in fact, one of our fastest growing startups from last year did exactly that.

One of the things I hear most often from our founders is that they accomplished more in their 3 months at YC than they did in the entire year before. Also, keep in mind that press is selective, and some companies wait years before publically launching as a YC company.

<comment><USER4> Hi we have been working on our idea for two weeks so we probably won't have time for actual users by March 24th and our application with stripe is still pending.Is it still ok to apply with an incomplete demo of an app?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just a request, please add "if I get selected by YC, do I have to reincorporate in the US, or will YC invest in an internationally incorporated company"

It is one of the most frequently asked questions by founders of India based companies as well as existing investors of India-based companies.

</comment><comment><USER6> how does it make sense for a company with 20m/yr revenues (messagebird) to give away the standard YC equity cut? did they strike a special deal? this is the first i've ever read of a company as late stage as this enter YC. sorry in advance if the messagebird story is well known and i'm a dodo

<comment><USER7> I'm not familiar with the messagebird story but there have been other later stage companies in YC before. For example, Quora entered YC when worth $900 million. [https://techcrunch.com/2014/05/11/quora-y- combinator/](https://techcrunch.com/2014/05/11/quora-y-combinator/)

<comment><USER8> what in the world is the point of that

<comment><USER9> You can read about it here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7723278](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7723278)

<comment><USER10> selected from one of the replies - this seems to be a better synopsis from the CEO himself. [https://www.quora.com/Quora-company/Why-did-Quora-join- the-2...](https://www.quora.com/Quora-company/Why-did-Quora-join- the-2014-Y-Combinator-batch/answer/Adam-DAngelo?srid=Om6j&share=1)

>There are a bunch of reasons why it's valuable for Quora to be a YC company:

>We'll have Sam and all the other partners to help us.

>We get to be part of the YC community / alumni network of founders.

>We get access to all the resources of YC.

>We were raising money anyway, so there was no overhead in letting YC participate - this ends up the same for us as if we had just raised slightly more money from Tiger. And independent of the benefits to Quora, I think it will be fun personally to participate in some of the YC events. I hope my perspective can help some of the other companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very interesting. Here are some random questions I personally have after operating a company in Europe for 3 years and planning to move the business to USA.

\- Do I need to document every single expense with invoices similar to vat?

\- What kind of expenses I can write off to my business? Apartment, house, car lease?

\- What kind of salary to founders pay themselves?

\- Do you hire yourself at the company or only pay yourself dividends as a salary? That's a popular method in Poland for founders to lower their income tax

\- What's a popular visa used for this? I am looking at L1 but I am not sure how the connection between companies is established

\- How demanding are the investors? If growth is slower than expected are there problems?

I would actually be happy to pay someone to get answers. But not sure who. A lawyer seems overkill for some of the basic questions.

<comment><USER12> \- Do I need to document every single expense with invoices similar to vat?

Not at all.

\- What kind of expenses I can write off to my business? Apartment, house, car lease?

This is determined by US tax law, not YC. Generally part of your rent can be expensed if you are working out of your house or apartment.

\- What kind of salary to founders pay themselves?

Usually founders pay themselves initially a salary that is below market for what they could be making at an established company, but enough to live on. Once their company reaches a certain level of success, they raise their salary to a market level.

\- Do you hire yourself at the company or only pay yourself dividends as a salary? That's a popular method in Poland for founders to lower their income tax

You hire yourself.

\- What's a popular visa used for this? I am looking at L1 but I am not sure how the connection between companies is established

During YC most founders stay on a visitor visa. After YC, most founders choose to get an O1.

\- How demanding are the investors? If growth is slower than expected are there problems?

Not from YC or from typical silicon valley seed investors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> How much equity is given out?

IIRC, YC use to take 6% for $100k. The link above says average now is $1m is raised from demo days.

Is that $1m for 6% or some higher equity percentage?

<comment><USER14> I believe the $1MM they're referring to is from outside investors (and is commonly on convertible notes, so the valuation floats).

<comment><USER12> This is correct.</comment></comment></comment>


Reverse Engineering the Tesla Firmware Update Process - <AUTHOR> https://www.pentestpartners.com/security-blog/reverse-engineering-the-tesla-firmware-update-process/ <comment><USER2> In short, nothing special . ubuntu based linux with safe boot feature and a bunch of shell scripts. QT based user interface. Wonder if the community will create fully open source linux distro for the tesla cars to substitute the Tesla one or this is illegal to do?</comment>


Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock Domain Specific Language in Ruby - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/danielsada/rock-paper-scissors-lizard-spock <comment><AUTHOR> If anybody has any feedback please let me know. It's a fun game to try out.</comment>


Paul Buchheit's Prediction Is More Of A Warning - <AUTHOR> http://www.tomstechblog.com/post/Paul-Buchheite28099s-Prediction-Is-More-Of-A-Warning.aspx

<comment><USER2> _You can destroy your Chrome Notebook and then walk to another and pick up where you left off. That's not true of Android and, by design, IT NEVER WILL BE._

Counterpoint one: If I treated an Android device like a Chrome OS device, i.e. using nothing but the browser, it pretty much would be. Counterpoint two: All that Android would have to change to satisfy that requirement is to default to storing data on a "cloud" filesystem.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Chrome OS is almost a strict subset of Android in terms of functionality. There are also a lot of reasons that storing _everything_ in the cloud, especially from a laptop, isn't really a "feature" anyway.

<comment><USER4> I don't get this whole "cloud vs. local" debate. We've had tools/protocols that sync local and remote for years, like rsync for files, IMAP for email, Git for version control, various package management schemes for upgrading software, etc. I can do all of my work locally and then sync remotely.

<comment><USER5> For me, a lot of the controversy surrounding the debate relates to who gets access to the data I generate. It would seem that the "cloud" crowd wants me to give up control over my data, evidently in order to further their business goals, and they're trying very hard to make the case to me that it's to my advantage. I just can't think of a reason I'd choose to limit myself from having more options to manage my data on my own terms rather than being at the mercy of various third parties.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Google Wave had plenty of unique qualities too.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think it's quite clear, Google has to choose: either Chrome OS or Android. Because of this schism, tablet support for Android was delayed, which was one of the biggest strategic blunders of Google, letting Apple entrench itself firmly there. Google often has competing projects and they have to attitude "we'll just let them duke out, let the data decide which is better." When you're talking about adding this or that button on the home page this is OK, but when you're dealing with huge industry-scale bets, this approach is appalling.

Google's misguided approach here not only hurts them but others, like Motorola and carriers, who have bet big on Android success. I think they should put _all_ their forces behind Android. They'll need all they've got to beat Apple.

<comment><USER8> "Because of this schism, tablet support for Android was delayed"

reference please.

<comment><USER7> I don't have an internal memo or something to prove that, of course :-) But think about it, why didn't they include support for large screens in Froyo at least? This delay caused hardware manufacturers to delay Android tablets, that's why there's no good Android contender to iPad now (other than some Chinese manufactured junk).

I think Google was still caught in thinking Android solely in terms of a system for phones and pushing Chrome OS (and untested OS, still under development) for larger devices.

<comment><USER8> translation: "i made it up".

<comment><USER7> +1 for the touche! Thanks for your keen eye for exposing made up comments in a funny way.

I talked to people at Google, just developers not themanager of Chrome or anything, so I cannot be sure what they are thinking. People I talked had the same feeling, though.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: My 56-year-old father is a developer having a tough time finding a job - <AUTHOR> Hi everyone,
My father, who is a 56-years old software engineer and introduced me to software development, got unemployed some months ago and is having an extremely tough time getting a job here in Spain.
In his whole life he has worked as a developer, businessmen and executive at various companies such as Xerox. However, he went the developer path these past decades instead of moving on to something more 'senior oriented' such as being a project manager.
He has been always learning new stuff, so right now he has a MongoDB certification and is totally fluent in Django. But most of the companies he applies to just see his age and step back. And I'm also worried because here in Spain large companies are seeing the crisis and the really high youth unemployment as an opportunity to hire youngsters under really poor conditions, and they can actually hire five young developers for the price of one senior dev.
So I'm not really sure how I can help him, I actually know a lot of people in the startup ecosystem but startups usually want people in their 20s and 30s. I have also read a lot of posts regarding 'old developers', and he has read them as well.
He has a fresh mindset, wants to move to another city/country if it's required, and has tons of experience, so it's very hard for me to see him having this tough time... Any tip would be very helpful
Thanks a lot <comment><USER2> "Spain" seems like the magic phrase here. Unemployment in Spain is 24.5% right now.

[https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome- instant&ion=1&e...](https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome- instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=spain%20unemployment%20rate)

Meanwhile unemployment in the UK is 6.2% right now.

[https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome- instant&ion=1&e...](https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome- instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=england+unemployment+rate)

I suggest looking for a job in London. A lot of tech companies are hiring there.

<comment><USER3> >Unemployment in Spain is 24.5% right now.

Yes, but AFAIK developers are exceptions - at least in Catalonia. Especially experienced ones. Depends on how much salary is acceptable. As I researched, for senior devs, it is 35-45K EUR/annual, which is rather low... He may as well consider consulting.

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately it seems to me that consulting is not really a thing in Spain.

There are a lot of consulting jobs, but they are usually the domain of consulting companies (known as "cárnicas", meat factories, among developers), that do little more than acting as a middlemen between the hire and the actual company, pocketing the substantial difference between the consulting fees and paid salary.

But I work in a more traditional environment and possibly this is different in the case of web development.

<comment><USER5> > There are a lot of consulting jobs, but they are usually the domain of > consulting companies (known as "cárnicas", meat factories, among > developers), that do little more than acting as a middlemen between the hire > and the actual company, pocketing the substantial difference between the > consulting fees and paid salary.

This also describes the situation in Portugal almost perfectly with the difference that we call those companies "negreiros" (slave traders).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The advice is the same to everyone. Work hard on personal projects, get them online and live and running and impressive. Join a well known open source project and do 200 commits. Tweet, blog regularly. Prove you know your stuff.

Same advice for everyone. Almost no one does this stuff and those that do greatly increase their chance of getting work.

People sit around hoping not to have to do the hard yards, hoping they'll somehow be given a job. In 2014 you have to make it happen through active, public work.

If you build enough of an online reputation then you'll get work without even meeting people and they wouldn't know if you were an 80 year old giraffe.

<comment><USER3> The thing is, if I have some interesting personal project that is useful for some group of people - I'd make a small business from it rather than dumping it online and just mentioning it on my CV ;)

<comment><USER7> No! - You likely won't, because of Spolsky [1]

And... your parent commenter is right: "When it comes to hiring, I'll take a Github commit log over a resume any day.", jeresig [2]

[1] The development abstraction layer ([http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/DevelopmentAbstractio...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/DevelopmentAbstraction.html))

[2] John Resig on Twitter ([https://twitter.com/jeresig/status/33968704983138304](https://twitter.com/jeresig/status/33968704983138304))

<comment><USER3> At least you should try. Maybe start small (and stay small..), there is always some path to escape from cubicle nation.. ;)

As for "github is your CV" hype:

[http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor- an...](http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss- community)

[https://blog.jcoglan.com/2013/11/15/why-github-is-not- your-c...](https://blog.jcoglan.com/2013/11/15/why-github-is-not-your-cv/)

<comment><USER7> On "the ethics of unpaid labor": YOU haven't been to a good university ?

And on "Why github is not your CV": Your animated gif is not advancing the discussion AND nobody said that github=yourCV.

You can bend reality (to your favour) but just not too much!

<comment><USER3> > Your animated gif is not advancing the discussion

Hmm, sorry, when I opened it used to be an article actually (and it is not mine). Here is the cache:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:yFBroqO...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:yFBroqO-1nkJ:https://blog.jcoglan.com/2013/11/15/why- github-is-not-your-cv/)

>You can bend reality (to your favour) but just not too much!

This might be reality in some hipster web startup scene. I'm glad I'm not in that domain.

<comment><USER7> The URL _is_ valid (copy and paste or type it in).

BUT: If you go there from HN he dispays just the gif

Wow, ... he seems to protect his article from the HN-crowd :-D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't know if his will help:

I am 63, and I realize that I might not be as effective as I once was. What I do is offer a really low rate for telecommuting from home, and a much larger rate when working on site. So, for the last many years, I work cheaply from home and occasionally work on site (most recently at Google) for a much better consulting rate.

I don't know if your father has the financial flexibility to follow my plan, but it works for me.

<comment><USER9> Don't undersell your experience. You might not realise it, but occasionally an insight to use a particular approach might shave days to weeks off the development timescale.

It's not all about how fast you can hammer out bits and bytes.

<comment><USER10> "Weeks of programming can save hours of planning."

This is where experience really counts. Younger developers who don't know any better will invent another logging framework, I guarantee it.

<comment><USER11> Haha, I did this (created another logging framework) at 23. It was a plugin- driven Python framework and it was beautiful (at the time), but was it necessary? Most probably, certainly not. Ah but I loved writing it. Really made me a better coder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Remote work online is absolutely going to be his best bet, and it will pay better.

Check out:

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

[http://hnhiring.com/](http://hnhiring.com/) (search for "remote")

[http://remotenation.co/blog/top-5-sites-for-finding-a- remote...](http://remotenation.co/blog/top-5-sites-for-finding-a-remote- developer-or-designer-job)

<comment><USER13> Are those sites good for those looking for part time remote work?

<comment><USER14> [https://gun.io/](https://gun.io/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Drop me a line at my username @gmail.com if he would consider working for a startup based on SF but with its engineering team based on Guadalajara, México. We mostly do django, flask and angularjs and are not worried on getting someone with his experience on our team.

<comment><USER16> Any chance I can shoot you an email too? I'm currently living in Guadalajara and looking for a new gig.

<comment><USER17> > I'm currently living in Guadalajara and looking for a new gig.

Drop me an email; we're hiring.

<comment><USER18> I'm currently living in Mexico City. I'm surprised to see these many startups in Gudalajara, and yours are not certainly the first ones that I read about. Is Guadalajara becoming the Silicon Valley/SF of Mexico? What are the reasons to establish your startups there?

<comment><USER15> GDL has a thriving technical community and getting bigger every day, the founder of the startup for which i work for has an special interest on making Guadalajara Mexico's technological hub and wants to create success stories to bring more inversion and companies to the city.

I think a big advantage of Guadalajara over Mexico City is that it's a big enough city without the downsides of a huge metropolis, and is very affordable for engineers to live on pretty good areas, i bike about 10 minutes to work every day and love it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm not convinced that 56 is that old for companies, especially large ones. I'm not sure this is anything more than the current financial problems that Spain is experiencing. There is 25% unemployment and many banks have purportedly been teetering on collapse. There simply may not be jobs available for him in Spain, unfortunately.

His best bet is to move around in the EU, and go to a country that is willing to hire him. Place like UK, France are likely doing better than Spain is, and will probably have more jobs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agree, the thing with countries like France is the language barrier. But he is fluent with English, so I may tell him to apply for UK jobs as well. Thanks!

<comment><USER20> Berlin may be worth considering as well. Opportunities for developers in Berlin are comparatively plentiful, and while it would be nice to know German if you live there, many tech companies in Berlin use English as the official language because employees come from so many places around the EU and the world.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's good to know, weren't aware of that

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I may be able to help. As a fellow Southern European (living in California), I make it a point to try to help people from that region with employment where I can.

I employ people (fully remotely) all over the world, and I help several other companies do the same (I assume basic professional/IT English). I'm not actively hiring right now, but I know a few companies who are.

My email is in my profile. Best of luck regardless.

<comment><AUTHOR> He just emailed you, thanks anyway :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is crazy. Were I hiring, I'd kill to have someone that experienced and with likely far fewer "life liabilities" (I'm doubting he's going to start having babies or go absolutely insane over some girl he can't get out of his mind... or disappear playing video games for two weeks straight)

Have him keep at it. Someone will appreciate what he's got.

<comment><USER23> Your intention is probably admirable (reassuring someone about a rough situation), but your list of life liabilities basically appeal to other prejudices based on age, gender, and possibly relationship status.

I'm not particularly impressed by this logic.

<comment><USER24> Its reality though.

The age group of my current workplace probably averages early 30's, and we have a lot of people taking time off to have babies. I seem to be the only person that does any work a lot of the time.

<comment><USER25> I bet you pay more tax than them too for the benefit of doing all their work. But the world needs more babies! Um... no it doesn't.

<comment><USER24> The continual growth economic paradigm requires more babies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Everyone's going to advise leading-edge technology options.

Consider the other extreme: long-established businesses are desperate for developers capable of working on _old_ systems like COBOL, 370 Assembler, etc. His "tons of experience" mean he is familiar with old-school tools & mindset, things which new developers can't fathom in a world of smartphones & clouds. Such developers made a pile of money 15 years ago when a burst of manpower was needed to solve the then-looming "Y2K bug"; those talents are still very much in demand, and there's a lot fewer developers able & willing to work on those systems.

Mainframe developers are still needed. Society isn't creating any more of them. Supply + demand = write your own check in this niche, so long as you'll work on anything anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER27> Your father should try to find development work online. Nobody cares about your age, or even your qualifications. It's all about your track record and your capacity to get things done. It takes a while to get your first few gigs, but once you build up a small client base, work goes smoothly.

<comment><USER28> Have any good resources to suggest? (aside from oDesk, where I sense it's become a race to the bottom price-wise.)

<comment><USER27> Don't think in terms of offering the lowest price. When you are selling your services online, price also tells the client how much your work is worth. Never compete on price, just ask for whatever you think is fair, given your knowledge and experience. I work on oDesk, and I've always obtained well-paid work. Just a question of patience and establishing a reputation.

<comment><USER24> Getting a reputation would seem to invove doing at least a few projects at a crappy rate from what I gather.

<comment><USER27> You can start off at, say, half your target rate, and/or on smaller projects than you would usually take on. Once you have two or three decent recommendations under your belt, then your online career will take off.

<comment><USER29> You don't have any contact info in your profile. I would like to run some questions past you, if you have the time?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Ask him to email me. I have 100% success rate to find people like your father jobs, and I do not charge them anything, in fact I will pay him $1000 if I can't find him a job. firstname.lastname@example.com. I have helped other people on hacker news and never failed yet

How do I do this? Because I change the mindset away from looking for a job based on skills to showing the value your father can add to a company

<comment><USER31> Wow that sounds great! Could you maybe provide some examples of how you did that? It might be really useful...

<comment><USER30> Sure. You or your father are welcome to join the Google Group and we can work through until your dad has a job. I will post my phone number in there so that I can talk to your father directly too:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/nemcv](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/nemcv)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> We, Lifesum, are located in Stockholm and are looking all over the place for a senior backend engineer that can work with Python / Django! Please have him take a look at: [http://jobs.lifesum.com/jobs/1103-senior-platform-backend- py...](http://jobs.lifesum.com/jobs/1103-senior-platform-backend-python- engineer) and see if it's a good fit.

Feel free to contact me (info in profile) regarding any questions. :)

</comment><comment><USER33> Spanish market is really tough these days, but it is possible to get a job. \- there are many possibilities in Madrid and Barcelona. Consider relocation. \- knowing Java or PHP can help further increasing possible job opportunities. I hardly hear that someone is looking for MongoDB developer. \- person with such experience is probably considered by HR to be demanding in terms of salary. I would not advise asking for more than 35k€. \- Also there might be a question: why still developer. I suppose there is a convincing explanation for that! (I also know many >40 years old people beeing developers). \- have a look at banks. santander & bbva usualy have some job offers. either directly or through some consulting company.

I hope your dad will finaly get some nice job!

-

</comment><comment><USER34> I would suggest he start contributing to open source. Write a fea utility libraries or even a few general purpose applications. Being able to point people to a github with work to show off some skills can be integral to how employers view your technical aptitude.

<comment><USER35> I'm all in favor of free(dom) software, but you still have to feed your family, and until farmers (1% of the population) and transporter (another few percentage of the population) can work and deliver food for $free, us programmers won't be able to provide (all) our software for $free either. Not counting the taxes that also have to be paid.

For this reason, I'm in favor of the universal revenue, lifetime income, citizen income, whatever you call it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This whole thread made my day. It is heartwarming to see so many people trying to help here.

</comment><comment><USER37> Has he looked into finance? The UK banking scene is predominately in his age group (not that it matters). I'm 24 and worked in a team of people ranging from 30-60 i suppose. Also the sector is moving towards noSQL so it could be a good fit

<comment><USER38> Please tell me that the banks are not running Mongo?

<comment><USER39> Banks are running MongoDB. The issue is not the industry, the issue is the problem they are trying to solve for in the app. I am sure banks have social applications too. Clearly, they won't be using it for financial transactions, as those probably are running on some mainframe.

Just like I hope that [your favorite social startup] does not have my user information in MongoDB. I don't want to lose my [points | badges | messages | likes | some other mundane detail that I cannot live without in my first world problem kind of way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Contact me if you want me to show his CV around HP's lab in Barcelona. Hope it works out well for him!

<comment><USER24> Can I contact you? Only just turned 40, but I am based in Barcelona and looking for a new job.

<comment><USER40> Of course!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I don't understand the reluctance of the industry to hire old people. I am young, and I love working with old people. They know their craft so well, they have so much experience, they have seen everything; they _do stuff_.

For comparison, I don't like working with young people. Always excited about new technologies, but they usually have no experience in anything and manage to delay every project and make a mess out of it. And there's also the meta- activities associated with young age. We don't just work, but we do all kind of meaningless forced social crap and boast about life and show our gadgets.

With older people, it's much more professional. It's just professional work, which gets done, and doesn't expand into our private lives.

</comment><comment><USER42> What about freelancing ? Try and connect with people you know who might be looking for a developer like him. If he knows Python/Django, I am sure there are lot of freelance opportunities. Also ask him to post in the Monthly HN thread of freelancers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that's what he's trying to do, but at least here in Spain both Python and MongoDB are still considered as 'young technologies for startups' that aren't usually seen in the enterprise or in the normal freelance jobs.

Anyway, thanks for the tip about the Monthly HN thread - he will definitely post there :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Unfortunately if he can't get a job that pays what he's asking for based on experience, he'll need to lower his rate. Outside of getting into a more "senior" orientated industry as joshcrowder has suggested, banking, finance, etc.

However Xerox itself is a very senior-orientated company, at least here in New Zealand. Has he reached out to his network to see if there are any positions going where he'll get a palm greased?

<comment><AUTHOR> That was really funny because he almost went to work to Xerox New Zealand when he was an executive. He has been trying to contact people from his network, but they have all changed from company, role and even industry (most of his contacts are from a couple decades ago)

<comment><USER43> Haha, well the work environment at Xerox here in New Zealand is actually really good. Too bad he didn't, I've met with a lot of their senior engineers (also at Konica) and they're extremely knowledgeable and friendly.

Unfortunately the pay would likely be why he turned it down.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it was more the fact that he got married and had two child than the pay

<comment><USER43> Perfect reason to move here. :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I left Italy because I was looking at a future in which I would have been one of those 5 young devs that got hired instead of someone like your dad.

I am still young and am always relocating to find better projects and conditions, and its been working for me in this past 5 years. But now I know that there is also a lot of companies out there that are willing to hire people from across the globe and let them work remotely.

Those jobs are not easy to find, and are a small minority in the job market, but they are a beacon of hope for really good devs for which relocating is not an option. You (royal you ... which means potentially your dad) will generally get good money but might have to set up your own taxes, insurances and benefits, so it's not as hassle free as just being a normal employee.

Relocation, IMO, is always an option. Just speaking English is enough ... and English is not hard.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, these kind of jobs are hard to find. Well, he is actually willing to relocate and he speaks English, so let's hope that works out

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I can totally understand how hard can it be. I`m 28 years old from Romania and looking for an IT related job. Its difficult and for me because i never had a 9-5 job. Always worked from home as a freelancer since college so i got no past experience and no one hires you without 2 years or more experience :(

<comment><USER25> So you've been working since 20? That sounds like 8 years experience to me. Maybe you just need to sell it differently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Self Marketing. Age is definitely a road block, it might be worse in spain, but it happens everywhere else.

The thing is that if you provide nothing for potential employers to see, then all they would see is resume and eventually your age. Make him get out there, make friends, build connections, show case what he has done online, get potential employers to see past his resume and age. When you provide nothing for them to see, they'll see what's in front of them. That is an older man trying to live in a young man's world.

When you are an older developer, it'll definitely take more work to get hired. You have to do more to stand out. Just sending out resumes isn't gonna do much good in this day and age. Your connections is what going to get you hired. It's true in Spain, London, EU, Asia and everywhere else.

</comment><comment><USER47> >"they can actually hire five young developers for the price of one senior dev"

I'm sure your dad's experience warrants a premium over others but anybody asking 5x what other devs make are going to have difficulty finding a job unless they have exceptional reputation, contacts and some luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, the thing is not that he wants a premium salary, he actually is below market price, the problem is that there is too many people willing to work almost for free

<comment><USER47> If there is a significant supply of people willing to work almost for free then market price is almost free.

This would also mean that the problem is not specific to his age but to the whole market for devs in your area.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> BTW I forgot to add it on the post, but this is his LinkedIn profile just in case [https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=75046358](https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=75046358)

<comment><USER48> I visited that link but only see a minimal box with very little info:

        Software Architect & Developer
        Madrid Area, SpainInformation Technology and Services
        Current	Proyecto Asturix, Asturlibre
        Previous	MeetPays, Yestilo, UPTA España
        Education	10Gen

May want to correct that, and/or set up his own microsite as a first link of reference (GitHub pages is convenient if he is already using Github).

General situation in Spain is quite shitty and age / gender discrimination is unfortunately still rampant here. My advice would be to keep his eyes open but definitely look for options in UK / Germany.

<comment><AUTHOR> He's not currently using GitHub, but this is his personal webpage: [http://cuende.net](http://cuende.net)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I am 10 years younger than your father and had a though time finding a job too. I have a bachelor in Information Engineering, founded and sold two successful startups in the InfoSec space, have raised venture capital and love programming, but still took me about a year to find a job. Granted, I wasn't ready to compromise too much, but heck, as the months go by, it becomes more and more frustrating, especially when age seems to be the #1 discriminating factor.

I am moved by all the support shown here to your father: hopefully it will help him boost his morale. I encourage you to keep digging too - it's payback time.

</comment><comment><USER50> I think startups usually want young employees because they usually don't have families. It's not really about age, it's about time commitment. All those startups with "epic snack rooms", beer coolers, ping pong tables, pool tables, etc. have all that crap because they expect you to live at the office. They want you to work 12 hours a day. Not all of them, but a lot of them. It can't really give that many hours if you have a spouse and kids to take care of. Most people can't, anyway.

It's not age discrimination, but it's still crappy.

</comment><comment><USER18> My suggestion would be for him to learn FORTRAN or COBOL, if he doesn't already know. At least banks still need programmers for these languages, and I can assure you that not many youngsters learn those languages anymore. The work might be monotone, and he'll be fighting a 40 year old mainframe, but chances are that he won't have a problem finding a job.

He should send his CV here: [http://www.geoban.com/es/estaticas/index.asp?wm=320&id=95](http://www.geoban.com/es/estaticas/index.asp?wm=320&id=95)

</comment><comment><USER51> Does he have an up-to-date portfolio on what he's been working on? how are his side projects?

I think that's one of the most effective ways to convince someone that you haven't been resting on your laurels/are still innovating.

Also, he could take the chance (assuming you guys are not 3 steps from being on the curb) to try and bootstrap a small startup -- 56 years is a ton of experience, he has to know some pain points in some markets/communities that he can fix (maybe his own?) and charge people money for.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an interesting point. He's been working for some months on his own project, that is an app for managing SMEs' salesforce. He has some experience on the enterprise so he really understands the problem.

The thing is that he is actually 3 steps from being on the curb (I live alone and am economically independent)

<comment><USER51> wow, sorry to hear that... that makes things way more difficult.

In that case, I would suggest that he applies to some of the bigger companies (like... real big), like HP/Dell, and market himself as a "tech-lead" \-- it's got more hope of being near code than a project manager, and they value experience (and it's relatively easy to get into big companies)... Though I don't know which big companies are in spain (AFAIK that's where you are?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I am software Enginner from Colombia, I move last year from Spain to Dublin, at least 25% of the staff in the company where I work are in ther 50s, my suggestion, move to UK or Ireland

</comment><comment><USER53> My advice is to apply his engineering skills to the job hunt itself. Send out CV's every day, network, hunt, analyze data, look for patterns, etc. As he is discovering, job hunting is a full time job.

In Canada, there are organizations for older job hunters that help with resume preparation and cover letters, job hunting techniques, how to network effectively, etc. Working with others in a similar situation is great for your morale. I wish him good luck.

</comment><comment><USER54> I would recommend that he jump on Guru.com or eLance.com and start looking for projects. It is not ideal but it will keep him active as he searches for work.

</comment><comment><USER55> The situation for developers in Europe currently isn't good. Forget those nonsense 'skilled worker shortage' articles. Europe's economic recovery does not proceed as fast as expected, forecasts are even lowered due to the sanctions against Russia. The 'best' you can do is sit and wait until next spring because spring usually is the high season of the IT job market.

</comment><comment><USER56> Feel free to contact me if you want to move his CV in a couple of companies that I know are hiring (Salamanca and Valencia).

Good luck to you and your father

</comment><comment><USER57> This may or may not be something that would interest him, but OpenStack is written in Python (no Django, but parts of it use MongoDB), and pretty much nobody who is deeply involved in OpenStack development has any shortage of recruiters trying to employ them.

[http://www.openstack.org/community/](http://www.openstack.org/community/)

</comment><comment><USER58> Forget the job adds, they will only attract a lot of competition. What he needs to do is finding firms which are growing and send them a letter. This way he will sidestep that whole hiring process and the firms appreciate someone who takes an active approach.

And those who points out how important it is to be active on the net are right. At least set up a nice LinkedIn account.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I have to thank you all from the bottom of my heart for the overwhelming support, I never thought he would get all this help.

I'm an avid HN reader and a somewhat active member but never imagined this could go up to the frontpage, you all are awesome.

I told my father about all the opportunities and interesting comments here, and will continue helping him get a job. Thanks :)

</comment><comment><USER59> Maybe he can edit his resume/CV and remove the date from items that would hint toward his age. This way the companies might give him the chance to show his experience in Django during an interview.

How about remote work within the European Union? I am in the US so I am not familiar with how common that is in Europe.

</comment><comment><USER60> Is moving to somewhere like London an option for him? There's a lot of demand for good developers in London and the companies tend to not discriminate. I'm talking about more established companies especially. Source: I previously worked for a company that hired a 55 year old developer.

</comment><comment><USER61> There are a few conferences coming up in Barcelona, he could go to network? [http://www.papis.io/](http://www.papis.io/) [http://velocityconf.com/eu](http://velocityconf.com/eu)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, he usually goes to startup and software events in Madrid, but he should probably do it even more. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Full respect for your father learning MongoDB and Django. I do not see his age as an issue with that mindset. Maybe he can work remotely? Also may I recommend joining relevant IT recruitment interest groups on LinkedIn and Python/Django on Meetup.com.

</comment><comment><USER63> Where in Spain? The author of the Typus gem (a Ruby admin tool) lives in / freelances from Barcelona. Your dad may want to reach out to him for tips or advice.

[https://github.com/fesplugas](https://github.com/fesplugas)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oviedo, in the north. But he wants to move to Madrid/Barcelona. Oh cool, I see he's a senior as well, he will contact him and let's see :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> If it helps, we work with startups/brands/agencies that primarily hire remote developers across a range of languages at FlexDevs: [http://FlexDevs.com](http://FlexDevs.com)

</comment><comment><USER65> Is he willing to move to San Francisco? Flightcar needs a fullstack Django dev.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hell yeah, he would actually love to live in another country :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> I just want to say that I know your situation and just encourage him to keep doing something and not sit in a chair waiting for something. Psychological problems come and they are not easy.

Wish you both the best of luck.

</comment><comment><USER67> [https://www.djangojobs.net/jobs/207/python-programmer- medica...](https://www.djangojobs.net/jobs/207/python-programmer-medical- science-computing/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well that position has expired, anyway just showed djangojobs to him, thanks :)

<comment><USER67> Didn't notice earlier, but what has expired is only the posting the hiring is ongoing. Will have the posting corrected. Contact me directly (email in profile).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Luis, We're recruiting for mongo experts—and happen to use django too for other parts of our system. We're an early stage co based in SF & NYC. -- Lindsay (lindsay (at) socialight.io)

</comment><comment><USER69> A 25 years old programmer in a country similar to spain will get 1100€ per month.

A 56 yo will probably expect much more, and companies won't be willing to... I mean, they are just evil.

</comment><comment><USER70> not sure how helpful this will be since we won't have a ton of activity at first, but Hired is about to launch in the UK. we'll be taking candidates all over Europe although we'll only have a London office until sometime next year. if he's interested in moving up there, it's worth a shot. his skillset sounds relevant. [http://join.hired.com/x/WF25Mp](http://join.hired.com/x/WF25Mp)

<comment><AUTHOR> I just sent him the link to sign up :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> It should be easy for him to move around the EU to places like Germany or the Netherlands. We have plenty of opportunities here for senior developers.

</comment><comment><USER72> hey luisivan, we're looking for a experienced php dev in Barcelona (working from home is welcome too) email me at my username at gmail

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, he will email you :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> If he's open to remote contract work, I'm always hiring freelance developers (knowledge of Python & JavaScript).

firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, he'll email you :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> Hola luisivan.

Could you somehow make me available your email? I would like to send you a couple of suggestions which I rather do in private.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure! me AT luisivan DOT net, thanks a lot :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> with his experience, he should set up a virtual classroom through Hangouts or Skype and make enough of a living short term tutoring people who want to learn how to code fast. Maybe he would not be able to offer certification and diplomas but there is enough interest in learning programming internationally that it may work.

</comment><comment><USER76> [https://www.liferay.com/careers](https://www.liferay.com/careers)

cheers from Recife.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> He's worked as an executive, but never moved onto something more senior like a project manager????

<comment> UK-AL Would not say project manager is more 'senior'.

Over here, on most graduate schemes you can straight in as developer, consultant, project manager depending on what you chose. You usually start of as assistant project manager though.

It's a separate career path, not a senior role.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> How is his English? Would he be prepared to work as a freelancer for a while? Can he code in C++??

<comment><AUTHOR> He's hasn't a perfect English but enough to work, and yeah, he would be prepared. He coded in C++ several years ago, not sure he's up to date...

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> we love experience! email@example.com ny/la/remote dev/design/consulting

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! He'll email you :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> Start a startup with dad.

</comment><comment><USER81> Pick up some freelancing jobs on oDesk?

</comment><comment><USER82> abdullah

</comment><comment><USER83> I have a friend who's about 60 here in the US. He doesn't have to work cause he's all set but he wants to. He's brilliant. Has wide ranging experience but, if he's not used your tech in the past, I guarantee he'll pick it up quick.

If you ever had eye surgery or used a vending machine, you've probably used his equipment. You've probably visited a couple of web sites he created for large companies. He's worked on Hollywood movies and you can see his face in some of them. I would almost go as far as say he's the most interesting man in the world.

Over the past year, he's gotten zero replies to any of the resumes he's sent out. Two companies complained they needed their sites updated and managed in their want ad yet, today, those same sites have changed little and are still awful.

Yet, I look out my home office window and see him working in his garden this morning.

</comment><comment><USER84> This is really cool, you are father doing having stage of retirement. I appreciated to your father with this act, that's it.

</comment><comment><USER85> He should start a business, it's easier than ever:

www.ProjectAmericanDream.com

Seriously, it could change his life in a major way.

<comment><USER86> You don't seem to have a history of spamming on HN so serious question, is this spam or are you being sincere?

If the former, given your experience on this site, I don't see how you can not know how wrong that is here.

<comment><USER85> Not spam at all. On many points. I'm on my iPad so I'll be brief (hate typing on this thing)

On advising he start a business. Launching a successful business is the greatest liberator. For OP's father a nice lifestyle business would provide him with security as he gets older. What happens when he is 60, 70, 75. None of these people talking about helping will hire him. That's an illusion. My statement could be wrong in this particular case but it isn't for the overwhelming majority of older engineers.

If your comment is about the link. No, it isn't spam at all. The registration period is now closed so I can no longer provide links to the content. I personally know somewhere in the range of 50 people doing this program through being a mentor for a local meetup group for members. There's an annual conference for the program. I believe the next one is in February. Sir Richard Branson will be the keynote speaker. So, no, not a scam or spam. The fact that people down-voted it or dismissed it as such is only a reflection of HN bias. I hope the OP did get a chance to consider it before this was voted down to the bottom and the registration period ended.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Here is a very meta solution, but it has to be considered. The problem of unemployment in Europe is directly linked to the European Union Treaty and the Euro ( google for TARGET2, ver por ejemplo [http://tinyurl.com/salida- euro](http://tinyurl.com/salida-euro) ). Entoncez, deberia promover la aplicación del artículo 50 del Tratado de la Unión Europea para salir del EU y resolver nuestros problemas.</comment>


I recommend Laravel - <AUTHOR> http://www.polcode.com/en/i-recommend-laravel-2/ <comment><USER2> Its really hard to read with the scroll jacking. From what i read i can interpret this article as "You should use it because Laravel is a young, far from mature, copy of Rails in PHP". Does not sell very well to me ;)</comment>


The way we are changing University and the first Hackathon at UCL - <AUTHOR> http://nicolagreco.com/the-way-we-are-changing-university/2013

<comment><AUTHOR> In the hope that this will inspire other universities to organise hackahtons</comment>


U.S. can't ban encryption because it's a global phenomenon, Harvard study finds - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailydot.com/politics/worldwide-survey-of-encryption-products/ <comment><USER2> The mere fact that the encryption ban is being discussed and bringing it up doesn't instantly end one's political career is frightening. Access to all individual's communications is a level of trust reserved for closest family members if that. And here government nonchalantly goes on to assume this level of trust from every citizen. Yet everyone except a handful of techies is completely oblivious to how monstrously perverted that is. The future looks really dark right now.

<comment><USER3> I hope it's obvious that I don't support crypto bans of any sort†.

But: I find this sentiment a little hard to understand.

The principle at play here goes way back into common law, and was most famously articulated in the 1700s as "the public is entitled to every man's evidence".

Access to all an individual's communications has been a privilege of the judicial system for the whole life of this country, and for many centuries of the country we came from. The founders didn't carve out a rule saying that individuals had the right to conceal evidence, and, one by one, when they assumed the reigns of government, their actions confirmed that they intended no such rule.

The norm for centuries has been that if you're being investigated, and the courts sanction that investigation, your documents and communications are fair game. In fact, before 1967, it wasn't even the law of this country that the government couldn't intercept and monitor your communications _by fiat, without a warrant_. Forced to confront the abuses of wiretaps by unscrupulous government agencies, Congress and the Supreme Court didn't choose to ban wiretaps; instead, they systematized them.

When people discuss the need for backdoors in crypto, they're generally not talking about the status quo. What they're worried about is 15 years from now, where _all communications and storage technology is end-to-end encrypted_ , and no warrant or judicial order of any sort can retrieve evidence from them. That's not a crazy worry: it's what's inevitably going to happen.

† ( _[http://cryptopals.com](http://cryptopals.com), &c_)

<comment><USER4> I think the big difference between the 1700s and today that seems unacknowledged in your post is that most communication happened face to face and was not documented for the government to intercept.

You and your wife could not be forced to testify against each other(Spousal privilege), but your private sms conversation absolutely could be. (What was possible as only a private conversation is now easily sent across the world, and as a consequence is sniffed and stored by potentially many parties.)

This is not a surprise for anyone who understands that they are sent in plain text, but from the context of people, those conversations would still be considered private communications between spouses.

I am not saying the law gives a shit about the distinction, but persons absolutely do. I hope you now understand the sentiment a bit more.

<comment><USER5> Answer me this, because I really don't know:

Back in the 1700s, if you wrote a private letter (on paper/parchment, with a feather ink pen as they had back then), in a foreign language, and the court system wanted to use this as evidence, could the government compel you to translate it?

Or, suppose you developed your own cipher (they had ciphers back then, I'm sure). Could the government compel you to decipher the message back then?

The use of encryption really isn't much different from this.

<comment><USER6> But with backdoored encrypted communications the government would have instant access to ALL enciphered letters at once, regardless of the seeming guilt or innocence of the sender or recipient.

To me that seems like the key difference. If all but face-to-face communications are electronic, and no electronic communications can be strongly encrypted, then the private sphere is greatly reduced and many things once considered private become public.

But on the other side of things, with strong crypto many things once considered public would become private.

There doesn't seem to be an easy way around this choice.

<comment><USER3> Hold on. With status quo electronic communications in the 80s and most of the 90s, the government retained instant access to communications for investigative purposes, and no serious objections were raised --- just as nobody objects to the idea that the police, searching your house with a warrant, get instant access to letters you've left on your desk.

Instantaneity can't be the fulcrum of this debate, because it's been the norm since the beginning of English common law.

There has to be some other principle at stake that can argue against decryption backdoors. And I think there are such principles! But I think it's important that they be articulated carefully.

<comment><USER6> Yes, in previous decades the government could access electronic communications under the third party doctrine[1] that says the fourth amendment only applied to "papers" held by the individual / in their home, not to communications voluntarily placed in the hands of a third party. On the other hand, far less of people's lives was conducted online. I expect that's why no real objections were raised.

Because much intimate communication has moved from in-person/on- telephone/other-instantaneous communications to asynchronous platforms hosted by third parties, in effect much that was "private" is now effectively "public". What once required a warrant now does not. Many things previously subject to protections against unreasonable searches are no longer so protected.

[1]: [http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/the_data_question...](http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/the_data_question_should_the_third- party_records_doctrine_be_revisited/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The politicians and national security bureaucrats advocating this are idiots. At least that's the charitable interpretation. The world is not static. Mass surveillance leads to mass demand, and therefore mass markets, for privacy products (e.g. VPNs, secure messaging). And a product will only be used by the masses if it is easy to use.

Can't these people see that they're shooting themselves in the foot (assuming their true goal is to intercept the communications of the 'terrorists/communists/lizard people' hiding under your bed)? Encryption is hard. Properly implementing a system that incorporates it is even harder. I doubt 99.9% of the aforementioned 'enemies of the week' have the technical capability to do so (ok, maybe the commies do). But that's no problem now! They can just buy a product off the shelf thanks to the new mass market you've just created!

Now they're trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle by banning encryption. Banning encryption? What does that even mean? How are you going to enforce that? I suspect the answer to the latter is: "selectively".

It feels like we're only a few iterations of this arms race away from our genius leaders pushing for telescreens to be installed in everyone's homes, to ensure they don't use any of that 'godless, un-american encryption that only evil lizard people use'.

After all, if you're doing nothing wrong you've got nothing to hide.

</comment><comment><USER8> I support a ban on encryption. /s

Any time something is banned, it becomes more prevalent and governments lose any semblance of control that they may have had on a thing. Such a ban would also force people to re-think security. There is a false sense of security if a thing uses an encrypted transport, or has an encrypted disk. This only partially hinders accessing data by people that are not supposed to have it. I should not have to start documenting the ways to side-step current implementations of encryption, right? This is the Hacker News, so most of you should already know at least some of the methods.

OK, back to reality. A ban would legalize what is already being done. There would be no more need for individuals to risk their own safety by breaking gag orders, NSL's, court orders, et al. Everyone would be painfully aware of what is being monitored.

BTW, I am being partially sarcastic here. The 3 letter agencies are nodding their heads as they read this. A ban on encryption would be highly detrimental to their operations. Such bans would be dead in the water or have their teeth removed before seeing the light of day.

</comment><comment><USER9> Hey we banned liquor once too, which I am thinking was somewhat global at the time. Don't underestimate the US! USA! USA!

<comment><USER10> People vastly underestimate the power of the US government to ban encryption within its borders. It simply can stop the sale of all offending devices, confiscate said devices, and even go after the profits from sale of the devices both new and old. If pushed they could theoretically go after those who run the companies.

It really depends on who is behind it and how much political power they have relative to their next election prospects.

<comment><USER11> You're talking like encryption is hardware. It's software. You can confiscate eight billion copies but miss one and tomorrow there will be nine billion more.

And it doesn't come from companies. Originally it comes from academics, but nobody actually gets their copy of AES from Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen. It's software on the internet. You can get it from Mozilla or Google. If you can't get it from them then you can get it from anyone at CCC or Debian servers in France or Brazil or your cousin in Russia or the Venezuelan government that loves any excuse to stick it to the US.

But let's pretend they're willing to cut all the fiber and close all the borders to keep encryption from crossing in from other countries. Your proposal is that they're going to go house to house and search your attic for the last of those t-shirts the EFF printed the last time this happened?

Now mind you, that doesn't mean banning encryption would have no effect. It would mean that your bank and your doctor couldn't use it to protect your finances and medical records, and they're the type of organization that could be compelled to comply with such a thing.

<comment><USER12> >Your proposal is that they're going to go house to house and search your attic for the last of those t-shirts the EFF printed the last time this happened?

As every comms is under surveillance its vastly easier than that. You just need to look for traffic you can't read. And then go after the sender. If you make encrypted communication a criminal offense, that's an easy task.

<comment><USER11> > You just need to look for traffic you can't read.

And what precisely is that supposed to mean?

If I send you a spreadsheet purporting to be "the latest numbers for the current period" but the low bits of each field (which would reasonably be statistically random) are really encrypted data, how do you propose an observer can figure that out?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I do believe that the U.S. can't "ban encryption", any more than it could "ban mathematics".

That doesn't mean the intelligence value to legally enforced backdoors in popular US-created or US-marketed products isn't significant.

For one thing, your target might not be sophisticated or suspicious enough to avoid these products, or they may be communicating with folks who aren't (for example, if you're studying recruitment).

For another, requiring anyone desiring to hide their communication to eschew popular products itself provides a signal that may be of interest. And a diversity of smaller encrypted products may end up being more vulnerable to subversion and exploitation, vs. widely used, deeply studied systems.

I am not arguing that this value is worth the massive privacy and civil liberties tradeoff of giving the government access to products like iMessage. But it's not, I think, as simple as saying, "the bad guys will just switch to using other tools".

<comment><USER5> They absolutely can ban encryption if they want. Just like they can ban mathematics. What makes you think it's impossible?

It wouldn't immediately eliminate all encryption, but it'd be easy to go after any corporations operating in the US and either force them to follow the ban or throw their execs in jail. After that, they could put up a Great Firewall and block downloads from foreign servers. They can use the Great Firewall to snoop on internet traffic, doing deep packet inspection, and look for unrecognized traffic, VPNs, encrypted emails, any markers of common unauthorized encryption protocols, etc. They don't have to catch every single person, they just have to catch some and then make an example out of them.

You're probably thinking that this is just too extreme. Has everyone forgotten what life was like in East Germany under the Stasi? That lasted until the late 1980s!

Now of course, you can debate how unlikely this scenario is to play out, but I'm just pointing out that it isn't impossible, not at all, and we've seen a society much like this in the very recent past.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Trying to ban encryption is like trying to ban a triangle.

</comment><comment><USER15> The US government can backdoor all the products they want. The only thing they will achieve is to destroy the tech sector in the US. That's no big deal right? Who cares if no one outside the US trusts US companies because all their software is backdoored? Of course, the tech sector will be only the first to suffer. The rest will fall like dominoes.

And all for what? So the FBI can catch some people smoking weed and the NSA can perv out to citizens' pics, that's what for.

</comment><comment><USER16> What's sad/funny to me is that people are making a bigger deal about this because Harvard study.

Encryption is like a knife. It's not good or bad. It just is. I find that using that analogy helps a lot especially when talking to lay people. Banning one/one kind of knife means a bad actor is just going to use something else. Ergo, it isn't a fix.

</comment><comment><USER17> I often argue this point, however I wonder how other people on HN discuss this issue with their non-technical "real politik" (actually just Political Science majors) friends that suggest that prohibiting encryption for non-sanctioned private entities (for example allowing bank transactions, online shopping, but disallowing encrypted chat protocols, emails, etc) is not terribly detrimental for the state barring "morality" concerns and our commitment to the principals of democracy, free speech, and the like.

I often resort to, "You can't ban math!", but wonder if there are more outlined resources for explaining this.

</comment><comment><USER18> The thing about encryption, you can always roll your own if you are advantageous enough.

</comment><comment><USER19> But if they ban encryption, there won't be any more bad guys.

</comment><comment><USER20> i agree

</comment><comment><USER21> > a foundational principle of our judicial system

You are sorely misguided if you believe a foundational principle of our judicial system is deliberate and systematic invasion of innocent citizens' private communications.

> no data center any country can build will ever so much as recover a single > emoji from a single IM

This is fine and how it should be. Historically there has been no way to intercept communications on this level ever before - so why claim it's suddenly necessary now? Especially since all of it has amounted to exactly nothing thus far...

This analogy has been beaten to death - but the parallels are almost exact when compared to Stasi Secret Police steaming open citizens hand-written letters for inspection... As others have already mentioned, one of the driving forces behind our nation was desire for private communications that the government didn't have entitled and unrestricted access to.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure who you're arguing with, but I don't think it's me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Same reason no one can stop cryptocurrencies.

So far I don't see any reason why Bitcoin's exponential adoption rate would suddenly grind to a halt.

<comment><USER23> Have you been hit in the knees with a wrench by government thugs? Just asking.

<comment><USER9> Rubber hose crypto is an issue but one that can be solved.</comment></comment></comment>


Write an Internet search engine with 200 lines of Ruby code - <AUTHOR> http://blog.saush.com/2009/03/write-an-internet-search-engine-with-200-lines-of-ruby-code/ <comment><USER2> Web search only becomes interesting when you scale it up. At small scale it's just fetching pages and tying together library code, which is fine but not particularly interesting or educational. Once you scale up, though, it involves tons of complicated and fascinating topics (math, distributed systems, compression, networking, query planning, databases, etc.). You also start having to make trade-offs among features, which is often a good sign that a problem is complex enough to be worthy of your time.

</comment><comment><USER3> Did he really need to engage in monkeypatching even in this small example?

Do you really pollute a class as fundamental as String as cavalierly as in this code?

<comment><USER4> There's absolutely no reason. Then again, there's plety of bad code to go around in this crawler. Just a few nuggets:

* Magic strings with no comments.

* Global variables

* Attempting to write his own URI parser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's actually not that difficult to write a text database from scratch (without libraries like Lucene). Most text databases are based on inverted indexes at their core. Implementing basic boolean operators turns out to be pretty easy to implement as well.

It's one of the exercises I like to do when learning a new language. I'd recommend giving it a shot if you haven't tried it before.

</comment><comment><USER6> Or, you could use Y! Boss in 3.

<http://github.com/jpignata/bossman-gem/tree/master>

However, this is a good first toe-in-the-water for people who want to get more into ruby and web-crawling.</comment>


Swedish man arrested for building nuclear reactor in kitchen - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/public-sector/3295333/swedish-man-arrested-for-building-nuclear-reactor-in-kitchen/

<comment><USER2> Previous submissions:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2837583>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2837693>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2840604>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2842770>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2842969> <\- lots of comments</comment>