iPhone 12 Models Won't Include Charger in Box, Power Adapter Sold Separately - <AUTHOR> https://www.macrumors.com/2020/06/28/kuo-no-charger-in-iphone-12-box/ <comment><USER2> Makes sense! Many consumers likely already have a USB-C charger, so splitting it up gives people flexibility.

I will be interested to see how they communicate this to prevent first time iPhone users being left without a charging cable/power brick.

<comment><USER3> >Makes sense! Many consumers likely already have a USB-C charger

I am willing to bet money the overwhelming majority consumer dont have USB- _C_ chargers, only USB-A.

<comment><USER4> But maybe Apple consumers will? I have a number of USB-C cables. Anyway, I agree that reducing waste is good, but this move isn't about waste. If Apple cared about waste, they'd come up with some way of keeping old devices out of landfills.

<comment><USER3> >But maybe Apple consumers will?

I dont think that is likely. Outside of tech circle, most have never even touched a USB-C Cable. Especially those only uses iPhone, and not iPad or Mac. There are 1 _Billion_ iPhone users, and only 100M Mac users ( And not every Mac users has a USB-C Mac ).

Not saying it is a bad thing. Most would already have a USB-A to Lightning Cable along with Charger so this doesn't matter. USB4 will be USB-C only anyway, but the move is certainly unApple as they tend to plan this in the very long run. Like including a USB-C 5W Charger for a few years before completely dropping it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I suppose that if you're upgrading to iPhone and already have one it is a waste to give you yet another charger. I wonder how much energy is used creating these cables that often go straight in a drawer because the previous cable is already conveniently plugged into the wall.

<comment><USER6> Yeah in theory it's a defensible move, because we're moving towards standardized charging ports. However, Apple is the only one that's being weird about it, introducing the Lightning connector instead of e.g. switching to micro-USB. USB-C was still a while out when Lightning was introduced.

But honestly they have no excuse to not adopt Micro-USB or USB-C.

<comment> tokamak-teapot As an iPhone owner, I don't want USB-C. Not yet, anyway. The reason is that I don't know how to be confident that a particular cable and power source will charge my phone well and won't fry it.

I expect Apple knows its customers would like to have confidence about this and that's why they are holding off.

With Lightning, I have been happy enough to plug into various non-Apple-brand chargers with USB-A sockets. Maybe charging might not be as fast as with an official charger. But it will likely work and I don't expect the possibility of damage.

<comment><USER7> I don't think the explanation "Apple fears USB C/USB PD will fry devices" fits the facts.

For one thing, this article claims Apple will ship a Lightning to USB-C cable - so the phone will need to accept whatever voltages that come out of USB C chargers anyway.

Second, Apple have adopted USB C on the Macbook - which would make no sense if they were scared of USB C frying devices. And they didn't go in cautiously on the macbook: They were one of the earliest adopters, and they dropped magsafe and USB A as they did it.

So I'm with Cthulhu_ - I don't see any good reason for Apple to stick with Lightning, except licensing fees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That's good as long as they'll reduce price for a power adapter cost. Also I'd happily buy iPhone without headphones with reduced price.

<comment><USER9> How would you know if they reduce the price? If it's priced at $994 and they say they took $5 off for the charger, that's OK, but what if it's priced at $899 and they don't break down the price?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Charging via USB-C - does that mean you will be able to use generic non-Apple chargers with the iPhone 12? (sorry, complete phone-noob here)

<comment><USER11> The article says a Lightning to USB-C cable will still be included. So you can use any USB-C charger which can delivery the necessary power (as with the iPhone 11).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hm. I switched from iPhone to Android almost 3 years ago and I'm thinking about going back to iPhone in the fall. I don't have any of my old chargers but this might not be a bad idea. If they deduct the cost of the charger that's money I can put toward a longer cable. I would always buy longer charging cables anyway.

</comment><comment><USER13> These petty BOM reduction exercises from Tim Cook's Apple to claw back single dollars on products that are $1000 are starting to get egregious.

<comment><USER14> They also reduce e-waste.

Few people need yet another lightning / micro-usb / usb-c cable and charger.

<comment><USER15> > They also reduce e-waste.

They do. But please note that Apple does this after years of pressure from EU and are one of the last companies to do so.

So please don't make them into some kind of champions for the environment.

<comment><USER14> > But please note that Apple does this after years of pressure from EU and are > one of the last companies to do so.

I have no idea what you're talking about. When exactly did the EU ask Apple not to include the charger in the box?

I'm very doubtful of this claim.

<comment><USER15> If you Google "EU charger" this The Verge article will be the top result:

"Since 2009, the European Commission has been trying to convince tech companies to adopt a single charging method for our gadgets, primarily smartphones, in a quest to reduce the waste that comes when every new gadget you buy includes yet another AC adapter in the box. Now, Apple's Lightning connector may be at risk."

[https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/17/21070848/eu-apple- europea...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/17/21070848/eu-apple-european- commission-common-charger-lightning-cable-port)

<comment><USER16> Yes that means that you can charge your Android an Iphone with the SAME charger, NOT that you don't include one with your phone.

And yet Apple could avoid implementing micro/usb-c (or the standard EU-Smart- device charger hm-hmm) etc since 11 Years and nothing happened...thanks EU for your strong fist and small mouth.

<comment><USER15> Aren't you misunderstanding the directive?

The EU explicitly stated the goal was to reduce e-waste, and the only way to do that is by not shipping a new charger with every phone.

Apple avoided all this by providing USB-lightning converters. This follows the letter of law but produces even more waste. Eventually EU decided they had enough and threatened to fine Apple.

<comment><USER16> >reduce e-waste

Yes so you dont have two incompatible chargers when apple decides to change the plug again...that's when it started, that was 2009.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's predicted that next year's iPhone will be wireless only, so not including a wired charger is the first step to getting consumers ready.

[https://www.macrumors.com/2019/12/05/kuo-iphone-without- ligh...](https://www.macrumors.com/2019/12/05/kuo-iphone-without-lightning- connector-2021/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Isn't it about time we moved away from the one-charger-per-device model? For the last few devices I've bought, I've only charged them from a multi-port Anker USB hub and the dedicated chargers have remained unused in the packaging. Which is great for resale value but bad for e-waste!

</comment><comment><USER19> Finally. Including all that was a waste.

</comment><comment><USER20> I was outraged for two seconds, then remembered I switched to wireless charging anyway.</comment>


Arrington hates Rails but wants Rails Hackers? - <AUTHOR> http://snaptalent.com/ads/182/ TC are hiring summer interns via Snaptalent <comment><USER2> _You_ should work at TechCrunch. You've mastered the sensationalist linkbait headline!

</comment><comment><USER3> When did Arrington say he hated Rails?

And if he did, how can he have an opinion on Rails when AFAIK he's never written a line of code in his life?

<comment><USER4> He called out the twitter (Rails) guy by name. I've been involved in the industry since dotcom times and that was the first time I've seen a single engineer been singled out for media ridicule. The scenario was like a junkie lashing out at his dealer for denying him his fix.

<comment><USER5> Just because he called out a single guy who was unable to make something scale doesn't mean he was dismissing the entire technology (as, clearly, he hasn't).

<comment><USER6> "a single guy who was unable to make something scale"

Allegedly. Nobody outside of Twitter knows the whole story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great title Sumon!

To anyone looking for a summer gig: come and work with Mark and me. We're two Rails dudes and we're having a grand ole time at TC.

</comment><comment><USER8> Actually, I know Arrington was interested in Rails as early as July 2006. We had a serious conversation about using it for the first version of the job board. I argued for PHP and we settled on it -- at the time, Rails deployment was a PITA and he didn't have any other Rails apps, so why take on that hassle for a simple app?

Yeesh, I keep mentioning I build that job board here. It only took ten days from introduction to done, he just keeps coming up here.

</comment><comment><USER9> Arrington never said he hated rails. I imagine he hates linkbait involving him though.

<comment><USER10> it's karma

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> and imagine he paid for that!

come to think of it, he probably suggested this headline. This is a double winner for TC and Snaptalent -- exposure for both of them! TC to the hacker crowd, and more traffic for snap talent.

</comment><comment><USER12> Arrington hates everything he doesn't own and at least half of what he does.

<comment><USER6> I think the negative TC articles get blown way out of proportion--I'm generally surprised by how positive and free of tough judgment the coverage on TC is. People often point out how positive they are to YC companies, but if you do the math, they're positive to almost all small companies. Bigger companies catch plenty of flack--but that's OK, they can take it.

If you add'em all up, though, TC is a pretty resoundingly positive site--it's snarky (in a TMZ kinda way), but it's generally good-natured ribbing of the sort that takes place all the time at events in the valley. Just tonight, a bunch of folks were hanging out at Bistro 412 in Palo Alto making fun of the Web 2.0 "business model", venture capitalists, and anything else that came up. Doesn't mean everybody who was there doesn't like the industry or the people in it.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What you think about encrypting users data at the database level? - <AUTHOR> I believe the average tech savvy user would like to know their data was encrypted or at least secure when on hosted on the cloud, and while it is trivial to encrypt, it also appears to be pointless because if anyone had access to the database they would also have access to the application, and therefore the key so could just "print" the data at the right point to get the users data.
The reason for encryption would be a great selling point - users are getting more and more distrustful against all the big providers around advertising and mining their data, and it would be great to able to prove to them that 'this web service CANT sell your data'.
I will be going live with a Task/Note taking website soon (clearly there not enough of them) and it will be a paid service, so want to make sure they know the data is truly private. <comment><USER2> You could offer a zero-knowledge product: only the user can decrypt the data.

<comment><AUTHOR> I want to do this for some sets of data, but the problem is how to make it easy for the users to manage their encryption key - It can't be saved to the database, or the whole thing is pointless.

I've considered: 1\. having an input form for them to enter the key when they access sensitive data (but then they have to copy paste that from somewhere else or remember it - not very convenient)

2\. A local client program that does the encryption, then saves the data to the web.

The more I think about it, I suspect the people who _want_ encryption are not going to be my customers anyway (why would they encrypt and then upload to a cloud service?)</comment></comment>


Using the content of music for search - <AUTHOR> http://glinden.blogspot.com/2009/10/using-content-of-music-for-search.html

<comment><AUTHOR> FWIW, also see automatic playlist generation techniques from:

<http://hop.at/mirage/> <http://www.schnitzer.at/dominik/moc/></comment>


Covid-19 Dashboard - <AUTHOR> https://lucyinthesky.io/heal/ <comment><AUTHOR> We built this (in React) as a first step towards providing more information and tools to help people.

Dashboard code available here:

[https://github.com/lucy-platform/heal](https://github.com/lucy-platform/heal)</comment>


Study finds conscious visual perception occurs outside the visual system - <AUTHOR> https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-12-conscious-visual-perception.html <comment><AUTHOR> One can try the video used to prove the perception gap being resultant in the frontal lobes (as opposed to the visual cortex), the video which is embedded in the article.</comment>


The mystery of sex transmutation (sex drive --> creativity) - <AUTHOR> http://www.sacred-texts.com/nth/tgr/tgr16.htm

<comment><USER2> This dates from 1937 and is sexist to contemporary eyes. There are a large number of Kindle versions with prices all over the map.</comment>


The greatest paper map of the United States, made by one guy in Oregon (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2012/01/the_best_american_wall_map_david_imus_the_essential_geography_of_the_united_states_of_america_.html <comment><USER2> I bought a copy of this map a few years ago to replace an aging National Geographic version and it has been a tremendous upgrade. For a while, we had it under a plastic sheet that protects the kitchen table[1], and it was great fun to discover details almost every night that were just really amazing.

[1] When we get a rolled poster we'll flatten it by putting it between the table cloth and the plastic cover of the kitchen table. Depending on the weight of the paper that can take one to 6 months but it leaves us with a nicely flat result which was can laminate and hang.

</comment><comment><USER3> In case you missed the link, here's where you can buy it: [https://imusgeographics.com](https://imusgeographics.com)

</comment><comment><USER4> Discussed in 2012: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3416426](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3416426)

A bit more in 2016: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10683830](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10683830)

<comment><USER5> Though there is an interesting update on the website of the map : there is a updated version with a patrons release in November 2018 and a global release in 2019.</comment></comment>


Yahoo not done acquiring - Foursquare next? - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/id/100792609

<comment><USER2> I would acquire yelp maybe.</comment>


German government to use Trojan spyware to monitor citizens - <AUTHOR> http://www.dw.com/en/german-government-to-use-trojan-spyware-to-monitor-citizens/a-19066629 <comment><USER2> I doubt they have capable programmers working for them. A few years ago the Chaos Computer Club discovered the 'predecessor' version of this State-Trojan ("Bundestrojaner"). This version was a perfect example what happens when you _want_ to have such a software but your programmers _suck_ at even most basic things (like establishing a working traffic-encryption).

Here's the video (in German): [https://youtu.be/zAV- hTpperU](https://youtu.be/zAV-hTpperU)

We shouldn't fear their 'capabilities' but rather their lack of knowledge that'll ultimately lead to 'open systems' which can later be exploited by other criminals.

In fact, our State (I'm from Germany) supports criminal activities by using a crappy software that'll crack the basic security measures of Windows.

I doubt they have any professional Linux programmers working for them. Working for the State also means earning only a fraction of what you can earn in the free market.

I do not fear the State but criminals who'll sooner or later exploit holes created by our "security agencies".

<comment><USER3> I guess you are not involved in politics? There is a lot of evidence that we should be very afraid of the state if you look at Verfassungsschutz activities. They are monitoring a _lot_ of people who oppose policy backed by the state and there is a precedent in which "opposition members" were banned from state official jobs (teachers, ...) just a few years ago. Opposition member can mean for example being involved in anti nuclear-power protests.

Edit: People are also targeted for being critical of the Verfassungsschutz, so me writing this as well as you replying positively is a likely reason to be monitored, take care!

<comment><USER4> What is the expected outcome of "being monitored"? If a new WWIII starts that means you'll be disappeared? In the mean time - what impact will this have on you?

I am just wondering how governments make intelligence "actionable".

<comment><USER3> Right now its mostly about "divide and conquer". They inject moles into political groups which will then actively push for violence and extremism which in turn causes a split of the group. Another effect is that people that are active in opposition politics are always questioning whether their comrades are on the states payroll ("V-Mann"). The goals here are to 1) weaken opposition, and 2) provide plausible reason for more sate security (e.g. Verfassungsschutz).

(Historically, the Verfassungsschutz was founded after WW2 and its goal was to persecute communists. It was headed by hardcore Nazis for more than 30 years. Even the Americans called it a "phony" institution, since its name translates to "Constitution Protectors".)

There are rumors that big parts of the Neo-Nazi scene is funded by the Verfassungsschutz. They funded and instrumented the NSU assassinations and the Oktoberfest bombing. That's only what we know of today, go figure.

If there was a fascist regime change in Germany, yes, I would expect a lot of people to be disappeared.

Impact on me personally, right now? How would you feel if there was a military black-ops agency tapping you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is the correct path forward to move society into a digital era. It follows the well established principle that the state uses force in legally proscribed ways to maintain security. Known as the "monopoly of the legitimate use of force", this is a core concept of modern law ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence)). This concept carries over cleanly from the past into the digital era. In this case govt security forces are committing digital violence in the same way that criminals do. Same thing as when the SWAT team breaks down a door, just a digital version.

The alternative is that the government co-opts manufacturers so that government agencies can carry out security tasks without using digital violence. That's what the FBI is seeking in the Apple case and it is a much worse direction for society because it challenges the existence of strong security in our increasingly digital society.

Note that the legitimate use of force is done according to law. As stated in the article, "In order to use the malware, government officials will have to get a court order, allowing authorities to hack into a citizen's system.". If your objection to this is "they say that it's done according to law but we know there will also be instances of them using it inappropriately" then you are also arguing that strong encryption (and pretty much any interesting technology) should not be allowed for public use because we know there will also be instances of it being used to achieve bad ends.

I understand that the reality of police, military, etc are not as nice as the theory but I have not seen people here explicitly rejecting the use of force by the state. If you oppose the German government employing spyware, you should consider whether you also oppose it arresting people in general. I suspect most people here have no alternative to suggest in place of the centuries of legal tradition that western societies are built on.

<comment><USER6> Use of force requires transparency and regulation to avoid corruption. That's why we have things like a separate judiciary, warrants, publicly available court documents, freedom of information requests, and so on and so forth. The use of force is also _minimized wherever possible_ ; warrants restrict the scope, both for arrests and searches, and are filtered through the aforementioned public and separate judicial system. Then we have things like the Posse Comitatus Act and use-of-force guidelines encouraging or mandating diplomatic and less-lethal attempts when possible and limiting force to dedicated peacekeepers.

Governments have been using their digital force _violently, indiscriminately, and secretly_. None of those are acceptable even on their own and all three together is _outrageous_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Relevant:

> According to a 2008 decision by the German Constitutional Court, remote > access to a citizen's computer is permissible only if there is life- > threatening danger or suspicion of criminal activity against the state.

<comment><USER8> That's their usual shtick. The same was used to legitimize blanket license plate scanning (now used for speeding tickets) and data retention laws (mainly used for drug trafficking).

"Life-threatening danger" my ass.

<comment><USER9> > The same was used to legitimize blanket license plate scanning

Was that ever illegal? The license plates are publicly displayed and visible, and you could already put people on the field watching and manually noting the license plates down, or even put cameras and look at the footage later. The only thing that changes is the economics of making it automated, no?

<comment><USER10> In Germany any kind of data collection must be backed by a cause. So automated license plate scanning was illegal since it allows creation of movement profiles by the state, something that is very much frowned upon.

Putting fixed cameras up and filming the public is not legal either in Germany - you can't have a surveillance camera pointed to public space, for example filming the boardwalk in front of your house. Whether dashcams are legal is still contested [1].

Whether large=scale manual collection would be legal is an interesting question which has - to the best of my limited knowledge - never been put to the test :)

[1] a fairly ok high level summary in german: [https://www.adac.de/infotestrat/ratgeber- verkehr/verkehrsrec...](https://www.adac.de/infotestrat/ratgeber- verkehr/verkehrsrecht/Dashcam/Situation%20in%20Deutschland.aspx?ComponentId=219667&SourcePageId=202144)

<comment><USER11> > you can't have a surveillance camera pointed to public space

Interesting so a business for example can't have a camera monitoring outside (or inside) the place of business for security purposes? Can they apply for an exemption and is it normally granted?

<comment><USER12> You can monitor your own property if you inform properly (post notices, renters have to agree, ...)

> _Can they apply for an exemption and is it normally granted?_

No. If your camera monitors public space (streets, sidewalk, ...) it either has to be so far in the distance that it can't identify people or cars, or you have to block these parts of the image (either physically, or by blanking those parts of the signal before they are recorded. Many cameras allow to put black boxes over parts of the image in firmware)

<comment><USER13> > You can monitor your own property if you inform properly

Even that is restricted. For example it is not allowed to video monitor your employees in almost all cases. To use video surveillance you have to have a legitimate reason and even then the rights of you and the ones being filmed need to be carefully balanced.

<comment><USER12> true, i was maybe generalizing a bit to much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think this really illustrates one of the biggest concerns with concentrating software power in the executive: what if a totalitarian seizes control? How much damage can they accomplish?

Last time, less than 100 years ago, 2/3rds of the Jewish race was eliminated. How much damage could be done to a targeted minority in the information age? Governments by my account, have killed (6 million) an order of magnitude more innocents than terrorists ever have, and short of nukes, ever will.

<comment><USER15> If you're referring to the Holocaust, the state-orchestrated mass-murder part of it was actually ten million dead, not six.

<comment><USER16> And there is no something as a 'jewish race'.

<comment><USER17> You should probably take another look at some discussions around the definition of race in modern times. It certainly can be used to refer to a grouping of people by common culture, such as the "Jewish" race.

As a side note, I've seen some pretty heated arguments about this. It's a bit strange to me why this is such a contentious subject. Is this coming from people who still think we have cleanly delineated "races" like Caucasoid, Mongoloid & Negroid?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Civilians are now subject to an unprecedented level of surveillance. It would be a mistake to underestimate the probabilities of abuse of personal and private information. The 'justifications' for spying are as endless as the means for carrying it out; in 2001 it was Al Queda, today it's ISIL and tomorrow it will be something else. Exactly how these surveillance programs are implemented is beside the point. The results are very clearly a loss of privacy and freedom of expression. Whether or not you're likely to become a security threat will be left to the interpretation of bureaucrats rummaging through your Evernote entries and text messages.

</comment><comment><USER19> If you are doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear, citizen.

This is for your own protection, citizen.

Your prompt compliance in this matter is appreciated, citizen.

<comment><USER20> Get back in the designated free-speech zone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It sounds like big news but I'm pretty sure that US intelligence is laughing at this kind of software... Germany is very bad on spying on its own citizens (this is by design, e.g. the privacy laws) in comparison to the USA which I think is even better on spying German citizens than their own government ;)

</comment><comment><USER22> Good thing the EU is now forcing US companies to keep EU customer data in the EU. You know, to prevent spying on people's data.

<comment><USER23> If a government is going to spy on me, I'd rather it be my own.

<comment><USER24> 'If I'm going to be forced to eat a pile of shit for my lunch, I'd rather it be my own'

No thanks.

<comment><USER10> Against your own government you have at least some amount of leverage, be that through courts or legal system or by supporting a political movement. Against a foreign government you're out of options. There is no feasible way a german citizen can appeal an act of the american administration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Are our operating systems so vulnerable? Even if we're talking about governments, how is it still possible for someone to 'break' into my computer without me doing anything stupid. How do they plan to install Trojans into my computer?

<comment><USER26> IIRC the predecessor was injected as malware into MITM'ed software downloads.

So if the police wants to deploy it against a suspect they first get access to their network traffic and then work from there. It was intended as an alternative to breaking and entering to deploy surveillance equipment or gain physical access to hardware.

Of course this approach has several obvious limitations (e.g. encryption) but there may be other approaches in use. That's just what I remember from when the original trojan was reported on a few years back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Do we know who wrote this version? The last one was from FinFisher IIRC.

<comment><USER28> It's developed by the Federal Criminal Police Office [0] (german BKA) They also bought another program from FinFisher as a backup that needs to be altered to fit the regulations and stuff. [0] only in German sorry: [http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/bundestrojaner- in...](http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/bundestrojaner- innenministerium-gibt-spaehsoftware-frei-a-1078656.html)

<comment><USER27> I don't know what "Steigerung der passgenauen Einsatzfähigkeit" means (I speak german; I just don't know what it means), but it sounds like they still need the exploits from FinFisher.

<comment><USER2> I think it means "better aim". "Passgenau" could mean "better fitted fit" which is actually a tautology because a "fit" already "fits".

Legal German is like any other "legal Language". Not for human consumption. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I just hope they don't start pressuring anti-virus makers to ignore their malware; lest we be exposed to malware pretending to be government spyware.

</comment><comment><USER30> > The interior ministry spokesman defended the government's decision, saying > "basically we now have the skills in an area where we did not have this kind > of skill." The program was already endorsed by members of the government in > autumn 2015, the ministry said.

By this do they mean they've only now just found and hired someone that can build this program? Is that what they mean by "skill"?

<comment><USER13> I think they used the German word "Fähigkeit" which better translates to something like ability (of an intelligence service).

<comment><USER10> "capability" would probably be the best translation of "Fähigkeit"

<comment><USER13> Ah, yes thanks, that was the word I was looking for. This is the closest translation which covers the meaning in this context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The funny thing is they don't want to develop an all-purpose trojan. It's only meant to intercept communication before it is encrypted and sent over the wire. This came to happen because they were unable to listen in on Skype calls in the past. So they're basically deploying a trojan which is able to copy VOIP traffic.

From media reports it's unclear if communication includes chat and email, which would make the trojan a keylogger. There are lawyers that argue email, without PGP encryption, is within the 'Quellen-TKÜ' laws reach.

Furthermore the government is not allowed to turn the infected machine into a listening station, by law the flat of a person is under stronger protection than his communication.

Technically this will be really hard to enforce in software...

</comment><comment><USER32> > "basically we now have the skills in an area where we did not have this kind > of skill...

when we were STASI

</comment><comment><USER33> Are we headed for civil war in cyber space? This is the kind of bs that starts to wake people up.

<comment><USER34> It's been a _cold_ civil war for many years. Encryption - and communication technology in general - is a power usable by anybody, not just established institutions.

As Dan Geer explains:

        In other words, [c]onvergence is an inevitable consequence of the
        very power of cyberspace in and of itself. [I]ncreasingly powerful,
        location independent technology in the hands of the many will tend
        to force changes in the distribution of power.  In fact, that is
        the central theme of this essay -- that the power that is growing
        in the net, per se, will soon surpass the ability of our existing
        institutions to modify it in any meaningful way, so either the net
        must be broken up into governable chunks or the net becomes government.

        It seems to me that the leverage here favors cyberspace whenever
        and wherever we give cyberspace a monopoly position, which we are
        doing that blindly and often.  In the last couple of years, I've
        found that institutions that I more or less must use [...] no longer
        accept paper letter instructions, they each only accept digital
        delivery of such instructions.  This means that each of them has
        created a critical dependence on an Internet swarming with men in
        the middle and, which is more, they have doubtlessly given up their
        own ability to fall back to what worked for a century before.

        It is that giving up of alternative means that really defines what
        convergence is and does.  It is said that all civil wars are about
        on whose terms re-unification will occur.  I would argue that we
        are in, to coin a phrase, a Cold Civil War to determine on whose
        terms convergence occurs.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT- TGvYOBpI#t=2824](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT-TGvYOBpI#t=2824)

[http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt](http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt) (section "10\. Convergence")

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> What's to stop someone setting up a honey trap computer all exposed with Microspy Windows running on it, and effectively summoning these guys.

I genuinely am interested in their payloads...

<comment><USER26> Nothing. Also nothing is stopping anti-virus companies from making their software detect the "Bundestrojaner" as soon as they have learned to recognize it. They have done this with the previous version, too:

[https://www.avira.com/en/support-for-home-knowledgebase- deta...](https://www.avira.com/en/support-for-home-knowledgebase- detail/kbid/1074) (2011)

<comment><USER36> For context, Avira is a German anti-virus company.

<comment><USER26> Thanks. I wasn't actually aware they're a German company. This should make it even more reassuring though: if even German anti-virus companies won't give it any special treatment, this really makes it no more of a concern than any other malware from the user's POV (other than the political debate of course).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> considered how Germans are obsessed with privacy and state surveillance (see for example cash usage vs electronic payments), let's see a country going nut in 3 2 1 ...

<comment><USER12> You have a bit too positive image of us ;)

Yes, it will spark discussions again, and certainly be tested in front of our highest courts, and probably fail in some aspects and send back to the drawing boards again after a few years, but I don't expect that much "outrage", at least as long as it remains a tool for few specialized cases.

<comment><USER37> I'm working in Germany (Berlin) and I was shocked by how often you see "cash- only" signs and how electronic payments are avoided on a privacy ground. Plus I saw the reaction from a German colleagues when it was a matter of communicating some personal data to a company that manages the salaries and I realised how Germans are obsessed (not necesserily in a bad way) about their privacy

<comment><USER38> Yet they (the Germans I've known) don't seem to give a second thought to handing out their bank account numbers to businesses for electronic payment purposes. Discount card use seemed to be widespread as well despite all the tracking that inevitably comes with it. I never once got through the check-out stampede at Rewe without being asked if I had a card. I met some wantrepreneurs in Berlin who were hatching discount/reward card schemes of their own, not something that would attract much investor attention here in the States, unless of course it was "the Uber of discount cards". No, stop, that's not an Idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Goog luck hacking in my Ubuntu box with latest patches and an iptables firewall... The only reasonable way to obtain people's data is to lock them in some Guantanamo like infrastructure and get their password. Betting on weak security as a mean to control people can't eventually prevail because open systems get patched at faster speed than vulnerabilities found.

</comment><comment><USER40> Apparently this "trojan" only works on a Windows computer.

[https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/10/10/german- governmen...](https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/10/10/german- government-r2d2-trojan-faq/)

</comment><comment><USER41> So this goes both ways and the German citizens can monitor their government right?

</comment><comment><USER42> On a practical level, I feel like configuring my systems as just-try<n>.come- get-me.de

If it's like any other IT project, they probably have just finished the Windows XP version of their 'trojan'.

</comment><comment><USER43> Good luck getting a trojan onto an iOS 9 based iPhone 6.

<comment><USER44> a second one text to preinstalled one? What would be the use?

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> It seems today's governments, like churches of the dark ages, wants too much control over what is not their fucking problem.

</comment><comment><USER46> One could easily mirror the title as: "German citizens to use Trojan spyware to monitor governments".

</comment><comment><USER47> > They [trojans] are often used by hackers and thieves to gain access to > somebody else's data.

What does this make the German government?

If you get something on a suspect, bring him/her into custody and start your investigation but bugging them and putting their digital life at risk for the lure and greed for information gathering is just detestable and unethical.

</comment><comment><USER48> How can someone justify spyware in any shape and form?!

</comment><comment><USER49> I see why merkel was upset with the US spying on her...

</comment><comment><USER50> When the state has a monopoly on force any speech against them is hate speech. Defending the censorship of people you dont like will simply come back to bite you.

<comment><USER50> Today it may be good fun to watch people with a differing opinion get arrested and harassed as a part of "justice" but tomorrow when they decide you dont need encryption and youre the one being targeted it wont be so funny.

<comment><USER50> >You are not arrested for "having an opinion" but if you call for violence, deny the holocaust or endorse genocide. Those are not opinions.

Those are all opinions. An opinion is a view or judgement on a given item. Just because they are opinions you do not like doesn't make them anything more than opinions.

>Nobody moves the definition every day and it has nothing to do with encryption nor can those laws ever used against encryption by definition as they all include doing something in public.

Nobody moves to definition? Talk to me about the use of spyware on citizens, I'm pretty sure that definition just got moved.

>Probably everybody who knows the German society will know whether something is "just an opinion" or violates one of those laws just be looking at most statements. It's one of those "I know when I see it" definitions that is shared among Germans. That being said courts have created very narrow and clear precedent on those laws.

Well if the state say so then it has to be okay right?

<comment><USER13> The thing is, this discussion is really off-topic. This spyware has nothing to do with hate-speech laws. It's supposed to be used in instances where wiretapping is legal but not possible. The idea is that the spyware wiretaps "at the source". Again, that has absolutely nothing to do with hate-speech laws and no definition has been shifted.

You will probably not even find a reasonable number of people living in Germany in favor of repealing those laws let alone something near a majority. Those laws are ok because the people living here are ok with those kinds of hate-speech laws. If you don't like it you are free to stay away from Germany.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Merkel has already told facebook and twitter to delete comments and ban accounts negative of her 'policies'.

<comment><USER52> This is not true at all. The German Government is asking Facebook to delete comments which could be categorized as hate speech ("Volksverhetzung" in German). These comments are not "negative of her policies", they are calling on people to kill, gas or otherwise attack refugees, politicans or journalists. They are simply asking Facebook to comply with German law.

Some comments comparable to those in question are curated at a tumblr blog ([https://perlen-aus-freital.tumblr.com/](https://perlen-aus- freital.tumblr.com/)). Those comments are anything but a political statement against Merkel's policies. They are born out of pure hatred.

<comment><USER51> When a state defines 'hate speech' laws they're really defining 'thought criminal' laws.

Merkle and co. are trying to manipulate public opinion through the destruction of contrarian thought from the public realm.

<comment><USER13> Hate speech laws and thought crimes are on a totally different level. In Germany you are completely free to use the most blatant hate speech as much as you like as long as you don't do so in public.

Those laws are also not created by "Merkel and co." but decades old and introduced by the allies after the second world-war.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I will always remember that days when german businesses requested servers in their offices because AWS was under NSA...

<comment><USER21> This is not an uncommon request... actually a lot of German companies (especially the bigger ones) will never trust public cloud infrastructures especially when they are based in another country.</comment></comment>


HTML5 Ball Canvas using Quadtree Partitioning and Circle Collisions - <AUTHOR> http://www.hawkee.com/snippet/9732/

<comment><USER2> It actually has a bug, which causes balls to fly through each other occasionally.</comment>


Interactive C++ Assembly Explorer - <AUTHOR> https://gcc.godbolt.org <comment><USER2> Thanks for the HN post! :)

Rust, Go, and D language explorers are [https://<lang>.godbolt.org](https://<lang>.godbolt.org), e.g. [https://rust.godbolt.org/](https://rust.godbolt.org/) and so on

<comment><USER3> This is very interesting! There is a huge difference between the assembly code generated by the C compilers and the assembly code generated by the Rust compiler for the equivalent code samples! Sometimes there is 10 to 20 times more lines of assembly generated for the Rust code than there is for the C code! The C assembly output is typically very tight while the Rust assembly output is much more verbose! Doesn't the much greater amount of Rust assembly code have a very negative impact on its performance? I just don't see how it can be claimed that Rust can be nearly as fast as C when executing the Rust assembly code requires so many times more instructions to be executed! I don't think it is a case of many fast instructions being chosen instead of a small number of less fast instructions. The Rust assembly to me just looks very unoptimized! I know Rust is a young language still but there is still a very big gap between the C assembly and the Rust assembly!

<comment><USER4> _> The Rust assembly to me just looks very unoptimized!_

If you're not adding a flag like `-C opt-level=3` to the compiler invocation this is literally true. (For one, Rust's unoptimised code does more work than C's, e.g. arithmetic operations are checked for overflow in debug mode, which is the default when optimisations are off, but is disabled when optimisations are on.)

With optimisations on, Rust seems to do a better job, e.g. the loop in the max_array example is vectorised and unrolled by Rust, but not by gcc or clang.</comment></comment></comment>


Bitcoin: Too Big to Fail - <AUTHOR> http://europe.newsweek.com/bitcoin-too-big-fail-418481?rm=eu <comment><USER2> I think it's difficult to argue that Bitcoin hasn't failed - perhaps not completely (as in total collapse), but it's certainly not been the financial revolution that it was proclaimed to be a couple of years ago - shortly before the price tanked and it's not recovered.

I say this as someone who had an incredibly interesting year a few years ago, getting into mining bitcoin and other crypto, and who holds what was at one point a few thousand £ of bitcoin. I still hold the same about, but clearly worth a fraction of that amount, but I'm not expecting the peak value to be reached in the near future.

The technology has shown itself to be viable (with sensible changes made), but bitcoin is tainted in the mind of the public as tied forever with organised crime, drug dealing and purchasing of illegal goods anonymously. I could be wrong (I hope I am!), but I think while the technology will survive, bitcoin itself is looking sadly dead in the water.

<comment><USER3> I disagree, Bitcoin is looking better than ever. I've been a miner for years. It was the best performing currency of 2015 and has remained surprisingly stable in recent months through all this time and uncertainty. The problem of block size is a great problem to have. It's like any technology business dealing with scaling issues. Bitcoin will revolutionize dozens of industries because of the many benefits it offers. To me, it is very clear; there is no denying that it will happen in due time. I have very little doubt in the success of Bitcoin, just as I have very little doubt that millions more people will be using the Internet in 2016 than did in 2015.

<comment><USER4> How was Bitcoin the best performing currency of 2015?</comment></comment></comment>


Understand Docker step by step. A tutorial repo for beginners - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/championshuttler/docker-basicLearning <comment><AUTHOR> Hello Everyone, I wrote a simple beginner tutorial for Docker, you can read here [https://github.com/championshuttler/docker- basicLearning](https://github.com/championshuttler/docker-basicLearning) or [https://championshuttler.github.io/docker- basicLearning](https://championshuttler.github.io/docker-basicLearning)

If you like it please do not forget to give the repo a ⭐.

Happy Open Source

</comment><comment><USER2> "docker-compose up &" Never seen it with the & before. Why not use "-d" instead?</comment>


A Visual Introduction to DSP for SDR - <AUTHOR> http://visual-dsp.switchb.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> Made by the same guy (kpreid) as ShinySDR, which currently is discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10270323](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10270323)</comment>


Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity - <AUTHOR> http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2009/12/23/why-programmers-are-not-paid-in-proportion-to-their-productivity/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheEndeavour+%28The+Endeavour%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> The author has not ever worked with the truly 10x more productive programmers. Most people do not get the chance to work with these programmers. They do get paid in proportion to their productivity. There are so many horrible programmers that you can be mediocre and be 10x more productive than the guy next to you. Thus you think you're in the 10x crew. But you really aren't. It's not because you're really that good. It's because the guy next to you is really that bad.

I thought I was pretty good until I worked with the guy who made Winamp. It took me a couple weeks to make some enhancements to their add-ons site. It took him a couple weeks to write his own version of Pro Tools. I made 80 thousand dollars. He made 80 million dollars.

<comment><USER3> "There are so many horrible programmers that you can be mediocre and be 10x more productive than the guy next to you. Thus you think you're in the 10x crew. But you really aren't. It's not because you're really that good. It's because the guy next to you is really that bad."

So someone who is 10x more productive then their coworker isn't actually 10x more productive because their coworker is so horrible? Isn't "10x more productive" an explicit measure of productivity relative to the guy(s) next to you?

<comment><USER4> He meant in the class of 10x better than the average programmer, which would include all developers in the world, not just the few you can see.

<comment><USER5> Why would the developers you couldn't see be 10x better than the developers you can see?

Could there be a dark matter halo of great programmers lurking around the world's mediocre-programmer-filled corporate cubicals?

<comment><USER4> I meant "the developers you can see" to imply the people around you. That's a small sample size, and not representative of the entire world.

<comment><USER5> A small sample size would just imply greater deviation. There's no reason to assume the programmers outside your sample would be x10 better than those in your sample.

<comment><USER4> That only works when you can assume your sample is representative of the global population. Since people are not evenly distributed according to their abilities, that assumption will not hold.

<comment><USER6> But in a generalisation, you have to generalise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My proudest moments as a programmer are those where I manage to develop some functionality in a week or two that took another team of programmers months or years to do by using a novel approach or stitching together preexisting code. Every line of code I write is another I will have to maintain. Sooner or later it will be a burden. For this reason, I strive to write as few as possible. The programmers I respect most seem to follow the same pattern.

<comment><USER8> I feel best when I'm deleting other's code, and accomplishing the same thing with much less code.

<comment><USER9> 100% agree with this, less code = less maintenance. Very few people truly understand this and why it's important.

<comment><USER10> In my latest app, I've noticed that I get the greatest highs when I write one specific function, and then rewrite it to be generic enough to handle four different elements. Great fun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Really it comes down to the simple fact that for the most part programmers happily sign a contract saying they will work X hours for Y money. If they are 'productive' they then can move up in the company and be a manager, but still for X and Y++. Sales guys are paid in a completely different way, same with the stock holders (founders etc). It doesn't matter how productive you are, even if you complete the task in 1 hour and have the rest of the week to do nothing, you agreed to work 40 so your boss will give you something new to do.

</comment><comment><USER12> Show me how to measure productivity and I'll find a way for the 10x more productive programmer to earn 10x the compensation.

I agree with the OP that the problem here is that it is not easy to measure productivity.

[http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-02-1...](http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-02-12/a_question.md)

<comment><USER13> Start your own business (even if only a consultancy) and look at your bank account each day. That's the raw, true measure of productivity.

<comment><USER12> That is roughly equivalent to saying that the true measure of an employee's productivity is their salary. What are you measuring?

<comment><USER14> It's measuring the amount someone is willing to pay you for your work. By an economist's definition, that's your output. If you divide your output by number of hours worked, that's your productivity, again by economist's definition.

I make no claims as to how useful these definitions are. There's a reason why economics is called the dismal science. But terms like output and productivity _do_ have accepted definitions - so yeah, the true measure of an employee's productivity is _almost_ their salary. (It's actually revenue / employee / hour, so if an employer keeps most of the money as profit, it's still productivity. That's why the grandparent suggested "start your own consultancy".)

<comment><USER12> You make good points. However... if we accept the economist's definition of productivity, then the article becomes a NOOP: We measure the marketplace, we discover that given a set of programmers with roughly the same conditions, there isn't a 10x disparity in output divided by hours worked, therefore no programmer is 10x more productive.

The only way there is something to discuss is when we presume there is another measure of programmer productivity and then ask why the marketplace is so inefficient that economic productivity does not correlate with programmer productivity.

<comment><USER14> I think that there is easily a 10x disparity in output divided by hours worked. Why did the Etherpads just make 8 figures over the past 3 years, while I made only 6 figures? They certainly didn't work 100x more. By the economist's definition, they were easily 100x more productive.

I think that there's a more interesting question in the article - why do salaries "flatten out" the productivity curve, so that programmers who would easily be making 100x more as startup founders are instead making 50% more, with the balance going to the employer? After all, if we measure by revenue generated for the employer, I'm in at least the 7 figures, within an order of magnitude. And I doubt Aaron etc. were making all that much in salary when they were Google employees either.

I suspect the answer to this has to do with risk allocation. Because technology markets tend to be winner-take-all, there's a lot of variance in productivity that's _not_ the result of the coder's actions. In other words, it comes down to luck, being in the right market with the right product. You can work hard at the wrong thing and still produce nothing of value, despite being smart and dedicated.

When you sign on as an employee, your employer agrees to take on the risk that you'll work hard and still nothing will come of it. And in return, they get nearly all of the upside if your hard work _does_ result in something great.

I suspect that the 10x more productive figure is a result of sample bias: when you look at what people _have done_ , there are some folks whose projects were 10x more useful than what other people have done. All the people who worked equally hard and produced equally large amounts of code are lumped into the "not productive" category, because in hindsight, their projects weren't all that useful. If you try to predict, a priori, who the 10x coders are, I bet you'll have a much harder time. If you don't, you have a sterling future ahead of you as a venture capitalist.

<comment><USER15> This is one of the best posts I've read in a long time. It is easy to forget that, with regard to creating _wealth_ , there are lot more factors at work than raw programming skill.

Networking, for instance, can greatly increase your output if you choose an awesome cofounder. It has a benefit that is not easily defined because of how hard it is to decouple the work and effect of each individual team member.

I know of one person that is worth easily in the 8 figures range, but he got in early to the venture. This does _not_ mean he's a better programmer than everyone else, but he does benefit from a lot of factors that sum to being more important than programming skills.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Being super-productive isn't always wise for the black belt coder. In the traditional world of commercial programming if you solve the problem in a couple of hours and then just spend the rest of the day fooling around, reading scholarpedia or working on your own pet projects managers often don't look upon this kind of behavior favourably - they think you're not being productive, when in fact the opposite is the case.

From having spent most of my adult life in the world of software development I've noticed that it's the programmers who make a lot of noise, huff and puff, and spend all day battering a keyboard looking stressed that tend to get pay rises and eventually promotions into managerial positions. This is really just down to the limitations of human psychology. If you look like you're working hard you must be being more productive than someone who did the job without fuss, then went out to get a sandwich.

<comment><USER17> I'd disagree with your description of "super-productive", that sounds like normal-productive with time to fool around. Do something productive with the extra time (either more coding or, better, something else business related like running the finished app past someone who might have to use it) and there might be a chance of hitting "super-productive". (fast + time wasted = normal speed)

<comment><USER18> While I agree with fast + time wasted = normal speed, in reality it is not the wasted time that plays the role. In most companies developers don't have a fixed 8 hour job and most of them work more than 8 hours a day on a routine basis. I have seen managers who valued the total time spent working more than the actual work accomplished. So a developer who works about 8 hours a day was ranked below someone who spent 10-12 hours a day working even though it was the former who was accomplishing more tasks.

<comment><USER16> It's often hard for a manager to judge how productive a developer is being. Often they're insufficiently qualified to judge the standard of the code being produced or whether one solution is more elegant/reusable than another, and instead are just using heuristics which work for other types of employment, such as estimating how much overall time and effort was put in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> From the comments:

> I'd love to see some metrics on the average life expectancy of a line of > code for different programmers. I know that some of my best code was written > and has sat there with minimal changes ever since.

Now _that_ 's an interesting idea.

<comment><USER20> Not necessarily. There's plenty of horrible, horrible code that doesn't get changed because it currently works, and it would be too much of a hassle to try and de-tangle it. There's also really awesome code that gets replaced because the requirements have changed and it needs to do something completely different.

<comment><USER21> I throw out about 50% of all code written for A/B tests within, typically, a week or two. If it weren't for all the business value added by it, I guess I would suck as a programmer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It is because true productivity is _very_ hard to identify, specially when you factor in quality, mainteinability, efficiency and timeliness. That is why managers should be as qualified as the people they manage.

 _Programmers do some thinking & some typing, the more you do of one, the less you do of the other. (don't remember the original author)

_The lazy engineer is the best engineer.. If not for lazy people we would still be living in caves

<comment><USER23> That's completely true.

Unfortunately, in the world of programming, most people get rewarded for putting in extra hours rather than for being good at their jobs.

My pointy-haired manager rejected a design that I developed for our current project because I think he didn't understand it... instead we went and cloned the existing bug-ridden, convoluted, user-hostile app, following its example at every opportunity, and leading to a HUGE increase in project scope... exactly what I had predicted and attempted to avoid.

In the end what should have been a six-week project for a good 4-person team turned into a 4-month crunch for a 10-person team saddled with several run-of- the-mill and a few genuinely incompetent members... and the worst of the incompetent ended up being the primary architect based on his ego and politics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> From the article:

> someone who stares quietly into space for a few minutes

...and exactly here lies the problem. I've been fired from a job because according to an old retiree who never saw anyone programming before, "he spent his days scratching his beard and looking blankly at the screen". No mention about the job being done and the extra $1M my ideas saved. And certainly no apologies after they had to replace me by a whole external company.

<comment><USER17> I guess the magic happens when you found that company :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm young enough that I can still change my career easily, and I often worry that I'm not one of the super productive programmers, and that I'm wasting my time and that I should choosing a different career.

Is uber-productivity significantly enhanced by choosing the right development methodology (e.g. test-driven development) or is it mostly something innate? Aside from stories like rdouble's (which I don't find _that_ helpful, since it doesn't contain information on rdouble or his employer's domain expertise), what is the evidence that super-productive programmers exist?

<comment><USER26> I have found that uber-productivity is domain specific. I might be uber- productive in a particular domain (Java programming), however put me in an environment that does Groovy programming and I will stink as much as the next newbie. However good programmers develop techniques for meta-uber- productivity. They know what it takes to get uber-productive in another domain in a short time and what works for them. My way to try and me more productive in any environment is to get my hands dirty, start soon and make changes often. Practice makes perfect. As an individual you can be uber productive, just practice more of what you want to be productive at. Want to be productive at running a business, start your own and practice it. Want to be uber productive at programming, write code lots of it, and so on and so forth.

<comment><USER27> I've found that most of the competent developers I've met haven't had a whole lot more difficulty switching languages than the significantly better developers. There's a lot of synergy between modern programming languages.

For instance, I started with Java, then moved to Python, learned COBOL and a little bit of php and ASP around the same time, then finally switched to Ruby, where I do most of my programming now. A lot of the things I learned in Java were still relevant in Python, and the same was true with the switch from Python to Ruby. COBOL was a bit of an outlier since I wasn't using the OO version of COBOL, but I already had a grasp on logic and flow of control, so even that wasn't that much of a stretch.

I'm definitely not one of those elite programmers, even though I do seem to grasp concepts better than a lot of my classmates, so I find categorizing domain as a programming language in relation to programmer ability is flawed. Once you've achieved competency in a few languages, you should be able to switch languages without too much trouble, assuming those languages at least have a moderately similar paradigm (a notable exception might be, say, Java -> Lisp).

It's the ability to understand _concepts_ that tend to separate the good from the mediocre, and that might have been what you meant when you referenced "domain."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The bare truth is that productivity isn't defined, so it's not measured, so it's not rewarded algorithmically.

</comment><comment><USER29> Honest questionn--did the productivity study where the oft-quoted 10x number comes from count lines of code as the productivity measure? If so, lines of code avoided would move a developer into the "less productive" bucket. Anyone have a link to a source for this number?

<comment><USER30> Dr. Greg Wilson (editor of the Beautiful Code book that spawned Beautiful Architecture later) is working on a new book that talks about exactly this kind of thing.

<http://pyre.third-bit.com/blog/archives/2910.html>

Basically, he says that professional understanding of software is still in the lore stage where we gossip about what works and doesn't rather than empirical studies based on evidence.

About this specific number though (the programmers are X times more productive) that's often repeated:

 _To date, these studies have mostly been confined to academia. Most professional developers are vaguely aware of some of the results, but often get the details wrong. For example, hundreds of books, blog posts, and presentations claim that the best programmers are forty times better than the worst—or fifteen, or a hundred, or some other number. Almost none of the people repeating that claim realize that it originally came from a very small study (twelve people) run for a very short time (one afternoon) in an era of batch processing and punch cards._

<comment><USER31> I don't realize his "fact" for the simple reason that he is wrong.

For example I often quote a 10x figure and cite _Peopleware_ as a source. They draw their data from measurements taken of hundreds of different programmers working at different companies in different languages in the mid 1980s. Which is a lot more solid than the punchcard study he cites which I have honestly never heard of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm starting to get a little burned out about trying to maximize my productivity. It's not a easy-to-understand, linear thing in most professions. No one really knows how to accurately measure it, and once you come up with something, you can game that system to produce false results if it benefits you.

I think the best approach for anyone is to do the best you can with what you have. It's more important to get something done than to worry about if the amount you got done is greater than most others. You certainly should do whatever you feel you need to do to optimize your "productivity", but don't get distracted or depressed trying to be #1 in the world.

</comment><comment><USER33> I think management uses salary to keep people at the company rather than to motivate them to be more productive. And if you're a manager, you want to keep people who have a lot of knowledge of the code that isn't either well captured in automated tests/documentation or easily figured out from looking at their code, ie. crappy programmers. Good programmers are able to write simpler, better tested and documented code so it's less work for others to maintain it if they leave. Paradoxically, if you're working at a 9-5 programming job, you have more incentive to be mediocre than great.

</comment><comment><USER34> The last time I was employed I got frustrated with this having deployed 5 applications to customers in a few months on my own, and simply negotiated a contracting role. We came up with a fixed price for each job, bugs included, and I tried to make as much per hour as possible. My hourly rate ended up being >250$/hr, and the application is still in production now 7 years after deploying.

The other comments are correct; if you aren't willing to take any risk, then you don't deserve the benefits. If you think you are good, put your money where your mouth is :)

</comment><comment><USER35> I think 10x is really not the right number.

First off there are the net negative producing programmers, you can't say the good programmers are 10x the productivity of those guys, because that would make them 10x worse, which is incorrect.

Second off, I think the variation between programmers can be much bigger than 10x, easily 50x or more. Of course the 1x programmers really don't like this idea, because their egos cannot handle the concept of someone else being that much better than they are.

<comment><USER36> 50x? Really? That means they achieve in a week what the 1x programmers achieve in a year. I'd say its more likely they are infinitely more productive (as in produce things the 1x programmers could never produce), but those kinds of projects are rather uncommon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Productivity based compensation for thought-workers isn't a panacea. Expenses based on time, income habituation, success or blame attribution, and differences of opinion on what is productive can actually make it a pretty horrible experience -- even for people who are well above the average.

Time-based compensation and productivity-based firing can be a pretty good system for a lot of people in a lot of situations.

I was hiring for some other jobs recently, and I was surprised at how the group I was hiring from thought about their compensation. It wasn't "I deserve $X", "Chris makes $Y", or even "I think I can get them to pay $Z." They'd come to me and say "I need a job that pays $A/month because [$A ~= monthly expenses + a little extra niceties + a safety cushion in case something bad happens]". It was refreshing.

<comment><USER38> I started responding to disagree with you, but now I'm not sure what you're saying so I'll just chime in with my views. :)

I actually think production based pay is refreshing. I've personally worked under this system (OK, so technically my wife did). It is really egalitarian. Unfortunately it is also very uneven, as production capabilities vary considerably and at times disappear complete (i.e, you're sick). Also, as you pointed out for software development it's pretty hard to find decent metrics that don't deteriorate when you optimize solely for them. In her field (medical transcription), it was more clear-cut with a payment per line and penalties for mistakes.

From the lazy, employee-based-safe perspective I can certainly agree that time-based compensation is attractive, but my sense of self worth would prefer being paid on performance. I'd certainly prefer to hire based on it.

Really the current system is probably roughly as good as you're going to get right now. There are all manner of intangible pluses and minuses to a particular person and a lot of places take this into account for compensation. It makes the process less transparent but it at least allows flexibility.

Just one example--I like to think that I'm helping out less experienced developers when I'm explaining some concept of business process or something. But I'm certainly not adding code then. And what of managers? Good managers are certainly valuable but their personal contribution is even less measurable than that of a developer.

<comment><USER36> That's one big problem I see with performance based pay, even if an accurate personal metric were available. Time spent helping/mentoring others would have a negative impact on a senior programmers bottom line, even though a company generally wants to encourage this.

<comment><USER37> You can't be accurate when you need to hit multiple different targets with one shot. It's exceptionally difficult to get people to agree on what's valuable, and how valuable it is.. and the problem gets worse with scale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> what kind of salaried professionals do get paid based on productivity?

<comment><USER13> The only people who get paid according to their productivity are the ones that own their own business, individually or collectively (in a partnership). Everyone else is paid "market rate" which is the lowest rate someone else is willing to accept to do the same job, and is able to deliver. These are completely different compensation models.

<comment><USER40> Untrue, many salaried finance types eat what they kill in bonus comp, even some developers (front office developers or quants) if they're responsible for driving P&L and not just a cost center.

I guess you could argue that they aren't salaried since their bonus compensation is usually significant, often many multiples of their relatively low base salary.

<comment><USER13> Good point. Having never seen one of those people I have forgot about their existence when writing this post.

To the point consider this - if you are my employer and you pay me performance bonus, do you have some money left for yourself? I imagine some of the value I generate as an employee gets captured by the company, otherwise they wouldn't keep me around, right? Therefore, self-employment is the only way to keep all the value you have created.

<comment><USER40> If you own the business, why would any rational market participant buy your product or service without expecting it to create more value for them than they paid? Same thing, really.

The issue posed by the original post was that great programmers are not paid proportionally to their output, not whether their employer makes a spread on them.

You're correct though that the closer you get to the money the more value you'll capture. You also take more risk. How many startups have folded where junior engineers made $100k/yr and investors and founders left the endeavor with nothing or a net loss? Depending on your life situation, being more risk- averse and taking the guaranteed paycheck isn't such a bad thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Seems to be a retelling of The Parable of the Two Programmers:

[http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~magi/personal/humour/Computer_Audienc...](http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~magi/personal/humour/Computer_Audience/The%20Parable%20of%20the%20Two%20Programmers.html)

</comment><comment><USER42> it's too bad we can't have a little roll reversal. most programmers wouldn't last a month in the advertising industry, it's far more brutal and under-paid than most development gigs unless you're founder/cto in an early-stage startup...

</comment><comment><USER43> > The most productive programmers orders of magnitude more productive than > average programmers

This is often repeated, never meaningfully demonstrated. I doubt it is true if we are excluding unqualified programmers.

<comment><USER31> Never meaningfully demonstrated? Have you tried to verify the claim?

Go read _Peopleware_. You will find described very carefully set up coding comparisons that routinely found a factor of 10 productivity difference between different experienced programmers on the same task, and also a discussion of what organizational factors lead to those productivity differences.

There is other research on the topic as well. For instance [http://www.computer.org/portal/web/buildyourcareer/fa035?utm...](http://www.computer.org/portal/web/buildyourcareer/fa035?utm_source=bronto&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Forgotten+Facts+About+Software+Engineering&utm_content=andrew%40badera.us&utm_campaign=BYC- Issue+38-December+3) cites "individual differences" research that found a 30 fold difference between mediocre programmers and the top programmers. That article is supposed to be a distillation of [http://www.amazon.com/Facts- Fallacies-Software-Engineering-R...](http://www.amazon.com/Facts-Fallacies- Software-Engineering-Robert/dp/0321117425) so I'd look there if you want citations into how that research was done and what exactly they found.

<comment><USER43> Well, I just googled the peopleware citation and it seems _the_ study backing this often repeated claim is from the 1960s and people have plenty of questions about its methodology.

I'll easily buy 2X or 3X productivity difference. I'm not buying these casually tossed off claims about 10X or 30X productivity differences without the supporting research discussed in detail front and center. Unacknowledged differences of that magnitude would imply a massive arbitrage opportunity that has persisted for many years. And that's just not realistic.

<comment><USER44> If you view computer programmers as mental ditch diggers, then the idea that one could be so much more productive than another seems crazy. But when you see it as a creative endeavor, it's completely rational that some could be orders of magnitude more productive, even infinitely so.

For example, when you have a hard problem (like a networked 3d game with physics) that is beyond the abilities of a developer A (he can't solve the problems at hand, no matter how much time given), but not developer B (a creative thinker who can solve the problems quickly), then I think you can literally say Dev B is infinitely better than dev A for those hard problems. Because it's going to take you infinitely many developers A's randomly poking at their keyboard to solve the problems. But dev B will solve them in a reason amount of time.

Now dev B isn't infinitely smarter, but for certain tasks, he's infinitely more productive. The point is the productivity differences are highly context dependent, and the greater the creative and cognitive load of the tasks, the the greater the measurable productivity differences between the highest and the average developers.

<comment><USER5> But this reasoning applies if:

1) Knowledge is entirely linear. If there some tasks programmer A fails at and some tasks programmer B fails at, then all you have is an apples-to-oranges comparison (which is what a lot of the x10 chest-pounding comes down to).

2) Knowledge isn't shared in the group. My proudest moments have involved actually teaching my co-workers _how_ to write a recursive descent parser, why ACID matters in databases or how to divide a multi-threaded application between worker and consumer threads. It might be true that if I'd just kept my knowledge to my self and laughed as they failed, I might have been a 10x or even a 100x programmer. But it was more pleasant and satisfying to be the guy who actually helped everyone.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Of 9 Tech Co., Only Twitter Says It Wouldn't Help Build Muslim Registry - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2016/12/02/of-8-tech-companies-only-twitter-says-it-would-refuse-to-help-build-muslim-registry-for-trump/ <comment><USER2> Way to go tech industry! Class fucking act.

What about other darlings, like Palantir?

EDIT: Struck a nerve, it seems. Look, most of the folks working on advertising and social surveillance technology probably already _have_ registries-- detailed ones--of Muslims, or could probably generate one on short notice.

The sheer lack of introspection the folks in our industry have is always something to behold, freaking the fuck out that Trump somehow won the election and then the next week going right back to work building the tools of oppression.

Maybe _that_ inability to think about your actions is worth examining.</comment>


Using USB-VGA dongles as SDR transmitter - <AUTHOR> http://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20180423-osmo-fl2k/ <comment><USER2> That's a neat party trick and all but abusing spurious emissions/harmonics to broadcast in licensed spectrum without proper filtering is just plain irresponsible. At low power, with an unmatched antenna those signals / _probably_ / won't make it out of your house but it's not good practice to spew harmonics all over the spectrum, especially GSM bands. I also can't believe that they are working on increasing the TX power. Purposefully emitting all over the spectrum is both iresponsible and illegal.

<comment><USER3> If there's a need for spectrum enforcement, then people should be out doing it. There's definitely enough money made from government granted spectrum monopolies to pay for it!

The idea that you're pushing here, that there should be varying degrees of a radio equipment prohibition is anti-knowledge and only serves to strengthen the spectrum monopoly businesses.

<comment><USER4> > _If there's a need for spectrum enforcement, then people should be out doing > it._

At least in the US, there are already people doing it and anyone who gets caught is subject to massive fines, e.g.:

[https://www.computerworld.com/article/2474412/data- privacy/g...](https://www.computerworld.com/article/2474412/data-privacy/gps- jammer-to-stop-tracking-messed-up-airport-navigation--driver-fired--fined-- 32-000.html)

[https://www.engadget.com/2016/05/25/florida-man- fined-48k-fc...](https://www.engadget.com/2016/05/25/florida-man- fined-48k-fcc-jamming-cellphones/)

<comment><USER5> Those are intentional jamming devices, I hope unintentional sideband interference wouldn't be treated remotely as harshly? The kind of power to achieve this kind of jamming would be pretty large too -- I'd judge at least 50W (depending on the jamming bandwidth I guess). A few miliwatts from an SDR transmitter isn't going to do much disruption. Not to mention there are pretty significant interference sources from defective devices mentioned elsewhere -- cheap usb power supplies, defective lightning, and more.

That said, anyone should indeed be filtering their output unless transmitting more than extremely low amounts of power (perhaps someone with radio experience could give a hand of thumb? Up to hundreds of microwatts sounds quite safe) as a matter of civility. Besides, you get to learn basic electronics by building a simple passive filter!

<comment><USER6> There are two problems:

A few milliwatts can easily block the sensitive input of a Police Repeater on the other side of town.

FWIW, your "Hundreds of Milliwatts" are routinely used by hams to communicate world wide.

And no, a simple bandpass filter WILL NOT clean up this rubbish. Its output spectrum is the base-band signal repeated over and over, all the way up to VHF. It would take a very capable filter to pick out the single product required. This is NOT the way to design a clean transmitter.

It will not only cause interference, but it will interfere with EVERYTHING within range.

Most output filtering is a simple Low-Pass Filter which is designed to remove harmonics. But by definition, harmonics are an octave removed from the fundamental. This horrid device puts out a closely packed comb of spurii from DC to daylight. A simple passive filter will not even come close to cleaning it up.

You first start with a sound design, then add filters to clean up the last of any unwanted emissions. Not the other way around.

And because these faults have been well documented, this equipment would most definitely be classed as an "intentional jamming device".

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the reply! I'm quite interested in this.

> FWIW, your "Hundreds of Milliwatts" are routinely used by hams to > communicate world wide.

Read again, I've written "hundreds of _micro_ watts" :)

And that's for a reasonably wideband signal! A narrowband signal with high power has a lot more potential to interfere with a specific application. I seriously doubt anything of that order specially with a rough bandpass (passive) filter around the frequency of interest can cause significant interference. Passive filters have <1 gain, so they shouldn't risk narrowband amplification of the weak signal. The background noise should be within this order of magnitude, no?

(I don't quite have the time to give numbers right now, but here's a source from quick googling: [https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=7833115](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=7833115) \-- the ambient noise should be on the other of .1 uW / GHz; at a few hundred meters away this competes with our wideband microwatt-scale transmitter?) I'll see if I can do some actual calculations later

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Heh heh. Back in the day when VRAMs cost a fortune I hacked low-level display software for a new frame buffer product in development.

The unshielded hardware lab prototypes emitted noise that stepped on the signal of the hardware team's favorite FM rock station. So they tweaked the clocks to be a little slower.

Then they forgot they did that.

Then benchmark time came around. And the new product wasn't up to spec. And tweaking it back up made it unreliable.

Ferrite cores and shielding boxes are your friends, and your investors' friends.

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting! Researchers have successfully listened in to VGA signals using professional equipment [1]. Could the same be done with rtl-sdr receivers?

One application I can imagine is to build an osmo-fl2k transmitter that looks like a USB memory stick, ask someone to plug it into the projector computer at church, and then record the video stream with the lyrics. Most projectionists have been helpful and willing to share their PPT files so I can study Chinese, but some are refusing to share them because of copyright issues. The translated songs were not officially licensed, so they're refusing to distribute their data. It is usually possible to ask someone to plug in a USB device (e.g. "to charge"), so if that's a possible entry vector then it would interesting to develop the transmitter further.

[1] [http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iss2006-tempest.pdf](http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iss2006-tempest.pdf)

<comment><USER9> Are you implying that you'd use this technology to steal lyrics from a church?

<comment><USER8> "steal" implies ownership. Their translations aren't officially licensed. They refuse to share it because they don't want to be sued for making illegal translations. But that also means I can't sing along with them, because I can't read the Chinese characters on the screen (I need to copy-paste it to my app to translate it to pinyin). When humans aren't cooperative, I try to find ways to work with the machines to achieve the goal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nice, but where can I actually buy those things? A quick web search doesn't get me anywhere.

EDIT: it looks like it's just the chipset and it's not sold directly - instead, one should look for devices based on it. I wonder if they have any competition, or whether I can just safely assume that any USB3.0 to VGA dongle will work.

EDIT2: Also found this:

> If they are advertised with 2048 × 1152 maximum resolution and support for > Mac OS X, or only have a USB 2.0 interface, they contain a DisplayLink > chipset and are not compatible with osmo-fl2k! The price range for the > FL2000-based adapters is $5-15, whereas the DisplayLink devices typically > cost more than $25. Also note that devices sold with USB type C connector > contain a different chipset (e.g. Realtek RTD2166) and are just DisplayPort > to VGA converters.

<comment><USER11> > Nice, but where can I actually buy those things? A quick web search doesn't > get me anywhere.

Plenty to be found on Amazon or eBay. See the coverage on the RTL-SDR.com blog[0] for a few links.

> EDIT: it looks like it's just the chipset and it's not sold directly - > instead, one should look for devices based on it.

Yes, that's correct. You need a USB 3.0 to VGA adapter that is based on the Fresco Logic FL2000 chipset.

[0] [https://www.rtl-sdr.com/osmo-fl2k-a-tx-only-sdr-hacked- from-...](https://www.rtl-sdr.com/osmo-fl2k-a-tx-only-sdr-hacked-from- commodity-5-usb-to-vga-adapters-demos-available-for-transmitting-wbfm-gsm- umts-gps/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How about a cheap optical links? If there is a similar blank- and porchless VGA to USB3.0 ADC.

Let's consider the figure of 140MS/s x 3 (RGB) x 5 bits per sample (instead of 8 due to noise). then it would constitute about 2.1 Gb/s...

<comment><USER13> Here are some plans to build your own LOS optical network: [http://ronja.twibright.com/](http://ronja.twibright.com/)

Apparently you can get 10Mbps over a distance of a kilometer or so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not mentioned in the article: its range is apparently from UHF to 1.7GHz+

<comment><USER15> Thank you. So it's not like this by itself is going to enable some miraculous transceiver setup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The article doesn't mention it, but I think Fabrice Bellards PoC [1], in which he generated a valid DVB-T and PAL/SECAM carriers using a graphics card (2005), is very elegant and highly related prior art.

[1] [https://bellard.org/dvbt/](https://bellard.org/dvbt/)

</comment><comment><USER17> This is a cool technique and super interesting. My little rtl-sdr dongle just became more powerful.

At the same time, I hope this doesn't result in abuse of the spectrum followed by tightened regulations on the cheap dongles.

Please be responsible

</comment><comment><USER18> So one of these for tx and a usb tv tuner for rx, a Raspberry Pi running OpenBTS, and you've got yourself a sub $100 IMSI catcher...

<comment><USER19> Why do you need Tx for an IMSI catcher? Also, a USB TV tuner won't work for the receiving side either. You'll need to step up into an actual proper SDR for that. Still easily sub $500, but sub $100 is a bit too far a stretch.

<comment><USER18> A $12 RTL-SDR USB stick will 100% work for most GSM rx (won't hit the 1900+MHz bands without a downconverter, but that's why you want tx - you'll use it to force the phone onto the 800-900MHz bands anyway, the top half of the 915MHz ISM band in the US if you have a HAM licence and are trying to not break _too_ many laws at once).

This DefCon talk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQSu9cBaojc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQSu9cBaojc)

Gives a good overview of why you need tx to capture an IMSI - without forcing a handset into transmitting non-encrypted, you only get the TMSI (unless you can crack the crypto - and why bother, when a base station can instruct a handset to just not encrypt anything?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's neat, but practically speaking having a transmit only device isn't useful for GSM. Having to use filtering on the output is also a major pain.

It is perhaps more interesting for use as a data exfiltration technique. Simple devices, usually used without analysis, can punch out a signal which is easily decoded, with a simple (and seemingly accidental) antenna.

<comment><USER21> Wouldn't you be able to use an RTL-SDR for the receive part, and thus, have a full-duplex SDR?

<comment><USER20> Theoretically yes, but a HackRF One is US$300 and you will save an enormous amount of time. [https://greatscottgadgets.com/hackrf/](https://greatscottgadgets.com/hackrf/)

<comment><USER21> HackRF actually can't be used with GSM as it's half-duplex only and GSM requires full-duplex.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have often considered trying to reverse: using high resolution VGA ADC's to digitize for a cheap scope, but the effort involved seemed to high

<comment><USER22> reverse "VGA ADC" in what exactly?

<comment><USER12> well you can buy video ADCs from parts suppliers (digikey etc, some parts are pretty cheap, but again, it was seldom clear if they could be used continuously or would refuse to work without proper VSYNC etc) or source them from older digital monitors/dvd players/VGA2HDMI etc (roughly anything that has a VGA in)

<comment><USER22> fast ADC is not the problem per se, you can buy $10 ARM parts with 80MHz 12 bit ADC (LPC4370), pumping that data into computer fast enough is.

<comment><USER12> such a scope would not be a raw part, but include an FPGA: summarize the triggered traces that happened since the last transfer to PC... alternatively speaking, consider the amount of information on the screen of an oscilloscope, thats a low color count, with relatively large areas of the screen unaffected, so 60fps of very compressible image data..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Well, that's pretty cool!</comment>


Don Valentine has died - <AUTHOR> https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/remembering-don-valentine/ <comment><USER2> Don was a pretty amazing guy. He was the chairman at NetApp when I was there and told me I was crazy to be pushing NetApp to use an untested AMD processor (Opteron) for the high end filer of the time.

What resulted was a solid discussion that ranged from how reliable AMD was to how important Intel was to Netapp, and how to measure the "betterness" of one technology over another. I really respected that he could be opinionated and listen at the same time, always willing to cede to a well reasoned argument about how he might be wrong about something. He was also really good at poking holes in an argument so I found myself on the defensive a lot!

<comment><USER3> Great share. I remember the inflection point that Opteron was. Essentially, it killed Sparc, PA-RISC, Alpha, Itanium, etc. That was a unique moment in time. Hearing a personal anectode between someone relatively junior at the time, and a legend, is very interesting to me. It was, really, the moment Linux/x86 "won". That 64 bit hurdle defined where we are today.

At the time, it inspired me to make a pitch that "RISC was dead", despite it's technical superiority. Kind of a VHS vs Betamax moment. My pitch worked out, and was probably the defining moment of my career.

I'm pretty happy that AMD is, again, riding high. Underdog stories are more rare these days. And you had a not insignificant part in that.

<comment><USER4> Opteron never killed SPARC. The changing market dynamics of Cloud did.

<comment><USER2> I was at Sun when SPARC was invented. And I think Sun killed it.

Every time someone started trying to take advantage of the "open" nature of SPARC, Sun would out compete them, fairly or not. It was a pretty open secret that Sun had hitched its wagon to the "best" processor for running Unix servers. As I told the leadership after I left that Sun was becoming DEC. They were retreating to the enterprise data center, nobody was buying workstations any more, and Solaris was not getting any more open. I suggested they build servers with the Opteron too :-).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you want to learn more about Don and how influential his work has been, I recommend listening the recent Acquired episode about Don and Sequoia [0].

[0] [https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/sequoia-capital- part-1](https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/sequoia-capital-part-1)

<comment><USER6> Great episode. Will listen to it again on a long walk today.

I've always sought commentary and quotes from Don Valentine to help me learn more about being an angel investor the same way I have have always Warren Buffett's commentary and shareholder letters to learn how to be a better long- term investor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> One of his great talks at Stanford: "Target Big Markets" [https://youtu.be/nKN-abRJMEw](https://youtu.be/nKN-abRJMEw)

<comment><USER8> I loved watching this talk — After watching this I gained a new level of appreciation for the VC model they pioneered.

<comment><USER7> If you then also listen to the episode on Acquired, it's eye-opening on how he / sequoia decide on making investments.

<comment><USER8> Just listened to it[1] twice; Thanks for the recommendation!

[1] - [https://castro.fm/episode/bwHpe7](https://castro.fm/episode/bwHpe7)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I first recall reading about Don Valentine in the October 1982 issue of National Geographic on Silicon Valley.

An excellent snapshot of Silicon Valley and a glimpse of Don Valentine's role in it.

[http://blog.modernmechanix.com/high-tech-high-risk-and- high-...](http://blog.modernmechanix.com/high-tech-high-risk-and-high-life-in- silicon-valley/)

Risk/Venture Capital, despite valid criticisms of it, has had an outsized effect on our world in the last 50+ years.

And Don Valentine played an outsized role in it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Really a great, supportive guy, and very kind in a pitch meeting, even when you are completely losing it. In general I've found the sequoia folks to be a class act (with a couple of, to me, egregious exceptions)

</comment><comment><USER10> " his high school friend, Steve Wozniak."

This can't be right.

<comment><USER11> That line also gave me pause, but I think it was meant to say that Woz was Jobs' high school friend (which is also wrong, but much less wrong).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Rest in peace Don!</comment>


Reddit's empire is founded on a flawed algorithm - Ian's Tech Notes - <AUTHOR> http://technotes.iangreenleaf.com/posts/2013-12-09-reddits-empire-is-built-on-a-flawed-algorithm.html#fnref1 <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6878369](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6878369)</comment>