Angry Birds' Peter Vesterbacka: Tablets are killing console games - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2011/03/16/angry-birds-tablets-console-games/ <comment><USER2> I'd call myself a casual gamer, but I think this 'tablets killing consoles' stuff is limited mostly to casual and possibly portable games.

My nieces and nephews have Wii's. They play together on an immersive big screen. You aren't going to do that with a tablet. You aren't going to have kinect with a tablet. Are serious gamers going to use WoW on a tablet? Will a tablet be able to provide the immersive experience that a big screen can??

Now, that doesn't mean that consoles aren't dying. There is more than one way to get a game on a big screen, but my gut instinct says that the death of the console won't be at the hand of the tablet.</comment>


Bitcoin breaks $3K to reach new all-time high - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/04/bitcoin-3000 <comment><USER2> That was quite a stair step up around 8pm PDT. Anyone know what happened? [http://imgur.com/a/W6m6n](http://imgur.com/a/W6m6n)

<comment><USER3> In the last week there was a fear of the Bitcoin Cash fork splitting the community. The fork failed so spectacularly that the biggest problem for Bitcoin / Bitcoin Cash holders was how to dump Bitcoin Cash when all reputable exchanges are afraid of implementing Bitcoin Cash. Now it's clear for most people that Bitcoin Cash failed.

Also Segregated Witness will lock in on Aug. 8 with a very high probability, and activate at the end of August.

<comment><USER4> > The fork failed so spectacularly

Really? How do you quantify this? Most people who are pro big blocks felt it went well (r/btc) and it'll take a while to make it profitable for miners to mine it. Many people who are against big blocks thought it'd immediately dive to $1, which is 1/200 of where it is currently at. It also seems like many pro-Blockstream people would dump Bitcoin Cash regardless, just because they don't believe in the rationale for it (r/bitcoin threads about how to sell Bitcoin Cash w/o analysis).

You could argue about market liquidity etc, but 4B market cap is hardly a failure. This doesn't mean it is a success. It is more accurate to call it _undecided_ for the time being. To call it a failure is definitely premature and uncharitable, though.

<comment><USER5> > people who are pro big blocks [...] > people who are against big blocks

Please don't play up this narrative unnecessarily. It's an easy narrative, but it's also wrong and misses important things about governance and identity. It makes it sound like the Segregated Witness proposal, which won supermajority support on the development list, does not increase block size (which it does, just in a backwards compatible way).

It has been known for quite some time that apart from a bug in the software, that could destroy value in an instant, the biggest challenge will be managing an open source project in the face of competing interests. It's the first time the IETF governance model meets fintech, and if Bitcoin continues to grow it will make the patent drama round rtcweb look like child's play.

> pro-Blockstream people

This is also simplifying beyond what's reasonable. Bitcoin is an open source project. There is a mailing list. You can join it.

It's not always roses and civilized technical discussion, but every argument can be heard out and there are enough people lurking the sidelines to act as a guard against abuses of power.

The Blockstream narrative plays down the contributions of Lau, Lopp, Lombrozo and dozens of others which do a lot of the development and release management of the software.

<comment><USER6> Using the Blockstream narrative to dismiss contradictory ideas is basically how r/btc maintains their belief it's a success. It's been very entertaining watching them seize on every big block as proof the "small-blockers" are wrong that nodes couldn't keep up even though the overall transaction rate is actually a small fraction of Bitcoin's right now and arguing that the price going up was a sign that everyone claiming they'd dump their BCH was lying back when no exchanges were accepting deposits.

Also, as you point out big block isn't really the defining characteristic of the Bitcoin Cash fork since in principle Bitcoin is having a block size increase in the near future too. The bigger difference is ripping out the SegWit fix for transaction malleability, with the stated intention of making Lightning Network off-chain payments which require malleability to be fixed not work. In an interesting attack of irony, the ViaBTC exchange (one of its main proponents) just has to stop withdrawals because transaction malleability was breaking them: [https://twitter.com/ViaBTC/status/893744282087047168](https://twitter.com/ViaBTC/status/893744282087047168)

<comment><USER5> > The bigger difference is ripping out the SegWit fix for transaction > malleability,

Sure, and as ironic as it may be that BCH deposits was malleability attacked earlier today, I still don't think it is a good idea to focus on the technical features of these forks. Who is behind the fork is more interesting than what is in the fork.

This is not a conflict among developers, with a few notable exceptions. This is a governance conflict. That is why the conflict is not very visible in the developer community, but rather outside in social media.

The open source project is a multi stakeholder model which can be very foreign to people who consider themselves influential. In many ways it looks more like academia than a corporation. Everyone would like the developers on their payroll, but no one wants to pay for it. Pretty much like academia, I suppose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not saying the alternative (fiat) is a substantially better alternative, but this is what happens when markets aren't regulated.

My prediction: There are going to be a lot of naive poor folks who are going to become poorer, maybe even dirt poor, and some very savvy wealthy people who are going to be even more wealthy when this is all said and done.

<comment><USER8> The more that I think about banks the more I realize they are no longer relevant. Why do I need to pay a "bank" to keep my money that is simply stored as a digital record? Seems absurd once you stop and think about it.

<comment><USER9> The primary purpose of banks in our society is not storing money, but lending it out.

<comment><USER8> Of course. But then why am I paying bank fees for a checking account? And savings accounts don't even pay enough interest to cover inflation.

<comment><USER10> Have you bothered to read the requirements for waving the bank fees? And if you are concerned with beating inflation, you are supposed to look into, at the very least, bonds or something similar.

Savings accounts are more suited for money you will need at any moment.

<comment><USER8> Of course I have. I need to keep $3000+ in my checking account. Either way I'm paying for the account either by lending them the $3000 or by a $15 a month fee. Either way I lose out especially since I don't think I'm getting any value from my bank. I'm planning on switching banks.

I have some money in other investments but I just think banks are a rip off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can someone explain how old Bitcoin works post-fork? Can you sell the same old Bitcoin twice now? Is this already priced in somehow and still going up?

<comment><USER12> Bitcoin works the same as it always did. However, anyone who had N Bitcoin on a particular time on August 1 also has N "Bitcoin Cash" using the same private keys, and can go spend that separately on the forked blockchain, without in any way affecting their existing Bitcoin. Both have their own price and market, and they don't interconvert beyond that one-time thing except by selling/buying/trading between them.

<comment><USER11> Thanks! Isn't this something a currency should fundamentally prevent? I don't know of any real-world currency that can be used twice.

<comment><USER13> Bitcoin Cash is a separate project and currency from Bitcoin. You can't pay someone who is expecting Bitcoin by sending Bitcoin Cash to them or vice- versa.

Bitcoin's code is open source and the balances of all addresses are public, so anyone could create a fork (a new separate currency based on it, optionally starting with the same balances).

<comment><USER11> Right, but presumably a reasonably large merchant would find that they need to accept both though, right? And now you would have more purchasing power with them which feels a bit weird, since the old Bitcoin and the new Bitcoin would not have the same purchasing power...

<comment><USER14> Right now, the exchanges have only just allowed Bitcoin Cash deposits. I'm not aware of any merchant that accepts Bitcoin Cash. I believe that because of the massive price difference (purchasing power) between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, merchants would have to accept them just like merchants accept different currencies in Hong Kong (RMB, HKD, USD).

<comment><USER15> You can just convert your BCH to BTC.

<comment><USER14> True! But that alone usually isn't enough for merchants to want to accept a cryptocurrency. (e.g. very few merchants accept ETH or LTC).

<comment><USER15> Sure. But my point is that there's no need for merchants to support BCH. Or to keep supporting BTC. As long as it's easy to exchange one for the other. As it is with ShapeShift.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Been long bitcoin since 2013. I felt like I was late but it has been awesome .glad I ignored the headlines about bubbles . the news is useless. for every bubble they call correctly, the get 10-20 of them wrong. Bitcoin is like General Electric..its not going anywhere. Against all odds it succeeded and surpassed everyone's expectations.

<comment><USER17> It will crash, its only a matter of time. It's also to be seen if it'll crash to a value lower than it currently is. Even if bitcoin becomes a major currency there will be overshoot in its value.

<comment><USER4> This type of prediction comments always strikes me as nonsense and containing zero actual information. If you believe this, either post fundamental analysis that argues your case and have the hope of providing some valuable insight, or - even better - put your money where your mouth is.

The same thing happened when people claimed to be 99.999% sure Trump would never be president, but of course they never actually bet any money on it.

One could argue the grandparent doesn't argue their point either, but they definitely seem to put their money where their mouth is. All these people who are so against crypto and like to sit at the sidelines moaning about a bubble, why don't you either short it or bet against it? A la [http://blog.samaltman.com/bubble-talk](http://blog.samaltman.com/bubble-talk)

<comment><USER18> You can be right that it will crash and still lose your shirt if you short it, if you are wrong about the timing. As Keynes said: "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."

There is an inherent asymmetry between going long and short. If you're going long, your losses are capped at what you put in, and your gains are unlimited. The opposite is true if you are going short: your losses are unlimited, but your gains are limited.

<comment><USER19> You don't have to sell short, you can buy puts which give you far greater (not unlimited) upside than your capped downside.

<comment><USER18> True, but then your timing is even more crucial. You can be right about a coming crash, but if it happens after your put option expires, it won't do you any good...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A rising tide lifts all boats and I can imagine this breakout boosting the entire cryptocurrency market. Just wait until we enter a bear market, we'll start seeing just about every cryptocurrency spike in value.

<comment><USER21> Perhaps if you measure in USD. Measured in BTC, Bitcoin Cash has been nothing but falling for the past couple of days: [https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin- cash/#BTC](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#BTC)

<comment><USER22> Bitcoin Cash is only a few days old. It is going to take some time for the market to find it's true price. That will take more and more exchanges supporting it so that markets function more smoothly. In the meant time it would be expected that there are wild price fluctuations and differences in price globally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This link posted a couple days back may be of interest:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14891968](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14891968)

</comment><comment><USER24> Yeah, but look at the trading volumes - at least an order of magnitude lower than 2 years ago!

<comment><USER25> 24h volume 2 years ago was around 22 million USD [0] Trading volume in the last 24 hours is 1.6 billion

[0] [https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#charts](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#charts)

<comment><USER26> OP meant the Bitcoin trade volume, not the US-Dollar volume. The BTC trading volume is extremely low currently. [0]

0: [https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/2y?r=week&t=a](https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/2y?r=week&t=a)

<comment><USER27> He said "the trading volumes." Could have been either, but BTC trading volume is even more meaningless than USD trading volume. An inflation-adjusted aggregate volume is probably the best metric, which is closer to the USD trade volume than BTC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> now bitcoin price $3,173 [https://www.exchangeratesdata.com/convert/BTC/USD/](https://www.exchangeratesdata.com/convert/BTC/USD/)

</comment><comment><USER29> Programmable money makes coders powerful.

For some reason, a large fraction of HN hates crypto. They seem to like getting fucked up the ass by everyone. Groveling to VCs for funding. Looked down on my MBA-types.

Coders/hackers should be embracing what's happening. Finally, merit > dick sucking.

<comment><USER30> What merit?

<comment><USER29> Investment. Tokens sales are going to fund projects without gatekeepers. Personal brand is going to become more important.

You're on an investment website -- for startups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> buying all that afghani heroin 10 years ago really fucked me out of being a millionaire

</comment><comment><USER32> Legendary. Huge thanks to all of the engineers behind segwit.

<comment><USER33> But segwit isn't active yet is it? Is it likely to go ahead?

<comment><USER14> I usually check the status here: [https://www.xbt.eu](https://www.xbt.eu) Since 100% of the blocks mined during this period has been SegWit, I would say it's very likely that it gets activated!

<comment><USER21> It's not a matter of probability. Miners decide what to do, and right now a majority of them will ignore non-SegWit blocks. Doesn't mean they can't change their minds, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It had to reach an all-time high, otherwise there's no way there's going to possibly be any money to back Bitcoin Cash, since I'm pretty sure the people that forked it have no real assets to back up this currency otherwise.

<comment><USER35> I'm not sure if this is a joke, but certainly I hope so.

<comment><USER34> Where'd the sudden money come from to back Bitcoin cash? Who put in the initial currency valuation? Did you watch the quick and near-parity change in price between Coin and Cash, only for Cash to suddenly double and then drop right back toparity with BC, then the jump to over 3,000 on Coin to nearly- mirror the needed missing reserve to back Cash?

It's pretty simple - follow the money. The pattern is BEYOND evident.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> So it's 2009-2010 and someone has $6000 laying around. Hears about Bitcoin and buys 100,000 shares at 6 cents each. Wakes up in 2017 and miraculously all is there, in the old computer. $6000 to $300,000,000 in 7 years.

Have we ever seen such appreciation in an investment /speculation?

Oh, it will crash, as soon as a 'better' cryptocurrency comes in. It has value for as long as people buy it.

<comment><USER37> I'm curious - if you actually had $300m worth of bitcoin and started selling it, would you be able to actually sell everything off for that price before the price started dropping like crazy? Would whatever exchange you're using even be able to wire $300m USD to your bank account after the sale just like that?

<comment><USER38> Well you'd have 100,000 BTC which is handily also approximately the daily trading volume looking across all the exchanges (at a cursory glance; I expected it to be higher). So it would take more than a day but not a significantly long time to shift them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm a board member and founder of [https://www.bitcoinwednesday.com/](https://www.bitcoinwednesday.com/)

What happened on 1 August and with the prices immediately after suggests how the conflict over the blocksize has been widely misreported.

Bitcoin was not ripping itself into two in a civil war, but innovating new forms of governance and token distribution for new projects.

We now have a technically proven, and from the looks of it, established new method of token distribution that is arguably far superior to crowd sales and ICOs.

If you don't like the BCH or Bitcoin implementation, there are already hundreds of other cryptocurrytencies, but you can also fork your own from the biggest, original (and arguably most widely distributed).

BCH now has a "market cap" of about $3.7 billion dollars, probably a world record for a startup (open source project) that was literally released to the world a few days ago.

If you own bitcoins before the fork, you should now own equal amounts on both sides of the coin, and (hopefully) soon will be able to buy or sell either token, depending on your preference.

Bitcoin itself has a $52 billion dollar market cap right now post fork not only because it survived the challenge and may soon implement Segwit, but because it will be one of the best chains from which to fork new projects.

There is no need to take sides from this perspective. Just sell the token you don't like and use the gain to buy more that you do like. OTOH, it's perfectly fine to like and hold both just like it was once okay to use more than one web site.

[post edited: BCash to the more neutral BCH ]

<comment><USER40> BCash is a fork ZCash.

For running a bitdoinwednesday you seem to be misinformed about what bitcoin is.

<comment><USER39> Indeed I stepped right into the next "civil war" by using "BCash" instead of its symbol, BCH.

Chill out, please. I don't want to see it fail at all.

Read my original remark more closely. This is good for the whole industry. We are holding both.</comment></comment></comment>


Could There Be A Better Advertisement For The iPad? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/24/the-best-advertisement-apple-could-have-for-the-ipad/

<comment><USER2> in the video- the voice announcing the color of the piano keys should be pitched to match the notes on the keyboard. they're missing a huge music education/development opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER3> heh, I get:

> WordPress.com is temporarily unavailable.

so that monstrous website is based on wordpress? I could never tell.</comment>


Ask HN: How to get the chickens without the eggs? - <AUTHOR>

This may be a stupid question, but I'm starting a startup in the stock photography sector, however the problem is I need photographers before I can start selling images (obviously). However, from my initial enquiries it seems photographers have no interest in joining new libraries and will only submit to established sites that already have lots of images for sale.
So my question is: how can I attract photographers to submit their work to a new site? I was thinking of contacting a few prospects and offering them 100% of the profit from sales for the first year, prizes for the first person to hit 100 sales, 1000 sales and things like that.
Does anyone else have any suggestions?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Tap into the amateur photographer with cameras on their mobile phones. Convince her that she can simply point her phone at things around the world, snap a shot that's auto-uploaded to your service, and she can make cash.

You and your team handle the categorization and tagging. And/or, the photographer can come back later on her PC and categorize/tag her photos resulting in a higher profit share for anyone licensing that photo.

On most smartphones, sharing/uploading photos via e-mail and applications is intrinsic to the mobile device. Handle uploads via your own mobile application or simply e-mail uploads.

<comment><USER3> This. People will jump on anything with the promise of "free" cash.

<comment><USER4> Except potentially all those photos will be crap and then you'll end up with a really mediocre photo selling website and business will scarred for life.

<comment><USER2> But you can validate and curate the uploads. In fact, that can be part of your community/crowd-source model, too. If someone else within your community comes along and rates/tags/categorizes the photograph, he can make a little slice of the pie.

Hell, get everyone involved in the process.

Solve chicken and egg problem first. Then maybe you can start thinking about cage-free organic eggs, second. ;)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


NY Attorney General Tells Daily Fantasy Sports to Stop Taking Bets in the State - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/11/sports/football/draftkings-fanduel-new-york-attorney-general-tells-fantasy-sites-to-stop-taking-bets-in-new-york.html <comment><USER2> That brings the list of states with outright bans to Arizona, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana, Nevada, New York, and Washington. That is a rather diverse set of states that probably wouldn't appear together on many other lists. By my rough math, they also amounts to roughly 15% of the US population that DraftKings and FanDuel are unable to accept money from. These companies have to be in full crisis mode at this point and it is hard to imagine they exist in the same form a year from now without some major reform.

<comment><USER3> As a New York resident, the state embarrasses me regularly in terms of the amount of personal liberty the politicians are willing to trample. Between Senator Schumer, Attorney General Schneiderman and New York Mayor DeBlasio, I honestly don't know who is the worst.

Schumer's ban requests include powdered caffeine [0], certain flavors of e-cigarettes [1] to Bitcoin [2].

Schniederman strikes me as someone more interested in extorting companies. His most recent subpoena Exxon for not speaking out about climate change to their investors (??) is his most recent campaign [3]. I'm guessing he wants to buy more iPads for the police department [4]

DeBlasio has an axe to grind against Uber [5] and costumed characters in Time Square [6] .

What a joke that this qualifies as progress.

Sorry, rant over.

[0] [http://www.schumer.senate.gov/newsroom/press- releases/follow...](http://www.schumer.senate.gov/newsroom/press- releases/following-several-tragic-deaths-schumer-calls-on-the-fda-to-ban- powdered-caffeine_one-teaspoon-of-concentrated-powdered-caffeine-is- equivalent-to-25-cups-of-coffee-and-is-highly-dangerous-for-teens--young- adults-)

[1] [http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Schumer-Calls-for- FDA-B...](http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Schumer-Calls-for-FDA-Ban-on- Candy-Flavor-E-Cigarettes-301376931.html)

[2] [http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2014/02/26/senator...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2014/02/26/senator- calls-for-bitcoin-ban-in-letter-to-financial-regulators/)

[3] [http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-11-10/schneiderma...](http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-11-10/schneiderman- s-dangerous-crusade-against-exxon-mobil)

[4] [http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2015/05/01/french-bank- settl...](http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2015/05/01/french-bank-settlement- to-fund-nyc-criminal-justice-initiatives/)

[5] [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/23/nyregion/de-blasio- adminis...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/23/nyregion/de-blasio- administration-dropping-plan-for-uber-cap-for-now.html?_r=0)

[6] [http://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/570-15/mayor- de...](http://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/570-15/mayor-de-blasio- city-task-force-curb-topless-individuals-costumed-characters-times)

<comment><USER4> Because the alternative to DeBlasio on the Democratic ticket was Christine Quinne, Bill Thomson, John Liu and others.

Bill Thomson spent the time between the 09 and 13 election working for an investment firm, and given the attitude towards politicians owned by banks, failed to gain the nomination.

Christine Quinne worked with Bloomberg to overturn 2-year term limits on elected officials, and ran a secret slush fund while she was on the city council.

Anthony Weiner, well. Was Anthony Weiner.

Randy Credico ran a very lackluster campaign.

While John Liu had a solid platform, his campaign became embroiled in financial scandal.

On the other side of the aisle, we had John Catsimatidis and Joe Lhota (George MacDonald ran a campaign as well, but was barely known).

Catsimatidis unabashedly supported the wildly unpopular stop & frisk tactics, which were (and still are) wildly unpopular.

Lhota was in favor of charter schools instead of fixing our crumbling public schools (DeBlasio's plans for public schools end up actually working, unlike charter schools); his mixture of fiscal conservativeness and socially liberal policies like choice & equal rights turned off the Republican vote - he only garnered a little more than 20% of the vote.

So it was between DeBlasio and Lhota. DeBlasio spoke to his base and Democrats actually liked him. Lhota alienated his base and Republicans hated him (and so did Democrats).

We get crap politicians because crap candidates run. Just like every fucking where else. Why do we get crap candidates? Because money.

\---

Yeah, the e-cig stuff is stupid. Yeah, the campaign against topless panhandlers in times square is pretty stupid. The campaign against uber makes sense, if you're not a proponent of neo-feudalism.

Schneiderman's v. Exxon stuff is actually kind of interesting. It's not that he's alleging that they failed to disclose climate change to their investors - you're mincing words, and it's pretty fucking obvious. They failed to inform their investors of studies that could pose change to their future profits. Shaky, sure, but not entirely insane. He's not anti-business, he's anti business that's fucking us over. Keep in mind that Exxon (formerly Standard Oil) was responsible for one of the largest oil spills on US soil - right here in Brooklyn.

<comment><USER3> Do you really believe that it's about Exxon's investors? I imagine the proceeds from whatever settlement would go to those affected, according to your description, the shareholders who's future profit's will be hurt from withholding their studies?

You can sue for oil spills. You can put in a gas tax. But what's Schniderman is doing is a shake-down, led by populism. I get it, no one likes Exxon (me included) and my opinions may not be popular. But these lawsuits are a new form of hidden tax paid by shareholders, not some mythical corporate entity. He even went after an English bank (Barclays) for something to do with their dark pool. It doesn't go to those harmed by the actions. You can read about where the money goes. It goes to government agencies, and yes, iPads for the police. It's fine if politicians think there are worthy programs they want to fund, but this isn't rule of law.

[http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/11/20/where-does- jpmorgans-...](http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/11/20/where-does- jpmorgans-13-billion-go/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Welcome to the online poker world ~4 years ago. The only difference (and the question is, 'will this be enough to keep it alive?') is that DFS has the backing of sports leagues (MLB, NFL) that have big lobby groups who can "influence" politicians. Doesn't matter how much money you have if you don't have this influence.

IANAL so correct me if I'm wrong, but assuming DFS sites challenges citing that banks can legally take their transactions (through the UIGEA and thus, "not gambling"), wouldn't NY need to pass a law to bar DFS in the state?

<comment><USER6> Poker was a little different. They were violating some major banking laws with how they were doing deposits. Also the companies were overseas...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This decision baffles me.

What possible benefit to New Yorkers is there to not allow them to take bets, if things like state lotteries are still legal?

We let people drink and smoke but people can't enjoy putting money on fantasy sports.

I'm not in the state, but I'd consider myself a power user of those sites, so perhaps I'm only disappointed that alot of easy money just left the system.

If these sites didn't have the people(NFL and Jerry Jones) and money(see people) behind them that they do, I'd be a bit more worried about their future.

Is this just some state's working on an endgame to be able to tax fantasy sports revenue that comes from their states?

This is the same state that outlawed pinball until someone proved that it was a game of skill.

[http://www.slate.com/blogs/atlas_obscura/2015/05/29/pinball_...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/atlas_obscura/2015/05/29/pinball_was_banned_in_new_york_until_a_single_miraculous_shot_convinced.html)

That's it, its time I took this into my own hands, and went on a major winning spree to prove that fantasy football and hockey are really games of skill and not chance:)

<comment><USER8> Is it about that specifically, or is it that the states are forcing these websites to play by the same rules as everyone else? Ignoring laws that everyone else has to play by is something that has worked so far for Airbnb and Uber but apparently something like gambling is a bit more clear cut.

<comment><USER9> The two aren't mutually exclusive. If they are just forcing them to "play by the same rules", Chollida's question just becomes "why are the rules in the state stacked against gambling?", with the rest of the question unchanged.

It's perfectly possible to fairly enforce unfair (and/or fair but counterproductive) rules, but that on its own doesn't justify it. Viewed this way, these companies are then just engaging in something like constructive noncompliance.

<comment><USER10> Your question reduces to: why is gambling illegal? And the answer is that lots of people don't like it, and people are entitled to make things they don't like illegal.

A recent poll found that 55% of people think sports betting should be legal, while 33% think it should be illegal: [https://www13.shu.edu/academics/business/sports- polling/uplo...](https://www13.shu.edu/academics/business/sports- polling/upload/11-14-NBA-gambling.pdf). But if you read closely, support drops off dramatically in the 45+ age group, which is heavily over-represented at the polls, especially in local elections.

One study found that the median age of voters in mayoral elections in four cities was 60: [http://www.knightfoundation.org/blogs/knightblog/2015/7/28/p...](http://www.knightfoundation.org/blogs/knightblog/2015/7/28/portland- state-study-seniors-much-more-likely-cast-ballots-young-votes).

<comment><USER11> > people are entitled to make things they don't like illegal

Things like gay marriage, flag burning, and atheists holding public office, right?

<comment><USER12> That known as the "tyranny of the majority" and yes it's one of those warts no one likes to credit democracy with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It'd be nice if more reporting on the subject highlighted the absurdity of DFS being legal but betting on game outcomes illegal. I think that DFS should be legal but at least the NY AG is being consistent in enforcement.

<comment><USER14> The amusing thing is that they're quoting the fact that 1% of players win most of the money and therefore DFS is gambling. I'd argue that the fact that 1% win most of the time is the strongest signal that it's a game of skill (assuming it's the same 1%).

<comment><USER15> Due to the way these are structured the main "skill", so to speak, is apparently figuring out what bets other people have made so that you can make different bets, because unpopular bets have a better expected payout than popular ones. That's why most of the profits go to industry insiders who understand what kind of players people bet on.

<comment><USER14> Given the information we have, it's certainly possible that some of that one percent used insider information.

Nevertheless, given the number of players that draft kings and fan duel have acquired through their indefatigable marketing campaigns, I would submit that a not insignificant portion (if not a majority) of that one percent figure out the bets others wouldn't make all on their own.

Further, math and computers can most certainly help with this given that all the relevant data is public.

How long 'til this goes the way of HFT in the stock market?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm all for this simply to get the commercials off the air. I was almost missing the constant barrage of cell phones and insurance providers.

I had the sense they knew this was coming and that's why they hit the advertising so hard. If they can get enough momentum, they can make it legal.

</comment><comment><USER16> Hmm interesting take on things:

\---

"It is clear that DraftKings and FanDuel are the leaders of a massive, multibillion-dollar scheme intended to evade the law and fleece sports fans across the country,"

\---

Also I guess a site served from another state considered to be "in state" according to their interpretation. I wonder if these sites can tacitly (hint, hint, wink, wink) nudge their users to put in a different state in their profiles. With a disclaimer and all or just simply make everyone pick a state but remove the states that disallow it. Let users "figure it out".

</comment><comment><USER17> New York's state constitution bans all unauthorized gambling and restricts the types of authorized gambling to (1) the state lottery, (2) parimutuel betting on horse races, (3) bingo and raffles by charitable organizations, and (4) no more than seven casino licenses. (I remember this from when the casino amendment was proposed; I voted against it because arbitrarily limiting the number of licenses stunk of corruption. If you're going to legalize gambling just legalize it all the way.)

Without a constitutional amendment, which in New York requires the approval of two consecutive legislatures to pass, it looks like daily fantasy is dead in this state.

</comment><comment><USER18> This chance/skill argument could be made for the financial markets.

<comment><USER19> The distinction with financial markets is that they are enablers of useful economic activity.

Years ago I worked for financial traders in Chicago, home to a lot of commodities markets. Thousands of people traded futures and options on those markets. But every winter, there was also the Chicago snow markets, where those same traders would illegally trade futures and options on how much snow would fall each month at O'Hare airport. It was illegal because it was not a CFTC-regulated market; it was just a gambling operation that happened to use financial lingo to make the best more interesting.

Interestingly, I see that decades later a legal snow market was actually launched:

[http://openmarkets.cmegroup.com/4967/a-market-for-snow- how-s...](http://openmarkets.cmegroup.com/4967/a-market-for-snow-how-some- businesses-use-futures-to-prepare-for-winter)

Here, though they had found a legitimate purpose: it let people with snow- related expenses insure themselves against excessive snow-related expenses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Excellent news. These sites prey on the people who can least afford to lose and as the article noted seriously misrepresent the chances of winning. Shame on the NFL for their involvement.

</comment><comment><USER21> What disruptive technology is disrupting is not markets, but government.

<comment><USER22> In what way is daily fantasy sports gambling "disruptive technology"?

<comment><USER12> In the $2,000,000,000/yr way and in the "Getting Disney to be part owner in a gambling site" way.

<comment><USER23> Well, there may also be the "new ways to commit insider trading" way, depending on how that story turns out.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pingdom is joining SolarWinds - <AUTHOR> http://royal.pingdom.com/2014/06/18/pingdom-joining-solarwinds/ <comment><USER2> I find the phrasing on Pingdom's site to be fascinating.

On SolarWinds' site, it's an acquisition, plain as can be.

On Pingdom's site, they're pretending they're 'joining forces.'

Pingdom just got bought by a public company. It sounds like they're in for a reality check.

<comment><USER3> Link to SolarWinds' statement:

[http://www.solarwinds.com/company/newsroom/press_releases/ye...](http://www.solarwinds.com/company/newsroom/press_releases/years/2014/solarwinds- acquires-pingdom.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I thought it was odd that this statement seems to avoid using words like 'acquire', 'buy' or anything else the would mean Pingom has been purchased by SolarWinds. It wasn't until I clicked on the FAQ link that I was sure that an acquisition has just happened :s

<comment><USER5> The Solarwinds brand isn't as flashy as the Pingdom brand. It makes sense that they'd want to maintain as much independence as possible until they decide whether to eat it or not.

<comment><USER6> Exactly this.

When I think Solarwinds, I think crufty enterprise shop that needs polished monitoring tools. When I think Pingdom, I think external monitoring for my startup app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe now they'll find the time, money, give-a-shit or whatever to address this maddening omission [1] (Can't omit check sources by geography).

If nothing else, this move will give me a recognizable name to refer to when trying to convince certain folks to dump some of the truly awful monitoring services out there. Not long ago I encountered a place that was paying one of the old giants $1100/yr _per target_ for simple pings and email only alerts.

1: [http://pingdom.uservoice.com/forums/113203-my- pingdom/sugges...](http://pingdom.uservoice.com/forums/113203-my- pingdom/suggestions/2223355-ability-to-choose-which-probe-servers-to-use)

<comment><USER8> I've never used Pingdom (or any service like it), but I've considered building a monitoring service for a number of years. The ability to configure monitoring and/or alerting by geographic region (if not specific nodes) has always been in the top 5 list of features.

<comment><USER6> Now may be your time to build your service.

<comment><USER9> Agreed, but wait until I build mine first. ;)

Pingdom seemed to be the service that was one of the more prominent first to market options and then promptly sat on their laurels waiting for a buy-out. That seems to have come to fruition.

Based on the quality of product Solarwinds offers, I will now go delete any remaining monitoring I've been using from them.

I think the market could use a really good monitoring platform that does a lot more than what's on the service offering from the likes of Pingdom.

<comment><USER10> Take a look at PRTG from Paessler ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really feel that in a world with tools like Newrelic that pingdom is starting to lose its value. I know there are significant differences between the two, but in terms of what I personally rely on each day to keep a tab on things, I can say that for me Pingdom is far less critical than it once was.

I hope this deal sees them innovate beyond a UI refresh (Which is just about all thats changed in the last 10 years)

<comment><USER12> The UI refresh was a bit of a disaster. Pingdom didn't need significant changes because it worked well at what it did. I just wanted to know when my servers went down and when they came back up.

Now with their UI change I can't even change the SMS provider to use, which means one of our devops staff doesn't get the SMSes he's supposed to. He also gets changed from the US country code to Afghanistan's. I've got a trouble ticket open with them that keeps getting auto-closed after 120 hours of "inactivity" because they said "yep, that looks like a bug, we'll let you know when fixed".

<comment><USER13> Instead of using Pingdom's SMS, you could always hook up another system that more reliably delivers alerts (e.g., PagerDuty).

Full disclosure: I work for PagerDuty.

<comment><USER12> Believe me, we're currently evaluating you guys and other solutions, especially if Pingdom's being acquired.

<comment><USER14> Check out OpsGenie, it works well and they are more friendly for bootstrappers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Called it last week when SolarWinds started posting lots of Linux Admin jobs.

<comment><USER16> So a windows shop acquires a Linux based cloud service and thinks it will be able to hire its way to Linux competency. Good Luck with that

<comment><USER17> In Austin, that probably won't be too difficult. Expensive, but not difficult.

<comment><USER18> Shouldn't be expensive. Plenty of "1st admin job" webhosts in town. Although I don't know why anyone would leave them for a job at Solarwinds.

<comment><USER17> SolarWinds is a good place to work AFAIK.

All of the employees that I know are cool people and very happy there and the pay, if I remember correctly, was pretty good.

BTW, the good admins are not coming out of the standard webhost support roles. Those people are cheap, but for good reason. The higher tiers at those shops, maybe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Pingdom customers who are worried and would like to look at alternatives, we at Site24x7 have a special offer for you. Get a one year subscription for the Site24x7 Business Pack for FREE. Get in touch with email@example.com. More details in our blog - [http://bit.ly/1jAeWfs](http://bit.ly/1jAeWfs)

</comment><comment><USER20> Pingdom is a good product and I've used it with moderate success.

However, sometimes I can't help but chuckle at the marketing and productization genius of someone who monetized the classic `ping`! Anyway, congratulations to the pingdom team on the acquisition and hope to see a more comprehensive API from them soon.

</comment><comment><USER21> Don't mess this up SolarWinds....

</comment><comment><USER22> as a nice alternative there is also Monitis, all-in-one monitoring platform, so it is quite suitable for any operational needs. by the way, they have recently integrated with pagerduty and zapier. www.monitis.com

</comment><comment><USER23> Ugh, Solarwinds. The most inflexible, Windows-only software I've ever used. Goodbye Pingdom.

</comment><comment><USER24> pingdom works great, we've been using them for the LiveFanChat.com sites for the past 2 years and never had a problem</comment>


Your Post Is Finished. Now? Blog Promotion Time - <AUTHOR> http://thecopypasteblog.com/post-finished-blog-promotion-time-2/

<comment><USER2> Let's say you are a member of X community - vintage cars, death metal, whatever - and your interest in this is completely independent of reputation or profit.

You actively pursue this interest in your free time, and find that many of the problems you encounter have already been solved, and solutions are already available on the internet.

As you develop your skills, the problems you encounter become more and more situation-specific, and you find it helpful to ask questions on forums related to what you are doing.

At some point, you get annoyed at the disorganized nature of the forum. You end up repeatedly linking people to other threads, which are usually poorly formatted, and difficult to find. You decide enough is enough.

You set up a blog. Your only motivation is to solve common problems rapidly - any monetization merely helps offset the costs of web hosting. This is your hobby, after all.

As time passes, your blog begins to develop its own unique "voice" in your community - you have a specific set of problems related to your community that you are very good at solving, and you have built up a significant amount of reference material that others find very, very helpful when they are starting out.

When the blog reaches a certain critical mass, you end up with users who are intimidated by the amount of information on your site. Not everyone has time to browse through your entire archive, but they still want a decent "baseline" of expertise to work with.

At this point, enough people will want a printed version of your content that it wouldn't make sense not to offer it. If the demand for your skill set is great enough, you could make a career off of it.

Professional writing is paid research, more than anything. Why do you need to convince people that the research you've already done is worth reading? Why can't you help people with their own research instead?

Even if your SEO skills are garbage, a basic wordpress install gives Google more than enough information for people to find you when they need help. You shouldn't be writing anything that is already available through a Google search. Why waste your time repeating someone else's work?

If you feel a real need to replace someone else's work, because you feel it can be done better or more completely, why aren't you talking to this person, or even actively working with them? If this really is your hobby, and you really are an expert, why should they feel threatened?

Sorry for the long rant, but I really, really, really find the blogosphere completely disgusting right now.

There should not be competition among people who are genuinely interested in the same topic. Especially on the internet - there is just no excuse.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, if you have a blog, without some kind of promotion the only reader you will have is you. Maybe your mother, too. Of course, original content (and _good_ original content) is what it should be... Writing for the sake of writing (i.e. blogging about blogging just to make money off bloggers) is like some perverted pyramidal scheme.

I wrote this as a guest post from my own experience for sharing my posts, where I write (except maybe in some case, I can be sure after more than 700 posts) only original content. But before I started actively promoting my content, I had mostly readers coming from Google to a few selected places ( _very_ few). After good promotion, my posts started finding readers, and when they were interested, they delved deeper in my blog, finding my old posts. My subscribers grew (I've tripled since I started my blog seriously), and so did my interactions.

But as you say, there are zillions of repetitions among the blogosphere (I've seen it also, all over the place) and this is completely sick. But as it stands, it is and endless run: if I create good original content without promotion, the repetition people will just fill the place and no-one will read what I have to say. And I enjoy too much blogging (blogging with readers... if I want to write for myself, I'll do journaling) to be forced to give up.

<comment><USER2> If your content really is that good, having a single social person start reading it is more than enough attention to get the word out. Not a single one of the blogs I subscribe to have ever promoted themselves beyond selling merchandise or showing up at conventions - and these are entirely the result of demand, not any initiative on the part of the author.

The only thing promotion does is skew search results in favor of your blog, at the expense of other blogs which address the same problem. If your writing really is better, this is completely unnecessary.

It seems like you crave attention more than anything, which is certainly a nobler goal than blogging strictly for money, but in the long run, you're only going to attract readers who also crave attention. Once you're no longer capable of giving them that attention, they will go somewhere else.

There is a "wall" between blogs like yours and the ones that really take off, and it's entirely based on the author's motivations.

<comment><AUTHOR> Social media doesn't work like this, this approach would take ages. People following me at twitter like my content (quite a few of my followers do so after reading my blog, thus I assume they like my content), but the number of visits I get through twitter is close to 0, and some of them even retweet or post my stories.

On the other hand, the only promotion from the post that helps searchs results is commenting in other blogs, and not in all (because of the "nofollow" tag). All the steps I suggest has 0 net effect with search results. To rank high you either need to be linked to, be the only one addressing the problem, or do some kind of black google magic.

Finally, being both Hacker News readers, I am really interested in knowing which are these blogs (as we both read here, if they interest you they probably may interest me), and I want to see what they are about.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How broken is discovery on the App Store? - <AUTHOR> http://gedblog.com/2014/12/15/how-broken-is-discovery-on-the-app-store-this-broken/

<comment><USER2> very.</comment>


Mumbling Is a Data-Compression Trick - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/mumbling-isnt-a-sign-of-lazinessits-a-clever-data_compression-trick

<comment><USER2> Audio compression and encoding is such an interesting area, and I'd recommend anyone to read up on the basics. I had a naive idea about compression being something-about-cutting-waveforms or something like that, and had no idea that principles of vocoding was used to encode phone conversations - we're essentially encoding speech by passing artificial air through a software model of an artificial human speech system, and decoding it by blowing the air back out the other way! The compressed data is essentially not even the sound itself, but parameters about the artificial tongue, mouth etc.

I know this is extremely dumbed down, but every once in a while you realise there's a subject out there you know nothing about, that's just so interesting to learn a bit about - and speech encoding definitely checks that box for me!

</comment><comment><USER3> Non-mobile link: [http://nautil.us/blog/mumbling-isnt-a-sign-of- lazinessits-a-...](http://nautil.us/blog/mumbling-isnt-a-sign-of-lazinessits- a-clever-data_compression-trick)

<comment><AUTHOR> not all compression are equal, I guess from the senses there are perceptual vs compression rate to consider. For language, it's a cognition issue.</comment></comment>


The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don't Tell Anyone You're Good at It - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-first-rule-of-microsoft-exceldont-tell-anyone-youre-good-at-it-1538754380 <comment><USER2> You know who's awesome at Excel? Martin Shkreli. You know, the Wall Street asshole who's in jail now? A while back, someone told me "hey, dude, there are these videos on YouTube where Martin Shkreli uses Excel, and they're fucking magic. It's like the first time you watched someone who's really good at Vim. "

It's true: [0]. Say what you will about that little heartless douchebag, he's fucking awesome at using Excel.

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFSf5YhYQbw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFSf5YhYQbw)

<comment><USER3> >>You know, the Wall Street ... who's in jail now?

He is a seriously misunderstood figure. Have watched his YouTube videos too, not just the investment class but also his working sessions. Sure his excel skills are legendary.

But I learned a lot from him about skills, learning and mastery. Merely watching him work not only motivated me. But gave me tremendous perspective on time, its utility to life and how skills and knowledge need to work in general.

This guy has legendary skills in investing world. But apart from that he was always reading a book or two. He was doing organic chemistry, chess, playing guitar, learning programming and interests in wide variety of topics in economics.

He was first genuine example of 10k hour practice I have watched live in practice.

You also get to look into the mind of this guy, and see what's at the core of it, and you see most is basically 'knowledge and practice'.

<comment> nv-vn Agreed. He really is an inspiration. In jail he's spending his time reading and learning, which you can follow along with on his blog. He's a very intelligent guy and I think he's almost like an anti-hero who's bad at portraying himself. I think if he played his cards right he'd paid a fine and spent no time in jail, but he had way too much fun stirring up a scene.

<comment><USER3> I largely believe now that the left movements across the world have degraded to making a virtue out of laziness, poverty and people lack of ability to take initiative.

There was no way this guy could have survived, in fact Martin should have spent time learning a little politics too.

If you have the kind of skills, motivated enough, have ability to take initiatives and overall quality of human enterprise that this guy has you are bound to attract envy, spite and more importantly people just want to see the end of you for being a live anti thesis to their lives.

I have a feeling that people won't relax until they see Elon Musk meeting the same fate too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If we're sharing awesome excel videos, You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky has to be among the best I've ever seen. Joel, being on the team that made excel, has an incredible amount of excel knowledge.

The video is meant to be in the same vein as the You Suck at Photoshop videos. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c)

<comment><USER5> He's got a Bloomberg console and he's typing data manually from a PDF into Excel. That's just got to be the incorrect workflow. If not, there is room for huge improvement in financial tools.

<comment><USER6> I used to work for a financial services company. Their main product was a 30 year old cobol program used by many large banks.

Some of them would use our software to print various reports and then _manually enter those printed values in to excel_.

Even worse, the software could export to a format excel could process so it wasn't necessary in the first place.

Don't expect to be disrupting banking anytime soon though. Banks are incredibly risk averse, especially when it comes to messing with expensive legacy software that has been working for decades.

At one point, one of the company's customers did an investigation to see how much it would cost to replace the software, and it was close to 9 figures, and so they decided it was more cost effective just to continue paying the multi- million dollar yearly licenses.

<comment><USER7> > At one point, one of the company's customers did an investigation to see how > much it would cost to replace the software, and it was close to 9 figures, > and so they decided it was more cost effective just to continue paying the > multi-million dollar yearly licenses.

A bank I've worked at had a project to replace lots of bank's legacy (Mainframes and Cobol) with Java on Linux. The project's budget was over 1 billion dollars and it was estimated to take 5 years.

<comment><USER6> The company I worked for tried to rewrite everything in Java twice.

Both attempts cost millions, both were abandoned.

The lessons (and pain) from the first attempt were ignored because not enough of the upper management were still around, and the only people who remembered the pain were the rank and file, who were ignored by the new upper management types looking to leave their mark on the product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Shameless plug - we actually founded a service [1] that provides Excel experts on-demand, within 30 to 60 seconds. So if you're tired of being the "Excel expert" at work feel free to pass them on to us. Also happy to answer any questions.

Tidbit: Most popular questions tend to be formulas, vlookups, conditional formatting, pivots.

[1] [https://www.excelchat.co](https://www.excelchat.co)

<comment><USER9> Word of advice - slow down your sliders. I read at an absurdly fast pace and I barely finish the "Our Experts" excerpts before it scrolls. I know, from testing, that I can mouse over them to pause them but that isn't intuitive to people who don't build these sorts of things as their day job.

That being said - bookmarked. I've needed this in the past and while I may not need it right now I probably will in the future.

<comment><USER10> This is why auto-sliding sliders with text are always a terrible idea. You can never sync them to all users read speed, so some always think they are too fast, and some always think they are too slow.

<comment><USER9> They should be able to be paused, controlled for prev/next movement, last a minimum of 3 seconds (and longer for large pieces of text). If it is too slow the user can click "next" without it being an annoying experience. If it is too fast - even with the ability to go back - it is an annoying experience without the ability to pause it. But it is _always_ better to be too slow than to be too fast.

My honest advice would be [1] and it should be designed in such a way that all reviews are visible, perhaps in 3 columns, instead of a stupid carousel slider. But slowing down the slider would be more trivial - as I expect very few people are actually able to read all of the text of any of the excerpts before it changes on them.

[0] [https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/time-limits- pause...](https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/time-limits-pause.html)

[1] [http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/](http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/)

<comment><USER8> thanks for the pointers.. passing them on to our UI designer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> People say "use a real database", fine, but where is the visual data entry? Where are the easy adhoc reports? Where are the forms? I guess if you're on Windows you can use Microsoft Access, but that's the only accesible tool I know of that doesn't require a team of programmers or an enterprise license for some Oracle/SAP type monstrosity.

<comment><USER12> I read a thing a few months back about some Western game developers collaborating with Japanese counterparts for the first time, and their biggest surprise was that a whole lot of game data is stored in an Excel file during development. If you want to change an enemy's stats or a physics parameter, you don't dig through config files with a text editor, you just pull up the spreadsheet. Reportedly it made a lot of tweak-test-repeat work much quicker.

<comment><USER13> I don't understand how editing a number in an excel file is any easier than editing a number in a text file. What was it that made the difference?

<comment><USER14> Probably table representation. It's relatively hard to implement something similar using text format. You can have row for every unit in the game with columns corresponding to various characteristics. It looks very natural in Excel, but it would require quite a lot of formatting and errors with text file. Also Excel could have formulas which might be useful somewhere and supporting formulas in config file is another level of complexity and almost certainly it'll be worse than Excel.

<comment><USER15> Then use a real database. You probably have a SQLite dependency anyway, so take advantage of it.

Or don't, since SCMs are much better at diffing plain text than either.

> Also Excel could have formulas which might be useful somewhere and > supporting formulas in config file is another level of complexity and almost > certainly it'll be worse than Excel.

You'll have an easier time reimplementing Excel's formula system than basic arithmetic? I find that hard to believe.

<comment><USER12> > _You 'll have an easier time reimplementing Excel's formula system than > basic arithmetic? I find that hard to believe._

I'm not sure you understood what the parent was saying? This seems like a non sequitur.

In a spreadsheet, derived values can be updated instantly. Say you want to upgrade a bandit from leather armor to chainmail (6 or so equipment items changed), and then verify that his total defense and modified movement speed are still within reasonable ranges for the part of the game where he appears. With a text file, you've got some arithmetic to do. With a spreadsheet, it's there at a glance.

Or say your enemies are missing too much, and you want to give them +10% accuracy across the board, for all of 50+ enemies. In a text file, that's a lot of cursoring around. In a database, you could knock together a query to do it, but that still might take a couple of minutes, depending. In a spreadsheet, I could do it in 15 seconds. (And if I screw it up, a couple of Ctrl-Zs puts everything back where it started. That's not so easy in a database.)

And, y'know, a lot of programmers really underestimate the value of good formatting. A database can spit out nice columnar tables easily, but a spreadsheet can do things like put borders between stat clusters related to different categories; automatically color-code data so you can see at a glance what the highest and lowest values in a given column are, or spot out-of-range derived values; add alternate-row shading to make it easier to scan across a long row; and on and on. That is _useful._ It lets you find and correlate the data you want faster with fewer errors. Not everything has to be viewed in flat text.

<comment><USER16> Your first couple of points reminds me of a talk[1] about using a graph database for tracking all sorts of entity and quest dependency relationships to assist in game balancing and content creation.

[1] [https://www.airpair.com/neo4j/posts/modelling-game- economy-w...](https://www.airpair.com/neo4j/posts/modelling-game-economy-with- neo4j)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> As bad (and deserved) as their reputation is for helping well-meaning users to create a big mess, spreadsheet software provides an incredibly intuitive UI to put in front of users that have the domain knowledge but not necessarily direct software engineering knowledge.

I've been thinking about this for years, ever since I first read "A Small Matter of Programming" by Bonnie Nardi: [https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/small- matter-programming](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/small-matter-programming) where she explored the history of end-user programming systems, and concludes that spreadsheet and CAD software are the only examples that have had widespread and undeniable success.

ASMOP was published in 1993 and I think it is still just as relevant today.

Just as it's possible to write a terribly-architected and designed program in any language, I suspect that with the right engineering effort and insight, modern software engineering practices could bring the complexity under control.

We shouldn't expect to just take spreadsheets and stick them into production, just as you wouldn't take a hastily-written prototype written in any programming language and do the same.

<comment><USER18> End user "programming" systems are precisely what personal computing was supposed to be about. Aside from spreadsheets and maybe a couple of other things (hangers-on from the business world), that line of inquiry and use has been abandoned. It's worth the development community's time to ask why today we have a larger schism between "programmers" and "users" than we did in the 90s.

Let's remember just how popular Hypercard was and what it meant for personal computing. It did not die because people weren't using it. It was allowed to wither on the vine because it never made business sense. And that's tragic.

<comment><USER19> My understanding of that shift is that the average "user" has become less savvy, because of improved UX and an overall increase in the percentage of the population who are "users". This is because over the last 30 years computers have moved out of just the business/academia/enthusiast space into people's homes (and then pockets).

The average "user" can't program a computer because we've been able to bring computing to a whole new population of people with neither the opportunity nor inclination to learn to use a computer at that level. You don't have to be a computer nerd to get immense value from computing, and in my mind that's a very good thing.

<comment><USER18> Excel is programming a computer. So was Hypercard. Any UX that reduces user "savvy" rather than enhacing it can hardly be said to be improved. A large part of the developer community has a very static idea of what a computer can be or what programming can be. What does it mean to author in the medium and why have we stopped trying to figure it out?

<comment><USER20> I think it depends what you mean by "savvy". A UX which reduces what the user has to think about to get stuff done is generally positive. That's what an abstraction is, and we intentionally create them all the time.

The counter-example is trite, but it's true: it's a very good thing that I don't need to know how a Xeon is going to reorder the instructions that v8 is going to turn my webpage into after Babel has turned my es6+whateverextensions into something node can actually execute. I can go down the stack and find out if I absolutely have to, but it's a total waste of time otherwise.

I also don't think we've stopped trying to figure it out. We see new languages, new environments coming forward fairly regularly. My instinct is that the reason it seems that way is because the computing field selected for people interested in that stuff _early_ , and more recent incomers are a) people who don't yet have the experience to understand where the limits are; and b) as a population are less interested on the whole in asking those questions, because if they had been interested, they'd already be present. It's also dramatically harder for a single project to become ubiquitous the way Hypercard was, simply because of the size of both computer-using and software project populations. It's a statistical artefact, in other words.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I do not understand the mindset of not wanting to help other people. Enabling people to learn more about the software they use every day is better for everyone involved. Yes, some problems are too complex to solve in a few minutes, but pointing someone in the right direction requires little to no effort.

Excel lacks the community programmers have and also lacks the learning opportunities given by open-source software. A lot of people struggle to find answers specifically because of this lack of community around using Excel as a tool. I know I personally have floundered learning things that would have been simple to understand had there been someone to guide me, so I try to provide that same support to other people when they face the same obstacles.

Yes, its fun to cringe at people's inexperience. It is also important to recognize we all started there.

<comment><USER22> It's less "not wanting to help people" and more "once people know you're 'the Excel person' they come to you for everything to do with Excel". It's very similar to being 'the computer person' in a family/group of friends and everyone coming to you with all their various tech support questions. At a certain point, it starts ruining your productivity since you get taken out of your regular job to do these one time help requests.

<comment><USER23> This is my experience working in offices like law firms that are filled with people that have limited technical aptitude for using software. Showing any sort of competency is a recipe for increasing your workload with no conferred benefits.

<comment><USER24> That's fine, the problem is that you also get all the blame as well. Once you "fix" a computer, everything that will break will suddenly be your fault.

<comment><USER25> Very true. I once installed a printer driver in a friend's company. I got blamed for missing files by several employees during the following weeks.

<comment><USER26> I've heard that auto mechanics know these as "Ever since you..." stories.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I suck at excel, but confession: i know how to make Installer programs and I don't tell anyone anything about them, EVER. I learned how to make MSIs packages and NSIS installers about 15 years ago and it didn't stop until I completely redacted the info and experience and changed jobs.

<comment><USER28> Know your pain, I know how to use grep/awk/sed/..., now I am "logs investigation" expert too often, ugh..

<comment><USER29> I'm not sure which is worse. Being that awk/sed guy or being that Git guy.

<comment><USER30> Who uses "guys" anymore? Didn't stackoverflow replace that?

<comment><USER31> SO often can take hours to weeks for a good answer, and that's assuming it doesn't just get closed as a dupe when the other one doesn't answer the question.

A good "guy" (or girl!) is a phone call away and can often solve the problem in minutes.

<comment><USER32> Totally agree, that network of SMEs is a huge productivity multiplier

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I have a joke I tell about Excel:

 _Excel is amazing, because it 's the wrong tool for everything! Which is really impressive, since there aren't many tools you can do everything with!_

I realize it's not a very funny joke, but I do think it's true.

<comment><USER34> This is great, thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm "the excel guy" for a lab of about 100 people, and it is indeed a challenge sometimes. Mostly I just yell at them and tell them to stop using excel sheets as makeshift databases. Then I yell at them some more and make them switch from formulas (which, being written in reverse Polish, are terrible to debug) over to macros. Then I yell at them for recording macros instead of writing them themselves. Then I just do it for them. It's not a ton of fun, but the money is good and the yelling is cathartic.

<comment><USER36> There needs to be an Excel "pro mode" where the mouse is disabled and you have to do all navigation by keyboard. People would become so much more efficient that way.

<comment><USER37> If "pro mode" is optional, it would be no more effective than the existing "pro mode" of simply taking your hand off the mouse.

<comment><USER38> I'd use it.

If there was a pro mode buried in a sub-dialog of the options panel, I would turn it on and see if I could make it for 10 minutes. Then 15, then 20 and so on. Instead of reaching for the mouse when I wanted to give up, I'd have to click on [File] > [Options] > [Advanced] and clear the "Enable pro mode" checkbox.

Wait... no. I'd have to enter [ALT], F, T, ↓, ↓, ↓, ↓, ↓, [ALT]+R (to get to Pr̲o Mode), then [SPACEBAR] :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> the best i've seen is a woman who did corporate financial planning and analysis. i could ask a question and she would have a pivot table spit out the answer as i finished the question.

i consider myself a good* (but not great) excel user, but she was amazing!

* having done complex financial modeling incorporating monte carlo simulation for predictive what-if analysis

<comment><USER40> How did she handle the precision problem?

<comment><USER39> not sure which precision problem you're referring to, but in general, we understood that excel's precision issues are probably overwhelmed by the imprecision of the model.

but i'd be more weary of using excel if we were doing scientific research (R or matlab would be better there).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Readable, non-paywalled version: [https://outline.com/epLGYZ](https://outline.com/epLGYZ)

</comment><comment><USER42> There should be a gameified excel online course. You've got challenges which you must overcome by learning ever increasing advanced excel concepts.

This would have people more 'engaged' at learning the concepts instead of trying to find the 'excel person' and dump their woes onto them.

Excel is great product (I hate it) but so often misused and abused by technically challenged individuals.

<comment><USER43> Heck, this could be an excel workbook itself!

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Joel Spolsky used to be a Program Manager for Excel. He has a great, 1h long video doing an Excel demo a few years ago - here, now YOU can be the Excel guru [https://youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c](https://youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c)

</comment><comment><USER45> As someone who finds himself called upon to operate in a lot of situations where Microsoft products are called for---I do wish the unix philosophy would have taken hold in business software.

Excel genuinely is very hard to use. As is Word, as is Photoshop/Illustrator, etc. Personally, I find those problems substantially more difficult than ordinary programming. Because you have a substantial fraction of the horsepower of an ordinary programming language, but hidden behind a forest of menus and semi-incomprehensible icons and weird terminology and poor documentation.

At least with word processing we have the capacity to strip it down to something resembling the unix philosophy, thanks to toolchains like markdown + pandoc. But for spreadsheets, what is there that's lighter than excel?

</comment><comment><USER46> Sounds like a cool startup idea.

A legion of VLOOKUP gurus manning a helpdesk, only $20 per screen-share!

<comment><USER8> Mentioned this elsewhere but we created a startup that does exactly this [1]. We charge a lot less than $20 though! Happy to answer any questions

[1] [https://www.excelchat.co](https://www.excelchat.co)

<comment><USER47> How is the pricing sustainable at $20/hour or $30/month "unlimited"? Do you just employ overseas where labor is cheap? Or are you counting on people paying $20 for questions that only take a minute or two to answer?

<comment><USER48> From their website, it says they pay experts from $2-$10 an hour.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> The widespread use of the Excel grid layout may explain why people seem to have a high tolerance for improperly-sized UIs.

Personally it drives me crazy to see things truncated all over the place, peppered with useless empty cells, for no reason other than "somebody shoehorned this sparse data into a grid and never looked back". It's like people just don't see how much time they're wasting constantly doing a mental reconstruction of their poorly-described data because they can't SEE most of it.

We really need better tools.

</comment><comment> cde-v I love being the excel guy at my office. I wish it was my only job.

</comment><comment><USER50> Shameless plug, I'm an AI researcher at Talla (talla.com). This is a problem space we're fascinated by. We want to make it easier to allow users to ask natural language questions about data in Excel, Sheets, pdf tables or really any tabular source.

What kind of questions and queries are difficult for you to do in Excel and require an "excel wizard"? Also my email is my profile, would love to hear about challenges folks face.

</comment><comment><USER51> I've always said that if I ever do one thing with my child, I'll make sure they understand how to use VLOOKUP in excel. If I do that, I'm pretty sure they'll be set for life.

Every office I've worked in those that can perform VLOOKUP's correctly become the Wizards of the office.

<comment><USER52> > Every office I've worked in those that can perform VLOOKUP's correctly > become the Wizards of the office

Some of them don't use the power wisely, though, and create poor clunky databases spread over dozens of sheets.

It would be nice if MS added more Access like data integration as an adjunct to spreadsheets. The current ODBC functionality is clunky at best and doesn't work well for shared documents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> [http://archive.is/HkCDe](http://archive.is/HkCDe)

</comment><comment><USER54> You can say what you want about Excel, but it succeeded at something where countless other software failed: Providing a smooth transition between manual data entry and programming and putting it in an interface that's easy to understand while powerful enough to accomplish many interesting tasks.

On a side note, one could say that Tensorflow is a (very) distinct Excel relative, as it also builds up a declarative description of your computation in form of a graph and then figures out how to compute that graph in an efficient manner. Excel is (in my understanding) doing something very similar by analyzing the dataflow between individual cells to compute or update values.

So maybe if we add support for backpropagation into Excel it could make a fantastic deep learning tool :D

</comment><comment><USER55> The true story of almost every finance/tech project:

Trader: "I've got a problem with my spreadsheet." Tech: "You shouldn't be using Excel for that. Let's make this better." Trader: "OK - how?" Tech: (Proposes solution - involving databases, redundancy, risk management, GUI, streaming prices, booking, etc.) Trader: "Great! So I guess at that point there (points at whiteboard), we can import it back into Excel?" Tech: "Sure." (facepalm).

This said - Python is fast becoming the new crack/Excel for front-office. Thank God for that.

</comment><comment><USER56> The first rule of Excel is to expect immense frustration.

Named ranges and tables can't be used as conditional formatting targets, Excel just converts them to absolute cell references right before your eyes. Even if you use INDIRECT.

Most formula errors result in #N/A, a generic error which never has anything remotely useful in the Excel help articles. You have to waste time searching keyword by keyword until you accidentally get the right combination to display relevant SO or obscure forum links from over 3 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER57> I also have a non-IT friend who worked in a local bank. He mainly produced different kinds of report for analysis. His main tool was Excel and he was very good at it. He told me the reason why he became good at it is, in enterprise, IT resource is grouped into a single department instead of spreading across every department. Acquiring IT resource is difficult and slow. It is faster to just use excel instead of proper tool to generate the reports. Finally he acquired the skill.

</comment><comment><USER58> If you like to get better in Excel learn some nifty tricks with tables then watch

You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c)

Replace vlookup() with index() + match() combination.

[https://chandoo.org/wp/vlookup-match-and-offset-explained- in...](https://chandoo.org/wp/vlookup-match-and-offset-explained-in-plain- english-spreadcheats/)

</comment><comment><USER59> Is there a word for being good/talented at something you find undesirable?

<comment><USER60> Cursed.

<comment><USER59> For certain curses I suppose [0]. I wanted something more general because not having words for certain concepts can affect the perception of that thing e.g. make it less relatable.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Excel would be fine if people didn't keep creating spreadsheets with it.

<comment><USER62> it's even worse when they use it as a database...

<comment><USER63> What's the alternative?

Microsoft leaves Access out of many of its Office license plans, so it's an extra cost add-on to most people, hence uninteresting.

Filemaker is very nice, but even more costly in most cases.

I've never used Base in LibreOffice, but I also don't see people sharing their Base files, from which I infer that it isn't very popular. (Could be my myopia, though.)

Even if LibreOffice Base is gaining users much more rapidly than I think it is, they're missing the cloud component for offline and mobile users, which acts as a brake on adoption, given Office365 and Google Sheets pushing people to stick with spreadsheets when they want to share tabular data across sites and to mobile users.

Collabora Online is moving LibreOffice into the cloud, but they haven't done anything with Base, as far as I can see.

Apple's iWork web apps are very nice, and they have native clients on many of the platforms I care about, but there's no GUI database component at all.

Without a free, cloud-capable, normal-person focused GUI/web database system, I don't see Excel-as-database going away.

<comment><USER52> Easy peasy. Everybody should just use SQL Server Express via VBA and ODBC to store and retrieve data for their spreadsheets.

More seriously, It would be nice if MS added a better way to manage data tables outside of sheets in Excel. They have the underlying technologies to do it. It just needs a low friction UI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> I've always wondered: these clunky Excel sheets are used at billion-dollar companies. Why don't they invest in building a sane web application (or similar) that can do all the validation and calculations in a much better looking interface that is suited for the job / application?

<comment><USER65> >Why don't they invest in building a sane web application (or similar) that can do all the validation and calculations in a much better looking interface that is suited for the job / application?

Inertia, training cost, and risk of failure.

1 year ago I made a very extensive spreadsheet to analyze planned production and forecasts at a factory. It took about 6 months after the logic was thoroughly vetted to transition it into an IT supported auto-update to a database as the primary project for 1 IT analyst. No pretty front end to modify production parameters or anything like that. If we transitioned any earlier, it would have been the typical "our user keeps changing the scope and logic of the application we're trying to build for them".

This was probably the best way things could have reasonably gone. No long term spreadsheet usage, spreadsheet had good documentation, used tables, names ranges to make the formulas easy to read, etc.

Excel _can_ do a decent job at figuring out the required logic. But it is used as an everything tool where task specific applications would be best. And people only know enough to be dangerous

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> This article seems like it was written 10 years ago.

BI, Technical Account Managers, Sales Engineers, and Finance People should all have a decent excel grasp at minimum.

Is it that common for there to be desperate needs for minimal competence in organizations?

<comment> barry-cotter Yes. The world is full of overwhelming incompetence. After a brief honeymoon period where you're learning almost every job turns into "I'm surrounded by idiots" unless you're the idiot. The exceptions are very effective organisations, and when they're businesses, very profitable or fast growing. Lots and lots of people reach the level of competence sufficient to not get fired and basically stay there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Everyone should be using airtable now

<comment><USER68> I agree it's incredible! Everyone owes it to themselves to try it for 5 min if not yet familiar. Its as easy and intuitive as excel (if not more) and has many of the benefits of a database plus a great interface, document attachments, integrated maps, etc.

<comment><USER69> Airtable can be mistaken for "just a pretty spreadsheet" at first glance, but it has nice column constraints, user access control, and (my favorite part) Trello-like comment history for each row.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> What this tells me is that companies need excel expertise and they need it badly, but are rarely willing to pay for it. This tells experts, that advertising their skills in this area is not going to result in rewards, rather it will cost them their time sorting messed up data. Is this a valid interpretation?

Also, since half the thread is Shkrekreli, I predict this will be featured in this week's n-gate.

</comment><comment><USER71> A lot of people here talking about pivot tables and vlookups. There's so much more to be good at in excel other than BI! Vba, udfs, volatile functions and dependency chain optimisation, com interop, windows libraries, vsto, etc.

You can build an absolutely massive application out of excel. And people will appreciate it being fully compatible with their own sheets.

</comment><comment><USER72> But I can fix your printer.

<comment><USER61> PC Load Letter: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_LOAD_LETTER](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_LOAD_LETTER)

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> First rule of development, client needs a custom report, export to Excel or ask them their Excel files

</comment><comment><USER74> Happened to me before as I used to be able to do VBA and use Excel's data analysis toolkit and then a lot of my assignments as a intern was to literally help department managers with their Excel spreadsheets even though that wasn't what I was hired for.

</comment><comment><USER75> I learned this one with typing in high school. Being the only person who could type proficiently, I was barraged by friends to type out their papers for them. After awhile I just charged people to do it. The next school I went to I made sure not to tell anyone.

</comment><comment><USER76> I'm an expert at Excel but I switched to Google Sheets years ago and haven't looked back. Version control is probably the biggest improvement; but also ability to insert SQL queries, `arrayformula`, the list goes on.

</comment><comment><USER77> I hate Excel. I use it extensively every day. It is amazing.

<comment><USER78> Hah, Excel is the true weapon of mass destruction.

And of course, it feels great when you know how to wield it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> Meanwhile, my current job uses VBA scripts written in the 90s instead of properly training its employees on how to create multi-sheet formulas.

</comment><comment><USER80> There is a paywall sadly.

I myself have stopped using excel for the last 3 years. My company runs on GSuite, and I love how there can be one source of truth updated in real-time for 1 document. For the better and the worst, some of our internal processes are Google sheets centric now.

I believe the next generation of business will be "fighting" google sheets intrusion in operation processes. Some processes are fine in a Google sheets, but not all of them.

<comment><USER81> [https://outline.com/epLGYZ](https://outline.com/epLGYZ)

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> What does this remind you of in general life? Don't tell people you have lots of money!

</comment><comment><USER83> Forget Excel. Never ever ever let anyone find out you are good with Microsoft Project.

</comment><comment><USER84> Google Sheets > Excel

<comment><USER85> In what universe?

<comment><USER76> uh version control (have u tried the version history?); live updates, arrayformula, importrange, the list goes on and keeps getting longer

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> That should be the first rule of SharePoint too. Yuck.

</comment><comment><USER87> Having used Excel for many years on the trading floor, I have to say it's awful.

It does everything, badly. Which is why it's popular. People can get by without properly thinking things through, just jamming a few formulas on a spreadsheet, and patching the calculation when something comes up. You're never forced to think rigorously.

You can use it as a crappy database. Or a crappy UI. Or a crappy place to call external DLLs from. It's the perfect tool for that guy who "has a great idea, but just needs it coded up".

If a guy comes to you with an Excel question, he wants _you_ to help _him_. Contrast this with a range of other technologies. If a guy comes to you with a question about c++, you tend to be helping each other. Same can be said for any number of things that non-techies would not think to ask. When was the last time someone asked you about Haskell or Erlang where you were treated merely as a means to someone else's end?

<comment><USER88> > Having used Excel for many years on the trading floor, I have to say it's > awful.

But the interface is not awful - it's absolutely wonderful as a quick way to enter and share data and do a fast analysis. The part that's awful is when you do more than that. And once you've got the data into Excel, why go through the trouble of changing to something else just to do one additional thing, even if that additional thing is complex?

<comment><USER87> As technological scrap paper, I admit it can be useful.

But as soon as your "fast analysis" is done, you need to be hardening whatever process it is you are creating. After all, that is what your analysis is about, right? Building some sort of repeatable, often auditable, transparent process.

<comment><USER78> But that's a great job done. You've described both - the ethos of hacker news from back in the day, and the point of excel with that original sentence.

Just Get stuff done.

Your boss will worry about an auditable process after the prototype shows merit.

Nothing in the world is feee/without trade offs. Any excel like program will have excel like problems.

The alternative being a world fragmented between different spreadsheet programs and no interop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> "Excel Everest": [https://exceleverest.com/](https://exceleverest.com/)

</comment><comment><USER90> non-paywall: [http://archive.is/HkCDe](http://archive.is/HkCDe)

</comment><comment><USER91> Paywall.

</comment><comment><USER92> The truth is that Excel is an ODBC compatible data source, and can be scripted to run SQL queries against itself... but you didn't hear that from me.

</comment><comment><USER93> For me, this article shows as paywalled. Paywalled articles should be banned, or at least some indication of a paywall should be included in the title, as people sometimes do with PDFs.

<comment><USER94> If there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the thread.

This is in the FAQ at [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) and there's more explanation here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20paywall&sort=byDate&...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20paywall&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)

<comment><USER95> Looking at their other comments it seems the OP is blind. I could see why this would be especially annoying for a blind person if you only found out once you start reading. Not sure what the answer is but I thought it was worth mentioning.</comment></comment></comment>


Programmer automates his job, gets fired after 6 years - <AUTHOR> http://interestingengineering.com/programmer-automates-job-6-years-boss-fires-finds/ <comment><USER2> Oh, I have an even better one for all of you along similar lines. Dug it out of Wayback Machine. Company thought it was one of those "advanced persistent threat" malware from super-hackers in China. Nope. The enterprise just hired someone who was as enterprising as them. :)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20130320154454/http://securitybl...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130320154454/http://securityblog.verizonbusiness.com/2013/01/14/case- study-pro-active-log-review-might-be-a-good-idea/)

Led me to create a security scheme for pulling off the same thing without detection. Depends on circumstances of course. Posted it on Schneier blog with the rest of my essays. I still wonder if I was first to do security scheme or protocol for self-outsourcing. Fun thought experiment if nothing else.

[http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/01/friday_squid_b...](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/01/friday_squid_bl_360.html#c1102977)

</comment><comment><USER3> ...and that's why it's a bad idea to separate QA from your dev team. In the long run, everyone would've been happier if his role on the dev team had been to automate the tests and then continue to work on more interesting things. If he and his company had taken that route, he'd be a very well-qualified and well-paid senior engineer right now.

<comment><USER4> Let me doubt this quite a bit. What he did was an impressive display of lack of foresight, career savy, professionnalism, interest in his professional work. What I'm saying is, engineers are thinking workers that need some indidual drive and forward thinking to succeed. He showed less ability for intrinsic motivation than a seven year old.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Probably a promotion would have been a better idea

<comment><USER6> It absolutely would have been if he'd demonstrated what he'd done right at the beginning and went to work on something else. But to sit around collecting a paycheck for years is inexcusable. It doesn't matter how brilliant someone is.

<comment><USER7> > But to sit around collecting a paycheck for years is inexcusable. It doesn't > matter how brilliant someone is.

Why is in inexcusable ? I wont mind if my employee does it. A lot of smart programmers finished their job in 4 hours and went home early. Got pay raises too.

<comment> King-Aaron Efficient work is hard to argue, but personally I see it as holding a level of contempt for your company.

<comment><USER7> I don't think I will punish my employee for having contempt for the company. That is how dictators work. If a smart employee holds my company in contempt I should probably figure out why.

<comment> King-Aaron I don't feel that it's the same thing here. I do agree that if someone is unhappy a decent manager should find out why and do what can be done to change it.

However, I see someone sitting back for _six years_ without offering any input on improvements or anything, just literally collecting a cheque and doing nothing as not being efficient or showing motivation for the company.

I agree, it shows he's smart, though he doesn't show commitment in my opinion, which is why I wouldn't justify a promotion. That's just my thoughts on the matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Maybe he should work in dev ops...</comment>