Full Employment - <AUTHOR> https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/ <comment><USER2> Reading the economic and tech-fix discussion here, it strikes me again that we're trapped in a system that doesn't provide workable means to solve our pressing problems. Yet we continue to treat it (economics, the global financial system) as some kind of inevitable force of nature, rather than as something that we invented and (to some degree) chose. I wish I knew why that is.

I don't know how we get from here to a place where these problems become solvable (or even what that place looks like) and from there to a world that is actually going to sustain us again. So its hard to have much confidence that we have much of a future beyond the later part of this century. My children will by my age then and I don't envy them.

<comment><USER3> > we're trapped in a system that doesn't provide workable means to solve our > pressing problems

Generalization: most of those problems are political rather than technical, and unlike with technical problems, if you make a wrong guess about how to solve a political problem, the costs might be unboundedly catastrophic (e.g. world war).

I personally believe that the best response to global warming is open borders, because it would mean that all the people who:

* are living in the global south could relocate somewhere colder and further inland, if they wanted;

* are subsistence farming, but who would be great engineers, scientists, etc. given the right opportunities, would be more likely to get those opportunities.

Most people think that open borders would be bad, and I don't think I will be able to persuade them otherwise in my lifetime.

In general, alternatives to persuasion in politics amount to seizing power and/or changing the rules of the game. Even if I thought I _could_ do that, which I don't, I wouldn't, because all too often in history, the cure is worse than the disease.

That's why I think these problems are hard -- and why I'm scared of people who propose grand solutions to them.

<comment><USER4> My issue with open borders is that everyone seems to come to the most populated places.

It seems kind of insane how everyone crams into the same old cities.

Companies do it because the workers are there, workers do it because the companies are there, and every city just becomes a crowded, unaffordable hellscape.

Is it not possible to build new towns and expand them anymore? There's plenty of land as far as I can tell...

<comment><USER3> What we've experienced is not open borders, at least in America it's mostly a mix of unskilled workers coming in over the Southern border and high-skilled workers coming in via visas. Naturally those recruited specifically to join companies are going to cluster where those companies are.

I also think that immigrants from a generation or two back tend to be spread out much farther. There's a large Indian population in the Detroit area, for instance: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Indian_Americans_in...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Indian_Americans_in_Metro_Detroit)

Bottom line: Immigrants, like the rest of Americans, go where the jobs are, and if that gets more spread out -- as might happen as a long-term response to COVID -- then so will the distribution of new arrivals.

Can't really speak to the experience elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Should that day come to pass, the money-issuer – the central bank – can > procure all that idle labor, without creating inflation. If the private > sector doesn't want labor, then there's no bidding war between companies and > a federal jobs program or a universal basic income, so creating money to buy > people's labor won't drive up the price of that labor.

I had to stop reading after this. This is not how inflation works and it borders on the preposterous to surmise that CBs can monetize deficits without creating inflation because there is excess supply in one market.

All of these people who would otherwise have less/no money are now spending that printed money to purchase goods like food, thus driving inflation higher. You can debate the merits of people being entitled to basic services like food, but the economic pressures are fairly well understood, even by MMTers

<comment><USER6> > All of these people who would otherwise have less/no money are now spending > that printed money to purchase goods like food, thus driving inflation > higher.

This assumes those goods are a scarce resource, so that increased consumption eventually leads to shortage. I can't quote sources, but my understanding is that we have enough food to feed everyone ATM, and any remaining hunger is just a failure of the economy to solve the distribution of currency.

<comment><USER5> These goods are scarce in the economic sense, even if you think they are "cheap". They are not free to produce.

We do have enough food to feed the world, but that would mean your food gets more expensive as other people consume what would otherwise contribute to downward supply pressure.

<comment><USER7> If there is excess food and it is given to people who would not otherwise buy food, there would be no negative effect on prices or the economy in general. Maybe examples of these types of people don't exist in America all that much but they certainly do in the rest of the world.

Your argument only makes sense if the excess food is given to people who can afford it and just want to eat for free.

<comment><USER5> I'm sorry, that's just not how economics works. A market with excess supply necessarily has lower prices than one that is balanced, ceteris paribus.

Idaho potatoes were mentioned above. They are only being thrown away because the market does not want them. The mechanism by which this happens is price: prices drop low enough that it's cheaper to throw away (we saw negative oil prices recently). One explanation is that other farmers saw this supply glut and raced to slash their prices. If we took all those excess potatoes and gave them away, then absent this excess supply, those other farmers would not have done this and prices would have remained steady or not gone down as much. Thus the artificial increase in quantity demanded is necessarily inflationary.

<comment><USER8> Incorrect. The use of discarded product by non-market flows has no effect on market price.

<comment><USER5> You're putting the cart before the horse: price came first, then the product was discarded.

The risk that these potatoes might be dumped into the market pushed prices down. If you magically take this risk away, it doesn't matter by which mechanism, that threat goes away and price responds.

If I'm another potato farmer and all of a sudden all those extra potatoes are teleported somewhere else, I will in all likelihood raise my prices.

Even the most progressive theorists would not debate this. It's basic aggregate supply and demand.

<comment><USER9> > If I'm another potato farmer and all of a sudden all those extra potatoes > are teleported somewhere else, I will in all likelihood raise my prices.

There seem to be two different scenarios being conflated here.

You describe producers acting in response to the risk of future price changes.

It seems to me that others in the thread are describing a scenario where product is discarded because the price has _already_ fallen so far that it is no longer profitable after accounting for various processing costs (ie things such as packaging and transportation).

In the latter scenario, if someone were to foot the bill for the redistribution itself there should be no direct effect on that specific part of the market. This assumes of course that the producers aren't compensated for the redistributed good (so it isn't significantly different than simply disposing of it). It also assumes that people don't resell or otherwise barter the product they receive (it's food and they're presumably starving so that assumption seems fairly reasonable in this case). (And of course there are bound to be countless indirect effects on the market as a whole.)

<comment><USER5> > It seems to me that others in the thread are describing a scenario where > product is discarded because the price has already fallen so far that it is > no longer profitable after accounting for various processing costs (ie > things such as packaging and transportation).

I understand what people are saying. Unfortunately this just isn't how things work. If there were a way for this to occur, prices would respond. Ultimately markets aggregate information and package it up in a single metric we call price. If all of a sudden there was a new future demand for some good, no matter how you frame it, prices will respond.

<comment><USER9> In the limited case where redistribution is equivalent to disposal from the perspective of the producer, and the food goes directly to people who are otherwise starving (ie literally incapable of purchasing food) I just don't see how that can be the case.

Obviously this includes a number of assumptions which might not hold. The redistributed product can't reenter the market. It must only go to those who otherwise could not have purchased it or an equivalent in the near term. The total value being redistributed must be insignificant relative to the market as a whole (to limit secondary effects). Etc.

> markets aggregate information and package it up in a single metric we call > price

In terms of the movement of information, product that would otherwise have been destroyed seems irrelevant. Consumers who were otherwise incapable of consuming seem irrelevant. Am I missing something?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's always refreshing to read someone who really gets that economy is not about money, but rather about what is being produced. The title reminded me of the famous Kalecki essay, Political Aspects of Full Employment, which actually explains deeper why this is not so easy to do as Cory Doctorow imagines (if you hadn't read it, I really recommend it, it's one of the best works on economics ever).

Here I think is the crux of the problem. In our (western civilization) societies, everyone wants to be a manager or a scrum master or at least a programmer, have a nice white collar job in the home office. Not many people want to do actual manual jobs, like painting or plumbing, even though these would actually be needed a lot. If we truly payed blue collar guys a market rate, no white collar jobs would exist, because what is the price for risking your health?

I think we are plagued by a very similar problem that plagued any human civilization before us. We have a system sustained by a psychopathic upper class, where clueless middle class, which wants to keep their white collar jobs, knows only one thing for sure - they do not want to become blue collar losers.

And the only innovation of the system we figured out was that we can make the middle class really big, thanks to productivity of technology. But unfortunately, that means we are actually underutilizing the possible technological advances. By relegating the maintenance of the technology to lower classes, we are limiting its potential, in order to preserve the middle class social status.

<comment><USER11> > In our (western civilization) societies, everyone wants to be a manager or a > scrum master or at least a programmer, have a nice white collar job in the > home office.

That's a very coastal city attitude which in most parts of the US would seem utterly provincial. The man who owns the roofing company that's redoing my roof shakes his head when he hears me talk about staring at a computer screen all day. The HVAC repairman who was at my house yesterday was horrified to find out that I need a special keyboard to prevent pain in my hands from too much typing. "Don't you have insurance or workers comp?" he asked. He thought I was lying or mistaken when I laughed and explained that my injuries are mine to deal with on my own.

In my part of America, which is neither overly cosmopolitan nor a big city where all the wide-eyed, bushy-tailed dreamers are flocking, most people aim to work in the various trades after high school. The ambitious ones will move up in the world by owning businesses which employ tradesmen, but that's about as far as most will go. To most HN readers this will seem like a colossal economic hole, but it's nothing like it. Tradesmen with only a few years of experience make decent money, and business owners are enjoying conditions similar to those which HNers with "lifestyle businesses" aim to attain.

Yes, there are untold millions of Americans working menial jobs. Those jobs require no special skills or experience, which is why such workers are seen as expendable. To lump such workers and their plight together with decidedly blue-collar tradesmen is a mistake.

<comment><USER12> Sorry, I know you wanted to communicate a lot with that paragraph but I gotta ask - what keyboard do you use? I want to avoid carpal tunnel myself but haven't been able to find any recommendations online.

<comment><USER11> I use the ErgoDox EZ ([https://ergodox-ez.com/](https://ergodox-ez.com/)) with those sculpted caps that come without letters printed on them. I love this keyboard: it's one of my most prized possessions. I only wish they'd made one where the sculpted caps _do_ have letters printed on them. This would make it possible for other persons in my household to use my keyboard.

<comment><USER13> I had some wrist pain building up during typing, which stopped since I switched to the ergodox. But it is a bit huge in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a great essay, but it doesn't give me much hope for the US. Our behavior during this pandemic has been for one part of the country to finger wag and disbelieve while the other part suffers, while doing very little to actually fight the disease. It feels like we are so incapable of responding to this crisis that we are simply retreating into fantasy and pretending it's not a big deal. This is all with a fast moving crisis that is in each of our own neighborhoods, and has already directly impacted about one in every hundred Americans.

When it comes to responding to climate change, I expect we will do basically nothing to prepare, and that we will abandon flooded coastal cities only after they've already been permanently flooded.

<comment><USER15> > while doing very little to actually fight the disease

Are you saying that there isn't much in the way of medical research going on to try to come up with treatments, preventive measures, and potential vaccines or cures for the disease?

What do you think could be done to start that kind of research in the US?

<comment><USER16> 350 million people. How many are pursuing medical research in any of its myriad forms? How many are posting 5g conspiracies, refusing to wear a mask or claiming that people dying years early on average isn't a big deal?

The second cohort is a multiple in size of the first.

<comment><USER17> > The second cohort is a multiple in size of the first.

That's a weird way of looking at it. The people who do $job provide food, energy, building materials etc and taxes so some people can specialize on medical research.

It would be terribly inefficient if we just switched over the majority of the population to medical research. I doubt they'd make much progress, and at the same time pulling them from their normal jobs would create a lot of problems that would make some 10 million excess deaths projection pale in comparison.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Compare [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_ch...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_change)

Wikipedia quotes studies that put the estimated aggregate impact at losing about 0% to 20% of world GDP. That's comparable eg to moving from NYC to a place with average US GDP per capita.

That's certainly a lot, but perhaps not a world shattering impact.

(Edit: the studies quoted on that Wikipedia page are quite old by now. It would be useful to find more up to date material.)

For some thoughts on a government job guarantee, see [https://web.archive.org/web/20200404052902/https://slatestar...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200404052902/https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/16/basic- income-not-basic-jobs-against-hijacking-utopia/)

<comment><USER19> Assuming that continued economic growth takes place (a safe assumption; the so-called third world countries are growing at a fast pace), the net economic result could still be positive.

Here's a quote from Nick Bostrom from the Wikipedia article:

> Even the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, a report prepared > for the British Government which has been criticized by some as overly > pessimistic, estimates that under the assumption of business-as-usual with > regard to emissions, global warming will reduce welfare by an amount > equivalent to a permanent reduction in per capita consumption of between 5 > and 20%. In absolute terms, this would be a huge harm. Yet over the course > of the twentieth century, world GDP grew by some 3,700%, and per capita > world GDP rose by some 860%. It seems safe to say that (absent a radical > overhaul of our best current scientific models of the Earth's climate > system) whatever negative economic effects global warming will have, they > will be completely swamped by other factors that will influence economic > growth rates in this century.

<comment><USER18> Yes, that's what I was aiming at. Fortunately, these days poor countries develop so quick, that even a 20% hit is equivalent to only a few years of growth.

However, I would go by the formulation in your quote "swamped by other factors" and not with "the net economic result could still be positive."

To make your formulation work, you'd have to say the net impact of business- as-usual growth and climate change. It's easy to misinterpret that.

Do keep in mind that difference places on earth will most likely be hit at a different magnitude. So some will suffer more than others.

That's a good argument for allowing more migration around the world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> My only concern with this, is he assumes that all that work is going to take an extremely long time and doesn't even consider the fact that it might take significantly less time than he proposes. He acknowledges this but doesn't actually go down the rabbit hole.

> Remediating climate change will involve unimaginably labor-intensive tasks, > like relocating every coastal city in the world kilometers inland, building > high-speed rail links to replace aviation links, caring for hundreds of > millions of traumatized, displaced people, and treating runaway zoontoic and > insectborne pandemics.

This does sound like a lot of work, but realistically it's like, what... maybe 10-20 years worth of actual human labor at current levels? Our capacity is so enormous that probably 90% of the things you'll interact with today were created in the past 10 years. If machines are slated to replace that amount of manufacturing, imagine the labor that would be displaced! If we could hypothetically throw double the labor into these projects than before these cities would go up instantly. Like Chinese Ghost cities.

Our civilization is already built. Most of the work went into building the required tools and technology which enable us to do more with less. Building skyscrapers is just large scale Legos when you have the right tools. What took Egyptians thousands of people now takes about 12 equipment operators. Now that we have those tools, now that we've commoditized them all this isn't really a "daunting" task for us as a species. Societally it presents new challenges, but humans are nothing if not resilient.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is just Cory's musings based on a list of very questionable assumptions. At several points he is not quite factually wrong but almost factually wrong (30% unemployment sounds huge, till you realise the employment rate has been falling, is around 50% and much lower in plenty of Rust Belt towns without total collapse). Why are we even discussing it?

<comment><USER22> Seconded. This strikes me as the half confused ramblings of someone who has smoked too much weed and watched Mad Max once too often.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> There's a lot to digest in this article and I have yet to digest most of it. But I don't think Doctrow understands the nature of immanent technological unemployment. It does not depend on the development of General AI, as he seems to suppose.

90% of professional motor-vehicle operators, retail workers, call center staff, radiologists, surgeons and other jobs can be unemployed due to the deployment of special purpose technologies whose development is well underway.

Some of those people, through the normal avenues of market-based resource distribution, will become plumbers, construction workers, and fill other-hard- to-automate roles in order to earn a living.

If the state institutes something like UBI, then still more of them will become artists, writers, community organizers and fill other roles that might earn them some money but would not on their own guarantee a full, stable income.

When global heating and sea-level rise create clear market incentives to rebuild the national infrastructure, those among the unemployed who are capable to work on that stuff will have a strong incentive to do so.

But for the state to, through a guaranteed jobs program, make effective use of 40-50% of the population in reconstructing national infrastructure as a response to global heating does not seem (to me) realistic. Are enough of those people capable of gaining the required skills for those kinds of projects? Where should they go and what should they do?

</comment><comment><USER24> I think the general marketing problem with climate change is that people know it's going to happen, but not exactly when. Are we going to have issues next year, 5 years, 20 years, etc? How will these issues impact me and my neighbors? It's difficult to predict these things, so I think many people become skeptical of the milestones we are supposed to be hitting due to climate change and we just become reactive as a society rather than fully proactive.

<comment><USER7> But... we are having issues right now? People aren't acting because there's no economic incentive, it is only in part due to denial or ignorance. Many of the world's leaders who have to power to shift the narrative are not doing so because it would be a short term economic loss and businesses aren't happy about it.

I mean, many technologies like carbon scrubbers already exist. Why aren't businesses buying them?

This is something we need to decide as a society to act on out of pure good faith, there will not be any profit to be made from the sacrifices that need to take place. People need to come to terms with just... being kinder. It would help if world leaders created jobs for this industry on a budget deficit and helped people get into those jobs.

<comment><USER24> Totally agree that we, as in the world, are having issues right now and this is clearly being observed. My only point with this is to say that the impact is not being felt by most people just yet. The economic incentives for reducing our carbon footprint are not there for the public market to make any significant improvements to the situation. If the economic incentives are not there for the public markets, then that means new policy needs to be enacted in order to tackle this, which given the state of the world right now, seems unlikely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> One thing I think is not said often enough is that money might be a store of value on an individual level, but in the level of the whole economy, it is not. It's just lubricant for making transactions. You can't take a big pile of money out of the economy one one year and then spend it 10 years later. You would get deflation and unemployment when you took the money out, then inflation when you put it back in. That's because money has no real value, it's just paper or numbers in a database. Property and labor power have real value but not money. That's why claims of there being a "social security trust fund" just seem bizarre to me- the account holding that money is purely imaginary and in reality they spent all the money collected right away. They _had_ to spend it because otherwise it would have decreased the money supply. And whether the money they spend on the program later comes out of the trust fund or whether they just print it makes no difference. On the level of the nation as a whole, money is only lubricant. Not a store of value.

</comment><comment><USER26> If anyone saw a path to general AI from current tech then we'd already have general AI.

Pretty week argument for or against general AI being possible.

</comment><comment><USER27> > _If we're willing to stipulate a fundamental breakthrough that produces an > AI, what about a comparable geoengineering breakthrough? Maybe our > (imaginary) AIs will be so smart that they'll figure out how to change the > Earth's albedo._

Marine cloud brightening was proposed in 1990.

</comment><comment><USER28> >One side effect of this is that it thoroughly forecloses on the dream of a General AI. Societies whose primary industry is digging through rubble for canned goods while drinking your own urine to survive do not make fundamental AI breakthroughs.

I find this deeply resonating.

</comment><comment><USER29> > California doesn't need money; it needs ventilators.

Source?

<comment><USER30> I had to scroll back to the top to double check the post date, because this sounds like information from four months ago...

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> > Remediating climate change will involve unimaginably labor-intensive tasks, > like relocating every coastal city in the world kilometers inland

Isn't sea level rise likely to only be a few feet? Regardless, Holland seems fine living below sea level. I don't think we really need to move cities kilometers inland.

<comment><USER21> 2.3m per degree C. That's about 7ft per degree. And we're looking at a 5C (aka 35ft) rise.

And that's without the "leverage" of flat land: you might have to go a mile in land to find the first place that's an inch about the beach. Ever been on a flat beach when the tide came in? You can lose a lot of land to a very small rise in sea...

<comment><USER31> Thanks. Either way, it seems much simpler to do something similar to what Holland has done than to move millions of people (hundreds of millions if we're talking about the entire world) inland.

<comment><USER21> Broadly I agree, but I think that is location specific: can you imagine doing that over the whole east coast? Is the beach\seabed stable enough? What about rivers going out, can we cope with them? Will anyone want to live in Miami if there's no beach? Will we need Mexico\Canada to do their sections to match?

I think smaller local mixed solutions are more likely given the scale and the US approach to government...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> How many pollution do we need to make to "relocate every coastal city in the world kilometers inland"? The notion that the objective for the human race it's to be employed is one of the two main reasons that we are destroying the planet.

<comment><USER32> It's not IA that eleminated our jobs, it was our parents. We need to be gratefull for what they have done and stop this full employment bullshit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm sorry but this article is garbage.

> That is, I believe that even if we were – by some impossible-to-imagine > means – to produce a general AI tomorrow, we would still have 200-300 years > of full employment for every human who wanted a job ahead of us.

The guy think that automation is far ahead. And people are needed for the economy to function.

> That money is mostly chasing the same goods that were available before the > crisis (rent, groceries, and debt service) so it's not crowding out other > buyers and causing inflation

Which is the same as saying that all people quarantined are doing BS jobs. Since they can be without that work but the economy is functioning and supporting all of them. Which means, if I'm reading it correctly, that we are already past the automation stage.

Here is one job that we could do without: The OP job. He is writing BS articles that probably could be written by the next few iterations of GPT-X.

The irony.

</comment><comment><USER34> I like the way this guy writes. I wonder if the idea that 30% unemployment cannot exist might be challenged by the ability of right wing authoritarian governments, which are on the rise globally, to tamp down dissent.

</comment><comment><USER35> 1) I tried to read the article, but it's badly structured and edited.

2) The SF Bay Area has never had a ventilator shortage. In fact, we gave away 500 in March/April to other states because we have too many.

3) The article mixes up various timelines into an incoherent wall of text - General AI, corona pandemic and global warming effects all have different timelines.

4) The USA is run by oligarchs who have a policy of discarding workers, so that completely undermines the article - the unemployed will not be working on moving cities inland, they will just be forgotten and destitute.

(I hope when Cory is able to focus he can improve the article. Maybe there is something worthwhile in there.)

<comment><USER18> > 4) The USA is run by oligarchs who have a policy of discarding workers, so > that completely undermines the article - the unemployed will not be working > on moving cities inland, they will just be forgotten and destitute.

What's your evidence for that? Unemployment was really quite low in the last decade up until a few months ago, with presumably the same 'oligarchs' already in power?

<comment><USER7> Unemployment was lower but jobs became worse. If there was no increase in federal minimum wage in a decade, you can see why employment went up in that exact same decade.

It's not good enough to just point to one statistic and cancel out a deeply complex claim like that one.

<comment><USER18> > Unemployment was lower but jobs became worse.

How do we know that?

> If there was no increase in federal minimum wage in a decade, you can see > why employment went up in that exact same decade.

That's great news, if true. It suggest a very actionable strategy to keep unemployment in check.

(Though, of course, looking around the globe, even the absence of a minimum wage law doesn't make all other unemployment problems magically vanish.)

> It's not good enough to just point to one statistic and cancel out a deeply > complex claim like that one.

Indeed. This was just to point out that the claim would have to be backed by quite a bit of evidence, because the surface facts about unemployment need quite a bit of explaining away first.

There was no evidence at all provided in the comment I replied to. So this was an invitation to bring some evidence.

I have no opinion on 'oligarchs', only on hypothetical 'oligarchs who have a policy of discarding workers'.

<comment><USER36> I mean... have you read the Wikipedia page of the current head of the Dept. of Education? See also: page of the head of the Dept. of Justice?

If you haven't... you _really_ should

If doing that doesn't change any of your opinions on the matter... oh well, we're already doomed.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: A project you gave up on? (time, cost, you were not smart/ready enough ) - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I was given a take home project to complete as part of an interview process for one company. I was given 48 hours to implement a basic chat server in Golang. I didn't know Golang, but the hiring manager thought it'd be a good challenge to see how quickly I learn new things and deliver results. I spent an entire weekend learning Go and tried to be honest about using only 48 hours to write the application. I wasn't given any skeleton code, had to implement the whole thing from scratch. I never made an entire web app from scratch especially in language I wasn't familiar with so the learning experience felt like drinking from a firehose. I learned a ton but couldn't complete the project because it was a bit too much on top of my full-time job and going through interviews with other companies, so I submitted my barely functioning code in shame and knew that was automatic rejection right there. I wonder if I'm just a shitty developer or if given enough time I would have been able to make it work.

<comment><USER3> Maybe it's just me, but I'm not sure what the point of take home projects like that is. Like my first instinct for something like this is to Google it. Guess what happens when I do google "chat server in golang"? I get a bunch of examples. So do I just copy them/strip them down/combine the examples or do I try to code this thing from scratch with no examples? Guess which I would do in an actual job?

No, you're not a shitty dev. I'm sure given enough time you would have gotten it. Take home projects are weird. They are better than the whiteboarding imo, but only barely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I almost gave up the work on [http://sirix.io](http://sirix.io). But somehow still motivated to bring forth the idea of a versioned storage system capable of supporting temporal, analytical tasks. That is storing and querying snapshots of data in O(log n). Still, sometimes it's frustrating to spend so much spare time and probably noone is using it. More than once I thought why am I doing it, but somehow it struck me back then in the university and I loved the project. And hey, it was a lot of fun to build an asynchronous, RESTful-API in Vert.x and Kotlin now, and maybe it's going to help someone once I build the JSON layer besides XML (shouldn't be that much work after all). In essence it's just which records we are going to be stored.

But sorry, didn't mean to advertise...

</comment><comment><USER5> Online fuel tracking system, that would allow you to compare your vehicle's fuel economy with others around the world. I spent too much time trying to get the data model just the way I wanted it, fuelly.com came along and ate my lunch.

</comment><comment> java-man Secure digital archive - locally encrypted archive (text search, image preview, tagging) with a cloud backup.

The market appears to be too small, the majority of people are ok with google photos and the like.

[https://goryachev.com/products/secure- archive/index.html](https://goryachev.com/products/secure-archive/index.html)

</comment><comment> java-man Software localization/translation service, aimed at developers and translators. Failed to take off.

[https://goryachev.com/products/localizer/index.html](https://goryachev.com/products/localizer/index.html)

</comment><comment> java-man Personalized news recommendation service. People are ok with regular news and the Economist.

[https://news-ai.com/](https://news-ai.com/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Running my own online sports betting company.

</comment><comment><USER7> SongScraps, a site and app I had developed for songwriters. A lot of writers come up with one line at a time, or a piece of a song or concept, so it was a way to organize those scraps and then assemble them into a song.

The app I had built was built on titanium appcelerator at the time, and both a new phone release and a new titanium release meant I would have had to recode the entire app. So, I closed it down instead.

Side note: I like to think I pioneered flat design with this site. Not as a concept really, but I was just tired of skeumorphic site design so I made everything simple.</comment>


1099 filings expand greatly starting in 2012: the penalties for failing to file - <AUTHOR> http://www.startupcompanylawblog.com/2010/08/articles/tax/summary-of-form-1099-penalties/#page=1

<comment><USER4> It seems like a major identity-theft liability to distribute your EIN or SSN to everybody who's bought $600 worth of goods or services. If you're doing consulting work, you should have incorporated and therefore have an EIN (which I suspect is more secure than SSN). But if not, you're going to be giving your SSN out to lots of people.

Based on the average net-profit of identity theft, would it be worthwhile for scammers to "invest" $600 to buy a product from somebody who they suspect hasn't incorporated, just to get their SSN?

<comment><USER5> You don't need to incorporate to get an EIN. I got one for my sole proprietor LLC. I'm not sure about other states, but in Oregon it was a single page LLC application and a $55 fee. (It's now $100, I believe.) After getting the LLC registered with the state, I sent in the EIN form to the IRS, and a few weeks later an IRS guy called me to confirm a few of the line items. That was it.

I've created a PDF of my W-9 and have it available upon customer request. I strongly oppose the 1099-INT reporting requirement, but unless it changes there are a few things that will make it a little less painful.

 _(BTW, despite the stereotypes, the guy from the IRS was really friendly and helpful.)_

<comment><USER6> I have literally _never_ dealt with anyone at the IRS who was anything but friendly and helpful.

<comment><USER7> Same here. I've had both mail and phone contact with them on a few different occasions, related to contract paperwork technicalities over the years, and they were always pretty nice, clear, reasonable, honestly trying to be helpful, etc. Granted, I try to be exactly those same things to them, so perhaps that helps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's been at least one attempt to reverse the 1099 reporting changes: <http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-5982>

Each representative that voted no on this should get an earful. With no riders on the bill, a no-vote there is inexcusable (especially given the composition of the votes, which flies directly in the face of certain rhetoric).

edit: Correction, this isn't the bill I thought it was. It does have a couple of extra provisions (to which votes against should also be infuriating for most). There's at least one other bill out there that was singularly focused on reverting the 1099 requirement change, which was also voted down.

In addition to the insane reporting burden this will add, I think important privacy implications of this change are being overlooked. Spreading SSNs and EINs as wide and far as this bill requires will certainly result in increased identity theft.

<comment><USER9> If we don't get them to fix this in an election year, it will never get fixed unfortunately.

<comment><USER10> I might argue that we should work "in an election year" voting OUT the idiots who thought this was a good idea.

<comment><USER11> That's not how legislation works. I don't understand why this wound up in the ACA, but it seems plainly peripheral, and anyone voting against the ACA on the basis of this legislative oddity would have earned far more wrath than they're getting now for having passed it.

It's not going to get fixed now because the Republicans benefit more from the impression that government doesn't work than they do by solving any problems. It'll get fixed at the eleventh hour.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So if I want to buy a nice cappuccino machine for the office to congratulate some hard work, 1099? A few chairs for the office, 1099? License an application for better productivity, 1099? An order of printer paper, pens, pencils, staples, paper clips, and pads, 1099?

Stupid bean counters. I bet you're still using SLOC to measure productivity...

<comment><USER13> I feel that this requirement is only there so that the data can be collected for a coming VAT in the US. They can't push such unpopular legislation through at once.

<comment><USER6> That doesn't make sense for me. First, US lawmakers don't really think that far ahead. But more tellingly, this isn't a universal requirement - it just applies to business transactions that can't otherwise be audited.

I think it's no more than what it appears to be: a ham-handed way to shore up the traceability of money flow.

<comment><USER13> And why does the government need to trace money flow?

<comment><USER6> The better to tax it, my dear. Presumably. I'm not saying I agree with it - <USER2> don't. Just that it's a smaller leap of faith in my opinion to believe that's the motivation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This law really does look like a red tape apocalypse. For most of us working on startups and small enterprises, I'm thinking it will boil down to two choices:

1) For major purchases (things that have to be over $600) centralise all expenditure through s single or few suppliers likely to do all the paperwork for you (as suggested by protomyth).

2) For everything else, forget about loyalty and spread your transactions over different suppliers to avoid hitting the threshold and not have to worry about it.

Online services look like one of the easiest things to deal with - Amazon AWS and Rackspace Cloud and anything where you spend over $50/month is going to get hit by this. But at least you won't be digging out and counting up receipt totals by supplier like your starbucks dockets.

<comment><USER14> Thank the accounting gods for the comments saying credit card transactions aren't included.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> How about the government start making it EASIER to start and run a business?

This is just the type of "friction" we don't need in an anemic economic recovery.

</comment><comment><USER15> >the number of transactions captured may increase as it becomes more likely that minor expenditures will aggregate to at least $600 and trigger the reporting requirement.

$12 a week for 50 weeks, or $50 a month for 12 months, breaches the reporting requirement. It will be a royal pain to keep track of everything. The IRS is saying there will be no new requirement _if_ you are paying with a credit card though.

</comment><comment><USER16> What if you buy starbucks coffee 3 times a week, during work, making it a total of $600 of goods. Not only do I have to keep track of that, but I have to get starbuck's tax id.

(of course thats assuming I'm having my company write it off, which I would)

<comment><USER17> I work at various coffee shops at least 2-3 times a week usually for a full day. I would easily have to file for minimum 3 different coffee shops a year. This bill is absolutely ridiculous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does anyone know how this works if the purchases are made by an individual and then some day eventually (hopefully) reimbursed by their company? eg if you have a startup and are bootstrapping and paying for everything yourself?

<comment><USER6> If you're an individual, the same law applies if you count it as a business expense. The usual disclaimers apply: I'm not a lawyer or an accountant, I'm just a sole proprietor. There's no legal distinction between being a sole proprietor with a daytime job and one without - income from your sole proprietor activity is taxed on Schedule SE for self-employment tax (Social Security and Medicare) and Schedule C for income tax from a business - <USER3> that's where this applies.

The "I'm not really a business" rule is really, really not one the IRS believes in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is one of those laws that really needs to be harped about after this election. It is an absolute killer for small businesses (both as a consumer and supplier). The only people I see benefiting from this are accountants and Staples / Office Max (get all your stuff from us and we will do the paperwork).

<comment><USER13> Why after - vote out everyone who voted for this crap.

<comment><USER19> Sorry for the down vote, small buttons on phone. I agree strongly with your comment. These guys push off votes over and over to a point they don't get anything done. The biggest bunch of procrastinators ever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So.. there has to be a way to benefit from this. Where is the startup startup dedicated to providing 1099s? The major problem is that all new versions of quickbooks, if Quicken has any sense, will have an online link to a proprietary database with all this information.

A feature isn't a startup, but...

</comment><comment><USER21> Reposting a comment from an earlier Hacker News thread on this issue:

The good news is that purchases made with a credit or debit card will be exempt from this requirement. However this requirement is still likely to be a huge pain for me at least because I use PayPal for a lot of vendors for totral purchases over $600 in a year.

The IRS is accepting comments on this requirement at <http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=225029,00.html>

<comment><USER22> What an amazing, and obvious, handout to the credit card companies. Unbelievable.

<comment><USER10> I suspect the implications are credit card transactions can be audited by the IRS anyway.

<comment><USER22> I figured that too, still a huge political windfall for them.

I see stuff like this and it makes me redouble my commitment to groups like fixcongressfirst.org.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I posted this in the last thread about this - it's a different way of looking at the issue: [http://www.taxgirl.com/new-rules-about-forms-1099-are- causin...](http://www.taxgirl.com/new-rules-about-forms-1099-are-causing-a- stir/)

<comment><USER24> The picture in that article reminds me of the scene from the movie "Brazil" where Harry Tuttle is swallowed up in paper and disappears. That movie is sadly prescient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think this weekend I'm going to pass a law amending my own personal tax system that requires that any entity wanting more than $500 from me, for any reason, has to fill out, say, a 20 page form (the details of which I'll specify next week sometime.)

There's a lot to be said for individuals being sovereign. I think we are anyway. But I have followed a "choose your battles" approach in life so far. Perhaps one day that will change.

</comment><comment><USER25> Software development can be done anywhere. The age of needing VC for a rack full of servers is over. Apps and Internet services can be sold from anywhere.

Why locate in high bureaucracy and regulation regions?

The only advantage I see is being able to go to meet ups of peers, etc.

Would you rather work for your startup and have to live invdowntown LA or SF? Or would you rather live in the phillapenes or Thailand on a beach?

<comment><USER26> I would rather live in the mountains of California.

I can deal with the taxes and bureaucracy.

<comment><USER27> Business runs on the numbers, not on the scenery.

<comment><USER26> My numbers are great, thanks :)

I credit all the great hiking, skiing, and fresh air with helping to incubate our three person start-up. It's worth mentioning that we make GPS software for the outdoors, so our location is very conducive to testing.

<comment><USER28> Come on over to Colorado... the tax situation is quite a bit more sane and we have..well all of that:)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Flip – A ReactJS Game - <AUTHOR> http://henleyedition.com/flip-a-reactjs-game/ <comment><USER2> I hate you for posting this. I kept playing it while I should have done something else :)

Great idea, great concept! Keep on! You got your first addict.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. I originally was looking for the ReactJS implementation, but find the game mechanic intriguing. Reminds me a little of the 3d Fez game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is cool!

Around line 327, would it be better to use classSet rather than string concatenation?

[http://facebook.github.io/react/docs/class-name- manipulation...](http://facebook.github.io/react/docs/class-name- manipulation.html)

<comment><USER5> It certainly would. I wish React would improve the syntax by allowing the className prop to directly take an object.

<comment><USER6> Hehe, believe it or not pre-open source react supported this. We thought it was too magical but it was crazy convenient.

<comment><USER5> I'm generally a fan of explicitness, but it's just such a ubiquitous pattern that I think the convenience would make it worth it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> tech-no-logical playing this without really thinking it through, so my remarks may be off.

the mechanics are unusual in the sense that they're deceptively simple but cunningly difficult at the same time... challenging.

becoming stuck (in level 3, e.g. when reaching the spaceship without the key) is annoying. could be that you intended this, but for a casual game it would feel better if that couldn't happen.

related : having to grab the mouse to click the 'replay' button is annoying too. maybe just use a key ? same goes for the 'next' / 'prev' button. when the spaceship flies away it triggers an annoying (growing) scrollbar at the bottom of the page. some overflow: hidden missing somewhere ?

overall I like the concept. someone else already suggested making the board larger, which I completely agree with.

<comment><USER7> Hey thanks for the feedback! I hotfixed the issue with level 3 and added keys for next/prev/restart (period, comma, and 'r', respectively).

The overflow thing I'll have to fiddle with. I am with you on the board size, and I'm going to try to find a better way to do it than the zoom.js plugin. Tile sizes currently are hard coded into the css AND the JavaScript because I'm stupid, so I'll have to figure out a way to make them fluid-width. Hmm....

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like the concept, but the graphics is a bit off. First of all, I would suggest making the board as big as possible and lose the shades of grey.

</comment><comment><USER9> The game is fun to play, but I recommend using vector .svg graphics for when the board is zoomed in.

<comment><USER7> Hey, game author here! All the sprites are from an svg icon font and the rest is all just divs. My understanding is that the blurring has to do with how certain browsers handle 3d transforms by converting vector graphics into textures:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8024061/webkit-blurry- tex...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8024061/webkit-blurry-text-with- css-scale-translate3d)

CSS transforms are awesome, but when you're doing crazy things with them things can get pretty buggy. Thanks for playing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Add more levels so I can play it longer :)

</comment><comment><USER11> Touch on iPad Safari double clicks.

</comment><comment><USER12> Reminds me of SHIFT2 game.</comment>


Should I switch to Ruby? - <AUTHOR>

Hopefully a question like this can be useful to more people than just me, basically I'm someone who likes to create, both at my job and in my own projects and to do so efficiently. I've been working primarily as a Java developer the last couple years and there are things about the language that are great and necessary for some types of projects but I can't help but think sometimes it just ends up making for a lot of drudgery and the whole culture around doing java dev is a bit stodgy, I'm fairly young, just a few years dev experience basically wondering if transitioning to Ruby may open up my career a bit, would be interested to hear from anyone who has done something similar.. More and more lately I've been finding its hard to feel, think and operate like a hacker when working just in Java <comment><USER2> Java is an enterprise technology, if you are going to stay in the enterprise then by all means Java is the way to go, it is not going anywhere for a long time. That being said, by your post I can tell that that is not where you want to be. A lot of people will say just use what you know, but ignoring trends does not make them go away. There is a reality and that reality is there is a lot of cool problems that are being solved and that work is not happening in Java. There are cool problems being solved in Java don't get me wrong, but what you you are looking for, is easier found in other language cultures. It is a reality whether we like it or not. That being said there are ways to leverage your Java knowledge and still move towards that culture. Specifically there are two languages that utilize the JVM and the existing Java libs they are Scala and Clojure. I recently made the full switch over to Clojure because I want to work on something else, and it has been a great experience. While it is not as popular as Ruby, the work available for the market it some of the most impressive projects I have seen. This was a big factor in my choosing it as a technology to invest my time in and it is a very valid reason to do so. Anyways point being yes you should absolutely learn Ruby if the market seems to be solving problems that you want to work on, but in saying that there are some other really cool languages out there running on-top of the JVM that some interesting work is available for, if you just want to get into interesting work, you might want to take a minute to investigate the others because your experience with the JVM and Java libs will give you a head start in moving over to them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reply.. I agree Scala and Clojure are interesting but Ruby seems to be the most in-demand so would like to pick it up first, I have used JRuby a bit and being able to use Java when necessary I think would definitely be beneficial, but overall it seems doing a lot of web apps in Java may not be as good idea as I had originally thought

<comment><USER2> _but Ruby seems to be the most in-demand so would like to pick it up first_

One thing to remember is that almost every field is undeserved as far as developers go, so all most all languages have more jobs available than their are people to fill the roles. While I agree you have to ensure that their is a market for your interest, most of the first and second tier languages have plenty of market to not be a risky proposition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Judging by the roles that I'm currently working on, having Ruby is a definite plus. Another strong option would be Python, from what I can tell the syntax is similar but most clients are definitely looking for one of those two in addition to your Java.

It also depends what types of companies you want to work for. Most of the startups I work with are looking for Ruby and Python with a Java background where as most the larger older companies are fine bringing on someone with just Java.

I hope that helps a bit and wasn't too much of a ramble.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, I used Python a bit before getting into Java, I think at this point Ruby seems more appealing, it would be nice to find a role at some point after I learn Ruby to where I can still benefit from my Java experience. Just doing Java, though, I guess I'm starting to feel a bit stifled.. just reading job ads for Ruby vs. Java is such a world of difference, most employers looking for Java devs def have the 'old school' mentality

<comment><USER3> As I said, I think the most important thing to decide is what you want to work on. Research Python roles and research Ruby roles, which of the two look like things you'd want to be working with/on? That should be your decision! I know the majority of Python roles I work on tend to pick Python for it's speed so they are generally more for hosting platforms or system development. Ruby roles tend to be the focus for more web development. As I said, those are just what I've seen here in Seattle.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Facebook touts counterfeit NHL shop as "Suggested Post" in fans' feeds - <AUTHOR> "Suggested Post" in my Facebook feed:
http://i.imgur.com/hcsMbdK.jpg
Here is their front page; note that they clearly masquerade as the "Official Online Store":
http://i.imgur.com/jc7Z7lC.jpg
(The actual Official NHL shop is at shop.nhl.com
Note the similarities, then note the key differences in branding and copyright message content, and copyright date.) <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable:

"Suggested Post" in my Facebook feed:

[http://i.imgur.com/hcsMbdK.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/hcsMbdK.jpg)

Main page:

[http://i.imgur.com/jc7Z7lC.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/jc7Z7lC.jpg)</comment>


Paris Founders Events – New Products, Big News and Great Networking - <AUTHOR> http://www.rudebaguette.com/2014/10/09/paris-founders-events-new-products-big-news-great-networking/ <comment><USER2> Awesome event. Thanks Liam.</comment>


The Joy of a Never-Ending Search for Hobbies [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/421509/the-joy-of-a-never-ending-search-for-hobbies/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> This made me sad - people try to leave something behind as they get older and more aware of the finiteness of life, but in IT we rarely build stuff that lasts as long as a musical instrument (programming languages, algorithms, file formats perhaps). It was much more about craftsmanship 35 years ago when I started, today everything I build feels like it'll fall apart at the next browser/OS/hardware upgrade or be obsolete due to superior alternatives.

I guess I need a new creative hobby.

<comment><USER3> This also tremendously affects human culture. While the information you need to perform a piece of classical music can easily get stored for ever (high quality, archival grade ink and paper plus loads of copies from time to time, stored in a save area) there is no such thing for recorded music.

There isn't even a future proof way to capture a simple house beat. For instance, the drums are sampled from vinyl then go into a 12 bit sampler then got digitalized a decade later. Finally a row of skillfully tweaked digital effects gets applied to the individual hits and the sequence as a whole.

All this is necessary to make a simple house beat sound/feel the way it does. But there is no notation for the process you have to go through to achieve this result. Drums in a different style of music that use the very same simple drum pattern have a very different feel to them.

You could argue that there is no need for a notation as there are ways to preserve the files of your DAW and thus the process is sort of documented. But whether or not you can open these files in the future depends entirely on economic interests of hard- and software manufacturers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _To live a life of just wasting time and just entertaining yourself is not > enough...it has to be someting that 's meaningful not only to you and those > you know but your friends, your people, your family..._

So many of us could use this reminder. That shot at the end of the video with the man and his finished work was beautiful.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for typing that out. I thought that to be a very poignant remark.</comment></comment>


SGX-Bomb: Locking Down the Processor via Rowhammer Attack [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://sslab.gtisc.gatech.edu/assets/papers/2017/jang:sgx-bomb.pdf <comment><USER2> Intel should just support ECC RAM on all platforms and possibly make it mandatory. It seems quite clear that DIMMs are not reliable, and the platform should stop assuming that it is.

<comment><USER3> I agree that rowhammer needs a hardware-based defense. While ECC isn't prohibitively expensive and has negligible performance cost, keep in mind it's only a parity check with a proprietary implementation. There's some multiple of bit flips that will pass the parity check and still achieve the attacker's intended result, and the exploit is definitely going to get multiple attempts - if you get pwned the malicious process might be in memory and hammering away for hours, maybe it's even dropped a registry key to make sure it auto runs next boot.

Reference: [http://blog.erratasec.com/2015/03/some-notes-on-dram- rowhamm...](http://blog.erratasec.com/2015/03/some-notes-on-dram- rowhammer.html)

<comment><USER4> It's true that it is possible to flip enough bits to bypass ECC and make whatever nefarious change.

However, it seems likely that first you're going to make a lot on correctable errors, which will slow down your system. Even if you don't notice that, chances are you're going to get a double bit error which will halt your system many times before you get a triple bit (or whatever) that gets the desired exploit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's a pretty straightforward mitigation to this: only allow enclaves from software authors you trust. The kernel does not have to allow usermode to run enclaves, which is very much by design.

<comment><USER6> This solution works, with its own caveats, for end users, but doesn't help cloud providers at all. Then again, with current restrictions on SGX, like having to partition out memory for it at boot time, running SGX workloads from VMs on shared machines seems like plenty difficult already.

<comment><USER7> > all. Then again, with current restrictions on SGX, like having to partition > out memory for it at boot time,

Huh? why is this an issue at all. The most memory SGX can directly use is 128MB. So partition it off-- it's a small cost if it's likely that you'll use it.

Enclaves are not limited to 128MB in total, since the OS can page in and out SGX pages...

<comment><USER8> > the OS can page in and out SGX pages...

That doesn't seem right. How is the OS supposed to page SGX in/out without being able to read its memory?

<comment><USER6> There is a special dance the OS has to perform in order to do it. In short, the OS calls EWB instruction, which makes CPU read the page from EPC, encrypt it, and write it to normal memory. To load it back, OS executes the ELDB instruction, which decrypts it and writes to EPC. There is slightly more to it due to version array, which is used to prevent replay attacks, but in general, paging in and out is completely fine in SGX.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


4 Startups + 4 Months + 4 People = Mayhem - <AUTHOR> http://www.technation.com.au/2008/09/05/4-startups-4-months-4-people-mayhem/

<comment><USER2> First the good: sounds like a lot of fun and a good way to generate ideas and see how they stick.

Then the crotchety: website != startup. Building a business is a lot harder than hacking together a website (wonderfully groovy or otherwise). Paul's mantra of "build something people want" is a precondition, not the endpoint. It's next to impossible to build a business in a month.

<comment><AUTHOR> cheers wheels

your "crotchety" point's a good one. in fact, it's a frequent point of discussion within the team. the website!=business comment is a common rebuke for us.

my position is agreement with your statement. "something people want" is a starting point, a primer for the business. rather than four business in four months, I argue 4 seeds, some of which may grow into viable business, and most that won't.

Further, trying to grow 4 business at a time (come November) is equally insane. The niches are small (we call them micro startups - one month to address the core need, the "one thing"), and the end of the year might be a good time to weed.

nevertheless, we are learning a tremendous amount about the process, about users, and about how much we truly don't know. and damn it's better than working in an office!

<comment><USER2> Hey Jason --

I'd really recommend taking one of the ideas at the end of the four months and seeing how far you can run with it. The trials and errors of building a business have really been the eye-opening part of our own startup experience. There's nothing quite like that first flopped investor pitch or learning how to incorporate or doing semi-long-term planning to really change your outlook.

Best of luck. :-)

<comment><USER3> Agreed. It might be worthwhile to work on a project longer than a month to build a user base and accumulate enough useful feedback that might lead you into building what people want.

Project Mayhem is an interesting experiment. I bet some of your products might turn out to be better than more well-funded products.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: An AVR based 8-bit Microcomputer - <AUTHOR> http://www.usebox.net/jjm/dan64/ <comment><USER2> More precisely, it's "An AVR-based 6502 microcomputer emulator."

Not all MCUs are Harvard architecture though - ARMs, MC68K, 68HC08/11/12/16, MSP430, and PIC32 (basically MIPS) all have a single code+data address space.

</comment><comment><USER3> The URL made me think it would be about the uzebox AVR-based 8-bit console.

[http://belogic.com/uzebox/index.asp](http://belogic.com/uzebox/index.asp)

</comment><comment><USER4> I was thinking about doing something like this as a weekend project. I'm gonna use your and just have fun with it. Very nice work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'm glad you like it :)

After all the work was done I realized that perhaps would have been a more accessible project if I had developed an Arduino shield instead of an standalone PCB.

You can still build it with an Arduino and a breadboard and the only _special_ component in the list is the SPI SRAM.

<comment><USER4> I'd say a shield would be ideal. You could probably sell it to get more funds to tinker. :)</comment></comment></comment>


BBC Open Sources its Toolkit for Developing Cross-Platform TV Applications - <AUTHOR> http://fmtvp.github.com/tal/getting-started/introducing-tal.html

<comment><USER2> Well done BBC, they could really be onto something big!</comment>


SubmitHub: how a solo founder built a $46k/mo SaaS business in 10 months - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/submithub <comment><USER2> 1.) Build an audience (~6 years)

2.) Build your business (a few months...)

That's the winning formula. I wrote about this at length regarding Ryan Hoover & Product Hunt:

[https://medium.com/@theunixbeard/product-hunt-s- rise-d49249a...](https://medium.com/@theunixbeard/product-hunt-s- rise-d49249a1a2c0)

The title was "Product Hunt's Rise: An overnight success 1,834 days in the making"... Same exact story here except growing Indie shuffle took closer to 2,190 days!

<comment><USER3> It's funny how this blog post probably explains quite well how the indiehackers (the site this article about indie shuffle is hosted on) guy builds his community.

<comment><USER2> Quite meta! Would be nice to hear csallen's thoughts on it.

Once big difference I think is that csallen is focused on writing specifically for the Hacker News audience as a way to bootstrap traffic from an existing large audience. Product Hunt didn't really use that strategy from what I can tell.

Similarly to Indie Hackers, I wrote my Product Hunt article with the aim to bootstrap off of Ryan Hoover's large existing audience (40K twitter followers at the time, compared to my paltry 100). He was the first to tweet about it after I brought it to his attention and it spread organically from there (26K views currently).

My next Internet Archaeology article is already in the works and I plan to use the exact same strategy as before (bootstrap off of my subject's existing audience).

<comment><USER3> Sounds good. I love your archeology work. Saves me a lot of time.It was a little too long for a coffee break read and now I'm behind my work schedule, though. Maybe you can split one article into smaller chunks, which may also increase your overall traffic. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> jason-grishkoff SubmitHub founder weighing in here -- thanks for sharing, Courtland! If anyone has any questions about SubmitHub or Indie Shuffle (technical or business), feel free to ask :)

Edit: in case you're curious, here's what the dashboard looks like for bloggers - [http://i.imgur.com/mJG1LP5.png](http://i.imgur.com/mJG1LP5.png)

<comment><USER4> Just wanted to chime in and say Indie Shuffle is one of the best resources I've found for new music out there (for my taste).

While I have no need for SubmitHub's main purpose, the Popular tab looks like it can serve as another source of fresh stuff.

All in all, massive respect for your work promoting new music. As a sidenote, I'd happily donate some money through Patreon/whatever to support an ad-free version of the site (I know, I know, one in a million :).

<comment><USER5> Ditto, this popular chart is very cool: ranked by approval, [http://www.submithub.com/popular](http://www.submithub.com/popular)

To me it seems like expanding on the playable features could make SubmitHub itself a very meta/cool place to submit through. A place to engage other artists. It's like HackerNews for music.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As seems to be common on Indie Hackers, the title is extremely disingenuous:

1) It took him 6 years to build an audience before turning it into a business. The title makes it sound like the entire process only took 10 months.

2) $46k/mo of what? Revenue or profit? If the latter, at least half immediately goes to the music blogs.

3) Where exactly does the $46k/mo number come from? It's only mentioned in the title and explained nowhere. Is it a projection, an average, the best month, ...?

Courtland, you have a great site and I really enjoy your articles. Please don't spoil your awesome content with vagueness and clickbait.

<comment><USER7> Well said.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Kudos! I get really excited when I learn about people working hard at creative and useful things like this. I also think it's important to note that, while this is surely no small feat, it sounds like this is the fruition of the author's accumulated experiences, network, and reputation "[over] the course of my ~7 years running a blog", and probably even longer with a strong passion for music and the people in music.

This comment is not to downplay the author's accomplishments--I think keeping to something for even 5 years is ridiculously hard, and that should be commended, especially if it resulted in something that people find valuable. Rather, I hope that people reading this won't lose hope when, 10 months into their own businesses, they don't see the same levels of popularity or financial success. This project seems to be the tip of an iceberg. I think luck is also a strong component, but it definitely favors the prepared.

<comment><USER9> _while this is surely no small feat, it sounds like this is the fruition of the author 's accumulated experiences, network, and reputation_

True for most success stories. Overnight success is so rare (and often fleeting - all of the rapid online successes I can think of are underwater now - all the best things were slow burns, including this very site). It's about accumulating bricks here and there and building the wall over years. People who never lose hope and who keep building those bricks will reap the rewards in the end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think another important lesson to draw from this is that you should build things for domains and problems in which you have a legitimate interest/curiosity. That was something I took away from this that's difficult to accept, because it means you're probably going to be limited if you want to work solo.

<comment> jason-grishkoff If you're going to spend 8+ hours a day on something, you'd best enjoy the subject matter :)

</comment></comment><comment> steve-benjamins I used SubmitHub to share my music and it's a great experience. It fixes an _exhausting_ cold-outreach process. (I used it to get some pretty major coverage— for me, at least— when a well-known blog sent 25,000 listens after covering my song).

</comment><comment><USER11> The guy had a very successful music blog and used that to kick off the network effect needed to make SubmitHub work. There is zero chance SubmitHub would work without the music blog, so unless you have a very successful blog yourself this article will not help you in any practical manner.

<comment><USER12> Or maybe the lesson is to develop a following first before developing a product. The music blog didn't happen by random chance, and his overall approach seems better than developing a product and hoping for a following.

<comment><USER13> I did this with the intention of promoting the product.

The issue was that I built it on someone else's platform. Something I've known to be a cardinal sin and a disaster waiting to happen.

Alas, I built /r/lifeprotips and it quickly became a default on reddit. I started building the site (lifeprotips.com which is no longer up) around the same time.

Some moronic moderator named reddit.com/user/krispykrackers banned me because I was promoting the site on the subreddit. They still use artwork I paid an illustrator to design for my site that I re-used there.

tl;dr: don't build a following on someone else's platform. You will be penalized because in 2016 there is no loyalty to the game anymore (I've been building sites since the late 90s so I know how corporate this environment has gotten).

Also, big middle finger to reddit for trying to be a big boy corporation but failing to address issues like mine -- I spent so much time and energy getting that subreddit to where it is today and I get rewarded with a punch in the face.

<comment><USER11> Thank you for sharing.

Do you think you would be as successful in developing an audience outside Reddit as you were inside it? Where? In a blog?

<comment><USER13> Of course.

Honestly, probably not. Reddit was the perfect audience for that particular type of content, so it made perfect sense. There's only one other player in that space that I know who is really killing it and it's lifehack.org.

Life Pro Tips focused on digestible pieces of content, but in order to monetize, it seems like you need more long-form types of content (that of which lifehack.org provides).

I've moved on to other areas (like I've always done). I've had wins and I've had losses. The losses are necessary in order to keep the wins going.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I ran my first startup with Jason 15 years ago. Since then, he's gone on to do some amazing things and seeing him on HN today makes me realize:

1) how lucky I was to work with him for those 2 years. 2) how small our industry is.

Congrats Jason on the well deserved success.

<comment> jason-grishkoff Nice to from you Reagan! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Congratulations Jason

Why did you pick Digital Ocean over Meteor Galaxy hosting ? Would you point me to some resources that you looked into while setting up Digital Ocean for Meteor hosting ?

<comment> jason-grishkoff 1) price; 2) they had a really good tutorial for setting up Meteor on Digital Ocean: [https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to- depl...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-deploy-a- meteor-js-application-on-ubuntu-14-04-with-nginx)

<comment><USER15> Thanks man

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have a question for the guy running indie hackers. Do you periodically update those revenue figures?

</comment><comment><USER17> Something that I think is worth pointing out: that site doesn't have a recurring revenue model and also charges very low fees, two things that go against the common wisdom of "just get people to pay you every month, and add an enterprise plan in there for good measure".

The truth is that the classic three-tiered SaaS business model is just one of many possible business models, yet many developers-turned-entrepreneur adopt it without stopping to think whether it's a good fit or not for their product.

</comment><comment><USER18> So, why not democratize this a bit more given the application and the current audience. Why not charge (and deliver) 1000 user reviews of music for $1 as well?

Obviously, established music sites are a distribution channel that works right now. But it seems apparent to me the natural extension right now is direct to music lovers?

</comment><comment><USER19> This could be used for other branches too, not just music blogs. For example Indie Games.

<comment><USER20> My thought as well: I could see this for novels/short stories, or even could revolutionize the academic publishing system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm finding that when some resources hang -- I got it with images.unsplash and cloudfront on different pageloads -- it freezes Firefox completely such that it must be killed. Is this a side effect of React/Meteor?

<comment> jason-grishkoff Ruh roh. There are more than 100 people actively using the site right now, and I haven't heard this issue before. The whole website does hinge on one single .js file, which is hosted by Cloudfront. So if that doesn't load, it's going to crash. The unsplash image would only be coming up if you were getting a 501/404/whatever via nginx.

Where are you based?

<comment><USER21> SF

<comment> jason-grishkoff Stumped. Not sure why that would be happening.

<comment><USER21> Hold fire, it just happened on an unrelated site. I had updated Debian Testing this morning and it turns out a couple other things are hinky, so it's likely not to be your fault.

<comment> jason-grishkoff Fire held :-D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Question to the moderators: Shouldn't IndieHackers posts be "Show HN"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Curious why you think this. What makes it particularly different from any other curated source of articles, e.g. Medium or TechCrunch?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Good job!

</comment><comment><USER24> Actual tl;dr: Founder built a webapp for streamlining music submissions made by artists to music blogs. One important element of success was having a popular music blog himself.

<comment><USER25> Which translates to "after years of work to establish a brand, this founder turned that brand into a successful business opportunity."

A great story and excellent business sense, to be sure. The "10 months" part is typical headline speak.

<comment><USER26> Right, and it doesn't hurt to say he worked for Google either.

<comment><USER27> On the contrary, I thought this was a strange and irrelevant fact to include in the article. There's no indication that his role at Google had any bearing on the success of the business.

Perhaps if he'd worked on Google Music (or other music related area of the business) or the referenced exposure to "top brass" opened some doors... but it seems unlikely this is the case.

There's certainly correlation between Google employees and successful initiatives... but not much beyond that.

<comment><USER28> After working at BigCo and saving steady pay while nurturing your startup at night for a few years. You have a visibility to traction. And a cushion against failure. So you can take the "risk". It's easy to take a "risk" when it's not really there.

It's not like this founder started with $100 and made an ongoing business employing a few others.

Started on second, scored on as RBI and media talks about your Grand Slam.

<comment><USER29> That's actually a really good point _if it 's what he did_. The common approach to employment is placing it safe using one job's revenue to get to higher-paying one. Or even savings. Many startups or bootstrappers go all in with different incentives and cost structure. Plus time available.

So, it's worth learning things like that in these stories in tracing the bigger picture of how the success story played out with what ingredients that might work next time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Tldr: "I was born in South Africa and moved to California just before the start of high school, graduating from the University of California, San Diego in 2007 before working a corporate job in DC that ultimately landed me a sweet gig at Google. My responsibility once there was to figure out how much to pay the company's executives, which meant I was lucky to enjoy face time with many of the top brass.,One of the biggest frustrations of running my music blog was that by the time I took it full-time, I was receiving upwards of 300 email pitches a day from artists, record labels, and publicists, all looking to have their music featured on Indie Shuffle.,Then, toward the end of last year, I decided that a good way to learn some new coding languages would be to try and solve this problem by developing a website to streamline the process."

<comment><USER31> Going forward I will upvote almost anything that you summarize that I see. Reading it and the responding comments will be a great time saver.

<comment><USER32> You could write a bot for that :-)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Landing page best practices and ideas? - <AUTHOR> In the same vein as the go-to web stack today, how are people creating landing pages?
To start the discussion - I've done a lot of Python and .Net development so my plan is to create a server rendered page with either .Net Core or Flask and roll my own contact form and email collection function.
I see there are a lot of landing page templates, another idea is to check the licensing on them and see if I can stuff them into a jinja2 page and add the functionality I need for submitting a form securely (all I need is email and a few other things). <comment><USER2> The main function of a landing page is customer acquisition and gathering information. The basic premise is you're not 100% sure how to attract your customers at any given point in time so your landing page needs to be very flexible.

Templates are the way to go but even more importantly is the speed at which you can make changes to these templates and to adapt to the context of the customer.

The main focus should be on gathering intelligence so the best stack would be one that you spend the most amount of time to gather as much intelligence as you can and no more. Go with what you're familiar with and leverage frameworks as much as possible. Your time is precious so avoid mucking about with new/untested tech if you don't have to.

FWIW, we rolled our own contact and email function based on Django but only to send the data into multiple systems. At one point, we began with Mailchimp and still do for a few forms.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, it sounds like I should definitely use Flask (or maybe Django) vs one of the many SaaS providers of landing pages.

I don't want to get locked into some service or platform that I can't change easily/quickly and I want to make sure it loads as quickly as possible.

<comment><USER2> Yes, with a 3rd party service, you will likely take a hit on load speed but a lot of the Saas providers are still quite flexible and simple to use.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you answer "how are things going?" - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> "Pretty well. How about you?"</comment>


Org Mode Release 8.0 - <AUTHOR> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/70753

<comment><USER2> I love org-mode. I have never found an online todo-list or task manager that I like to use... but plain-text lists fit my mental model perfectly. org-mode is plain text on steroids... also the clocking abilities while doing tasks is incredible.

<comment><USER3> Yup, me too. I use it exclusively to manage all my ongoing projects, whether related to programming or not. The way it handles contexts (I do it via tags), ToDo keywords, numerous custom agenda views, is just plain awesome!

Just the other day I was thinking of a good web front, which can be made for org files which are in Dropbox or something. Then, when on a computer with emacs, those files can be edited via emacs and otherwise, via the web app. This would also help in bringing other non emacs people on the orgmode wagon.

<comment><USER4> this! an online editor would be so great

<comment><USER5> Like this?

<http://www.ymacs.org/demo/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Org is very active, high profile project, the number of changes from previous major release are just amazing.

git diff release_7.01 release_8.0 --stat [snip] 352 files changed, 119010 insertions(+), 80849 deletions(-)

<comment><USER7> Org has 352+ files? I plead ignorance, but that strikes me as absurd.

<comment><USER8> Well why don't you look at them to find out why before you say stuff like that. It isn't exactly a fucking secret. It is quite small at the core and the rest of it is giving added value, like interaction with python, java etc and the large range of output formats etc. Just like a great many software solutions.

[http://orgmode.org/cgit.cgi/org- mode.git/tree/lisp?id=5ef07d...](http://orgmode.org/cgit.cgi/org- mode.git/tree/lisp?id=5ef07dc54a4353a1c349f02dd80294a565fccb7c)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Working with people who use org-mode to schedule and sort their daily professional activities with it when you're not is... quite an interesting experience.

I remember this guy popping up every time on the channel right at 3:00pm sharp, as planned. Another dev used to say 'org-mode tells me that I need to talk to you now'.

For the semi-unsupervised messy crowd out there, I thought I would give a pointer to Basket intead, <http://basket.kde.org/> Less powerful than org though!

<comment><USER10> Basket was a pretty nice replacement for (some features of) OneNote. However development seems to have stopped on it. The last release was in 2010 unless I am mistaken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Org-mode is a package for Emacs which supports tree outlines in plain text mode, plus a ton of features.

It is intended to cover the ground between what you would write in a notepad during a meeting, and a fully-fledged "reproducible science" notebook.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you find Org-mode hard/complicate to use, you could skip the agenda and export function, they are the most difficult part in Org-mode. But if you only use Org-mode to keep/organize notes or make outlines, it is a perfect tool.

Some other application could handle the agenda part and integrate with your OS better, like Omnifocus etc.

But the user experience of MobileOrg (the mobile client of Org-mode) is not very well, it may be the only weak point I could see.

</comment><comment><USER13> Org mode... The only reason I keep coming back to emacs, despite my love of Vim. I've tried the vim "alternatives", and they just don't go anywhere close to good old org mode.

The one thing that I'd really like to see, is a properly made, polished mobile companion app.

</comment><comment><USER14> ox-rss.el - What a surprise! Nice..

M-x org-publish-project RET blog RET

That plus TRAMP and you've got a full blog generated from org! Now to hack up ox-rss.el and make a ox-feed.el that does atom..

<comment><USER15> No need for TRAMP. <https://github.com/juanre/org-jekyll>

org is to outliners what emacs is to text editors.

<comment><USER16> confusing and overfeatured?

<comment><USER15> Different from each perspective! For handsome, smart, educated, awesome, people such as myself, it is a lifetime of treasures, hidden within RSI- inducing key bindings, no matter where on the keyboard one puts C and M.

For leprous, primitivist, stinky, bottom-feeding, monkey-scratchers, it may be a befuddling plethora of options and flexibility that forces the user to form their own opinions regarding the pursuit of goals.

Plus, they both give me something to clean out and start over every ten to fifteen years.

<comment><USER17> I feel a bit filthy now after realizing my knowledge of named functions to M-x far outnumber the keybindings I've got down pat by a 10:1 ratio.

And yet I don't feel particularly encumbered. Call it a case of the customer only being able to think of a faster horse.

<comment><USER15> ido and anything/helm are great for "just close enough" partial matching. Knowing that emacs can do something is just as good as knowing the key bound to the particular command.

<comment><USER17> _Christ_ I've just tried out helm and it's simultaneously blowing me away and surprising me by exposing emacs builtins I'd never known about. It's _far_ easier to recall objects to act on than named functions.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, it really helps with maintaining flow while also showing you things you never knew about. OK, sometimes the last part really screws up flow when you see dwim-finish-my-work in the completions list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've never heard about org-mode before, but after checking this thread I had to give it a try.

This is _exactly_ what I've been looking for for years. Fantastic stuff.

</comment><comment><USER19> Org mode is nice but for most of the planning (TODOs, Agendas etc...) stuff isn't Google Calendar much better? As people share events/meetings/their calendars with me I need to use Google Calendar anyway, and since I'm using it anyway why use Org mode for this at all? Also google calendar syncs with my phone, acessible from any other computer etc..

EDIT: I updated and now the export-as-pdf and export-as-html (the only things I really used) are broken.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm interested in using org-mode to take notes in class. Anyone have any resources for getting started? I'm using latest OSX.

<comment><USER15> The easiest thing to do is to install a variant of emacs on your machine (aquamacs is fine but stuck at version 23 of emacs). It probably comes with org already at this point.

I assume the things you'll want to track are facts and tasks. You'll want to capture as quickly as possible for later organization.

It really is as simple as typing to get started. Then you can go back later and re-organize your notes, tasks, etc. according to whichever system you prefer.

Some tutorials that seem to be well-paced for org newbies are available at <http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/>.

[http://sachachua.com/blog/2008/01/outlining-your-notes- with-...](http://sachachua.com/blog/2008/01/outlining-your-notes-with-org/) (old, but you probably want the basics to get hooked first :-))

<http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html> (includes a good guide to the state of tasks, among lots of other things to orgify just about every aspect of your existence)

<comment><USER21> I like using homebrew (<http://mxcl.github.io/homebrew/>) to install emacs.

To install a GUI version it's "brew install emacs --cocoa".

<comment><USER15> That's my preference as well, but integrating it with your app launcher of choice (among other things) can be a little more challenging. The alias in /Applications is a particular pain if you try to use Alfred or Spotlight, but maybe Quicksilver works fine. You only need to open emacs on startup anyway. :-)

<comment><USER22> I just mv the .app from the Cellar to /Applications so that spotlight can find it.

<comment><USER15> brew upgrade misses out then. I add Cellar/emacs to Alfred's search path and brew upgrade/cleanup more or less works fine.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Inconvenient Message Detection: A way to hide communication metadata - <AUTHOR> http://topchicksdigengineeringguys.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-inconvenient-message-detection-imd.html

<comment><USER2> The author has absolutely no clue what he is doing - don't even touch this with a stick. You can spot high entropy data hidden in the least significant bits of an image from a mile away unless you work hard to not disturb statistical properties. And the code is a mess, too.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wouldn't say I have no clue. But I'm certainty not an expert. Can you cite a source that shows that if I randomly twiddle some of the lower bits in an image, it is detectable? If any (even random) change to an image is detectable, then it would be true that this doesn't work.

<comment><USER2> First, I really don't want to discourage you. I have myself reinvented a lot of stuff from a raytracer over a database to a kernel and a lot more. A simple steganographic tool, too. I think this is a great way to learn things, because it really makes you realize the complexity involved, how much effort other people have put into figuring things out and why some things look so quirky and make you think you can do it way better. But don't be fooled, chances are pretty close to zero that you will come up with an idea that has not been tried and dismissed long ago. There are a lot of people out there much smarter than you and me. So reinventing stuff is good for learning, but improving on the state of art and coming up with something useful for others is really pretty unlikely.

Now having no clue may sound a bit insulting but it was really not meant as a personal attack. But just by searching for »detecting steganography in images« you will easily find a lot of papers and even software dealing with this and they also deal with your idea of a randomized embedding in the least significant bit. You obviously did not research what other people have tried and what works and what not and that is why I called it clueless. The abstract of »Reliable Detection of LSB Steganography in Color and Grayscale Images« [1] from 2001 and one of the top search results for me starts with the following abstract.

 _We describe a reliable and accurate method for detecting least significant bit (LSB) nonsequential embedding in digital images. The secret message length is derived by inspecting the lossless capacity in the LSB and shifted LSB plane. An upper bound of 0.005 bits /pixel was experimentally determined for safe LSB embedding. _

So this idea has been rendered obsolete at least a decade and a half ago unless you only want to embed tiny messages in huge images. Hiding only a single tweet requires a uncompressed image of 0.64 MiB to remain safe. And I did not search for it, but there may be other algorithms making the situation even worse. And using lossless compression is a nonstarter to begin with because you will stick out of the sea of JPEG images. But there are of course ways to embed hidden information in JPEG images, but again there are also ways to detect this.

[1] [http://www.ws.binghamton.edu/fridrich/Research/acm_2001_03.p...](http://www.ws.binghamton.edu/fridrich/Research/acm_2001_03.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but "topchicksdigengineeringguys.blogspot.com"?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's an old name. I was single back then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reading the description I was wondering how it was working because it says during encoding it hashes the image to create a key and during decoding it hashes the image to create a key. But if it is hashing the whole image these keys cannot be the same. But when you look at the code it is not hashing the whole image. It is only hashing a subset of the bits. :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Sounds stupid. Steganography + Vernam cipher makes it impossible to detect and decrypt. Why would you artificially weaken it?

<comment><AUTHOR> The difference is you'd have to transmit the one time pad; which is a big secret. In this case, it's like everyone is using the same pad but you have to do a bunch of work to find out where to start.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> ObXKCD: [http://xkcd.com/538/](http://xkcd.com/538/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly the kind of thing I'm trying to solve.

EDIT: Ok, not exactly. But it was one inspiration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Note, the submitter is the author.</comment>


Nine Species of Human Once Walked Earth. Now There's Just One - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencealert.com/did-homo-sapiens-kill-off-all-the-other-humans/ <comment><USER2> >"Yet the extinction of Neanderthals, at least, took a long time – thousands of years. This was partly because early Homo sapiens lacked the advantages of later conquering civilisations"

Is it possible we "simply" outbred them? If one population breeds slowly compared to another one of them will be swallowed by the other and not necessarily primarily through violent means.

<comment><USER3> The answer is probably that we were able to kill them because we were able to outbreed them. They fit into a similar ecological niche, so they would have been competition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> ... and the other eight were delicious.</comment>