Ask HN: Why can't I make as much as I make? - <AUTHOR> In "How to Make Wealth" PG puts forward the following argument:
1. Assume a hacker can make a good wage working for someone else.
2. Assume a hacker can in turn be significantly more productive working for themselves.
3. All things being equal, a hacker should be able to make significantly more money by working for themselves (albeit at the cost of increased risk and stress).
The relevant quote: "If a fairly good hacker is worth $80,000 a year at a big company, then a smart hacker working very hard ... should be able to do work worth about $3 million a year."
My question to HN is as follows:
Excluding outliers such as Gates/Zuckerberg, is the inference that a good hacker can make more from the market directly actually valid?
If so, why does it seem most hackers struggle to capture even half their regular wage from the market directly?
All advice/experiences appreciated. <comment><USER3> Actually, it's pretty simple: supply and demand.

In the B2B world, there is a stunning demand for good software everywhere I go. Two and three year project queues are the norm. They have trouble finding _anyone_ to get the work done, whether it's employees, contractors, or vendors, either for services or products.

Perfect example right now: I know of two large companies whose customers are demanding that they be able to enter their orders on the internet. Imagine, in 2011, large companies struggling to find people to get e-commerce working!

OTOH, I read about what other programmers are doing here on hn, and 90% of the time, my first thought is, "Why? Who would pay for that?"

To make it on your own, you have to stop building what you think people will pay for and start building what they actually will pay for. Huge difference.

Aside: I remember talking about something very simliar a few weeks ago here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2363723>

<comment><USER4> _To make it on your own, you have to stop building what you think people will pay for and start building what they actually will pay for. Huge difference._

That's right. How hard is it to find such a niche? I'm looking for a niche where I can make $5K/month only. Here are the criteria:

\- Be able to launch the SaaS in 3 months work.

\- A small customer base (200-300) with monthly subscription.

\- Requires 30 hours/week for support.

\- Doesn't require physical stuff, or lot of expenses.

Any one who can think of such a service? I'm looking to build one this summer.

<comment><USER3> That was a pretty good post, csomar, but I'm going to critique it anyway. (If it was a crummy post, I wouldn't even bother.)

What I like about it: You're focused on building something that supplies an actual demand. Good!

What concerns me about it: You're still too focused on yourself. Every one of your bullets was about what _you_ want your business to look like.

I think you're focusing too much inward when you need to be focusing on your prospective customer and how they will benefit from the value you provide them.

Examples are everywhere, just a few off the top of my head:

      - salons that wants to optimize their scheduling
      - retailers that want to improve one on one communication
      - actors/artists that need better portfolios
      - shopkeepers who want to capture more POS info
      - teachers who want to play bingo in class (never mind)

Get out of your office and find people like this first. Ask them, not us, what they want. Then figure out how to provide them with what they crave. (Once you find one niche and get going, you'll be surprised how much fun it is and how well it works out.)

The rest (your bullets) will take care of itself. The shape of your business will be the byproduct of doing whatever you must to satisfy your customers' needs.

One great resource that will probably help you:

[http://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-Developers- Launching/...](http://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-Developers- Launching/dp/0615373968/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1302537432&sr=8-1)

<comment><USER5> edw519, I think your advice is in the right spirit but (as you admit) naïve.

nopassrecover, edw is 100% on target about looking outward. However actors, salons, and teachers are all good examples of people with little money to spend, who would not capture significant extra margins by adding software.

In my estimation, nopassrecover, you would do better to think deeper in the B2B value chain, particularly if you can flex relationships you've made in previous industries you've worked in. Imagine how many more people you could touch writing software that hooks into a shoe factory's shoe machines than making a web store -- and how much less of a customer's attention that would require.

Two consejos that I think are good (but not necessary) for entrepreneurs to follow:

1\. Do a part-time job while you work on your own thing.

2\. Use knowledge & relationships from businesses you have worked in directly.

And (3) for hackers specifically: spend some time thinking about and researching how the commercial world fits together. Who made the plastic fibres in the salon's brush? How does the aesthetic layout of the salon enable them to charge more? What other construction materials could they have used? What catalogs are thrust in the face of new salon owners and how does that affect the way they see their choices? What's the price history of the real estate they own vis-à-vis the other places they could have set up shop? And more generally: What companies in the world do the most revenue and why? What companies have the most profits?

The salon scheduling example is particularly naïve, because scheduling software would not add much value to either salon owners or customers.

But edw519, I very much agree with you about looking outward (both to meet business minded people and to meet people who don't have iPhones).

<comment><USER6> > The salon scheduling example is particularly naïve, because scheduling > software would not add much value to either salon owners or customers.

Interestingly, someone told me recently that his sister, who runs a salon, spends a ridiculous amount of money on precisely this: scheduling software! He's a hacker and couldn't quite work out why she would pay $thousands (sic) for some crappy semi-customised calendar when Google Calendar works just fine: in the end it came down to, "because all the other beauty salons use this software".

Not that I'm recommending this particular niche, mind you...

<comment><USER5> As I understand it the dominant salon software is tied to product ordering and upselling; scheduling is of secondary importance (or less).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > _Excluding outliers such as Gates/Zuckerberg, is the inference that a good > hacker can make more from the market directly actually valid?_

No, it is not.

It makes a _huge_ number of assumptions without bothering to mention them: that the hacker is equally skilled at public relations, marketing, business management, financial management, and on and on. Running a business -- even a relatively simple one -- requires much more than, "sit down and write great code for 12 hours a day, six days a week."

As the business grows towards that $3 million / year figure, the number of business-y things that have to be successfully managed also grows.

Yes, there _are_ stories of people who have done it (e.g., Minecraft) -- and yet, on further investigation, you often find that there's a lot more to the story than there appears to be (Angry Birds). Still, these are the exceptions, the breakout successes, and it's as foolish to go into business for yourself expecting this kind of outcome as it is to walk into a casino and expect to walk out as the big winner of the month.

I think that trying to distill the entire process down into whether or not you're a "good hacker" ignores all of the other talents and luck that are required, and also really diminishes the perception that any business acumen is required for that kind of success.

<comment><USER8> While I agree with you that not everyone can make a billion dollar business I can't help but think that there ARE people they did it. That other people already did it doesn't mean that you will do it the same way. These thinks require a lot of luck and much more hard work.

BUT what I want to say is non of these people made a billion dollar business because they want to make billion dollar business. No, they did it because they found finally something they thought people on earth do need. Some of them were wrong (like most of the weekend projects on HN will die because of monthly costs ect.) but a few of them were right and did it.

If you want to play this coke game then you should it and you should do it with a fun project, with a project you think the world needs, with a project you would love and whole bunch people too.

BUT make sure that you know that you don't have to play this game. There is also a way to make great money (not billions tough). If you want to go into the million dollar business you could dig into cooperate e-business stuff. These may not be fun and you can't program in Haskell but if do it big you will get your money. There is a lot of room for smart people you just need to say what they want you to say and make them happy. This will let you make so much money you wouldn't have thought about.

Just find out what you want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think that is the most important essay pg ever wrote, honestly. Don't read "hacker" as "programmer", read "hacker" as "maker of valuable things." Yes, you can make astoundingly more than your day job salary by making valuable things. Maybe not $3 million -- though that's less than what MicroGooFaceZon will pay per hacker at a talent acquisition these days -- but certainly more than the day job salary.

I'm 29 this week. The market wage for a 29 year old programmer in this region is about $35k annualized, or under $12 an hour. I worked for that in 2010. Also in 2010, after quitting, I did consulting work at a variety of price points. One of those price points was $200 an hour. It was in the middle of the pack, and I would need a non-monetary reason to work for $200 today, but let's take that as a starting point.

The difference between $12 and $200 an hour was not a sudden quantum leap in my programming skill. It wasn't all that spiffy to begin with -- many of you are better programmers. The biggest single difference was that I moved from a place where programming skill provides fairly little value at the margin -- writing CRUD apps to universities to e.g. print out the list of students in a particular class -- to places where I can credibly sit down with a decisionmaker and show him why N weeks of work stands to make the firm a few million dollars. Often, this translates into the decisionmaker personally making a million dollars. ("A 5% increase in conversion rates does _this_ to the value of your stock options.") This is a nice place to be in negotiating.

Another thing which changed since I "negotiated" pay at $12 an hour: I started negotiating seriously, based on the value I could reasonably be expected to provide. The best single tactical suggestion was from Thomas (tptacek): rather than compromising on rate, compromise on scope. If $20,000 is too dear for the project budget, rather than offering to cut prices 25%, offer to cut scope 25%. OK then, no problem, we won't do that review of your email autoresponders this time. Bam, $5,000 saved. (Of course, after the "how many millions this is going to make you" discussion, price in thousands often becomes less than material.)

Does this carry over directly to product businesses? Yes, though again, you're not going to double your income because of a quantum leap in programming ability. If you succeed, it will likely be a combination of ability to make things (not to be underestimated: most people can't, after all) with a plethora of soft skills which are very difficult to find in a single person or small group of people. If you do it yourself, you get to keep the salary of the employee/consultant a firm would have to hire to get the benefit.

Bingo cards, for example, is really, really no great shakes in the programming department. The lion's share of my (modest) compensation for that isn't for programming ability, it is for identifying and alleviating a huge unmet need in the bingo cards publishing industry, which I use to sell a complement (my software). I publish more bingo cards on more topics than every "real" educational publisher worldwide combined.

And even then, BCC has many suboptimal choices about the business model. One big takeaway from bootstrapping AR is that recurring revenue -- the SAAS model -- really, really rocks. (More to come on that sometime when I get a day free to blog.)

</comment><comment><USER10> _2\. Assume a hacker can in turn be significantly more productive working for themselves._

I'm a hacker. I work at a company that employs sales people, marketers, and support staff. The software I work on makes my company money--far more than my salary. Without sales, marketing, and support, however, that software would generate no revenue at all.

I could quit my job and go into business myself making the same software. Now I need to do my own sales, marketing, and support, none of which I'm any good at, and I have no time to work on development.

Working for a company makes me significantly _more_ productive than working for myself, because I can specialize in the things I'm good at.

This doesn't mean that I might not do better financially by going into business for myself. I absolutely, positively would not do better technical work, since I'd be constantly distracted by non-technical tasks.

</comment><comment><USER11> Reminds me of this article in the Economist: "Why do firms exist?":

"His central insight was that firms exist because going to the market all the time can impose heavy transaction costs. You need to hire workers, negotiate prices and enforce contracts, to name but three time-consuming activities. A firm is essentially a device for creating long-term contracts when short-term contracts are too bothersome."

EDIT: link: <http://www.economist.com/node/17730360>

<comment><USER5> Coase's 1991 Bank of Sweden Prize for ^: [http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1991/...](http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1991/press.html)

Oliver Williamson's 2009 Bank of Sweden prize updated Coase's theories. Speed read: [http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2009/...](http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2009/speedread.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> In my experience, it is NOT valid in general. If you simply go out on the marketplace and say, "Hey, I'm a good hacker, give me a contract job!", then clients will calculate your worth by taking the $80K figure. (Clients are much better businessman than you are, much better negotiators, and usually need you much less than you need the contract.) But, you won't have 8 hours worth of work per day, so you'll go broke.

The trick is to be more than just a general-purpose "hacker". You have to be a "Security expert" or an "iPhone SEO expert" or an "Oracle DBA"... The trick is, you have to know a market segment, and have a good understanding of what the business value of your skill/work is, and then you can charge based on that.

And of course good networking, good people skills, good self-management skills, etc. Stuff that "hackers" usually don't care about.

<comment><USER13> This isn't quite correct. Contractors and freelancers (of which I am one) charge substantially more than the clients' employees salary ($75-150/hr, typically, vs 70-100k/year). This is accepted due to the cost savings of not paying for insurance, 401k contributions, etc.

In my experience, I charge more (than I made when salaried), but only bill the 4-7 hours a day really, actually working. I'm much more productive, work less hours, and make more money doing it.

Specialties are certainly a lucrative way to go, but not necessarily essential. An all-rounder is more likely to have a long-term relationship with a client (depending on the industry of course).

<comment><USER14> "This is accepted due to the cost savings of not paying for insurance, 401k contributions, etc."

Probably more about the liquidity of the arrangement than those things. Not always easy to hire and fire as needed whereas with a contractor/freelancer you can take someone on board for a particular job and then not use them again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Money for valuable effort" - world does not work like that.

World is built of cash pipes and 99% people just tap into them (salary) or builds their own thin pipes (lifestyle business?). 1% of clever people from time to time manages to build new fat pipe but who and when it's almost due to sheer luck. Experience and smarts don't help you win the lottery, they just buy you a ticket.

When you work for yourself you make an attempt at building new pipe but all you can usually do is build thin pipe and even if you are draining 100% of it it's still less than what you could get if you just tapped to someone else's fat pipe, even if your work doesn't do anything to make the pipe fatter or even harms it. It's most apparent for people in financial sector but I believe it's true for everybody.

That's why most people have salary and try to build something own after hours. This way they are getting a shot at building own cash pipe while still not passing on opportunity at draining someone else's fat pipe.

Oh and it's much easier to widen already fat pipe that to build your own as fat as the amount of the widening. That's probably the answer to your question.

</comment><comment><USER5> 1\. Salaried people demand very strict floors on their earnings. It's completely unrealistic in business. Imagine saying you won't open a toy store unless someone guarantees that you will make at least $XX,000 in the first year (with guaranteed pay rises each year).

2\. Coming up with good business ideas is _hard_.

3\. Your wage in an office environment is strongly related to your ability to harm the bottom line by leaving, your ability to play politics, and your credentials. Your wage as an entrepeneur is entirely related to your ability to get customers to pay you or to get investors to invest in you. In my experience the two skill sets are negatively correlated.

4\. In addition to being exposed to and responsible for the entire risk distribution, costs that a corporation spreads out over many people (incl. health insurance) are focused narrowly on an entrepreneur. Remember how you used to be able to make phone calls from the office and still be on the clock?

5\. Lastly, hackers' skills are often complementary to other parts of a business but not sufficient to establish a new business with ≥ marginal value. {Sales ⋃ hackers} > {sales} + {hackers}.

There are many good reasons to believe that hackers can make more money freelancing than working for a single company. Starting a new company is a totally different proposition.

</comment><comment><USER16> Interesting question, and a premise that was put together by someone on the 'other side' (someone who already made it). On paper it sounds valid, but it's still much more difficult than it looks.

I do think part of it has to do with 'thinking small'. If you are shooting to make $100k, you'll be looking for activities to engage in to make $8k/month. But there's a lot of time and effort involved in getting anything started, and as such, the net result of shooting for $8k/month may be significantly less.

Many people are looking to replace a wage rather than start a business, which would almost necessarily entail growing beyond a one person org, even if only by using freelance help as needed. The effort involved in creating reproducible systems (market research, customer acquisition, product development, support, etc), as oppposed to just hacking on code, is far greater than most people realize. Not that it can't be done, of course.

<comment><USER16> Following on...

That $3 million sounds random and high. The notion of wages and income and such all relate to 'what value can I bring to someone else?'. Our income is related to how much value we bring to others (and how much they value that value). It's quite possible that in my brain there's info and skills worth $3 million to _someone_ (more likely many someones) but figuring out how to deliver that value is a problem I'm still working on, I suspect others are too - for themselves, not for me!

<comment><USER17> $3 million is actually probably not high. For instance, here are the revenue/employee of some tech firms:

[http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2283-ranking-tech- companies-b...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2283-ranking-tech-companies-by- revenue-per-employee)

Note that these figures include admins, HR, finance, warehouse staff, etc. and not just hackers. Taking that into account, $3m annually per programmer isn't outlandish according to these figures. Remember that each programmer is offset by n support staff, who will often not contribute directly to revenue.

You can calculate the analogous numbers for any company that is publicly traded in the US and some other exchanges that require employee counts to be published. There are also other aggregates posted on the web.

So if you're aiming to create $60k of value for yourself, you're aiming at a far lower number than anyone who would hire you.

<comment><USER18> I disagree. It is BECAUSE of the HR, finance, and warehouse staff that the products that are being sold have that value proposition.

If you're 37 Signals you're providing a SaaS product, which means that people are paying exactly because you have a level of support that goes beyond mere development. Also, there is a certain "economies of scale" going on where by adding less and less people you can make a product more useful to a larger segment of the market (because you can include many of the little featurettes that are deal-breakers for many businesses).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The company has a mix of activities which end up generating money.

(developing + x + y + z + brand + existing clients + ...) = $$$

If you leave that company, and develop 3 times more efficiently, you'll still be missing those other activities and you might not make any money.

(developing x 3) = :(

Related is the observation that, in most large companies that I've observed, a large amount of people do "work" that actually contributes almost nothing, and if you take into account their salary, has a negative contribution. Still, those companies are profitable.

(developing + x + y + z - a - b) = $$$

<comment><USER20> Excellent point, and I think that's the challenge for hackers starting a business. You have to learn the other skills required and that can take time. It took me 5 years running my own thing on the side to even feel like I know what I'm doing at all in some of those other areas, but I've only just scratched the surface. I'm amazed at how the ycombinator startups pull it off. I think that's part of the reason the training they get from the program is really valuable.

<comment><USER19> It's also quite hard to figure out what x, y and z actually are. Could be SEO. Could be not. Could be sales. Could be not. etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think one of the issues is sales/customer generation. Most hackers are good at that - hacking. Not at selling themselves, their services or generating leads and customers.

</comment><comment><USER22> The simple explanation does not factor in economies of scale. You might make a good wage working for someone else because they have some kind of market advantage. Would 100 mini-Googles that were 1/100th the size of Google make as much money? No, because their advantage (at least in selling ads) has to do with the fact that they have such a high percentage of the inventory.

I'm not saying some hackers can't make more than their salary's worth by going alone, but the argument is way too simplified to account for the real world.

<comment><USER23> I agree. A huge corporation also has the structure in place in all levels that makes a programmer profitable from the beginning.

When starting a startup, you need to build that structure from scratch - <USER2> the marketing, to the sales process, to the scalability, support, hiring, etc. The reason why most employees think they're more than they're worth is because they don't see all the things that happened before they were hired, and all the things that happens behind the scenes that makes their specific tasks valuable to the company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The question is: Is the hacker going to hack or run a business?

If he is going to hack only (considering he has found someone who is going to pay based on his output), then he should be able to make what he actually worths.

If he is going to start a business, then he is going to become an Entrepreneur. And that means, he requires a hell lot more of skills like Copywriting, Sales, Customer care, Networking, SEO... (just to name a few)

</comment><comment><USER24> IMHO, Hackers are usually very poor negotiators. (I assume because we are fact based thinkers)

In life, you never get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate.

<comment><USER25> Negotiating can be learned and trained, it's nothing innate and static.

This book helped me learn something about it; despite its name. [http://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Power-Negotiating-Inside- Negot...](http://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Power-Negotiating-Inside- Negotiator/dp/1564143996/ref=cm_cr_dp_orig_subj)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think this is proven at companies like Google, and Nintendo.

If you divide total revenue of the company amongst all of its employees, Google still makes say 1-2M per employee, and Nintendo has been reported to earn in revenue 2-3M per employee during the heyday of the Wii.

The key to making this work though is being able to have a product market fit. Or in the HN religion, 'make things people want'.

Secondly I think there are a great number of inefficiencies that can occur if say a product could earn you $3M per engineer/ hacker and you are able to get at-least $40k per engineer/ hacker, as you work to narrow that delta you will refine your nitch, and craft.

If however the revenue does not scale, meaning, it's not easy enough to grab something for your poor/ unskilled efforts, I think it's hard to wiggle your way to the top and reach $3M per person.

I think this is why HN/ VCs tends to fund people in strong existing markets which are begging for an update.

It's too expensive to educate someone on your value, and to build the market, even though there are some entrepreneurs that are really good at that.

<comment><USER27>
      > your nitch

Pet peeve: It's "niche." In spite of how it's commonly pronounced.

<comment><USER28> My peeve is the pronunciation 'nitch'. It's pronounced neesh, it's a French word.

<comment><USER29> According to Merriam Webster, the primary pronunciation is "nich"...

<http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/niche>

Just because a word has a French origin, doesn't mean the French pronunciation is preferred in English.

<comment><USER30> Since we're nitpicking, that should be (US) English. In the UK we say neesh. Or at least, I do :)

<comment><USER29> Indeed. According to the Internet (which is always reliable): "There are two common British pronunciations, [neesh] and [nitch], the first perhaps being more highly regarded. The US pronunciation is always [nitch]."

Source: [http://www.talktalk.co.uk/reference/dictionaries/english/dat...](http://www.talktalk.co.uk/reference/dictionaries/english/data/d0082473.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> "working for themselves"

Maybe I'm reading too much into that, but if you're thinking of going it alone, you might not get very far. Gates, Zuckerberg and most of the rest had others they teamed with from the start. Pg is very big on co-founders for that reason. Smart hackers have made 3 million a year (and up) by teaming with other smart hackers.

There's a difference between a freelancer and a startup, and in the "How to Make Wealth" I've always assumed pg is referring to small teams making things many people want (startups), because that's the theme of so much of his writing.

</comment><comment><USER32> I think that's a pretty gross oversimplification of what Paul says, that quote is from pretty much right at the top of the essay, and he then goes on to spend several pages saying why it's not that simple.

He especially isn't talking about lone hackers working for themselves, but ones working at startups - the very first line of the essay is "If you wanted to get rich, how would you do it? I think your best bet would be to start or join a startup".

The difference between a lone hacker working for a per-day rate and a startup is the lone hacker doesn't have a value "multiplier", where 1 days work can be resold many times, whether through product sales or something else.

And for the lone hacker who is building a product, well, most hackers are really bad at doing a sales job...

</comment><comment><USER33> most hackers do the following (from my knowledge of my friends) \- devalue their self-worth (I can't really charge $200 for 15min of my work right?) \- waste their time on things they find intriguing (solving problems not many have), that aren't ultimately profitable \- coast through easy non-challenging jobs which leaves them w/less time to strike out on their own. \- lack of business acumen (business acumen != tech acumen)

I have a brilliant friend who is helping his friends work on a potentially dead end project because "I don't have anything else to work on" you also forget these outliers have other factors helping them: solving common problems, existing connections (gates + IBM connection), etc.

</comment><comment><USER34> The amount you can capture value in a 'big company' depends a lot on the industry you are in.

If you are in the right niche, say finance then A.N Other Big Bank will pay 1,000 to 1,200 USD per day for _good_ programmers and more like 1,200 to 1,500 USD per day for _excellent_ programmers.

Now if you are capturing 300K USD per year for your programming skills jumping into a start-up looks like a significantly higher risk proposition than at 80K USD per year.

This is a point that I kind of feel is missed a lot on HN. One of the reasons you see less start-ups in NYC, LDN, etc is simply because it's too easy to make good enough money that the hunger simply doesn't exist.

</comment><comment><USER35> _Assume a hacker can in turn be significantly more productive working for themselves_

You might be more productive working for yourself but that doesn't necessarily translate to making more money/wealth. Companies are like big socialist states where the productivity of the few is transferred to the rest. Most of the wealth in companies was created when the early team figured out how to make money. Figuring out how to make money is incredibly hard to do. It's probably a better bet (financially) to siphon off this wealth than to try to go out and create more yourself.

</comment><comment><USER36> That 3 million figure is operating under the assumption that the hacker already has good market research (he is building something people want) and distribution (he is able to get it to those people). Those are the costs you are paying for when you work for a large company.

If the hacker does not have those two things, it is quite likely that he will generate significantly less than 3 million dollars of value.

<comment><USER37> I suppose the missing factor here is what PG refers to as simply "hard work". By that, he means all the other stuff you have to do to run a successful business besides hacking. He's oversimplifying by putting it that way, IMHO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> There's three factors I can think of -

Number one is that it is an uneven distribution. Some hackers might make millions, some will make nothing.

Number two is that hackers may focus too much on doing the work they understand and enjoy, when all parts of a business need attention (like sales and networking).

Number three is that 3 million just sounds a bit on the high side.

</comment><comment><USER39> There are a few ways to look at this problem, but the fundamental skill set for being independent isn't necessarily your hacking ability -- it's your ability to find a market, and successfully sell your talents and/or a product.

I can speak from over ten years of freelancing and working for startups: learning how to communicate effectively with non-technical people, understanding how to sell your services and/or products, and figuring out what market your skills are most valuable in ... that is the trick to making good money.

I've picked up a few good habits, and it has significantly increased my income, but fundamentally there are only 24 hours in a day, and one of me.

Here's my take: a highly skilled, professional, experienced, and independent freelance software developer can bring home $150k in a good year. That's nearly $200,000 before taxes, and represents an hourly rate of about $150 to $200 per hour (there's a fair amount of of downtime for freelancers and consultants).

You won't make $200 per hour selling your services as a developer to SMEs and startups (the typical market for freelance developers). That kind of money is usually reserved for solving significant problems for big businesses.

On the other hand, can make an equivalent amount at a lower rate by starting starting your own development agency and hiring other developers ... and sales people ... and administrative staff. But that means you're not really out on your own, and your value is in successfully managing people -- not being a "smart hacker working very hard."

The other way to make a significant amount of money is to build a product that people love. This isn't an easy task. I'd venture that a significant number of people on HN have actually tried building their own products.

There's a very good reason why hard working and smart software developers aren't making $3 million each year -- it's because it's extremely hard to do, requires a skill set that is far broader than simply writing good code, and also involves a lot of luck (being the right person, at the right time, in the right place). We happen to have a skill that is in demand and pays well, but that does not make us brilliant business people.

All that aside: working for yourself can be an extremely rewarding experience in and of itself, and over time you will make a good amount of money as you hone your craft and business skills. I love what I do, and I strongly encourage others to try it out if they're interested in the independent work- and lifestyle.

tl;dr? Independent, smart, hard working hackers can make good money, but the $3M / year figure is bullshit.

<comment><USER39> Note: this is under the assumption that this scales down to the individual level. The idea that a good developer can earn a company $3m isn't unreasonable: it's the idea that the developer is doing it on their own that is incorrect. There are many other people involved in magnifying the value of what a software developer creates.

Conversely, it's also quite possible for a software developer to cause a company to lose $3 million .. and again, it's a question of amplification. :)

</comment></comment><comment> wh-uws I would also add that there are unfortunately alot of hackers that don't understand a pretty central business rule.

Closed mouths don't get fed.

They never ask for or seek market wages. And the business people they seems to fall into the hands of get wide eyed and/or start slick talking (because to them they've found a sucker) and next thing you know they're working crazy hours and taking a low wage because "they're just coding" "some else's" "big idea (TM)"

Many say things like "I don't really care about money." or "I can wait a couple of years."

And those things can be true but if they were a bit braver and spoke up or found employment with a group who appreciates their talents they would get paid better.

</comment><comment><USER40> > 2\. Assume a hacker can in turn be significantly more productive working for > themselves.

OK.

3\. All things being equal,

Here. All things are _not_ equal between a lone hacker and a company. You won't get that lucrative contract your employer won.

</comment><comment><USER41> I think the gap is not how much value the hacker generates, it is how much value they get from the corporation.

If you are independent, than you loose out on all the value the corporation provides above & beyond your salary. Things like: \- Taxes on revenue. The corporation pays state/federal taxes on the income you help generate. You would have to pay this on your own, and it can be expensive. \- Limited legal liability. They have lawyers and deep pockets to dissuade lawsuits, and fight them if necessary. Most corporations protect individual employees. You would have to pay for this on your own. \- Sales force. Demand generation is very expensive \- Healthcare. Yeah, very expensive. \- Office space. \- Training, travel, budgets. \- Hardware, etc.

Basically, take everything captured under "General administrative expenses" and divide that by the number of employees in the company. This is the amount of value each hacker gets above & beyond their pay.

This gap isn't insurmountable, and you probably don't need _all_ the services, but it explains much of the 'barrier to entry' for hackers going rouge.

</comment><comment><USER42> _why does it seem most hackers struggle to capture even half their regular wage from the market directly?_

Marketing and selling is hard. And programmers have varying degrees of build- it-and-they-will-come syndrome.

I'm trying to help solve that problem with my new project. Please consider signing up if you want to sell more - <http://laughingcomputer.com>.

</comment><comment><USER43> I guess he's just simplifying things, but the more complex truth is that a hacker's worth to the company is unlikely to so neatly correspond to a salary figure like that. (BTW that salary figure is about 10 years out of date; hackers are making more like 130-150k now, if only salary is considered). I've had years where my worth was 1x my salary, 10x my salary, and 100x my salary, based on unique contributions where I took the initiative to do things that most others would not have. I suspect most of us have good years like that, but they partly happen because of the context in which you work. It would have been unlikely for me to have such big contributions without being part of a team that was also contributing a lot.

</comment><comment><USER44> The rule of thumb is that the company expects to generate profits at least one order of magnitude larger than your salary. Hence I would say the 80K hacker should be able to do work worth about 1 M a year _to the company_.

This gets back to PG's second assumption: "Assume a hacker can in turn be significantly more productive working for themselves."

Most hackers are not more productive working for themselves for a multitude of reasons, some of which have been discussed (i.e. lack of marketing focus) but I think that most hackers who work for someone else hone very specific skills that are suited to the task at hand, which build value for the companies they are working for, but those skills arent necessarily valued in the marketplace.

</comment><comment><USER45> From my experience if you are any good you might get some income dive when you go independent but it should sort itself out within a year or two. That being said, working as a consultant requires different skill-set then just hacking on some software for 'the man'. You can be super brilliant when doing tech work but miserable when dealing with people, selling, managing your own time, etc. In such situation you have only 2 options: a) change and learn to deal with people, or b) work for a company that can utilize your skills while "protecting" you from the outside world. some people choose (b), others choose (a).

</comment><comment><USER46> "2. Assume a hacker can in turn be significantly more productive working for themselves."

This premise is fundamentally flawed for one simple reason. When you are working for someone else, you just come to work, sign in, and start coding. The question of actually having work to do is solved long before you ever set foot in the office. When you're working for yourself, a big portion of your time has to be spent looking for work. And that's time you can't spend coding, ergo you aren't making money for it. That's why people working independently will generally earn less than people in a company, all other things being equal.

</comment><comment><USER47> Effort is multiplicative. While 50% of your effort might provide $500k of value to a company, 100% of your effort might be worth nothing without the structure and support provided by that company.

</comment><comment><USER48> "should be able to do work worth about $3 million a year."

Note that he says you can DO work WORTH $3 million. That quote says nothing about actually selling that work, or getting it in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER49> You are quite smart and you guessed right. Start-ups are not a guarantee to win the lottery. PG makes money with people being interested in start-ups, so he tells you about as much of the advantages as possible. And it is not like he's lying or hiding something. From all the facts he just emphasizes the ones that he thinks favor his own situation most. Both "smart hacker" and "working hard" can be interpreted in different ways. Not much of a surprise, isn't it?

</comment><comment><USER50> I recently started asking my clients if I could interview them - so I could learn about the sales process (they are sales reps - i provide a one off service for them now). Sales people love to talk, so I spent on average 2 hrs per interview x 10 interviews last month. Almost every person I spoke with TOLD ME a product or service they need. They also described their sales process from lead gen to close and support. If you have hacking chops, talk to people.

</comment><comment><USER51> It is absurd that a smart hacker is 30x better than a mediocre hacker. I consider myself slightly above average, and I look at the smartest hackers' code on github, and it is not 30x better at delivering customer value than mine. Maybe 2x at best. Many times the code delivers 1% of the value of my code because it is full of architecture astronat garbage that I am not smart enough to write.

<comment> T-hawk > It is absurd that a smart hacker is 30x better than a mediocre hacker.

How maintainable, readable, understandable, and extendable is their code? It's well within possibility that changes and enhancements could take 30x longer to develop and test and deploy for a mediocre hacker on a disorganized platform than for a smart hacker on a well-factored codebase. Architecture astronauting is a valid and legitimate criticism, but it's also quite possible to make an application extensible without going overboard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Network, network, network... because you're not a salesperson. Maybe you have those traits but most hackers don't. So you must rely upon being good at what you do and letting people who have work know you're reliable and available so they will funnel you work.

If you're not interested in consulting or freelance, network anyway. You'll need a list of contacts to tell about your startup.

</comment><comment><USER53> If you have non-programming skills like SEO, sales, PR (or eager to learn them), than it's certainly true, that you can get a lot more, than your current wage.

The problem for me with working on my own is laziness - sometimes i can work for whole days without interruption, sometimes i skip months without any work.

</comment><comment><USER54> I think pg's idea of a hacker is not a person who only hacks code, but it is more like "Venture hacks", "marketing hacks". To hack is

a) the process of grokking through hacking

b) the process/mindset of circumventing apparent barriers in front of you.

Both are very hard, and require a great deal of street smarts.

</comment><comment><USER55> Because you start from scratch, instead of improving upon something already big. You might make more money by making Google 0.01% more popular than by making your smaller startup 1% more popular, while the effort could be similar.

</comment><comment><USER56> as a poor man, i've learned that there are no shortcuts in life. as an optimistic poor man, i believe that 80k can indeed be re-valued to 3m, but not overnight, and certainly there are barriers and heavy risks associated. so this is where you really need to dig deep and figure out the truth behind all of this--are you just looking for a shortcut or do you really enjoy the path to potential enlightenment?

</comment><comment><USER57> It's because most engineers stare at the feet of a client when talking to them, and people with money (that don't understand tech) don't like that.

Simple as that.

Tech - Normal liaisons will (hopefully) be a growing market in coming times. I'm being selfish in saying that :)

</comment><comment><USER58> "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts." — Aristotle

</comment><comment><USER59> First of all, a lot of software projects fail. A successful software project is worth millions, but a failed one is worth zero or less, at least in terms of value created for immediate capture. A well-organized and large company can squeeze value (wisdom, code) out of the failed projects but small companies (which are often single software projects) just go out of business.

Second, there's risk. Capitalist society always allocates most of the reward to those who take the monetary risk, not those who do the work. From a humanist perspective, it's unfair because _you_ are taking more risk with every job you take-- you're risking your career and health, they're just risking money, which they have in abundance-- but that's how the game works. If you don't like it, become politically active and try to change it.

Third, "business people" are better at capturing surplus value. It's about leverage, negotiation, and putting oneself in the right chair.

All that said, I don't think an unproven programmer is worth anything near $3 million per year, or even 1/20 of that. The worst programmers are not very skilled and are a liability-- negatively productive. I would say that base salaries are about right-- $50,000 for an unproven beginner, $80,000 for a top beginner, $120,000 at the mid-range, and $200,000 for experts-- but that companies should extend much, much more in the way of employee profit-sharing and creative control. Where programmers get stiffed is not in their compensation (which is quite fair) but in their lack of autonomy and "say" in how they do their jobs; often they are held back and prevented from unlocking their talents by meddling "executives" of mediocre intellect and vision. _That_ is what should change, not base salaries _per se_.

<comment><USER60> _Second, there's risk. Capitalist society always allocates most of the reward to those who take the monetary risk, not those who do the work._

This assumes that having a paying job at all is not itself much of a reward, and that the programmer's take-home pay constitutes no profit for the programmer. But this is wrong, because the programmer would rather have the money than his free time, so the transaction is highly profitable _to him_. (It's also invalid to suppose that the main human motivation is only to make so many dollars while ignoring all the other relevant context.) Who is it that said "the maintenance of life and the pursuit of happiness are not separate issues?"

Another problem with your way of looking at it is that it ignores non- financial rewards. Doing a _good job_ causes an increase in self-esteem (the real kind that results in the creation of value, not the fake thing we call by the same name, where your teacher gives you and everyone else a gold star), and _that_ is a reward. No one else can ever give you genuine self-esteem.

It doesn't bother me that there are other people out there with a great deal of money, while I don't have very much at the moment. All I care about is myself, and how I'm going to make the most of _my_ life. The only thing I think about when I hear about people with lots of money is, "if they let them keep their money, we're doing great as a society. If and when I earn lots of money by creating and trading value voluntarily with other people, I'll be able to _keep what I've earned_ by the same principle enjoyed by others who have earned their wealth, and that's good for my flourishing life."

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Its skewed by a certain economic bias..what bias?

You see software units once the first one created has zero cost of duplication as far as producing that next unit to sell to someone..so that economic bias is the assumption that the smart hacker is able to produce a desirable product or service that one can monetize..

Let me give you an example:

The average right now for 2d games on android market is 20k in downloads over 3 months. At $1.99 that works out to about $10,000 net every 3 months from one game. And that is recurring income. Most 2d games take one month to code, thus realistically doing 5 games could net over $100,000 per year after taxes!</comment>


Why Super Metroid's Hacking Community is Still Going Strong - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/196769/why_super_metroids_hacking_.php

<comment><AUTHOR> > For these explorer-type players, finding development fossils -- items that > were present in the original game's code but never used -- is one of the > chief rewards of ROM hacking.

That's pretty cool, they find enemies and items that have never actually been used in the game, and reuse them in modded missions.</comment>


India tiger census shows rapid population growth - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-49148174 <comment><USER2> When I was growing up, there were far more tigers, even in Nashik district[1]. One of my most vivid memories from growing up is when we were driving to a near by place called Bhandardara. My father was in charge of constructing a tunnel to store water for a hydroelectric power plant and we took this trip many times. We were driving early morning and at around 6.30am, our driver stopped as he could see a tiger cub lying on the street. Our guess was a vehicle had hit it and it needed help. But we could not risk getting out of the car in case the mother shows up. This is before mobile telephones (circa 1994). All we could do was to turn back and reach nearest police station and call forest department for help. Sadly the cub never made it, it was run over and died long before we came across it. Often it is said that we dont always see change in environment as it happens slowly over generation, but drop in tiger population happened very fast. Even though there are no tigers left in my district, I am very glad the population is rising elsewhere in India.

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashik_district](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashik_district)

</comment><comment><USER3> A bit unrelated but this reminded me of my hike to mullayanagiri about 15 years ago. We were a group of 12 and our guide was leading the way and was a good 0.5km ahead of us. All of a sudden the guide was running back towards us like no tomorrow. We asked him what happened and he said he saw a tiger cub. We got so excited and wanted to see it. He said this is no joking matter and that if a cub is all alone, the mother is somewhere nearby and will rip us all apart in no time even if we are no threat. The tone in which he said it still makes me shiver and we ran for our lives :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Astonishing. Still a long way to go, though.

> Mr Modi said the results of this tiger census would make "every Indian > happy".

This isn't an exaggeration: Tigers are interwoven in to the Indian (and Bangladeshi?) psyche [0] owing mostly to the overwhelming guilt of almost singlehandedly causing extinction of these beasts. As the article states, in the 20th Century over 80,000 Tigers were killed in undivided India-- They were mostly demonised in tales of yesteryears [1] and terrorised the populace due to their aggressive behaviour and man-eating tendencies.

There's 2,900 of them now, but a long way away from 80,000. May they burn bright forever [2].

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machali_(tigress)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machali_\(tigress\))

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

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyger#Poem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyger#Poem)

<comment><USER5> There is a slight insinuation in your comment that it was ignorant villagers who killed off large number of tigers due to population pressures. Superstition and a reaction against man-eating tigers were not the cause of the near extinction. They were intentionally hunted down by the British and the local Maharajas for "sport". Tigers were hunted mostly during the British era.

[https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2014/03/10/a-concise- his...](https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2014/03/10/a-concise-history-of- tiger-hunting-in-india/)

<comment><USER4> > insinuation in your comment that it was ignorant villagers who killed

I'm sorry but I don't see which sentence makes you think that: esp the _ignorant_ villagers part.

> hunted down by the British and the local Maharajas for "sport"

The article too points this out. And at the Raj Mahals (Palaces of the Kings) of the Mysore State there was indeed a display of photographs, pictures of Tiger kills by not just the Rajas but also by visiting dignitaries.

Additionally, it wasn't uncommon to have Tigers killed, back then, due to danger to human lives. And the Tiger hunters were celebrated heroes.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Corbett#Hunting_man- eating...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Corbett#Hunting_man- eating_tigers_and_leopards)

<comment><USER6> > Additionally, it wasn't uncommon to have Tigers killed, back then, due to > danger to human lives. And the Tiger hunters were celebrated heroes.

But then why do you say in your previous comment that there is an overwhelming sense of guilt in the public psyche? There is no such guilt; people are largely indifferent.

<comment><USER4> > But then why do you say in your previous comment that there is an > overwhelming sense of guilt in the public psyche?

The amount of media coverage on Bengal Tigers, the outrage at decline in numbers in 1990s (?), the despair today when a Tiger dies in vain or is locked up [0], plus a handful of Indians commenting on their rendezvous with the beast and other related stories in this very thread speak for themselves, don't they?

All major Indian newspapers carried this bit on the front pages. And everyone I've come across has an opinion about it, I don't see the indifference that you speak of. That said, I realise that I cannot speak for the entirety of the vast Indian populace... But the signs that the majority care are ominous, to me.

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-24_(tiger)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-24_\(tiger\))

<comment><USER6> If you say something weighs on the Indian psyche, it does seem that you are making a statement that holds true for a large majority of Indian people, not just a handful of individuals.

Also, why would anyone who was not directly or indirectly involved in hunting tigers feel _guilty_ , of all things? Sad, certainly, but guilty is a stretch.

<comment><USER4> I've shared multiple links, pointed out various facts, and even called your attention to the comments in this very thread for you to guage what I mean.

If you choose to ignore that and nitpick on pedantic meaning of words, then so be it. I'm going to stop taking the bait, sorry.

> why would anyone who was not directly or indirectly involved in hunting > tigers feel guilty, of all things?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt_(emotion)#Collective_gui...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt_\(emotion\)#Collective_guilt)

<comment><USER6> Nitpicking? No, you made the following statement. I'm saying it is entirely false.

> This isn't an exaggeration: Tigers are interwoven in to the Indian (and > Bangladeshi?) psyche [0] owing mostly to the overwhelming guilt of almost > singlehandedly causing extinction of these beasts.

If there is any such thing as a general Indian psyche, it is unburdened with concerns of tigers dying off. The Indian people are more concerned with mass unemployment, droughts, floods and poverty. Also, kindly do not suggest that I'm trolling you in any way. I sincerely believe that you are making an incorrect representation about how concerned Indians are with tigers.

Your references to a Kipling story and a Blake poem are completely irrelevant. Newspapers give coverage but where is the mass outrage or outpouring of sorrow or regret? If there was any you haven't linked to it.

<comment><USER4> > where is the mass outrage or outpouring of sorrow or regret? If there was > any you haven't linked to it.

Pls read the Wikipedia entries on Tigers, T-24 and T-16, see the referenced articles therein.

> general Indian psyche, it is unburdened with concerns of tigers dying off. > The Indian people are more concerned with mass unemployment, droughts, > floods and poverty.

Non sequitur.

> Your references to a Kipling story and a Blake poem are completely > irrelevant.

> Also, kindly do not suggest that I'm trolling you in any way.

?

> I sincerely believe that you are making an incorrect representation about > how concerned Indians are with tigers.

I've shared links to back my claims. And I hear your opinion loud and clear, too. Can we pls agree to disagree and put this to rest?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Tigers unlike Lions are solitary animals, so these numbers are impressive +/\- 10%. My home state has one of the largest numbers and I was fortunate to see a Tigress with fresh kill and couple of cubs. Truly majestic beasts these are.

<comment><USER8> > was fortunate to see a Tigress with fresh kill and couple of cubs.

also fortunate you werent the 'fresh kill'!

serious, though, in what kind of context is it possible to see an adult tigress and not totally crap your pants?

<comment><USER9> The tiger to be afraid of is the one stealthily stalking you because it's starving and looking for prey it doesn't usually go after.

One with a fresh kill isn't going to be very interested in you unless you come too close to it or its cubs.

<comment><USER10> I hear one way to tell you're being stalked by a predator is a sudden eerie silence, where all the birds etc. stop making noises.

<comment><USER11> Why would birds go silent when they see a tiger? They're not in danger. The only possible danger would be to their eggs/chicks in a nest and my experience there is they make noise when they perceive any possible intruder near their nests.

<comment><USER12> Jim Corbett was a Brit in India who had the job of hunting down a number of man-eating tigers, lived to tell about it, and wrote several books about it (recommended). He talks extensively about listening to the jungle as a tiger detection method - the monkeys freak out and call to warn each other about the predator, birds freak out and then disappear, etc. He paid attention to both unusual silences and unusual noises. There were still several occasions where he almost became tiger chow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here's the summary report that explains the methodology, data analysis and results: [http://www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/files/file/Tiger%20...](http://www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/files/file/Tiger%20Status%20Report_summary.pdf)

<comment><USER14> Thanks for this. Astonishing report.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> the really interesting story is around how the law enforcement works here . Indian Tigers (especially the Royal Bengal Tigers) are some of the world's largest predators and are prized in Chinese medicine. Its brilliant how poachers have been kept off.

For those interested, there is a brilliant web documentary series called "Ranger, Ranger" about India's forest rangers who work in the sanctuaries - [http://mukha.co/ranger-ranger/](http://mukha.co/ranger-ranger/)

here's the one with the Tigers - [http://mukha.co/ranger- ranger/project/resurrecting-paper-tig...](http://mukha.co/ranger- ranger/project/resurrecting-paper-tigers-sariska)

<comment><USER7> Good find. I was looking for this article on STR (Sariska). It's indeed unfortunate what had happened in Sariska, but I am glad corrective measures were taken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is such a welcome news and a great start to the week!

But with the recent news about a tigress beaten to death in India and after coming across some videos in the social media on the tiger encounters with humans, I hope the Indian govt. also works on bolstering education and awareness campaigns across the rural population on the man vs animal encounters and also works towards preserving the forests where these encounters are reported.

<comment><USER17> I don't know if any amount of "awareness" is going to stop the people who live near them from revenge killings of man-eaters. Hard to blame them honestly.

Tiger population growth means more people live next to them. And on the internet we'll argue that it's because there's too many people but they'll expand into whatever territory they're ceded and someone is always going to have to live near them.

<comment><USER18> Craig Packer (former director of the Serengeti Lion Project) has been a big advocate of fencing in the national parks in Africa to prevent this sort of human-wildlife conflict.

Here's his original paper: [https://sci- hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.12091](https://sci- hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.12091)

And here is an interview with a more high-level explanation: [https://www.minnpost.com/earth-journal/2013/04/minnesota- res...](https://www.minnpost.com/earth-journal/2013/04/minnesota-researcher- says-saving-lions-requires-we-fence-them/)

It's very controversial, but similar principles would apply in India to minimize human-tiger conflict. At least some of the tiger reserves are already fenced in, but I don't believe all of them are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> While this news is good, it should be taken into consideration that without increases in habitat area, this will lead to higher tiger-human and tiger- tiger conflict. There is rising cases of tiger-human conflicts already and I hope this doesn't lead to a backlash.

<comment><USER20> Notice how these wildlife advocates don't have lobbying offices in these areas. Their property is safe.

Elephants are not destroying their crops/orchards. Rhinos are not smashing their cars. Leopards are not eating their pets, livestock, neighbors or family members.

[https://www.beefmagazine.com/pasture-range/wolves- economic-b...](https://www.beefmagazine.com/pasture-range/wolves-economic- bite-cattle-goes-way-beyond-predation) [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/110923...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/11092399/Man- eating-leopard-targeting-drunks-in-Indian-Himalayas.html) [https://www.cnn.com/2012/11/03/world/asia/nepal-leopard- deat...](https://www.cnn.com/2012/11/03/world/asia/nepal-leopard- deaths/index.html) [https://thehimalayantimes.com/nepal/one-dead-in-rhino- attack...](https://thehimalayantimes.com/nepal/one-dead-in-rhino-attack-in- chitwan/) [https://www.earthtouchnews.com/conservation/human- impact/rhi...](https://www.earthtouchnews.com/conservation/human- impact/rhinos-rampage-through-nepal-town-caught-on-camera/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is a great achievement for such a densely populated countries. I'd thought Tigers in the wild were on a terminal decline.

</comment><comment><USER22> >But there has also been an increase in human-tiger conflict recently and one reason is that India has too many tigers and too few forests that can sustain them unless more protected reserves are added. //

So they've stopped people killing them, but haven't unfortunately, it seems, been able to address the issue that leads to people killing them.

Presumably at some point the forest area needs to increase, or people will start killing tigers to protect themselves?

I wonder too how much of the increase is improved technique in finding (and recording?)?

<comment><USER23> If conditions are good, the tigers will presumably increase in number to fill any additional forest area available to them, as well. So I expect the best- case scenario is to provide enough reserved land for the tiger population to be at a safe size, and maintain that population by culling if needed.

<comment><USER22> They'd only adopt all forest if food was limitless, they're going to reduce their growth below replacement by over-predation before they inhabit the entire World. It's possible that forest increase would see a commensurate increase in prey, but it's not a given, I imagine.

You sound spot on with the culling, population management is a complex problem given the tendency towards chaos for such systems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Amazing animals, great news! See also the recent (Jul 20, 2019) "Siberian tigers start summer training in Heilongjiang, China" short video, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIilv8vyDYI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIilv8vyDYI) – says that from eight tigers in the captive breeding program from 1986 there are now more than a thousand.

</comment><comment><USER25> The article mentions tigers running out of room and coming more and more into human contact, in fact there was a story not long ago about a bunch of villagers killing a tiger.

Are there any plans to increase the size of the reserves, or creating new ones for the increasing tiger population?

Also, is it possible for tigers to mix sufficiently from one reserve to another, to avoid a lack of genetic diversity?

</comment><comment> lota-putty

        Modi said the tiger population had risen from 2,226 in "2014" to 2,967 in "2018".

Highlighting their(NDA/BJP) Govt at centre has positive effect on Tiger conservation.

        big cats breed and live in only about 10% of India's total potential tiger habitat of 300,000 sq.km

Even if we cut back a tiger's territory size from 450sq.km to 100sq.km, 3,000 Tigers at this time covers all the potential tiger reserves.

Now should we poke into actual healthy tiger reserves? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_reserves_of_India#Goals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_reserves_of_India#Goals) [https://www.letsstudytogether.co/complete-list-of-tiger- rese...](https://www.letsstudytogether.co/complete-list-of-tiger-reserves-in- india-pdf-download-free-pdf/)

India added a billion people since 1950 to its population. Should it be called a successes of erstwhile Govts?

Healthy sustainable growth without putting any life in ecosystem under threat is desired. India can sustain a healthy happy human population of 330 million without degrading natural wealth of the nation.

</comment><comment><USER26> ... and in Vietnam...

[https://www.nst.com.my/world/2019/07/507559/seven-dead- tiger...](https://www.nst.com.my/world/2019/07/507559/seven-dead-tigers-found- car-vietnam)

</comment><comment><USER27> I hope to see a tiger in the wild when I go to India. Looking into how to make this possible.

<comment><USER7> Please do.

If you are visiting Bangalore, the Karnataka state(of which Bangalore is the capital) has second largest number of tigers in the country, and there are multiple tiger reserves within 100-150 Mile radius of the city. I highly recommend visiting at least one of them, the forest staff are quite friendly and you can get first hand information on how they deal with poachers etc.

This is the Govt. website so please be gentle :)

[https://aranya.gov.in/Static%20pages/TigerReserves.aspx](https://aranya.gov.in/Static%20pages/TigerReserves.aspx)

Bandipur, Nagarhole & BRT reserves are 3-4 hours drive from Bangalore.

PS: Avoid the weekends if possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is a great achievement.

</comment><comment><USER29> Forgive me for being the party-pooper here.

I might be going off on a tangent, but this govt has a history of cooking up numbers. Be it GDP, be it out-of-deficit spending or be it the output of the informal economy. Something that's coming from PMO, I'd be super skeptical. Pardon me for pointing out their carelessness in handling water crisis and climate change, but sure, they focussed on tiger population growth. Definitely believable.

<comment><USER30> Do you think Tiger population growth happens overnight? I think successive governments have invested in making sure Tiger population growth is healthy. Read this: [https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144540/china-and- in...](https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144540/china-and-india-lead- the-way-in-greening)

Do you think India and China are somehow cooking up green cover to fool NASA's satellites too? Give me a break.

<comment><USER29> My friend, if you've been in touch with how this govt presents numbers, you'd be on my side. I acknowledge that in this case there is no hard evidence on either side, except for the statement by PMO. Good luck getting anything out of an RTI (if it still exists).

The article you shared, I completely agree with it. There are a number of other factors that go into tiger population growth. Greenery is just one part of it.

I never said the number of tigers *decreased". They might have actually increased, but I was only pointing out the potential misrepresentation by this govt which has been seen with numbers time and again.

<comment><USER31> The numbers have doubled since 2006. The surveys in 2010 and 2014 showed similar increases.

I am no modi bhakt or bjp supporter, but it is appalling that people will just oppose and disbelieve anything the current government does. I can claim very confidently that you would have no problem if Manmohan Singh announced this news.

<comment><USER29> I could say the exact same thing about Congress's GDP numbers. It should good progress over the years, until NDA came in and downgraded them. I would be critical no matter which govt it is. The underlying problem I have is with the inefficiencies of the informal counting/measuring process. If the ruling govt pokes its nose in a "supposed to be" independent authority carrying out the process, then of course I would be skeptical. Especially after it has been exposed multiple times.

"it is appalling that people will just oppose and disbelieve anything the current government does"

Frankly, I'm not the one running troll farms and calling everyone anti- national. Nor am I the one killing my accuser.

"I can claim very confidently that you would have no problem if Manmohan Singh announced this news."

I would believe the news by anyone who has integrity.

<comment><USER32> "Frankly, I'm not the one running troll farms and calling everyone anti- national. Nor am I the one killing my accuser."

Neither is _every single person_ who is rooting for the other side in this, or any debate, including, likely, the person you replied to. While pretending that everyone on the other side is running troll farms, it's a strawman that isn't actually helpful for debate.

Do you have any _specific_ reasons why this _specific_ tiger census is untrue?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Stories about climate change are flagged off the front page because they are supposedly irrelevant but somehow this story remains. What gives? How is the tiger population more relevant than climate change, an existential threat to humanity and all living species?

<comment><USER34> Plenty of stories about climate change still get attention on the front page. There's usually at least one every day. But they're the ones that contain new information.

Stories get flagged off the front page when they're repetitive, and stories get front page traction when they contain interesting/useful new information.

The recovering tiger population is interesting new information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> tiger meat!

<comment><USER36> Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? We're trying for something a bit different here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

You might also find these links helpful for getting the spirit of the site:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html)

[http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html)

[http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html)

<comment><USER35> ill just stop using hn

sorry.

<comment><USER36> We'd prefer you to stay! It's just a matter of not lowering the signal/noise ratio.

<comment><USER35> ive read the content you shared. it's in line with my heart and mind. ...sorry and cheers and thank you.

<comment><USER36> Glad to hear it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Tigers are twice as heavy as lions but still the same size. With a single swipe of a claw, a tiger was able to slit a lion's throat, killing it instantly.

<comment><USER38> >Tigers are twice as heavy as lions

how? less fat?

<comment><USER39> Muscle density I would imagine. Neither lions nor tigers are likely to have a lot of extra fat.

<comment><USER40> Muscle density does not really change from one animal to another, so more likely just the amount of muscle if the premise is true.

And I am not sure that it is obvious that they have the same level of fat.

<comment><USER39> If there is more muscle on a creature of approximately the same volume, then the density of muscle has increased?

<comment><USER40> But how do you know that there is more muscle? You only know that there is more mass based on the premise.

My point is that muscle cells across animals don't have significantly differing density. However, different individuals (of any species) may have different levels of glycogen and fat embedded in the muscle, which may contribute to your point of "muscle density". It is just a loser terminology of muscle density as such. Even then, I doubt that muscles mass for the same volume of muscle could change that much across individuals.

All in all, I am just arguing for more specificity in your hypothesis, because I think in its current form, it isn't adding much clear detail.

<comment><USER39> I'm not sure where the confusion lies

[https://www.quora.com/Are-male-African-lions-more- muscular-a...](https://www.quora.com/Are-male-African-lions-more-muscular-and- have-robust-built-than-the-tiger-From-the-picture-one-can-see-the-lion-s- muscle-more-easily-compared-to-the-tiger-s)

This suggests tigers have 72% muscle mass vs 50% hence more density?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> kind of happy but also now scared to go to india. I saw a video of a guy on a motorcycle almost get mauled by one.

<comment><USER42> Yeah..that's why we ride on elephants

<comment><USER43> Everyday ? You live in rough country. In Bangalore, we ride on elephants only for the first day of work. The local tigers here dont care much for engineers with experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> 30% in 5 years = rather 'decent' than 'rapid'

<comment><USER45> Tigers usually have 2-3 cubs in a litter. So i guess it is a good number

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> The bulk of the tiger population is in the Sundarbans (marshlands at the bottom of the Ganga-Brahmaputra delta). Anecdotally, many of the Sundarban tigers are man-eaters and there is a tacit policy to not go after the ones that happen to kill humans. This keeps the poachers and encroachers away, but also makes any census nearly impossible to conduct. I would not put too much faith in these reported numbers.

<comment><USER47> This is wrong on many levels. 7-8 states have more tigers than Bengal. Sundarban tigers are not man-eaters by default Tiger census is tricky business, but these numbers are as legit as they can get (especially given, outside of India, BD and Nepal, no other countries have serious population of tigers in the wild). I mean, what other numbers would you trust?

<comment><USER47> In case you want a reference: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_states_by_wildl...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_states_by_wildlife_population)</comment></comment></comment>


Anko SQLite, a library to simplify working with SQLite on Android - <AUTHOR> https://www.kotlindevelopment.com/anko-sqlite-database/ <comment><USER2> For those not using Kotlin, or using Kotlin and Java, check out Room:

[https://developer.android.com/topic/libraries/architecture/r...](https://developer.android.com/topic/libraries/architecture/room.html)

It's in their list, at half the size and method count of Anko (with no need to pull in the Kotlin runtime if you're not using Kotlin). It offers all the same features, really awesome migration testing, and RxJava integration.

For me these days the options that make sense in Android's world of infinite DBs/Orms/Wrappers are down to SQLBrite+SQLDelight, Realm, or Room depending on what you want

</comment><comment> le-mark SQLite is such a fantastic database. I've always wondered, is anyone using it at scale in a client server application? How do people handle syncing online/offline in mobile apps?

<comment><USER3> One problem we've ran into with it, is tables with > 400 columns.

<comment><USER4> Can you expand on that?

<comment><USER3> It's simply creating a local cache of a remote database that runs on Oracle.

<comment><USER4> I mean...what kinds of problems did you run into? Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really wish the android team would create an officially supported ORM package to wrap sqlite like CoreData on iOS. Global data access is even more important on android since Activities are stateless, and data access always seems to be to failure point in so many of our projects.

<comment><USER6> Golden rule of UI development: do not block the UI thread with I/O.

With ORM packages, the degree of I/O becomes proportional to the app's feature growth, and the UI eventually stutters. I've been on several successful app teams, and everyone that started with ORMs had to throw them away to solve stutter, and since the data and threading models of the apps were written around ORMs, they had to be mostly rewritten. Going through this, I also noticed that the before and after ORM code was about the same in line numbers, and it didn't save time to use the ORM (because ORMs have lots of negatives that required time to work around, e.g., distancing you from control over the use of indices).

For a great example of successful UI code, see Chromium, which explicitly outlaws blocking I/O on the UI thread.

<comment><USER7> > Golden rule of UI development: do not block the UI thread with I/O.

This doesn't have to mean avoiding ORMs; it means separating frontend from backend with an explicit, narrow interface between the two, but that's no reason not to use an ORM in the backend piece.

> I've been on several successful app teams, and everyone that started with > ORMs had to throw them away to solve stutter, and since the data and > threading models of the apps were written around ORMs, they had to be mostly > rewritten.

Even in that kind of case (which doesn't match my experience) that doesn't mean the ORM was a mistake; 90% of apps fail, so if you can save time on getting to the point where you can verify product/market fit one way or another, that's well worth doing even if it leads to more work in the cases where you do want to develop the app further.

> Going through this, I also noticed that the before and after ORM code was > about the same in line numbers, and it didn't save time to use the ORM > (because ORMs have lots of negatives that required time to work around, > e.g., distancing you from control over the use of indices).

Not my experience. Or rather, that matches my experience on teams that tried to maintain manual control over the database while using an ORM, but teams that were willing to embrace the ORM and use the database in an ORM-first way (i.e. the ORM is the source of truth about what the schema looks like, and the DDL is generated from that) have been able to save a significant amount of code and have a lower defect rate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's also Room from Google that tries to solve the same problems:

[https://developer.android.com/topic/libraries/architecture/r...](https://developer.android.com/topic/libraries/architecture/room.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> I am planning to do a blog post on SQLite pitching it as one of modern engineering marvels. With SQLite4 things might be even better from performance perspective due to LSM engine under the hood (Shameless plug I have ported the engine to windows [https://github.com/maxpert/lsm- windows](https://github.com/maxpert/lsm-windows) ). SQLite was never _uncool_!

</comment><comment><USER10> These type of libraries are cool for small and non-complicated things. None of them can compete with the expressiveness of SQL, as it is based in relational algebra.

<comment><USER11> Which are "these" libraries and what do they do?

Leaving some technicalities aside, SQLite __is __SQL. So I guess we 're not talking the same here.

<comment><USER10> For example the one of the article, which basically get rid of all the SQL code. Read the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One more dsl for SQL is cool, but not maintainable, not approachable or scalable.

SQL scripts in assets/ folder would be not cool or sexy, but everybody knows what are they.

</comment><comment><USER13> I really think trying to create ORMs is a misguided endavour.

Instead what we really need is a way to map a row from an sql query to a struct (or similar).

Luckily, the SQLite helpers from Anko do provide this ability, and it's pretty much the only part I use.

        data class UserRow(val id: Long, val name: String);
        // .... open db .. etc
        var users = db.query<UserRow>("select id, name from users where ....."); // where clause content omitted

        // now users is a list of structs (as close to structs as you can get in Kotlin).

Where I have an extension method `query`:

        inline fun <reified T : Any> SQLiteDatabase.query(sql: String, vararg args: String): List<T> {
            this.rawQuery(sql, args).parseList(classParser<T>())
        }

</comment><comment><USER14> You don't have to close your database every time if you manage it with a ContentProvider. I've used SQLite on Android like that without many issues, although the boilerplate can be too much using SQLite as is. You can also create views to avoid including queries in java code.

</comment><comment><USER15>
        database.use {
            insert(Book.TABLE_NAME, Book.COLUMN_ID to 1, Book.COLUMN_TITLE to "2666", Book.COLUMN_AUTHOR to "Roberto Bolano")
        }

That's pretty bad design: you're throwing out type safety with this API.

</comment><comment><USER16> When was SQLite ever not cool?

<comment><USER17> When the Android SDK wrapped it into an horrible api

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'd probably still use Realm</comment>


Living like it's 2050: Transition Farm in North Carolina - <AUTHOR> http://faircompanies.com/videos/view/living-like-its-2050-transition-farm-in-north-carolina/

<comment><USER2> At the beginning of the clip, they mention that this farm is situated on 350 acres of land but I didn't hear how many people they expected to sustain with that. Will it all be self contained? Also, how many people outside of this pre-industrial society are required to supply solar panels, wind generators, tools and other materials necessary to keep this kind of facility going and where would they live?

<comment><USER3> My impression from doing the story is that they want to use the farm for experiments in living. Trying out solar, wind, raising animals, growing with intensive raised beds, etc. But I don't think they expect to be completely self-sufficient, in the short-term anyway. I think they're fairly realistic that their entire community isn't set up that way at this point (good points about what it takes to supply solar, wind, etc). Tim, the farm's owner, is also trying experiments in more sustainable city living (for more, I did a video on his small town green highrise going up in Chapel Hill, NC [http://faircompanies.com/videos/view/a-small-town-green- high...](http://faircompanies.com/videos/view/a-small-town-green-high-rise/)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How much runway should you save? - <AUTHOR> How much runway should you have in the bank? 3 months? 6 months? 12 months? What's fast and what's slow? <comment><USER2> It totally depends on the company.

If you know you won't be profitable for a while and require outside investment, then you need a longer runway as it can take a long time to raise money.

If things are going well, but you've built your business on a channel you have no control over, like facebook (and one change to their algorithm / one even cyclical change in costs can screw you - this happened to a 'previously' successful side project I created) then it's best to save as much as you can - at least if you want to / think you can find another channel.

If you're working on a startup and aren't planning on raising money, then sometimes a shorter runway is a good thing - i.e. you don't want to dedicate yourself to 'the wrong' project for years.

If you've found a growth machine and output currently equals 2*input, there's not much point saving money huge amounts today. Best to continue investing.

Sure there are tons of other scenarios.

</comment><comment><USER3> > How much runway should you have in the bank? 3 months? 6 months? 12 months?

As much as you can. Hopefully 18 months.

> What's fast and what's slow?

How quickly it dwindles; how slowly customers sign up.</comment>


Building a RNN-LSTM completely from scratch (no libraries) - <AUTHOR> http://wp.firrm.de/index.php/2018/04/13/building-a-lstm-network-completely-from-scratch-no-libraries/ <comment><USER2> Wow, this is plagiarism. The code is copied from here: [https://github.com/llSourcell/LSTM_Networks](https://github.com/llSourcell/LSTM_Networks)</comment>


An automated assembly line for Visual Studio Code on ARM - <AUTHOR> https://headmelted.com/what-i-learned-building-code-that-builds-visual-studio-code-b520b1d83d0f <comment><USER2> "I'm no longer hosting a fork of the main repository, instead favouring a fresh clone of the upstream repository on each build, and applying patches and overlays where needed to make the code build for our targets. The hope here is to make our build system more resilient to changes in the upstream repository so as to avoid manual intervention as much as possible."

How is this better than a fork? Git seems like it would handle merges much better than this DIY patch pile.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the late reply, was at NIDevConf yesterday and only just got a look at this.

I agree - I was originally doing this with rebases. The problem I ran into over time was that because things upstream were changing around without my knowledge (which they should), files would move and the replayed steps would break. Even worse was when the rebase would succeed due to no merge conflicts, only to find out later on that the code file is now jibberish as the core team have taken a different direction earlier in the file / in an import / removed a variable etc.

I could have gone through and manually worked around this, but so much was changing, and so quickly (which is a good thing) that it was an uphill battle.

It's also possible that this is a solved problem in git rebase that I'm not aware of (I'm far from an expert), but by that point I'd kind of come to the realisation I was doing it wrong anyway (hacking together multiple Ubuntu versions, pulling packages from different releases etc.)

I now have a docker container I've put together that I intend to expand on (it's "cobbler" in my github, and referenced from this project) that builds the toolchain as a layer over Xenial - this takes a lot of the other hackery out of the equation.

It's beside the point but given that the goal of this when I set out was better tools on ARM and Chromebooks, I'm hoping to expand the docker image out to all of the architectures that debian supports (should be trivial) with static user-space QEMU enabled for all of them with mounted binfmt support (less trivial, but privileged mode should make it doable) - the idea being that adding a foreign architecture for something that's already building on Travis / Circle / Gitlab etc. should be as simple as "switch-arch arm64" before compiling and testing. Obviously, this assumes no exotic platform- specific calls.

Sorry for the rambling response, and thanks for the question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It looks as though the code-oss binary in the ARM64/aarch64 packages is actually a 32 bit executable (code-oss: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.26, BuildID[sha1]=14b6a9ab1263520c73d76aafa59a326d291a44f8, stripped)

I'm making slow progress through the build system to work out what needs to be done - others are likely to be faster than I!

<comment><AUTHOR> This is true - Electron currently doesn't support ARM64, so I wanted to get this to the point that it will be trivial to change at this side (which it now is) when they have it ready over there.

I wanted to have arm64 packages out in the meantime that people could use now - Electron will run as a 32-bit executable, but everything else (like the native extensions) are compiled to ARM64 (things like Oniguruma and node-gyp) to reap whatever benefits can be had from ARMv8 on those devices.

It also means that if/when Electron starts shipping ARM64 binaries I can switch over without breaking anything (users would likely not even know unless they had your shell savvy-ness!)

Edit: By the way, if you're looking for a starting point check out Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF), that's where we'd need to start with building out ARM64 support last I looked (then Electron, then this project).

<comment><USER3> Cool, thanks. I was trying to run the tool on one of Packet.net's ThunderX servers, which have no 32-bit support in the CPU itself. I'm grateful for your kudos, but it might be misplaced - I wouldn't have engaged my shell-foo if it had run :)

Will take a look at CEF, though my dev skills have atrophied in recent years.

<comment><AUTHOR> Honestly, it looks like CEF is in good shape to build for ARM64, I just don't know anyone that does currently (it's a looooong build - so it rules out CI I think)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Cron job"

Would the Travis CI cron job system work?

[https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/cron-jobs/](https://docs.travis- ci.com/user/cron-jobs/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually I think I can make this work for me. Tagging doesn't seem to be supported for Github releases, but I can work around it.

Thanks!</comment></comment>


The Unum Pattern - <AUTHOR> http://habitatchronicles.com/2019/08/the-unum-pattern/ <comment><USER2> I'm not convinced solving the data replication technique once, as briefly alluded to, is not a good idea vs. this model of addressing multiple "presences" and having different messaging topologies.

In particular, doing synchronization for realtime gameplay (not an adventure- style game like Habitat) requires a lot of tricks (like prediction, rollback, etc) and I think it makes a lot of sense to extend that synchronization over all gameplay, not just the physics state of object. Although I suppose you could have a hybrid system.

Further, there's not really a reason you can't have your data replication mechanism replicate inputs (with states as a fallback) rather than just states (which would indeed take more bandwidth).

It's interesting to read about the "division of responsibilities" (paraphrasing). I think in a "modern" game, this would simply be done by specifying that components in an entity-component-system have a policy that say whether they are local-only or if not, who they should be replicated to (everyone, just the player who owns the object, etc). This would give you the "data-hiding" (the player shouldn't know what's in the treasure chest, the player shouldn't know exactly* what the monster is going to do next, etc, player shouldn't be able to read each other's chat log, etc).

All in all, I think I'd definitely take a more data-driven approach than an "objects sending messages to each other ala Smalltalk", at least in a game I'd like to write. The describe system likely works great for what it was meant for, though.

I do think it is enormously useful, re: unums, to pick the right vocabulary or even pick "new" words, within reason. Even if you're just thinking in your own head, it can make things more clear.

* This is actually an interesting one. Having a "dummy" AI for clients that doesn't know/do everything the server version does seems like an option

</comment><comment><USER3> For anyone else who was a little confused, this seems to be entirely unrelated to [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unum_(number_format)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unum_\(number_format\))

</comment><comment><USER4> > One obvious pattern to look into is a pure peer-to-peer model, where all > presences are equally authoritative and the "true" state of reality is > determined by some kind of distributed consensus mechanism.

Makes me wonder if you could model Mage: The Awakening as a distributed reality consensus MMO. Sybil attacks would be the primary weakness. Though, if it was a paid game you'd _somewhat_ mitigate that.

The thoughts about clients being authoritative on different unums is very interesting. For larger worlds, it could lead to some interesting scalability results. If I'm exploring a region with no one else, the server can simply let the client decide whats happening and offload that work. For more dense situations, clients would need to communicate with each other. A server could detect cheaters via sampling, maybe? Of course, the problem might be that a cheater might only need to cheat a proportionally small amount of time. For sparse situations, you could just do the full computations later and punish harshly if cheating is detected. For dense situations, it becomes difficult to determine how you could roll back fairly.

It's very interesting. I'd love to build something like this. I think it could have very compelling, novel gameplay mechanics. Not quite sure what the story would need to be to drive players into those mechanics though.

</comment><comment><USER5> "World object" seems pretty self explanetory to me, implying the holistic embodiment of an object in every dimension in which it exists. It's in the same family as "world model" (for robotic systems) or "world reference point" (for dynamic systems), etc.

Introducing a new term "unum" seems an unnecessary abstraction, but I like thinking about the superpositional nature of virtual objects. That's a pretty fascinating topic and probably an area that can be mined to achieve efficiency improvements.

<comment><USER4> "world object" is the new term you introduce. It is, admittedly, more common than "unum" and not new in the sense that its parts are familiar, but you're already defining a new term.

It is a bit odd, but I think I like it.

Also, world object could be the 'object' for the 'world', as opposed to the unum of an item in the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you find all of this fascinating and want a bit more history, Chip and Randy's original game, Habitat, is now playable at neohabitat.org

You can even sign in with an original C64 if you have one! Probably easier to emulate though, and [https://neohabitat.org](https://neohabitat.org) offers everything you need to witness their incredibly revolutionary creation in the flesh, today, live and free.</comment>


Every Freeware Download Site Is Serving Crapware - <AUTHOR> http://www.howtogeek.com/207692/yes-every-freeware-download-site-is-serving-crapware-heres-the-proof/ <comment><USER2> Why do these sites even exist?

If I want HandBrake, I get it from handbrake.fr. I get VLC from videolan.org. I get OpenBSD from one of its mirrors. Etc. Etc.

So are download sites mainly for the subset of people who a) download software (a small percentage of all users) and b) don't know enough about that software to know where it comes from?

<comment><USER3> In the past people knew the WWW was risky and that you should only download software from trusted sources. These places quickly became trusted sources.

That's obviously wrong, but the problem wasn't helped by a bunch of projects using eg Sourceforge for hosting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a ton of money in it. IronSource, a few year old startup, is a litte- known unicorn rolling in money. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IronSource](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IronSource)

<comment><USER4> see forbes [http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2015/02/25/israeli- un...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2015/02/25/israeli-unicorn- ironsource-raises-105-million-ahead-of-ipo/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The sad truth seems to be that there is no other business model for download sites. Maybe we should really improve micro payments to be able to pay for good services.

</comment><comment><USER6> Even though I'm pretty disappointed in the quality/quantity of apps in the Windows app store, 'crapware' is the biggest reason why the app store needs to exist.

You can't expect non-experts to find, download, and install apps safely anymore.</comment>


Load testing Healthcare.gov with a billion users - <AUTHOR> https://blog.navapbc.com/the-billion-user-load-test-ffb035aeb2d6#.f7y0qyn3j <comment><USER2> Caution: Grossly inaccurate and click bait title. They've tested with only 7,500 simultaneous users load and calling it billion user load test because they've added rows for a billion users in the database.</comment>