Scanner: Processing Terabytes of Video on Hundreds of Machines - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~apoms/blog/scanner/2018/05/21/scanner.html <comment><USER2> I feel like CMU has been on a tear on HN lately. It feels like there's an incredible amount of momentum around them, from Robotics to Computer Vision to AI/ML. It feels like each thing that comes out lately is even more impressive than the last. Exciting times. Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with CMU whatsoever, just an admirer.

<comment><USER3> CMU does a ton of neat stuff, but that shouldn't be surprising, they're one of the top CS research universities in the world.

<comment><USER4> So is ETH but they don't get so much exposure. What is the difference?

<comment><USER5> HN is primarily US oriented.

<comment><USER6> HN is primarily Silicon Valley oriented. Pittsburgh is already quite far from the center of gravity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Scanner is a great tool I have been following it's development very closely over the last year. Great to see it reach 1.0 . I highly recommend checking out Hwang [1] (a sparse video decoder) which is bundled and used in Scanner.

Scanner is one of the first few tools to leverage Docker/Kubernetes by demonstrating ability to ship complex heterogenous architecture in a reliable/reproducible manner.

[1] [https://github.com/scanner-research/hwang](https://github.com/scanner- research/hwang)

<comment><USER8> I am not an expert in video encoding. Just curious, what does Hwang offer that ffmpeg doesn't?

<comment><USER7> Hwang lets you perform "efficient random access" across the video by building a GOP/Segment aware index. This comes in handy in a lot of applications where you want to access particular frame or set of frames but do not wish to decode and store all frames. Most tools such as ffmpeg (command line application not library) are optimized for sequential decode use case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Oculus Research just rebranded itself as FB Reality Lab. And the Oculus Go stand-alone headset looks like a winner with 100K sales already, 2M+ estimated by years end.

Distributing VR / AR content seems the next big challenge to me. VRChat can handle on order of 10 per room. But we are talking serious grid compute / bandwidth beyond that. Especially for "multiplayer" narrative 360 video ;)

</comment><comment><USER10> Can't wait until I can `apt-get` install this tool! (I'm not a huge fan of using docker)</comment>


Gmail- Quick(on iphone/ipad) way to block a sender? - <AUTHOR>

I already have a filter that deletes email based on my block email list. However, painful to add new email addresses to it. More importantly, cannot access filter settings from iPad at all!
Any suggestions? Thanks <comment><USER2> 1) You can click edit and Move messages to your Junk folder. It doesn't remove them permanently – sorry. Your best bet is to Unsubscribe if they are commercial emails.

2) This is a general rule I use. It may help if you are bothered by commercial email and are looking to filter your inbox.

Log into Gmail. Filter messages that have "Unsubscribe" in the body, and label them as Junk. Also, go to the Inbox settings in Gmail and turn on Override Filters for important messages.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the response. I indeed label them Spam. The problem is Gmail does not then automatically block or filter out new such messages in future (I guess they have some threshold for number of reports or something). Also looked at writing a script to implement a black list myself - however gmail email settings API only available for Google Apps.</comment></comment>


Chessgym - <AUTHOR> http://www.chessgym.net/ <comment><USER2> (requires Flash)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sadly, yes. But its good site for learning chess.</comment></comment>


Hyundai Motor to invest $87 bn in future mobility tech by 2025 - <AUTHOR> https://koreatechtoday.com/hyundai-motor-group-to-invest-100-trillion-won-in-future-mobility/ <comment><USER2> Every time I see this the amounts get higher and the times get shorter. This was the first:

[https://www.autonews.com/mobility-report/hyundai-motor- group...](https://www.autonews.com/mobility-report/hyundai-motor-group-plans- invest-346-billion-mobility-tech-2025)

Which reads as $34.6 billion in five years time or, $50 billion over the next decade.

I'd take all these figures with a healthy grain of salt, but Hyundai is getting excellent PR mileage out of these announcements.

</comment><comment><USER3> "The company will spend 20 trillion won ($17.4 billion) a year"

Hyundai is big, but that is insane amount of money. They're going to have to finance a lot of it since their profit is "only" $5 billion per year.

Good on them for such bold decision.

<comment><USER4> How does that compare to others in this space? That's nearly $1.5 B per month. How do you ramp up and spend at that level without a noticeable amount/percentage being pure waste?

Yes, it's bold. But perhaps too much so?

<comment><USER5> > How does that compare to others in this space?

It is quite significant. Ford is the biggest one I can think of with about a $1b each for Argo AI and Rivian. Toyota AI Ventures is only $100m.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Capitalism is (i think) about efficient allocation of resources (ie free price movement in markets are better than governments). But BigCos are so Big they are just as bad as governments - take the trophy property bid below - I mean you could parcel out that 10 billion to every HN member and I guarantee higher returns than a Seoul Real Estate bid.

So while I am sure Hyundai will spend this 87bn on car related stuff and multiplier effects etc, I just happen to think that since the money exists anyway as they are borrowing it, perhaps it should all be turned into VC funds

I mean look at SoftBank. if you took 100bn and handed it out to a million start ups globally what could you expect. Another WeWork? or better?

So - the million start up fund? Whose in?

</comment><comment><USER7> Lovely news</comment>


Cryptographic Right Answers (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2009-06-11-cryptographic-right-answers.html

<comment><USER2> >Client-server application security: Distribute the server's public RSA key with the client code, and do not use SSL.

I don't understand this part - if I'm not using SSL, what am I doing at this point?

<comment><USER3> Alone among these recommendations, this one is indefensible in practice (though understandable on paper). We see people implementing "simpler" TLS alternatives somewhat routinely in our practice, and they are virtually always broken. A fear of TLS --- which is reasonable --- is an insufficient reason to expose yourself to the risks of a custom crypto protocol.

You'll save yourself time and heartache if you just use SSL. Once every few years, someone will find a flaw in TLS, and once every few times that happens, that flaw will be relevant to your application. But on those rare occasions, you'll also have some of the smartest crypto implementors on the planet rushing to come up with the best fix, which is something you will never have with a custom protocol.

It is worth remembering here that the overwhelming majority of TLS security issues are relevant primarily to browsers, and rely on the BEAST exploit model, where attackers have extensive and fine-grained control over what plaintexts victims generate, due to Javascript.

If certificate processing code scares you --- also reasonable! --- and you're building a client/server backend system, do what enterprise software does: slurp the whole certificate into your code, fingerprint it with a hash, and verify it in a whitelist. Your TLS implementation will still verify the certificate, but you won't care; you'll rely on your whitelist for security instead.

<comment><USER4> My advice is IMO much simpler. Feel free to write your own crypto code that uses a SSL connection. It might not be secure on it's own, but in the small windows where SSL happens to be broken you have a little extra security and even if you just do XOR your still basically safe in the first place.

<comment><USER3> You can actually end up _less_ secure by layering additional crypto inside of SSL, particularly if (as is likely, given what most people are afraid of in SSL) your crypto involves endpoint authentication.

What Colin wants to say in this document but couldn't at the time (because it didn't exist yet) and won't now (because of false modesty) is that he thinks you should use spiped instead of TLS. If he'd say that, I'd agree that was a reasonable choice.

<comment><USER5> No, don't use spiped. As awesome as it is, spiped is symmetric -- it's designed for "I control two servers and want them to talk to each other securely", _not_ for "I want to publish code which people can use to talk to my server".

I've been considering writing aspiped though.

<comment><USER6> NaCl? [http://nacl.cr.yp.to/](http://nacl.cr.yp.to/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can anyone explain why GCM is more attackable than CTR+HMAC? Is it because the signature is encoded in the ciphertext and can't be verified until some or all of the decryption occurs?

<comment><USER3> It's not, really, but the problem people are referring to is actually not too hard to explain.

An HMAC authenticator is conceptually very simple. You start with a secure hash (even MD5 still qualifies, barely, when we're talking about HMAC), and, given a "key" and a "message", apply the hash function twice: an inner hash of the key and the message, and an outer hash of the key and the inner hash (the inner and outer hashes are distinguished by an "inner pad" and "outer pad" constant). Doing this produces a secure message authenticator for a message assuming the hash and key is secure (with SHA3, you don't even need HMAC, and can create a secure authenticator out of a simple keyed hash).

You understand a secure hash, you understand what a keyed hash is (concatenate the key and the message and now only people who know the key can replicate that hash), and now you get what HMAC is.

GCM is CTR mode, like Colin says you should use with HMAC, plus a GHASH authenticator. GHASH is a little trickier to understand than HMAC, but you can get most of the way there by thinking of it as a thermonuclear CRC algorithm: it's (at root) polynomial multiplication and reduction.

The problem with GCM is that fast polynomial multiplication and reduction in software is table-driven. When software verifies a GHASH MAC, it is forced to look up elements in a table at locations determined by a secret. Those lookups end up configuring the system's cache; future memory references at addresses that collide with the secret table indices will be measurably faster than references that don't collide. Attackers can write software that profiles cache hits and from that information potentially recover secrets.

Modern implementations of GCM on X64 hardware get hardware-accelerated multiplication optimized for this operation, mitigating the table lookup problem. But GCM is still potentially a concern for platforms that don't have these instructions.

The plus side of GCM is that you'll never implement it yourself: it's gnarly enough that everyone uses one of a few library implementations of it. As a library interface, GCM is very nice: you're getting a "seal" and "unseal" operation that securely verifies authentication and then handles decryption, in the correct order of operations. On recent server hardware, that implementation is likely not to have side channel problems; the same is _rarely_ true of HMAC implementations, which tend (annoyingly) to be hand- hacked, particularly for verification.

The "cool kids" replace GCM with Salsa20+Poly1305, which replaces AES-CTR with a native stream cipher (Salsa20, which is actually a hash core running in CTR mode) and a polynomial MAC that is very fast in secret-table-free software. If you use Nacl, that's what you're getting; it's something much closer to GCM than to AES-CTR+HMAC.

<comment><USER5> _On recent server hardware, that implementation is likely not to have side channel problems; the same is rarely true of HMAC implementations, which tend (annoyingly) to be hand-hacked, particularly for verification._

Disagree. Hashes and HMACs are very safe against side channel attacks. Heck, I don't think I could insert a side channel if I tried!

On a 1-10 scale of side channel attackiness, hashes and HMACs are 0, block ciphers are 3-4, and asymmetric crypto is 6-8.

<comment><USER3> Come on. You mean apart from virtually every web stack's implementation of HMAC? They all start with a version that uses string comparison.

<comment><USER8> In case anyone is wondering the proper way to compare two HMACs, it's to xor the strings and check whether the result is zero. If string A xor string B is zero, then they're equal. If it's nonzero, then they're not equal. This will prevent timing attacks, because the entirety of both strings are compared.

When you compare the two HMACs using standard string comparison, you expose yourself to a timing attack because the algorithm will likely stop comparing after finding the first difference in the strings.

<comment><USER5> _In case anyone is wondering the proper way to compare two HMACs, it 's to xor the strings and check whether the result is zero_

You've just punted the problem. How are you checking whether the result is zero?

The correct code (copy and paste from libcperciva):

        /**
         * crypto_verify_bytes(buf0, buf1, len):
         * Return zero if and only if buf0[0 .. len - 1] and buf1[0 .. len - 1] are
         * identical.  Do not leak any information via timing side channels.
         */
        uint8_t
        crypto_verify_bytes(const uint8_t * buf0, const uint8_t * buf1, size_t len)
        {
                uint8_t rc = 0;
                size_t i;

                for (i = 0; i < len; i++)
                        rc = rc | (buf0[i] ^ buf1[i]);

                return (rc);
        }

<comment><USER9> A question.

What prevents a compiler from optimizing that function to non-constant time? For example, by inserting a bailout condition (rc == 255) into the loop? (I am aware that it probably wouldn't, but "probably" in cryptographic contexts isn't generally good enough...)

<comment><USER5> Theoretically? Nothing at all. You could have a compiler which produces code which revs the CPU in such a way to output the complete works of Shakespeare in Morse code via the fluctuations in your laptop's fan speed, and it would be perfectly standard-compliant.

Worse than that, there's things compilers actually do in practice, like optimizing away

        memset(sensitivedate, 0, sizeof(sensitivedata))

and you can't even protect yourself against that properly by using a (volatile *) cast since the compiler is perfectly within its rights to make extra copies of that data and even without optimization the memset will only zero one of the copies. (gcc in particular loves to copy data onto the stack, due to a broken register allocator.)

I've been trying to convince some clang developers that we need to have a C language extension for "we're handling sensitive data here, don't optimize it in dangerous ways", but it's difficult to define exactly what optimizations could be problematic...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> X-Istence This is from 2009.

<comment><USER5> And everything I said five years ago is still true! I'm proud of how well those recommendations have stood the test of time.

<comment><USER3> The past 5 years have not aged your aversion to elliptic curves very well. New modern designs by crypto specialists tend to be curve based. Curves also have a nice property in practice of tilting designs towards forward secrecy.

Naturally, we agree that devs shouldn't implement curves themselves --- but then, neither should they implement RSA-PSS. The right answer is to use Nacl, which is curve-based, but who cares? You're not interacting with that level of the design.

<comment><USER5> _The past 5 years have not aged your aversion to elliptic curves very well. New modern designs by crypto specialists tend to be curve based._

The first of those statements does not follow from the second. I agree that there has been an increase in the usage of elliptic curves; but I've also seen a _lot_ more attacks on elliptic curves recently than on RSA or DH(Z_p). Unless you have a particular need for small signatures (e.g., bitcoin) or maximal performance, I maintain that using elliptic curves is an unnecessary risk.

 _Curves also have a nice property in practice of tilting designs towards forward secrecy._

I'm not sure why you say this. DH has exactly the same PFS properties regardless of the group being used.

<comment><USER3> Reverse order:

My claim about forward secrecy is easy to understand: ECC software doesn't encrypt directly, but RSA software easily can, and developers (for instance: Paul Kocher) give in to the temptation to use RSA encryption directly. RSA practically begs developers to create systems that aren't forward secure.

There is a lot of new attack research on ECC. But how much of that research implicates (a) common implementations of (b) the popular curves (NIST-Px, secpx, and Curve25519)? Inquiring minds, who have been implementing a lot of attack papers on artificially vulnerable curve software, want to know!

(Also, curve attacks that target DSA tend to be the fault of the DSA construction. I'm guessing this isn't the level at which you're thinking of curves being attack in the literature, though.)

<comment><USER5> Wasn't there an ECC side channel attack in OpenSSL just a week or two ago?

As for the more theoretical research -- none of it has been relevant to widely deployed systems _yet_ , but this is the nature of research. Elliptic curves have a lot of structure which is still being explored, and as long as people continue to find attacks against new variants, I'm not going to bet that they'll never find attacks against the widely deployed systems.

I put being wary of ECC right now in the same category as being wary of SHA256 in 2006. It's not broken but there's a worrying amount of progress on related systems.

<comment><USER10> If you're referring to the recent FLUSH+RELOAD attacks, that is hardly ECC- specific. They also owned GnuPG's RSA earlier with the same technique [1]. On the other hand, if your argument is that ECC implementations are generally less mature, I can't disagree with that. I believe that ECC (using Edwards or Montgomery forms; debatable when using general Weierstrass form) is easier to get right with respect to solid implementations than RSA is.

With respect to theoretical attacks, it is of course impossible to know what the future brings. But as long as we're sticking with conservative prime fields, I think it's probably either going to be fine or all of ECC is dead. It's also not like integer factorization or discrete logs have reached some kind of complexity lower bound; it's certainly not impossible that we'll get a L(1/4) method in the future as well. I look forward to see how it plays out.

[1] [http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/448](http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/448)

<comment><USER5> _It 's also not like integer factorization or discrete logs have reached some kind of complexity lower bound; it's certainly not impossible that we'll get a L(1/4) method in the future as well._

Not impossible, no. But the fact that people have spent much longer looking for improved integer factorization attacks without making progress makes me more optimistic that integer factorization will continue to hold up to further scrutiny.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


PowerVR GPUs: Tile-based rendering explained - <AUTHOR> http://blog.imgtec.com/powervr/a-look-at-the-powervr-graphics-architecture-tile-based-rendering

<comment><USER2> I wonder how tiled GPUs will perform compared to "traditional" ones considering that resolution in mobile phones is increasing so much, so the size of the tile (in the case for PowerVR, 32x32) gets dwarfed by the total resolution and I guess on-chip memory is very expensive.

I mean, if the tile size was 1x1 we can see it wouldn't be efficient, so how the architecture will keep up with this trend?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> greybeards, if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask.</comment>


Freelancing, half a year in. - <AUTHOR> http://alanhollis.com/freelancing-half-a-year-in/ <comment><USER3> So, how does one work at all with multiple programmers and no version control?

Are you creating patch files and manually merging them (like Linux used to do)?

Or are you just using a shared FTP and keeping a spreadsheet of who is using which file at any particular point?

The amount of discipline and organisation required to use either of these methods would appear to be far higher than that required to sit down for a few hours to learn a basic VCS like Subversion using a graphical tool.

<comment><USER4> The first thing I do when starting a new project is get everyone on git. If the project is far along and is using svn, I can live with that ... sort of.

The next thing I do is explain that I will be spending more time for coding upfront because I will introduce testing into the project.

These are not negotiable.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd be interested to know how you sell git to your clients.

I have listed all the positive benefits of version control in detail to my clients and still have the idea rejected due to it being an "unnecessary complication"...

<comment><USER5> If the opportunity arises, try the following approach: Tell your client " I use some very specific tools for my work as they increase my productivity and efficiency, and as part of the work i deliver to you, i'd like to continue using those tools to deliver to you. You'll receive multiple benefits as a result, and i can name them if you wish, but don't wish to bore you with technical details"

Just try it. Not making any promises, but i think you'll have better luck if you do. Sounds like you're either framing things wrong, or allowing certain people to make the decision when it should be yours to make ;-)

<comment><USER3> I suppose it depends on if you're trying persuade another programmer or the end customer.

The way it is framed seems to suggest that they have an existing (probably solo) developer who is used to not using version control and is frightened by the thought of adding new tools and processes.

If you introduce such a person to version control it will necessitate them spending some time to learn the system which they may be defensive about since they see it as some outsider encroaching on their territory.

In such a case the best bet might be to follow their method until you hit some situation where there is a problem or significant reduction in productivity as a result (shouldn't take long) and then demonstrate the virtues of using source control.

If on the other hand it is a non technical person who is making specific dictates about source control then that might raise another set of red flags.

<comment><USER5> Yeah - When I was providing IT support services, we used to run into a similar kind of problem all the time. In the end we realised that we were going to execute in a way where they had no option but to use the tools that we wanted. We at all cost avoided getting into a debate with internal IT staff, and as for the client gave them only one option which was to do things the way that we wanted.

Your method of using appropriate timing to introduce new tools is also what we employed and works very well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> What non programming skills have you found most useful for freelancing apart from general business stuff?

For example when I have looked at freelance web programming jobs, especially for smaller companies who don't have an in house team they seem to also expect you to do the design work.

Do you have other freelancers that you sub-contract out to, do some yourself or stick to strictly scoped (programming only) projects?

<comment><AUTHOR> I explain very clearly that I am not a designer right from the start. Again I've lost projects to digital agencies because of this, which is sad, and is another problem I'd like to solve but haven't yet.

The biggest non programming skill I have, and something that I appear to be okay at, is in face to face meetings. I've not yet walked out of one meeting where I haven't then got a job.

There's probably a few things that have helped here.

1\. It's easy to demonstrate my knowledge face to face.

2\. I repeat in my head "be confident" throughout the entire meeting.

3\. I dress smartly.

<comment><USER3> How do you explain the value add that you provide or do you stick mainly to marketing yourself in terms of selling a certain skill per hour?

I ask mainly because of recent patio11 posts about emphasizing value in terms like "I can increase sign ups by x% by doing Y". This would seem to require a lot of experience and analytical/stats knowledge that a programmer might not necessarily possess however.

<comment><AUTHOR> When I say I'm not marketing myself correctly, it's exactly this point I'm talking about.

At the moment my value add for my clients is my previous experience and my communication skills. I try to reply to emails as fast as I can, that alone sets me apart from most other freelancers.

I would love to be able to sell myself in similar terms to the way patio11 does, but as you rightly state it takes a lot of experience that I for one don't have, yet.

That being said, I've read so much information about on-line conversions techniques, have run successful (profitable) affiliate PPC campaigns, got on the front page of hacker news multiple times and done other things that maybe 99% of other people on the planet have never done.

I'm sure there's something in there that I can sell as a value add.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> £20k ~ $31k

To save anyone else having to do the math.

Also, yes, your rates are still very low, Mr. Hollis, although I suppose it depends on how many days you worked on billable projects. I would expect to see more like £40k for six months given your CV.

<comment><USER7> For comparison, top† graduate software engineers (in London) will be on ~£35k/year.

†Not like "won IOI" top, but I imagine Google/Microsoft/FB etc. has a graduate starting salary around that.

<comment><AUTHOR> From my experience that's also the very very best graduates. I don't know of anyone who's gone in at that figure.

I was earning just less than £35k two years after graduating with a 2.1 ( not sure what the equivalent is in American university terms ). And at that point was earning considerably more than anyone else I knew who graduated at the same time.

<comment><USER8> I went from GBP 33k to 40k within a year after graduating, in 2001. This was for an investment bank though. (London)

<comment><AUTHOR> Banking/finance does seem to be the industry which breaks the standard, especially in London.

I think I've mentioned here before, but I know a friend of a friend who supposedly earns £50k a year as a Java developer for a bank, but didn't know what a constructor was.

The mind boggles.

<comment><USER3> Probably because he never used one, all his classes came from factories :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have always wanted to do freelancing but refrained from it.

Below are my skills,

Official: I got 5 years of experience in various fields,

1 year as manual tester for a Mainframe/JSP based application.

2 years as an automation test engineer, which is a fancy way of writing scripts to do automatic tests.

2 years as a tools developer for an automation framework, work involves writing java/Oracle based tools to do a specific task.

Non Official: . 2 years learning to code and worked on basic android applications. . 2 years on iOS ranging from games to apps.

Side Projects:

Android:

Personal Finance Calculator (<http://bit.ly/STAJ8n>) helps you to calculate Loan Interest rate.

Baby Names (<http://bit.ly/STAJ8n)Provides> List of Baby names and their meaning

Mobile Number Tracker(<http://bit.ly/STAIkI>) provides caller info based on the mobile number (Only India).

Mobile Number Tracker US (<http://bit.ly/PGakKz>)

iOS Game:

Juicy Fun (<http://bit.ly/Ub7IRv>) physics game

Atom Ace (<http://bit.ly/UxZ6F9>) a different kind of puzzle.

iOS App:

London Tube Map (<http://bit.ly/QqAXo7>) shows london tube statues.

Movie Theaters (<http://bit.ly/SwedyD>) shows info about latest movies and movie theaters which plays them.

I am not sure what will I be able to charge clients as I don't have professional development experience, and also living in India doesn't help things I guess.

My big question is, will I be a fool to try freelancing at this stage and with my experience?

edit: formatting

<comment><USER10> Customers will rarely go looking for a shopping of skills such as JSP, automation testing, Java, Oracle etc.

Instead, they'll say 'I want a website to do X' or 'I want an application to do Y'.

A lot of the time, they didn't even care what you use or how you do it.

Your set of published apps in the relatively hot mobile space puts you in a good situation in this regard.

The first step would be to build a portfolio of your work.

<comment><USER9> I just bought a domain. I will build my portfolio and blog more. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As someone looking to try freelancing in a couple of years (only been programming for about 2 years) it is reassuring to see that you can make a decent amount of money with almost no network.

How do you find freelancing vs ordinary job? Do you have savings for harder times?

<comment><USER12> Freelancing has helped me understand just how much my previous job was paying me that didn't show up on my paycheck. Health insurance, matching 401k contributions, and various miscellaneous other perks are actually quite valuable. So you really have to take these things into account when you set your rates.

The other big difference is that a salaried job means a regular paycheck, no matter how busy you might be in any given month. But there can be a lot of downtime between billable hours freelancing so that's another potential dent in your income.

Personally I prefer to bid a fixed price instead of an hourly rate for a project. This makes it that much more important to consider your initial estimate carefully but it also eliminates a lot of micro-accounting and haggling over how much a single hour is worth.

You also have to be careful not to take on more work than you can handle. Unlike a regular job there's no hard ceiling on how much you can make in a month but it's easy to get in over your head this way.

So far I'm really enjoying the freedom and variety of freelancing but I think a regular job is easier in a lot of ways.

<comment><USER13> The OP is in the UK so thankfully health insurance is not an issue as it is state-provided out of your taxes (although some companies do provide subsidised private healthcare, which some people might value highly).

You're very right about the other things though - pension contributions, paid sick leave etc. which freelancing doesn't cover, so it's important to compare them carefully.

<comment><USER14> Healthcare is public, yes (although a private insurance is a popular benefit) but the tax that pays for it (up to 13% I think) is deducted separately. Ie. for your employer to give you a salary of £10000, he has to pay £11300. If you're self employed, you have to pay this, so it can bite you when comparing salary and contracting rates.

<comment><USER15> Thats not correct. PAYE (Pay As You Earn) tax for employed people and the equivalent Income Tax for self-employed, along with similar rates of National Insurance for both, go into the general tax pot which pays for healthcare and other government programs. Employers advertise pay rates from which the tax is deducted, so in that way they are the same as contracting rates (the tax is deducted from both). Employers also pay a small National Insurance contribution on top, which doesn't come out of your wages.

<comment><USER14> Yes, it goes in the general tax pot, but it's still called national _insurance_. Although you don't have to worry about coverage, you very much still have to pay.

> Employers advertise pay rates from which the tax is deducted, so in that way > they are the same as contracting rates (the tax is deducted from both).

Yes, this is correct for income tax and the employees portion.

> Employers also pay a small National Insurance contribution on top, which > doesn't come out of your wages.

The problem is that it's _not_ a small contribution on top, it's 12.8% above a low threshold. For a £35k salary, it's just under £3,800 - <USER2> <http://www.listentotaxman.com/>. And as a contractor, you have to pay that for yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Congrats Alan, can I just say I like the look of <http://whensgoodforyou.co.uk> \- I've had that on my pile of 'implement someday' but you've actually done it. Fantastic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks very much coob. It still needs a little more work doing to it before I'm happy with it.

At the moment I've got my friends alpha testing it, and have got some good feedback. Hopefully I'll be confident enough to post a SHOW HN soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What are "digital agencies" and how to find one?

(Sorry if the question seems stupid, I haven't heard the term before and it seems a little too general to return meaningful results in Google)

Edit: Thank you benjaminwootton!

<comment><USER10> Web design and marketing companies that specialise in online stuff.

They often have more design and campaign work than development, so they will regularly bring on freelance developers to help with projects.</comment></comment>


Tired of Looking for Work, Some Create Their Own - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/technology/start-ups/14startup.html?hp <comment><USER2> yeah, really excited to see my startup Jellyfish Art on nytimes

I got great feedback and found a programmer from hacker news a few weeks ago

Got a new website up, keep it coming

ramen profitable!

<comment><USER3> _ramen profitable!_

Wonderful news! Especially for the jellyfish. (Hungry programmer + tanks full of captive jellyfish + willingness to entertain thought of slightly-more- adventurous-than-usual Asian cuisine to avoid starvation = pass me the soy sauce, please)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hey, this is cool. I remember a while back someone posting a comment about how his friend started a business making jellyfish aquariums. Is this the same guy? If so, CONGRATS!

<comment><USER5> Yes, Alex Andon started <http://www.jellyfishart.com>. They met the NYTimes reporter at an event called LaidOffCamp in San Fran.

The other company is <http://www.30words.net>. Send any comments/suggestions about either website my way.

Unfortunately I was at a YC Dinner the night the NYTimes came over so we didn't get a plug. :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> These are my roommates!

</comment><comment><USER6> Noticed his site has improved ten fold too. Good work!

<comment><USER2> thanks all for the feedback</comment></comment>


A breath reveals a hidden image in anti-counterfeit drug labels - <AUTHOR> http://ns.umich.edu/new/multimedia/videos/22323-a-breath-reveals-a-hidden-image-in-anti-counterfeit-drug-labels

<comment><USER2> _The method requires access to sophisticated equipment that can create very tiny features, roughly 500 times smaller than the width of a human hair_

Semiconductor fabs are doing this already, in the form of MEMS devices. The setup cost is not cheap, but not all that expensive either for determined counterfeiters.

This reminds me of holograms and microprinting - they were (and still are) considered great anti-counterfeiting measures, but now you can buy sheets of them printed with whatever you want for next to nothing. If this technology becomes popular, it might not be long before these "hidden images" end up everywhere.

If there was an easy way to test the _drug itself_ for the right quantity and composition, I think that would be a much better solution, although somewhat more difficult in practice... for some reason this reminds me of [http://xkcd.com/810/](http://xkcd.com/810/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Researchers always think of ambitious applications for their work. Somehow the presentation didn't show how it's easier for the legitimate manufacturer to do than for the counterfeiter. If it's nothing more than an expensive process they might not be able to afford, then why not short circuit it and attach money directly to the drugs to prove they're real?

<comment><USER4> > If it's nothing more than an expensive process they might not be able to > afford, then why not short circuit it and attach money directly to the drugs > to prove they're real?

The idea is indeed odd but this solution doesn't work. The point of expensive/complex anti-counterfeit measures isn't that they're expensive per- item, it's that they have a high fixed cost so they make setting up a counterfeit operation very expensive. They should be cheap or free in per-item variable cost, so that someone doing the real thing can amortize the large fixed cost over their large volume.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Slightly off-topic, but I hope the credit card they showed in the video was cancelled, because you can see the last 12 digits as well as the expiry. And using the logos and text displayed on the back it would be trivial to work out the first four digits.

</comment><comment><USER6> I just received a patent which protects each tablet from being counterfeited, the actual tablet, not the label or packaging Holograms and expensive printing are nonsense, drug orgs have millions to spend on printers

</comment><comment><USER7> It looks like cool technology but I missed how it combats counterfeiting of drugs. Was there something in there about how it's tied to the structure of the drug you're taking?

<comment><USER8> Counterfeiters presumably won't have access to the specialized equipment required to print the label.

<comment><USER9> How about a boxcutter and access to discarded empty bottles that used to contain the real medicine?

<comment><USER10> That obviously rate limits the amount of counterfeiting they can do.

<comment><USER11> Yes, from 10% (current state) to 50% (the "limited" state).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Try getting moisture with your breadth on anything when its warmer than 24 C degrees..

<comment><USER13> No problem, I just did it at 25 °C with little effort.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any recommended resources for beginner bloggers/publishers? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Andrew Chen's learnings from 10 years of blogging [http://andrewchen.co/professional- blogging/](http://andrewchen.co/professional-blogging/)</comment>


HTML 4.2 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-TBPekxc1dLNy5DOloPfzVvFIVOWMB0li?p=978

<comment><USER2> This is actually the problem with a lot of the W3C standards (I should know I've worked on 3).

Often times the working groups identify a problem that needs to be solved, but there isn't a solution. The web moves so fast there is this great desire to bring things together as soon as new trend emerges. However, the point of standards is for a lot of experimentation to have happened so that some consensus about what works and what doesn't can happen.

Doug is absolutely right, standards and research don't mix.

I believe this is one of the reasons one of the standards I worked on (WCAG 2) took around 8 years to create. Starting WCAG 2 hot on the heels of WCAG 1 meant that the industry hadn't figured out how to do accessibility, for whatever socio-political reasons. As such the 8 years was more the time it took for patterns to emerge as to good practice than it was the working group's inability to understand the problem, or apply appropriate definitions and constraints.

</comment><comment><USER3> HTML5 seems different than ECMAScript 4 in that it proposes substantial, widely beneficial, updates to HTML that would do the web itself a lot of good.

Standardized, yet _open_ , enhancements for the web: video, audio, sockets, cross-window communication, and more. Sure, it's ambitious, but it stands to push the web forward in noticeable ways.

If we take IE out of the equation, a lot of HTML5 features have already hit Safari, Firefox, (opera?). The primary drag on HTML5 is IE, but even Microsoft has embraced HTML5 to some extent (it describes HTML5 features in its documentation for IE7/8).

<comment><USER4> Since you seem to know a lot about HTML5, and I don't have the inclination to browse through and ingest it all, maybe you could answer this: will there be support for defining custom attributes, and will these attributes allowed be JSON objects?

I've often had the need for something like

. Up until now you're left with the choice of on pageload attaching the JSON to some arbitrary property of the DOM object, or reading the attribute and eval'ing it.

"onxyz" attributes are interpreted automatically as JS, albeit they are automatically cast into a function. I'm hoping there's a similar way to define custom attributes and their types.

<comment><USER3> HTML5 allows "data" attributes: any attribute starting with "data-" can be used for that purpose. Those fields are accessible via node.getAttribute() and also node.dataset. But it does not automatically parse JSON.

More info:

<http://ejohn.org/blog/html-5-data-attributes/>

<http://ajaxian.com/archives/embed-your-data-in-html-5>

<comment><USER4> That doesn't seem like much of an improvement over what already works, other than the namespacing. Is there a reason they chose the attribute "data- whatever" to map to "dataset.whatever" instead of just "data.whatever"? I can create my own attributes, such as _data_id and _data_name, and it's accessible through getAttribute(). It just won't validate, which doesn't bother me too much, since it makes things very convenient.

Alas, I'm not here to gripe to you. Is there a way to suggest support for embedding data other than text in attributes? In your experience, are "they" open to new ideas? Is it a time consuming process?

<comment><USER5> The "data" prefix is indeed for the sake of namespacing. This is actually quite useful since you can validate and e.g. find typos in ordinary attributes while still having your custom data attributes.

If you have some good ideas for HTML5, you just post a well-argued message on the open mailing list (<http://www.whatwg.org/mailing-list>), and it will be considered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It is strange he proposes a HTML4.2 without any hint of what it actually will contain, except fluffy words like "simplify", "streamline" and so on. This is actually what XHTML and XHTML2 attempted - by means of the draconian error handling all parsing ambiguities would disappear, making parsing much simpler. By eliminating all legacy presentational HTML, the vocabulary would get much simpler and so on.

The problem with XHTML was that is was too simple and elegant, and didn't consider the actual state of the web: There are already billions of malformed documents, and they dont go away just because you declare them illegal.

HTML5 on the other hand accepts and embraces the actuale state of the web. By declaring rules for how to parse malformed HTML, it attempts to solve the major source of interoperability problems between browsers. But this also requires a much more complex spec.

I don't like peddling conspiracy theories, but I have to mention that Crockfords attack at ECMAScript 4 only succeeded because of backing by Microsoft. Microsoft supports Crockfords notion that JavaScript absolutely does not need high-level features like classes, type annotations, packages and so on - we are fine with a minimal language, thank you! While at the same time focusing significant ressources to support C# (a much larger language than ES4) as a client side language through Silverlight.

Crockford worked in secret with Microsoft on ECMAScript 3.1 before it went public, and I suspect this announcement means that they are working on a HTML4.2 proposal. And I am pretty sure this HTML4.2 will _not_ cointain features like canvas, audio and video, since these features is a selling point of Silverlight relative to HTML.

<comment><USER6> Not everything is a conspiracy. They were right to nix ES4.

Javascript has prototype based inheritance: adding classes would only further disguise this, confusing people more. And javascript is a dynamic language, this isn't something that needs to be fixed any more than Ruby or Python do.

Javascript is basically a cross between scheme and self, it's actually a great language. Why turn it into C#? Especially when C# and a billion languages like it already exist.

Perhaps what we need is for browser developers to actually use the language attribute on the script element so you can program in the language you want rather than trying to change javascript into that language.

(BTW the more believable conspiracy theory is that all these suggestions add up to ES4 looking a lot like ActionScript and that ES4 was an attempt by Adobe to do an end run round Microsoft.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Now we are getting somewhere. But, why do we even need a HTML 4.2 or a CSS3? Bundling these standards up into giant documents doesn't do anybody any good. First, we should try writing a separate document for each new feature, standardizing each one individually. Then, browsers will have HTML 4.01 + CSS 2.1 + <canvas> \+ <video> \+ CSS opacity + CSS 2009 Selectors + Query Selectors + Cross-Domain XHR.

<comment><USER8> Seems much more complicated than even the current setup where browser either do not implement all features or implement them inconsistently. Browser- building companies interact with the standards a bit differently than the rest of us (I am assuming you do not work on IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome etc.) Separating features into separate documents likely does not affect their process much.</comment></comment>


JIT Assembler Library for Multiple ISAs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hlide/jitasm <comment><USER2> I wonder if they know about TAOS and its virtual ISA JIT VM?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806607](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806607)

</comment><comment><USER3> How is it validated? I have yet to discover something more frustrating than debugging a code generation bug that's actually an assembler bug.

<comment><USER4> there is a define to uncomment for generating instructions and decoding them with capstone to check whether they are valid.

I mean there is main to output them on stdout so you can check.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The close parallel is AsmJit: [https://github.com/kobalicek/asmjit](https://github.com/kobalicek/asmjit). I'm curious how it compares.

</comment><comment><USER6> This looks like the very start of a project that's not far along (and hasn't been updated in a year). Why is it interesting at this stage?

<comment><USER4> yeah, it is an experimental project which isn't even multi-platform right now. There are some parts I don't like and have not a lot of time to rework it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How does this compare with numerous other similar things (LLVM, libJIT, Lightning, etc.)?

<comment><USER4> not usable</comment></comment>


Ask HN: SaaS boostrappers what does your security stack look like? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I'm a SaaS bootstrapper. What do you mean with "security stack"? Security is layered into all components of the tech stack. It is not a discrete part of the stack.

<comment><AUTHOR> For example: OpenVAS for vulnerability scanning on the VMs. Clair for container image vulnerabilities, OSSEC for IDS etc.

<comment><USER2> Aha, you mean dedicated security scanning / intrusion detection systems.

I use none. I use static websites, Heroku and AWS Lambda for all work. So all of the network, vulnerability etc. worries are of loaded to the provider. No user data is stored on our backend: that's all in Stripe and Auth0.

We encrypt some sensitive data (not PII) in the database and in flight.

I guess for now the use of various 3rd party services negates the need for dedicated "security stack" products. This might change in the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> As a SaaS bootstrapper, zero security stack. I used the crypto package in go?

Absolute security (aside from standard protection of passwords) is at the bottom of my to-do list. It'd have zero impact on finding product market fit.</comment>


Ask HN: Any one ever training a NN on a kinect data to guess depth? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Kinect data includes depth. I guess you mean train a model based on kinect rgb+depth and use it then to predict depth using only the rgb data.

[http://cs231n.stanford.edu/reports2016/407_Report.pdf](http://cs231n.stanford.edu/reports2016/407_Report.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> cool thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I know there seems to be a nn can guess a depth map out of image. haven't see any using kinect data.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, didn't mean Kinetic specifically.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: My employer forces me to like company product pages on Facebook - <AUTHOR>

My employer who otherwise has banned Facebook use in the company has a standard process. Whenever we launch a product, Facebook is made available for an hour in the evening where we are told to login and like the company product page.<p>Is this process followed anywhere else ? <comment><USER2> This sounds quite ludicrous, if it was a request I would understand, but telling you to do this isn't the right way of going about it.

The underlying question here is - are you happy doing this? If your not happy doing this may be you should speak up. I personally wouldn't do it because the way I see it is, you're recommended or vouching for a product which you might not want to, and on top of that, your not even getting paid.

If your employer is really concerned about those numbers (When I'm sure he could be focusing on something else which adds more value), there's plenty of services that sell FB likes out there. Recommend that to him, or even better, resell it to him.

</comment><comment><USER3> It all sounds rediculous. My company often sends out emails announcing a new Twitter account/FB/LinkedIn page and asks if we'll Like/Follow it. Not such an unreasonable request really (as long as it is a request).

I simply have two accounts. One for me and my personal life and then a dummy account I use for testing social network integrations and "liking" things I don't really like.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a minefield! see forbes article on being forced to hand over your facebook password to employers: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamespoulos/2012/03/22/employers...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamespoulos/2012/03/22/employers- demanding-facebook-passwords-arent-making-any-friends/) . I can see the potential conflict in refusing but it might be pragmatic solution to set up a 'corporate you' face book account making it clear that it is set up for work and simply being used in this way. That way you are not being forced to 'personally' endorse products which is the real issue but equally are not putting yourself in a difficult position and refusing your employer.

<comment><AUTHOR> May be the fight is not worth anything to me personally. But look at the larger picture. By asking you to like their product they are enforcing their opinion on you, in aspects of life that they have no right to control. If we exaggerate this scene the company might tomorrow ask you to marry your coworkers because that will help them curb attrition rates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are you likewise forced to have a facebook account?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes.

<comment><USER6> Like fraud and Like rings are frowned upon. I'd suggest mentioning it to Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if the best argument against this involves outcomes. How effective are these campaigns?

It seems a bunch of artifical Likes that no one will follow up on will go nowhere. In that case, someone might point out that this strategy is not working. Employee time would be better invested in improving the product, or coming up with a better marketing strategy.

If the strategy is working, then the company probably doesn't need this approach. The product doesn't take off because of these Likes, it takes off because it's a good product.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've been asked to do this before. I just put coworkers into a group and made the post only visible to them. It's ridiculous but harmless and "being right" sometimes just isn't worth the fight when there's no meaningful downside to just going along with it. Save my ammo for battles that matter. Metaphoric ammo that is of course :)

</comment><comment><USER9> I've been asked to do this before, but I just went and did some work instead. If they'd asked about it, I would have just said, "Oh, I was too busy ____ing to mess around on Facebook" -- but they didn't actually check up.</comment>


Citadel - An Open-Source Malware Project  - <AUTHOR> http://blog.seculert.com/2012/02/citadel-open-source-malware-project.html

<comment><USER2> How cute:

 _The Citadel developers are strongly against the use of this product within CIS. The product doesn't work on systems with Russian or Ukrainian keyboard layouts._

There was a tradition among some ex-USSR shareware developers in 90's to make their product freely available to ex-USSR users (because they won't buy it anyway, and I guess, doing good for neighbors). They detected keyboard layout or had special registration instructions, like "enter the current month name in Russian instead of registration key". Example: FAR Manager <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAR_Manager#Licensing>

Today you can actually sell software to ex-USSR users, so not many developers do this, but -- hey -- the evil people continue this tradition with malware!

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems like a very good way for the original authors to plant a backdoor and take over your botnet.

If you didn't write it yourself, you'd better be very careful.

</comment><comment><USER4> Not to be confused with the great open-source _groupware_ Citadel project: <http://www.citadel.org/>

</comment><comment> johnx123-up Looks like opposite of SocialAV <http://socialav.com/>

</comment><comment><USER5> So...source code then?</comment>


Ask HN: Is Kubernetes the New Computer? - <AUTHOR> Maybe we should be treating Kubernetes as he new IBM PC and designing cross platform Kubernetes operating systems or apps? <comment><USER2> No. Kubernetes is a complicated piece of orchestration software that codifies some of the techniques giant tech companies like Google and Facebook have developed to work at their scale.

Under the hood you still have to configure and manage the actual computers and their operating systems, which means you're also running Chef, Puppet, or the like. You need to have a pretty big engineering organization (handwavingly, the few hundred engineer range) before it makes sense to run both the config manager and Kubernetes.

Managed Kubernetes may change this equation for you if you're going that route.

<comment><AUTHOR> So what is your opinion of this article? [https://thenewstack.io/kubecon-2018-kubernetes-is-the-new- os...](https://thenewstack.io/kubecon-2018-kubernetes-is-the-new-os-so-what/)

<comment><USER2> It's an ad from a conference about Kubernetes.

<comment><AUTHOR> But I guess you don't always need to configure the systems underneath, if you buy Kubernetes as a service from Google or Amazon, is that correct?

<comment><USER2> Yes, and if you buy managed databases as a service you don't have to do your own backups (though you probably should copy their backups offsite on a regular schedule).

That doesn't mean you should regard k8s as the new OS. If you wanted to go that route, the relevant things to look at are Inferno, Plan 9, and clustered VMS.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok thanks, I'll check out Inferno, Plan 9, and clustered VMS then, if they are the future of IT world

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Kubernetes might not be the new IBM PC, but it is in fact the new platform that is the de facto standard to deploy and manage web services and the infrastructure used to run them. There's no way around it, and that's good thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well since most new apps are web services and kubernetes is the standard then shouldn't we be treating it as the new OS later?</comment></comment>


The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Remote Work After 5 Years of Experience - <AUTHOR> http://ionutn.com/the-good-bad-and-the-ugly-of-working-remote-after-5-years/ <comment><USER3> I'm coming up on 17 years of remote working (we used to call it virtual office back in the day), and most of this rings true, however there are some additional considerations when a family is involved. I've found a couple of things to be most helpful as a family man:

Set a quitting time. Don't worry about starting your work day, that will happen by itself, but you need to put a good cap on the end of the work day, so you know when to walk away from work.

Have a place to work. I have a home office, but it could be a specific desk, room, or beach chair. Wherever it is, try to do your work there when family is around, that way they know you're working.

Leave your work laptop at your desk. Get a second laptop, tablet, etc that doesn't have work stuff on it if you're going to use electronic stuff around the family outside work hours.

And perhaps most importantly, take advantage of it! I have been able to watch my kids grow up in a way 99% of fathers can't dream of. I take them to dentist appointments, keep an eye on them once in a while when my wife needs to run an errand, and get to see the amazing lego creations they build right away - <USER2> don't have to wait till daddy gets home... My wife constantly drops comments like 'it's such a blessing that your job lets you be here for this', and it's true - I wouldn't trade it for the world.

<comment><USER4> What type of work do you do? Webdev, sysadmin or ? It seems remote working is only just becoming mainstream acceptable. How were you able to start doing so 17 years ago? Has it been with the same company or many companies? Are you independent consultant? Sorry for so many questions, I just haven't been able to figure out how to work remotely full-time. The best I've gotten was 1-2 days a week. Appreciate your reply.

<comment><USER5> I know someone who has worked over 20 remote years coding AS/400 for large corporations (last one I knew of was Whirlpool). Think she started on dialup. So it has been around for a while, but clearly has gotten more popular over time.

Here is how to find a remote job.. find a remote FIRST company. Not a normal company you ask if you can work remote. Find a company that only hires remote people. Watching the companies that post on say weworkremotely.com and you will find something interesting.

That said, remote jobs do tend to have more competition. Since anyone can apply to any remote job, I suspect they get 20x the resumes of a local job (would love to hear for someone who has worked both sides of HR to confirm). So you can't just apply to 2 jobs and assume you will get 1 of them. It will take more work.

<comment><USER6> I've gotten multiple jobs via weworkremotely.com - and hired from there.

Our ad for a sysadmin got 100+ resumes, of which about 50 were trashable, and we had a dozen plus excellent candidates.

<comment><USER5> How does 100 compare to your average local ad posting? Seems high but not as high as I had expected.

<comment><USER7> 50% trashable from a web posting is _amazingly_ good.

<comment><USER6> It may have been higher. But it seems that weworkremotely seems to have a good bar for candidates. Also: I'm counting candidates, not agencies and such spamming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A lot of this rings true for me. I've been working remotely in SF for 5 years, though my company is based in CT. The 3 hour time difference makes things interesting, since I now work 6am to 2pm to be on the clock the same hours as my east coast colleagues. The disadvantage is the 6am start time. The advantage is the 2pm end time, which sometimes slips to 3pm. However, I still keep a very much Office/Personal dichotomy, where outside my working hours I tend to not be working unless there is a specific deadline.

The real downsides for me are: 1\. The occasional loneliness 2\. difficulty in casual collaboration with colleagues 3\. the "work hangover" where after finishing work, I don't have adequate physical separation from it (like leaving the office gives you), and sometimes I can waste time after work is over before being able to spin up on something else.

The upsides are: 1\. Music when I want it, silence when I don't. 2\. Cheaper food costs, healthier meals 3\. no commute costs 4\. more overall time to indulge in hobbies/side projects 5\. tax benefit of maintaining a home office. 6\. save on dry cleaning, clothing costs 7\. can run errands during the day, and always have the 2-5pm block of time while normal companies are still open, and I am free.

<comment><USER9> It's interesting to me that you have adjusted your working hours to match your company. I work for a company in London and I would never be able to match their working hours. Is that a requirement from your company, or just something you hold yourself to?

<comment><USER8> it is a convenience thing - If they need me, I'm up. If I need them, I know when they're available. My role involves some support for other employees, and also some reliance on others. I work in the research/consulting/advisory business, so I'm less independent than many developers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Every article about remote work makes it sound harder than it really is, and probably scares a lot of people off. I've been doing it for 3 years now and don't suffer from these problems. There was some initial shock for the first month or so where home = work = home but once I got past that it became easy. Now I wake up, grab my laptop and sit on the couch and work. When someone wants to talk I go to my office, or if I need heads-down time.

Otherwise I just live my life. I usually sign off around 5 and take my dog for a walk. I do normal hour-ish long lunches. If I need to mow the grass I go do that, no big deal.

<comment><USER11> Oh man, I got a puppy 3 months after starting to work from home and it's been a struggle. I would get interrupted so often and she wants constant attention.. I ended up working poorly for many hours. Some nights I end up in bed at 5 or 6 AM because I don't get to do much during the day.. I hope she'll need me less when she gets a bit older.

<comment><USER12> She's a dog. Tie her up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My job for the past 2.5 years has been remote and one thing that I have a problem with is getting out of the house. I (kinda) followed "Invest in yourself" to the point where I have a desk I like with monitors I like and my cozy little spot.

It's hard to justify "Get out of the house" when you've built a nice work spot for yourself. Maybe it's because the audience for this is in an urban environment where it's a 5 minute walk to the coffee shop (as opposed to my suburban 10 minute drive) or maybe it's because I'm cheap and know the coffee at home is cheaper than paying "rent" buy buying coffee.

I'd really be curious to hear other remote workers' experiences with getting out of the house.

<comment><USER14> Slow travel - you will always have a reason to go out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've been working at home for 4 years, and I sort of disagree with point #1. Maybe this is good for some people, but part of the high degree of flexibility comes from being able to work different, odds hours. Because of my freedom of working at home I can run to Costco at 10:30, or take my daughter to her soccer practice at 4pm. If I'm trying to wrap up some code, being at home allows me to stay focused past 5, sometimes 7 or 8pm, without the need to get in a car. It's give and take.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are not really disagreeing :), the point was that a while ago I used to work 16 hours / day or work 2 am - 11am and sleep whole day which was really crazy.

Working between 7am - 11pm is quite ok, I agree with all those advantages.

<comment><USER15> Oh yes agree there. When it get to a point that you are ignoring your family then it's time to set a hard boundary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is one person's experience and viewpoint. I've worked remote for the majority of the last 6 years and haven't run into anything like this.

Why would you treat working from home any differently than working from the office? I wouldn't work until 8pm in the office, so why would I do it at home?

The special scheduling of personal appointments doesn't make sense to me. If you were in the office, you'd tell people "I'll be away from 1-2 today" and that's it. I do the same thing when I'm working from home.

Maybe I'm weird because I'm not big on socially hanging with my coworkers, but the face time doesn't bother me at all. We do a lot of video calls, I see them plenty.

My work is not my life. I've never had trouble separating work and home life. Working from a room in my house has never changed that. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some yard work to do on my lunch break.

</comment><comment><USER17> Very valid points. I've been a remote worker for a year so I can understand many points. I haven't tried some things yet (travel) so hearing about it is insightful.

\- Although my work permits being flexible, I'd rather have a normal person's schedule too! There's just too many real life things to take care of that require normal hours.

\- After spending a lot of time alone, I have to find a friend to meet up with. I made another remote working friend so we meet up 2 times a week. It's odd but it does feel like there is some sort of pull towards human interaction embedded somewhere. I also enjoy the busy and loud cafe background.

\- Taxes suck :( They have been very confusing since this is my first year. Still working on them :'(

<comment><USER18> Anything particular about taxes that sucks for you?

Are you working for yourself or remote for a company?

I'm about 5 months into a remote job for a health company and I love it so far.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey,

I am a co-founder and employee of a company so while salary stuff is clear, things like dividends + fiscal residence + tax treaty makes you crazy to be short.

Just working remotely for a company and being in a specific location all the time is certainly way easier to handle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Most of this is just healthy working practice for anyone, regardless of their remote/office status (schedule time for yourself, don't work too much, see people face-to-face etc).

Good post overall though!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep indeed, my goal here was to tell non-remote workers that is not always sunshine and rainbows :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I work (as network engineer) from home around 1 year and I am very satisfied. I have project based position and am the only one (within department) who is taking care of specific role. I have global customers so they don't care if I sit here or 500 kilometers over-there. Provided service is still the same.

Here are my experiences from last year:

1\. I have own workplace with stand-up desk, big screen.

2\. I have silence for thinking and creating.

3\. In case of lower workload I can work on some side projects or get some home-tasks or child-care.

4\. I am out of noisy open-office.

5\. Nobody is staring at my screen and asking silly questions what are you reading? What is it? Can you send me a link?

6\. I didn't get any open-office illness.

7\. I don't have to fight for air-conditioning/heating temperature.

8\. I am home from work after 1 second.

9\. Since I don't travel to the office I save a huge amount of money

10\. I don't feel lack of social contact. I have neighbors at our street, family near to us. I am introvert. Maybe sometime I don't have someone with same technical expertise but never mind.

11\. I am living in area with lower cost for living so I am saving money, I have higher quality of life.

12\. I don't need afraid that my car will be scratched (as happened a year ago at private parking, of course no camera records, no witness).

13\. Sometime it's hard especially if kids are getting insane and make huge shambles.

14\. Relationship with your spouse require higher attitude because you are threatened by marine disease. You are together very often without break.

I would not change it back to the open-office insane workplace.

In regards to blogpost...I can confirm point #6 - third culture kid. After 5 years living abroad I moved back to my domestic country.

</comment><comment><USER21> Suggested topic change: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Digital Nomadism After 5 Years.

A lot of us who work from home but stay put are confused by this article.

<comment><AUTHOR> I struggled about finding the right title, I don't really consider myself a fully digital nomad either, the article is about remote work, however under my personal circumstances, I am now more an expat than a nomad.

Some learnings happened also in different periods of my life, so is really hard to write a title/content that is clear and all the people reading it will identify.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I just want to say, as someone who currently works remotely, the points about travel don't apply to everyone. Some of us don't have to fly around for our jobs, no matter where our base of operations is. The last flight I took was to a conference my company sent me to, which I would have taken even if I worked in-office.

<comment><USER22> i agree with this. i have yet to meet a very productive remote employee that is changing locations frequently. all the travel i do is either for work, or vacation, in which case it would be the same if i were in office.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> There's a variety of work-from-home situations. The OP describes a situation of WFH while living in foreign countries, and apparently he's also self- employed.

Others (like myself, since 2012) are full time employed and work literally from home.

Still others work from local coffee shops or other comfortable hotspots.

As a full time employee, and having tricked out my home office with a comfortable chair and good equipment that I paid for myself, WFH is like being at the office, minus the noise and inconvenience.

Financially speaking, WFH is a huge win for most of us who aren't lucky enough to be able to walk 10 minutes to the office:

\- I no longer commute 15-20 hours a week, which to me is worth an extra $20K a year.

\- I don't have to make lunch, or buy lunch.

\- I can go running at lunchtime, in fact, just stand up and go out the door, back in 50 minutes, and at some point I'll hop in the shower, at my convenience.

\- I can time-shift my work; dental, quick shopping trips, running down to the Post Office, etc. become very easy to fit in.

\- I can time- _slice_ my day, getting my work done while fitting in 5 minutes here and there of practicing the piano, walk out into the woods to clear my head, or reading the news or checking social network sites without feeling self-conscious.

\- Privacy

\- Quiet

\- Lighting as I like it.

\- Can easily do the laundry.

\- Easily make a personal call.

\- Take a "youtube" break now and then, no need for phones. Ditto for having music going, though I'm more of a silence kind of guy.

True, you miss the 5-minutes-in-the-hallway kind of interaction that can grease the wheels and answer questions quickly, but phones, chat/texting, Facetime/Skype, screen sharing, and email pretty much cover it. A small price to pay in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER24> The biggest thing for me was that programming by yourself is lonely.

And this was the case for me even in a coworking space with people I came to know pretty well.

Jeff Atwood has written on this: [http://blog.codinghorror.com/in-programming- one-is-the-lonel...](http://blog.codinghorror.com/in-programming-one-is-the- loneliest-number/)

I came to the realization that others felt this from this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3AAGlG6NqM&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3AAGlG6NqM&feature=youtu.be&t=10m12s)

</comment><comment><USER25> Regarding point 6, I wonder how much a decent expat community from your own country, or at a minimum native speakers of your language, might help. For example, I imagine living in Hong Kong might be alienating after a while (I suspect this is because you may feel like you are a member of your own culture less as time goes by, but never quite feel fully integrated into your host culture), but if you have a core group of people with a shared original culture around you, that might go a long way towards staving off feelings of alienation.

<comment><USER26> English, an official language, and British culture are still pretty strong in HK though declining. Still, I get your point. I live in China and I while I don't work remotely, I just don't interact with the expat community. It's much easier if you have local friends and co-workers. I can't imagine being here as a remote worker -- China can feel pretty isolating. I just find your reference to HK odd because I go there when I don't want to feel isolated/alienated. HK is an extremely "western culture" place.

<comment><USER25> I used HK specifically because I have a friend (one of my my Fiance's best friends from highschool) that moved there a few years ago to marry a HK native. She lives there and works in the family store now. She's noted more than once (but not _often_ ) that she's somewhat lonely there, even though there are some people that live in the same building that are Americans, as she feels somewhat disconnected from them (although it sounded like this may have had something to do with them being wives that didn't work). She mentioned that in the store, her humor often falls flat with the other employees, so there is some cultural disconnect there.

She is Chinese, speaks the language fluently, and I believe she was born in HK, but she was raised in Northern California, and identifies completely as an American. It's entirely possible this confluence of attributes may cause more problems for her than if she was obviously Caucasian and living in HK.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Thanks for sharing this. I just started working remotely and need all the advice I can get.

<comment><USER28> I've worked remote for the past 10 years and I'll say treat your workspace as a real office, good chair, monitors, wireless headset, closed door to minimize any noise. Scheduling tasks is absolutely critical because I find your way more efficient and focused without office distractions. I'm easily 2x more efficient vs an office so I have more time with non-work activities. Get a small office or have access to one of those shared space offices to get away at times, don't think that Starbucks and Panera are places to get actual work done. It's easy to over work, so set aside time to learn something new to keep things interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Most of this is pretty solid, though not particularly insightful.

I disagree with point #1 about working a "normal schedule". I think being able to adapt to work when the mood strikes (or doesn't) is one of the best things about being a digital nomad. Personally, I schedule my times in blocks which are different on different days, and adapt to the needs of clients, team, my current timezone offset, and personal schedule (classes, dinners, etc.). I also move things around as I go, to adjust to things like nice weather to go out, having a slow morning, or being inspired to do something. Note that while I am flexible, I'm also very disciplined about scheduling work time, averaging 75hr weeks.

I also disagree with #6. I've certainly experienced being happier in some countries (and cities) than others. I think one of the great things about being a DN, is experiencing daily life (not vacation life) in different countries, and learning where you are the happiest in different areas of your life. Then, unlike a vacationer, who sadly has to return home, a DN has the ability to extend their time in those places.

When I think of happiness, I also think of fulfillment which is more granular than just being "happy". There are different areas where you can experience fulfillment: family, friends, hobbies, work, lifestyle. Different locations provide these in differing ratios. In one place, you may be happy that you can be near family, while in that place, you miss surfing. One of the great things about being a DN, is that you don't have to chose only one of these. You can mix them in various intervals. Last year, I spent a lot of time with family and friends in a bunch of different countries, made two trips to Peru, two trips to Japan, and a bunch of time all over Europe and Mexico. I would say I'm happier for it, than if I had been in any one place, even if I spent the whole year in one of my favorite cities.

I thought I was going to agree with #3, but agreed less the more I read of his description. To me, it's much more about being around specific selected people that I care about: family, friends, clients, partners... Also beneficial are places where I connect with people based on shared interest. Meeting random people in cafes is nice sometimes, and the universe does throw interesting people into the mix, but for me it's about more than just, "having people around is always better".

Of everything here, #8 (Invest in yourself) is the strongest. The risk- adjusted return of informed and ongoing self-investment is phenomenal.

(source: Digital Nomad since '06\. 10-20 countries/year while running multiple successful service and product businesses)

</comment><comment><USER30> Not having to put on headphone to listen to music while working is glorious.</comment>


Wal-Mart Tells Workers: Don't Download Labor Group's Chat App - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/wal-mart-tells-workers-dont-download-labor-groups-chat-app-1479214510 <comment><USER2> It's an illegal labor practice in the US for an employer to do that. It's interference with the right to bargain collectively.

But WalMart probably doesn't have much to fear from the Labor Department. Even under the current administration, enforcement is weak, and it will probably be weaker under the next administration. It's really tough to organize a union today, even though the law as written is pro-union.

<comment><USER3> > Even under the current administration, enforcement is weak, and it will > probably be weaker under the next administration.

One of the more interesting features of the American political environment, over at least the last three and a half decades, is the extent to which the demographic that is (or was) nominally represented by unions has voted for politicians who have made no bones about their intent to weaken the unions and labor law, especially at the state level.

Whether the unions could have made a difference - and whether that difference would have been to the long-term benefit of their members - in the face of global industrialization and automation, is another issue altogether (unless it was the issue that got the ball of disillusionment rolling in the first place.)

<comment><USER4> > One of the more interesting features of the American political environment, > over at least the last three and a half decades, is the extent to which the > demographic that is (or was) nominally represented by unions has voted for > politicians who have made no bones about their intent to weaken the unions > and labor law, especially at the state level.

They failed because the majority of people are hard workers who loathe being yoked to a lazy or incompetent person, and unions have proven to be exceptionally good at maintaining employment of people who are terrible at their jobs.

Some people are absolutely baffled by the software industry not having unions. It's because people getting hired and fired within 12 months at my job is what ensures that I only work with the best.

Unions suffer from what most of the progressive movement does: everything bad that happens to them is the fault of the big, bad republicans and capitalists. If they'd bother to introspect for even a second, maybe they could fix their shortcomings and start to do some good.

The environmentalist initiative that went on the ballot in Seattle this month was lead by a guy who is working within the Republican party for climate reform because he's said it's not possible to work with the left anymore because of their dysfunction. The left's response to this? Tried to torpedo his climate bill. The head of the left is so far up its own ass that I think it's getting close to terminal. Progressivism in America will have to die and be reborn as a functioning body for political change.

<comment><USER5> While a bit more political and divisive than I would have gone with, I think you hit the nail on the head.

Those that would benefit most in theory from unions generally have the most experience "in the trenches" with them. This experience shows them that unions more or less became places to protect the lowest common denominator with zero regard for any value they bring to the table.

Show me a union that functions like a "guild" where it polices it's membership extremely well, and people strive to be skillful enough to join - then I will both support that union as a member, and hire those members when possible.

If all you exist to do is keep the lowest performers employed at the expense of your most productive members you can see why most hard working folks tend to have a complicated relationship at best with unions as they are implemented today.

<comment><USER6> > _" Show me a union that functions like a "guild" where it polices it's > membership extremely well, and people strive to be skillful enough to join"_

Pro sports players' unions.

It makes sense -- owners must act as a collective unit in order to ensure competitive balance and some degree of economic stability. A sports league where one team can afford to buy all of the best players from other teams is going to lose fans very fast. With owners acting collectively, players act collectively as a counterbalance. They make sure that they get a reasonable share of the overall income, and that it's distributed in a way that pays top performers more but also pays well enough at the bottom to keep the league an attractive place for marginal players.

<comment><USER7> > A sports league where one team can afford to buy all of the best players > from other teams is going to lose fans very fast

On the other hand, the New York Yankees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just to play devil's advocate here, this is from the article:

> The app, called WorkIt, invites users to register by providing a name, > email, telephone number and ZIP Code. Users can also s hare (sic) their job > title and Wal-Mart store number....

That is a bunch of personally identifying information. You can easily steal somebody's identity with those bits of information, or at least have a good idea of who they are. I see how Walmart's corporate line is at least somewhat believable upon further thought.

And there has been no disclosure on how they're storing this information. Are they storing it on AWS/GCE/Azure or Linode? Or do they have their own locked down racks that safeguard this information?

Look, I'm not saying that there's anything malicious about this, or the Walmart isn't trying to bust worker collaboration. But, in today's security conscious world, you really should ask these questions when you're requesting PII to sign up to your app.

And malice vs carelessness doesn't matter when your personal information is leaked all over the web.

<comment><USER9> It's not PII [1]. That's an actual legal term. Workit apparently wants worker identifying information, and Walmart, like other employers are free to tell their workers not to provide it, but there's no ethical or legal reason they can give to workers not to use it.

It's not unlike GlassDoor - lots of companies would prefer you didn't use it, but at the employee level, the advantage/disadvantage ratio is pretty in your favor.

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

<comment><USER10> Your own link lists some of the collected data as PII.

<comment><USER9> Employment data considered "linked" information, and not core PII.

Core PII is: "any information about an individual maintained by an agency, including (1) any information that can be used to distinguish or trace an individual's identity, such as name, social security number, date and place of birth, mother's maiden name, or biometric records"

<comment><USER8> You're talking about core PII here. I'm saying the signup requirements probably constitute PII when taken all together.

Full name (if uncommon) and email address (if private from an association/club membership, etc.). IP address (I'm pretty sure they can log your IP address unless they specifically say they don't.) And Zip code is mentioned as PII if linked to any of the above.

These are all things they request for signup, and then you can optionally include your job title and your store number. All that stuff put together is very clearly PII, so I'm not quite sure what your point is.

<comment><USER9> You need something personally _identifiable_ , not just personal of nature to constitute as PII (I deal with actual PII on a daily basis). Adding up PII- related info together doesn't constitute PII.

Many people gladly share personal details with activism sites and social networks well in excess of what this app is requesting, the only thing surprising here is the Streissand effect that wal-mart will get by naming this app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Another link: [http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2016/11/15/wal-mart- tell...](http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2016/11/15/wal-mart-tells- workers-dont-download-labor-groups-chat-app.html)

Interesting:

      Wal-Mart has instructed store managers to tell their employees
      that the app wasn't made by the company and described it as a
      scheme to gather workers' personal information, according to a
      document viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

<comment><USER12> That's totally unsurprising to hear. Wal-Mart apparently defaults to portraying unions as pure evil. I don't know what the current procedure is like, but they used to make new hires watch laughably biased "educational" videos about unions. I don't remember the contents in detail, just that they roughly reminded me of '80s anti-drug PSAs/specials, with union organizers essentially taking the place of the "drug pusher" who wants to profit by ruining your life. Wal-Mart management, of course, takes the place of the wise parent/guardian who has your best interests at heart.

<comment><USER13> It works, too. In the popular media, unions have been so thoroughly demonized for several decades.

Lots of middle-aged folks now will have grown up with their only idea of the union as being the lazy teamster who does nothing all day except file grievances, or the fabled electrician who won't plug in your power cord at a trade show because it's someone else's job.

And the kinds of people who're going in for these jobs at Walmart probably aren't the most educated to begin with, so watching a video that confirms the biases they've picked up from popular media, well, that's probably a pretty effective tactic on Walmart's part.

This is all not to say that unions in the US are blameless. They could surely learn a lot from the way unions operate throughout Europe.

There's been corruption, greed, and mismanagement in the big unions, just like every big organization (especially big American organizations; something in our cultural DNA seems to make us prone to graft), but us workers still absolutely need them or something like them to keep up the good fight.

<comment><USER14> _" Lots of middle-aged folks now will have grown up with their only idea of the union as being the lazy teamster who does nothing all day except file grievances, or the fabled electrician who won't plug in your power cord at a trade show because it's someone else's job._"

Or have had the actual experience of not being allowed to plug in your own electrical cord at a trade show and blaming in on the union - which is probably right. I'm not saying unions are all bad but in the US ones don't have a good track record.

When the AFL-CIO asks for an exemption to the $15 minimum wage it doesn't help their image. [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/12/los- angeles-...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/12/los- angeles-15-dollar-minimum-wage-unions)

<comment><USER15> > Or have had the actual experience of not being allowed to plug in your own > electrical cord at a trade show and blaming in on the union - which is > probably right. I'm not saying unions are all bad but in the US ones don't > have a good track record.

While in grad school, the heater in our lab was out during a cold-ass New York winter. We put in work requests for weeks, and no repairs were ever made. A fellow grad student finally got fed up, looked up the plans to the heater online, and figured out how to fix it on his own. Months later (it is spring time now) someone from facilities shows up, goes into a fit that someone non- union fixed the heater, and the fellow grad student got into some shit from the department and the deans office. Yes, this is anecdotal, but negative interactions with unions are a real thing.

Edit: Also, the most vocal opponent of the smoking ban on campus was from one of the service worker unions.

<comment><USER16> There are very real safety/regulatory/liability issues with having random grad students performing electric repairs. My guess is that this is the actual problem from the facility manager's perspective, and you (or someone in your chain of communication) are misattributing it to a union problem.

Of course, it's inexcusable for repair work to take so long.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Walmart is just a front for off loaded cheap Chinese goods. Sure using labor camps, product dumping and destroying the sky doesn't happen in our backyard. But the concept of Walmart as pro American is disgusting. Anything to harm it is good. Good for this app. Bored? I'll fund a new one.

<comment><USER18> why the hate for imported stuff? Do you want everything you buy to be made in USA? I don't understand you people. Trade is good for all of us. No country can build everything.

<comment><USER19> What do you mean you people?

<comment><USER20> People like you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It is a fascinating idea. Let's explore it:

The app would let users signal need from a buyer so that workers in their social network could agree on the price to give them.

If buyers managed to find the service somewhere else, users could snap a picture of the person/company who won the business and "review" them so that their network knew not to help the winner out, like if their brakes were about to fail or their house caught fire or whatever.

Signup would be free but users would pay like %5+ of their paycheck, which they will be fine with because of the increased benefits they get, and we would use the money for expansion and blocking competitors. Uber failed at getting political support because they were greedy capitalists who create injustice, so campaign contributions will be one of our big cost centers, but the returns will be well worth it.

Instead of an auction for services and market making like the apps we have today, it's a way to collude to fix prices. If they act now, YC can get %5 for a mere $50m.

Imagining the utility elevator pitch, "...no, no, like Grindr but for comrades!" An app for creating labor cartels.

What will I call it? "Koloodr."

</comment><comment><USER22> The most dangerous thing about this app is the certainty that, if it takes off, it'll be filled with union-busting labor "consultants" who'll focus on identifying rebellious workers so Walmart can retaliate against them for some other pretext. Note that Walmart already spends millions of dollars on these particular types of specialized attorneys who do pretty much exactly that except over other channels, so this isn't at all far fetched, despite how evil it sounds.

</comment><comment><USER15> > The app, released on Android phones Monday

Why Android only?

<comment><USER23> android is more prevalent in lower income workers. More of the potential users would use android thus they develop on the predominant platform first.

<comment><USER24> Not in my observation. Where I work there is a low paid call center on another floor of this giant building, and they all have iphones. Its like shoes.

At my socioeconomic level when I want to blow some cash or show off some money I go on a thousands of dollar vacation travel or maybe buy a new car, for me its enough to show I have some dough, but its cheap enough to fit my cash flow.

Likewise a step or two or three downward, their way of flashing cash is the $400 sneakers or $400 video game system or in this specific case, the $400 iphone. They may have saved from months of paychecks to afford it, but I'm not really all that different other than I went to Ireland instead. Or I bought a car mostly in cash. Its the same behavior at a different scale.

Android is definitely in the middle, from what I observe. No one over $400K or under $40K has an android phone, at least not that I've seen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm curious, was this article censored off the front page? I saw it near the top briefly, and then when I clicked back to the front page, it quickly disappeared, and it is still not in the front pages despite racking up votes.

</comment><comment><USER26> Hmm. It seems likely this will result in the Streisand effect for Walmart.

</comment><comment><USER27> 1\. Hello Streisand effect.

2\. Does anyone else hope semi-anonymous apps like this will lead to a new age of unionization?

<comment><USER28> 2\. More than you can imagine. Technology should be bringing an end to sharecropping, not further increasing economic inequality.

<comment><USER29> I should have a pony.

<comment><USER28> I ain't got time for defeatist or libertarian attitudes (see handle).

The future is what we make of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> By doing that Walmart is promoting the group ha ha. Min.wage employees are not going to listen to their boss when at home.</comment>