My one-liner Linux Dropbox client - <AUTHOR> http://lpan.io/one-liner-dropbox-client/ <comment><USER2> > Recently, the proprietary Dropbox Linux client dropped support for all Linux > file systems except unencrypted ext4.

What the heck. Anyone has more information about that? Any announcement? And why would it fail to work on an encrypted (LUKS?) ext4 FS when encryption seemed to me to sit _below_ the filesystem (since AFAIK ext4 doesn't support encryption itself)?

<comment><USER3> It's FUD. ext4 with LUKS, which is what pretty much everyone is using on a desktop, is still working and the client supported.

<comment><USER4> No, it's not FUD. encrypted ext4 is encfs and ecryptfs, not xy on LUKs, and yes, they did drop support.

<comment><USER5> Just FYI: Ext4 has file-level encryption built-in now [1, 2], so 'encrypted ext4' is actually different from encfs and ecryptfs.

[1]: [https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.19/filesystems/fscrypt.ht...](https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.19/filesystems/fscrypt.html)

[2]: [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ext4#Using_file- based_e...](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ext4#Using_file- based_encryption)

<comment><USER4> I didn't know this, that's new for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I setup Syncthing [1] to do the same for my vimwiki folder. It was surprisingly easy, and doesn't require any external storage services. And it can even automatically sync files without internet, over the local network.

[1] [https://syncthing.net/](https://syncthing.net/)

<comment><USER7> I've used Syncthing and it's excellent. But for me, the lack of a mobile app was a dealbreaker. Even though it's not open source, I switched to Resilio Sync[1] (formerly known as btsync). It ticks all the other boxes, and just works amazingly well. I want to support them so I sprang for the $20 one time Pro license which adds selective sync and a few other nice features.

[1] [https://www.resilio.com/individuals/](https://www.resilio.com/individuals/)

<comment><USER8> Syncthing does have a mobile app [https://f-droid.org/packages/com.nutomic.syncthingandroid/](https://f-droid.org/packages/com.nutomic.syncthingandroid/)

<comment><USER9> For Android yes, but the GP is likely using iOS where no such client seems to exist.

<comment><USER10> I used fsync when using I bought an apple device [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fsync/id964427882](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fsync/id964427882)

It's lacking and has a weird workflow, but at least it worked for me. Didn't test it too much as I hated the apple experience and gave away the device.

<comment><USER9> The reviews would show you that it no longer works at all for iOS 12 and beyond.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Dropbox will work if you just create a local loopback file for an ext4 filesystem and mount the Dropbox folder on it.

<comment><USER12> The above is a great answer.

To expand on this (from some googling). All of this requires root.

1) Create a sparse file (actual size depends on usage)

      truncate -s 100G /home/zzz/Dropbox.image

2) Create a ext4 filesystem on it

      mkfs.ext4 -m0 /home/zzz/Dropbox.image

3) Mount it as a loopback file system

      sudo mount /home/zzz/Dropbox.image /home/zzz/Dropbox-fs

4) Create / Copy your dropbox folder to Dropbox-fs

      sudo mkdir /home/zzz/Dropbox-fs/Dropbox
      sudo chown -R zzz.zzz /home/zzz/Dropbox-fs/Dropbox
      cp -r /home/zzz/Dropbox-original /home/zzz/Dropbox-fs/Dropbox

5) Start Dropbox and point it to the new location

6) If we want to mount this automatically at login. Adding it to /etc/fstab may not work because of encryption.

But perhaps some script at login to mount it will work. For example, we can create a script at /usr/local/bin/mountDB.sh and then add a line to /etc/sudoers

      zzz ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: /usr/local/bin/mountDB.sh

Then somehow call this script at login of user zzz.

<comment><USER13> I've never heard of a 'loopback filesystem' before. Can you expand a little on what this is?

<comment><USER14> It lets you mount a file as a filesystem, instead of an actual hardware device. I think it's called "loopback" because instead of reading from /dev/whatever it loops back to /dev/original and reads the specified file.

See the man page for `mount`: [https://linux.die.net/man/8/mount](https://linux.die.net/man/8/mount) (search for "loop")

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I hadn't seen entr before! My first glance at your one-liner:

find $ORG_DIR | entr -r rclone sync -v $ORG_DIR $REMOTE:org

is that find will enumerate all your existing files, but starting a new one won't get picked up.

It seems like entr is prepared though, and you should just pass in -d. In fact why use find at all, if you want to rsync the directory?

<comment><USER16> Huge additional plus, entr does not rely exclusively on inotify, it is also 'BSD kqueue wrapper. It is the only command line utility that I found that allows cross platform (linux/BSD) scripting with file system events.

I have few scripts that rely on entr and I am always sure they are OS agnostic.

<comment><USER2> Then take a look at fswatch! (See sibling comment)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Since it is being used with systemd a systemd path unit could be used to monitor the file system removing the need to use entr.

<comment><USER18> Thanks, didn't know systemd can do that [0]! I must grudgingly admit that it seems to be quite useful, though I still don't like having a single app doing all that stuff. But that's off topic... :)

[0] [https://blog.andrewkeech.com/posts/170809_path.html](https://blog.andrewkeech.com/posts/170809_path.html)

<comment><USER19> Both path units and entr use the inotify kernel API on Linux. If your needs get more complex, there are python, perl, etc, APIs for the inotify libraries.

Also, if you have an older linux distro that predates inotify(), there's similar functionality within auditd that will log changes to a file with a tag of your choosing, then you can tail the file.

<comment><USER20> dnotify is another older one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> .... Except, a file added to your dropbox will only appear in your local box the next time you create a local file -- there is nothing to wake the local entr when a file is remotely added to dropbox.

<comment><USER22> Could write a little script to add then delete a temp file on some chron job or at login or something.

<comment><USER21> If I have a shared dropbox folder with someone, as soon as they put the file in, I get a copy. There is no way to get a notification that would provide a similar experience without the real dropbox client, afaik.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Consider using git or another SCM instead. You don't need a centralized server, you can push/pull between any two machines with ssh (or a handful of other protocols). Encrypted end to end. Supports branches, useful for stuff like dotfiles on different machines. You don't need commit messages, just make an alias to add all changes and commit with and empty message. You have a full history, can revert back to any state, inspect any old version, diff versions, etc. There's git clients for mobile. Free as in beer and freedom. Check- summed. Puts you in control of when to sync, supports offline. Future-proof, acquisition-proof, VC-proof. Familiar.

<comment><USER24> I do this, but 90% of the time I forget to pull on the other machine and have to deal with conflicts.

<comment><USER25> Yes, you'd have to automate the pull for this to work, and then you'd have a way to notify on conflicts so that they are resolved ASAP.

Come to think of it, Dropbox isn't really so great at the notification aspect of this either. It creates a 'conflicted' file but there is no notification that I'm aware of. I have to remind myself to periodically check for conflicts.

<comment><USER26> Is there a standard-ish git merge driver that resolves all merges with a Dropbox-style "conflicted copy", so you can unconditionally git pull in a cronjob and it never leaves the repo in an unmerged state?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Not really the same, but this reminds me of the top comment of the Dropbox announcement: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863)

<comment><USER28> Why does someone have to bring up this eleven-year-old comment any time file synchronisation or Dropbox is mentioned?

Dropbox is now broken for certain Linux configurations and someone had a bit of fun writing a shell one-liner to replicate some of its functionality. Meanwhile, the original eleven year old comment was partly a throwaway remark that it didn't do anything he could not do already which means it wasn't interesting _to him_ (plus two other points, but nobody links to it for those).

That's not even "not really the same", it's "and since you mentioned Dropbox, let's make fun of BrandonM some more". It comes across as just mean-spirited and shitty to me.

<comment><USER29> > any time file synchronisation or Dropbox is mentioned

This is one of the most relevant topics you could quote it on, really. The post is tackling _one-way_ sync and calling it a rough equivalent to Dropbox.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> In that setup entr only watches files that existed when systemd service was first started. So new files won't trigger backup. Something like this should work:

while true; do find $ORG_DIR | entr -d -r rclone sync -v $ORG_DIR $REMOTE:org; done

<comment> ISO-morphism That's constantly polling the filesystem, isn't it?

I've never used it myself, but I know systemd has file watching built in. I think using `PathModified=/path/to/org` would also eliminate the need for entr [1].

[1] [https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.pat...](https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.path.html)

<comment><USER30> It should re-poll only when a new file is added. In op's usage scenario it won't be very ofthen.

The systemd solution may be even better, though it seems there is no way to ignore changes in temporary files that emacs likes to create.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It looks like there might be a bug. What happens when you add a new file? A quick scan of the entr help text suggests you should be using the -d flag.

<comment><USER15> Ha! I took too long to format my response :). The entr examples from [1] seem to do the same (ls *.rb for example).

[1] [http://eradman.com/entrproject/](http://eradman.com/entrproject/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The true workhorse behind this one-liner is inotify(Linux) or FSEvents(Mac) API. Not sure what is the Windows equivalent.

If your favorite language has access to those, then you can basically build your own file syncing client.

</comment><comment><USER33> rclone is great, i have been using it to make backup of google photos. I had tried so many different solutions before achieving this. Great to see it being here on HN.

<comment><USER34> rclone is such a great tool indeed. This is almost the only viable approach for transferring your data from one cloud to another. Huge thanks to the creator and contributors!

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> It's kind of funny to replace a proprietary client for a proprietary service with FOSS tools when you could completely replace Dropbox with FOSS alternatives instead and enjoy Freedom: Syncthing works very well, and while syncing is not its main feature you could also work with nextcloud.

<comment><USER36> If only there was a platform agnostic, standards-based, cloud platform that you could point any old SSH tool at.

Imagine if such a provider existed _and_ was running on top of ZFS _and_ maintained the current, stable version of 'borg[1]' on the server side ...

Probably too much to ask.

[1] [https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail- backups/](https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/)

<comment><USER37> Given the username, I'm assuming this is tongue-in-cheek because rsync.net is pretty much that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I got one too, but syncs to ipfs/ipld and uses gpg for encryption. [https://github.com/peerparty/fs2ipld/blob/master/fs2ipld.sh](https://github.com/peerparty/fs2ipld/blob/master/fs2ipld.sh)

</comment><comment><USER39> Previous discussion of entr: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13856623](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13856623)

</comment><comment><USER40> If you did want to run the original Dropbox client, you could likely make a blob image on your encrypted partition, loopmount it and then sync to that.

</comment><comment><USER41> I did something similar actually. I have my 1Password vault on Dropbox so I can get it on my Linux machines.

Dropbox has some nice python modules/libraries to support me, so I'm able to download the directory as a zip and extract it in memory.

It's stupid and unidirectional, but I'm sure more talented people are able to build a bidirectional python Dropbox client in no time, with inotify since python has bindings for this too.

</comment><comment><USER42> rclone is great, but I find syncing manually in intervals to be ideal since you get to see what is changing from your destination/remote. I use CrashPlan Pro to back up everything automatically, and then a few times a week I'll run rclone on my data drive so that I can see what has changed.

</comment><comment><USER43> You will be interested by this free and open source software: duplicati.com

</comment><comment><USER44> Why does the client care which filesystem you use???

<comment><USER45> Different supported features make it easier to maintain such a client. Example: Some filesystems notify observers on file change, some don't.

<comment><USER46> This shouldn't affect other local filesystems though. Inotify won't work with NFS, but should be ok with fs owned by the local system.

<comment><USER47> The mistake is assuming that there's something special about 'local' filesystems. They have as much feature disparity as networked ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> This is cool. Thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER49> Wow, this is better than getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.

<comment><USER50> reference acknowledged

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> This is _VERY_ cool but I stopped using dropbox and keep everything on my self-hosted Nextcloud.

</comment><comment><USER52> Dropbox is a no no for one simple reason - there is no end to end encryption. Unless I don't know something? I wouldn't want a disgruntled employee to fiddle with my files.

<comment><USER53> Is there any Dropbox-like service that lets you control your own private keys, without resorting to the ugliness of uploading an encrypted image to Dropbox?

<comment><USER54> Spider oak?

[https://spideroak.com/](https://spideroak.com/)

<comment><USER55> It's important to note though that their client is not open-source, so if one goes through all that trouble to use end-to-end encryption, it seems a bit unsatisfactory to me to then trust this company to actually keep the private keys on my machines (and encrypt things correctly).

Personally I used syncthing which doesn't do encryption but also only uses my own devices, so I can keep the data on my machines at all times.

In the past I used seafile which does support encryption (and it's self- hostable): [https://www.seafile.com/en/home/](https://www.seafile.com/en/home/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Boxee Acquired By Samsung For Around $30M - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/03/streaming-entertainment-startup-boxee-acquired-by-samsung-for-around-30m/

<comment><USER2> An exit break-even for investors (money-losing if the funds' cost of capital are considered) and no real return for founders/team.

The hardware-media play is tough.

<comment><USER3> "no real return" might be a strong statement to make when you take into account retention packages and bonuses that Samsung probably put together.

Sure, none of them are probably retiring, but if they can stick around at Samsung for a while they can probably do very well for themselves.

<comment><USER4> They did not get 'venture returns.'

</comment></comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell Boxee is a nice app. As long as you don't mind giving them a list of everthing you watch and when you watch it:

[https://grepular.com/Boxee_TV_Helps_Its_Self_To_Your_Viewing...](https://grepular.com/Boxee_TV_Helps_Its_Self_To_Your_Viewing_Habits)

Use XBMC. It's just as good but doesn't have all the unnescessary social crap.

<comment><USER5> I use Plex. It's incredible.

<comment><USER6> Isn't that a completely different thing?

<comment><USER7> All three are forks of XBMC, to varying degrees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I work in the same building as Boxee's New York HQ, four floors down – now I know why I've been seeing such a marked uptick in the amount of Boxee employees out on the sidewalk chatting excitedly, in like the past two weeks… to my upstairs neighbors, I say congrats!

<comment><USER9> $30 Million acquisition on $26.5 Million in funding is probably not something they'll feel great to be congratulated about.

<comment><USER8> Ha, I'll just empathetically wince at them instead in passing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Curious to see why the financial numbers don't look so great for Boxee, but if this is true, I think it's a super smart move for Samsung. They're trying to push smart TVs in the living room, but those haven't taken off yet. Grabbing a company that's making some of the best living room hardware makes a lot of sense.

<comment><USER11> _Grabbing a company that 's making some of the best living room hardware makes a lot of sense._

Have you _used_ a V2 Boxee box? Its honestly almost unusable and underpowered from both a software and hardware perspective, even the remote feels cheap. Their D-Link V1 box was a significantly better but they didn't _make_ it, it cost twice as much as a Roku and was only a hundred bucks less then an Xbox which they couldn't compete with. So they tried to take on Roku on the low end and flubbed it badly.

The one thing boxee has always done better then anyone else is their XBMC overlay for playing back local (or network attached) media. This is also where Samsung lacks, if anything this should be where Boxee's talent can play a part.

<comment><USER12> I love my little Boxee v1 box. I may be a developer and I may love technology, but I utterly despise anything remotely related to hi-fi, and I want my stuff as plug-and-play as possible. My supposed "SmartTV" from Samsung sucked (aside from the iPlayer integration, which worked really well) -- but the boxee v1 worked a treat. Plug. Scan. Play.

The QWERTY remote was icing on the cake, to be honest.

Glad to see Samsung taking over; maybe now Netflix will work in the UK on it.

<comment><USER13> I wish I could say I had the same experience with the box. The firmwares were consistently buggy and never quite worked well.

By far the two most frustrating aspects being the forced updates (which were often more buggy or broke features) and the lockups while in sleep. There was nothing more annoying than having to get up and hard reboot the thing every time I wanted to watch something.

Once the Pi and raspbmc became a viable alternative I quickly replaced my boxee boxes because, while not bug free by any means, they're much closer to "just working" than the boxee box ever was.

The one good thing I can say about the boxee box, though, is that its remote was a real treat. That thing worked like a charm.

<comment><USER14> Agreed, and for the price, really hoping that XBMC's stability issues on the Ouya get worked out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am not an insider, but had worked at Samsung HQ several years ago. Knowing their tendency to look for lowest price in anything and committee-based consensus building, I am sure it took them a while and hard bargain to reach $30M.

IMHO, such practice only allows them room to acquire non-prime (past-prime) companies. And their culture is largely not compatible with startups in the US. I would be interested to see what happens to Boxee team in 6-months to year down the road.

</comment><comment><USER16> Seems not a so awesome exit with Launch Date: 2004 and Funding of $26.5M

<comment><USER17> It isn't a very good exit. Boxee always painted themselves into a corner. They're the streaming device that could never achieve enough scale to gather content relationships.

It was a great device, but plagued by the anathema that is content partnerships with modern media companies. No matter what, if you have to provide consumer content, you're gonna get fucked. Plain and simple.

<comment><USER18> This is why I fully expect an advance in streaming media to come from a business with another form of revenue (Apple, Google...).

The content companies are intent on smothering any startup with great ideas, because it's a huge threat to their current business model. Like Apple did with iTunes, it's going to take a great idea _and_ a company with a serious war chest to force progress along. Good technology alone is just going to meet this same end, time and time again (in my opinion): Comcast, Verizon, etc. have too much of an incentive to keep things the way they are now, and enough money to keep startups from reaching critical mass.

Edited to add: In a lot of ways, Microsoft might be the first to really break the barrier with the XBox One. They have loads of cash, an audience that the content creators / content delivery companies need and the technology to get it there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Smart pickup by Samsung, who has struggled to build software matching the quality of their hardware. Smart TV's just aren't that smart. As Samsung is my electronics brand of choice, I'm hoping this results in a better user experience out of the box.

</comment><comment><USER20> On my 47" I've used many 10' UIs, XBMC, PS3, x-box, Apple TV, etc. Boxee and X-bar(PS3) are my favorite. Don't know if XBMC or Boxee designers should take the credit, but if Samsung is getting the talent responsible, 30M is a steal.

</comment><comment><USER21> "Streaming Entertainment Startup Boxee Acquired By Samsung For Around $30M"

So after 9 years of business they are still considered a startup? At what point do you stop being a start up?

<comment><USER22> After you get big or die or get acquired.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Woah, that's low.

</comment><comment><USER24> Awesome for Boxee, its a great product (actually the valuation seems kinda low to me)

<comment><USER25> I normally would agree with your low valuation sentiments, but the competition is really fierce (Roku, AppleTV, even Ouya) and I haven't seen more than one Boxee out in the wild.

<comment><USER26> I've got three in my house. Amazing devices imho.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I keep expecting LG to acquire Plex but maybe Plex has OEM agnostic plans.

<comment><USER28> I really hope LG doesn't acquire Plex. Plex's polyglot approach to platforms is too valuable to me...

<comment><USER27> I strongly agree with you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Seems like an awesome buy for Samsung, at a bargain too!

</comment><comment><USER30> I wonder where Samsung is going with this...

</comment><comment><USER31> The schoolboys from this site are laughing at their faces for such a miserable exit.

</comment><comment><USER32> BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO</comment>


Start-Up Kids Grow Up to Be Millionaires So Fast - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/08/AR2008040802798.html <comment><USER2> "They called the company Boso ("Buy Online Sell Online"), unaware of the clownish connotations that word would have in the States."

It wouldn't be Levy if it didn't have a grating line like this. Of _course_ nobody could have a successful Internet presence with a name that connoted stupidity or ignorance -- what kind of yahoo would think otherwise?

<comment><USER3> Levy is right, though -- "as in, bozo?" is the response of most Americans when they hear the name spoken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The thing that bothers me is you only tend to hear about the successes, so it's hard to get a feel for the true success/failure ratio.

<comment><USER5> Yes! I thought about this while reading Founders at Work. Beyond just the success/failure ratio, there's all the other details we don't get about failed startups. Can you identify what went wrong by reading their story? Can you learn from their mistakes, or at least temper what you think you've learned from the successes with examples of how it doesn't always work out?

I'd love to read another book like Founders at Work, but all about failed startups.

<comment><USER6> That sounds like an interesting idea, but I'm thinking that the line between success and failure is composed of luck and interpersonal relationships.

Most of the stories in FaW involve meeting a key person, an important external event or being in the right place at the right time. It's very hard for someone to say "Well if we had talked more with this one person, I think that we would have stumbled into a great situation a few years later"

Likewise I've seen a lot of situations where personal relationships make the difference. Two founders disagree and one of them just has to be "right", even if there is evidence that their plan isn't best for the company.

So maybe you can work out the characteristics of failed startups by looking at the inverse of the characteristics of successful startups. I'm thinking that they would be: don't be committed to the product, don't explore every relationship and don't have an open mind about new opportunities.

<comment><USER7> I would postulate that a funding or acquisition event depends on meeting a key person or having a key external event happen. Making something people want, however, is not dependant on any external event.

It's really not just luck. If you get a lot of traction, the chance of those fortuitous things occurring simply increases.

<comment><USER8> I think millionaires are made. Billionaires (or hundred-millionaires) need luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a dupe of the Newsweek article.

<comment><USER10> totally! - impressive pr pick up of this story though</comment></comment>


Unusual Ways to Live Forever - <AUTHOR> http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2010/03/12-unusual-ways-to-how-to-live-forever/

<comment><USER2> I am very used by now to seeing people who think as ambitious technologists in all other parts of their life fall over and fail to think clearly and ambitiously when it comes to aging. The pall of long-standing societal attitudes towards aging is hard to overcome.

But really - a whole screed on what to do about aging and you don't mention biotechnology once? That is a hot startup market, in which amazing things are taking place, and there are at least three competing visions of how to significantly extend human life currently battling it out in the scientific press and pop-science translation of that.

As your future arrives, there are two things you can do: either (a) accept suffering and death and do only the things you list in your article, or (b) materially help the nascent industry of rejuvenation biotechnology.

We are entering an age in which you can turn money into years of life. If you aren't noticing that, and you don't understand how to do that, then you have not been doing your research.

If you can buy time with money, then the worth of money becomes very different, and you should be giving a lot more of it to the right sorts of science:

[http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/10/the-rational- use-...](http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/10/the-rational-use-for- excess-money-is-longevity-science.php)

And all technologists should have a better grasp of what aging is, and how it can be ameliorated within the next 20 years with the right research path:

<http://www.sens.org/sens-research/research-themes>

It isn't as complex as you might think - it only takes a couple of years of reading around to come to a good understanding as to why most of what you read is unscientific nonsense, and why despite that fact there are still functionally useful paths ahead:

[http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2008/09/the-scientific- de...](http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2008/09/the-scientific-debate-that- will-determine-how-long-we-all-live.php)

[http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/12/magical- thinking-...](http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/12/magical-thinking- abounds-in-the-antiaging-marketplace.php)

[http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/03/money-making- webs...](http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/03/money-making-websites-and- the-cause-of-longevity-science.php)

\----

And finally:

[http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/03/is-prevention- of-...](http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/03/is-prevention-of-aging- within-our-grasp.php)

"Yes, prevention of aging is within our grasp - in the sense that a package of foreseeable medical technologies could enable repair of the low-level biochemical damage that causes aging, and those technologies might take only twenty years or so to develop. Unfortunately, that timeline is dependent on a large amount of funding and a dedicated research community, neither of which presently exists for many of the essential parts of this research program. While the regenerative medicine and cancer research communities are populous, well funded, and achieving progress, very few researchers are presently working on other goals necessary to halt the aging process - such as repair of mitochondrial DNA.

"So when I say "within our grasp," I mean "if we all get up and do our part to make it happen." It takes a wave of public interest and advocacy to steer the scientific community and large funding institutions - and they presently need steering towards repair-based strategies to deal with aging, otherwise the first working rejuvenation therapies will arrive too late for those in middle age today."

<comment><USER3> >The Rational Use For Excess Money is Longevity Science

Depending on how you calculate it, something like one quarter of the world's population live on less than 2$ a day. Many of them die due to a lack of absolute basics, like food, or basic, cheap, medicines.

Surely, the place to put 'excess money' is towards improving the lifespans of the people dying in their 30s, rather than of the people dying in their 70s?

Poverty problems are really hard to solve, and longevity research is good stuff; but you can't make global arguments about where we should put our resources, to improve overall human well-being, and ignore the vast numbers of people barely surviving.

<comment><USER4> The rational use of excess money _depends on what you care about._ If you place more value on living an extra few decades than on the welfare of people you don't know, then from that set of priorities, spending your extra cash on longevity research is perfectly reasonable. You can argue that people _shouldn't_ feel that way -- that we should be more consistent in caring about the people we know and the people we don't -- but you'll be fighting our instincts every step of the way, which is kind of difficult in practice.

(Note that I'm not taking a position here one way or another. If I were, I might point out that new technology generates jobs that can alleviate poverty more effectively than most forms of aid. Then I might argue with myself, saying that there are some forms of aid which are actually very, very cost- effective, and link to GiveWell. Then I might point out that we can do more than one thing, and that it's probably most effective to try to get people to more effectively contribute to things they do care about, rather than trying to change what they value. If you want to directly help people living in poverty, consider going to <http://givewell.org/> and looking at what they recommend. If you want to live longer, the SENS Foundation is doing some good work there and could definitely use donations. Damn, I thought I wasn't going to take a position, and now I just took three of them.)

<comment><USER3> Just to clarify, I never mentioned aid.

What's rational does of course depends on what axioms you have.

I guess its not obvious, so I'll explain my thinking. I think there are two broad scenarios.

Scenario 1: You care about increasing well-being and life-expectancy globally in the system. In which case the money better spent making those who currently die young, live longer. After all, if nothing else, it is extremely inefficient to have all those people dying in their prime.

Scenario 2: You care solely about increasing your own well-being, and not about whats best for the group. In which case, you'll keep your money to yourself, and try freeload off other peoples investment in longevity research. Because, unless you are exceedingly wealthy, your contributions will make very little difference to the overall research effort, but will make a very large difference to you. (Maybe you get sick, or circumstances change; for most people, their money has higher utility kept for such circumstances, than donated to a common research effort).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Please note that the author is not a medical professional (he's an investor) and some of his advice may be harmful to your health.

"[Instead of surgery], find out first if there's any other non-surgical procedures. (…) first check with an acupuncturist (a good one that is recommended by friends who were actually helped by that acupuncturist) or a chiropractor."

He refers to some pop-science articles here and there, but overall it's just a 'common sense' advice, which you must decide for yourself whether is valuable or not.

For example, although probably everyone here would agree that tobacco is very bad for you, please note that his method of arguing for that ("Of the 250 known harmful chemicals in tobacco smoke...") is one that can be (and has been[1]) used to argue against vaccines.

[1] <http://www.informedchoice.info/cocktail.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not arguing against vaccines though. And, btw, I'm not advocating people avoid surgery. But there are many well-documented stats (read any Gawande book) of when surgery is recommended but not the best solution.

<comment><USER5> > I'm not arguing against vaccines though.

I didn't say you were. I've said that your argument can be (and has been) used to prove or disprove almost any theory—including that of vaccines conspiracy. You have to either accept all the conclusions and uses of said argument or you must acknowledge that said argument was flawed to begin with.

And I'm sorry but you can't start your sentence by saying that you're not advocating people to avoid surgery and then go ahead and do exactly that.

Furthermore, dr. Gawande is not arguing what you do by a long shot. Your medical treatment options are always presented to you and you're free to chose a non-invasive one if you wish to. You're however advocating for choosing a non-medical treatment instead of a medical one, and in case of both acupuncture and chiropractic, ones that have no scientific basis whatsoever, and have not been proven to work or have been proven to not work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Posted November 18, 2010: <http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2010/11/how-to-live- forever/>

Posted March 5, 2011: [http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2010/03/12-unusual-ways- to-how-...](http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2010/03/12-unusual-ways-to-how-to- live-forever/)

Isn't this the same article, republished?

<comment><USER7> Yup, I'm sure it's in the blogger's rights to republish his own articles with a more link-baity title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Risk of death from #1 heart disease and #8 pneumonia can be greatly reduced quite easily by getting a pneumonia vaccination shot, it protects you against the viral form of pneumonia and halves the chance of heart attack.

I'd say most people want to live a long healthy life but only if it's easy instead of consuming fewer calories and exercising so really a pneumonia vaccination is as easy as it gets.

Vitamin D is also a fantastic thing, being in a northern climate and inside most of the time it's hard to get enough vitamin D. I started taking a 1,000IU chewable chocolate vitamin D each day and haven't been sick once. It's not a cure it's long term prevention but its effects are quickly noticed.

</comment><comment><USER9> Nothing in the article is unusual. Same old "eat right and exercise" variations. Nothing in the article approaches immortality. Same old "do this and you might last another decade" variations.

</comment><comment><USER10> Decent article, common sense for the most part. What does it have to do with living forever though? With a reasonable amount of effort you can avoid a few things that shorten your life span. The problem is that the long tail is huge, and it WILL kill you.

By following your advice you add maybe 10 years to your life expectancy. Not bad, but "forever" is a long time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course, but to an 80 year old man, ten years is a long time also

<comment><USER11> 10 years to an 80 year old man is 1/8 of his life. 10 years to a 20 year old is 1/2 of their life.

As I get older, I find that time seems to pass faster (and right now, I don't see how it could perceptively pass any faster than it currently is).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I don't mention biotech for a vey important reason: that good , common sense techniques can prolong life as easily if not better. Biotech is there for the tails. I believe the article clearly states that and cites all of the relevant statistics

<comment><USER12> The title is a lie; none of the techniques you mention will enable someone to live forever. None of them even stop aging; a few of them might slow it down, but there's no good evidence that they do. You don't even _mention_ caloric restriction, and there's good evidence that caloric restriction can slow aging substantially. ("No snacks" is not caloric restriction; we're talking about cutting your intake well below 2000 calories a day.)

By contrast, techniques that reverse aging damage would allow biological humans to survive for many centuries. Nothing on your list comes close.

In short, your comment is also a lie.

<comment><USER13> All of the techniques slow the things that increase aging. I encourage pele who are focused on anti aging techniques to start with their bodies and minds first and then focus on the external.

Calorie restriction is not realistic for most people but all of my techniques are

<comment><USER12> > All of the techniques slow the things that increase aging.

That sentence fails to rise to the level of coherence. What are "the things that increase aging"? What is their usual velocity? How much do they increase aging? What's the relationship between their velocity and the speed of aging?

If you mean "all of the techniques slow the processes of aging", you're absolutely wrong. Exercise accelerates your metabolism, which accelerates some of the known aging processes. Of the other 11, most have no known connection to aging at all.

> Calorie restriction is not realistic for most people but all of my > techniques are

Caloric restriction is easier for many people than quitting smoking, having sex, sleeping a lot, avoiding hospitals, or avoiding accidents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Moderate drinking will help stave off a heart attack if you're already sclerotic, which most older industrialized people are to some extent. The evidence that moderate drinking will do you any good if your veins and arteries are squeaky clean is slim. Moderate drinking and aspirin and so forth are only ameliorative.</comment>


JP Morgan index to measure impact of Presidential tweets on financial markets - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/08/donald-trump-is-tweeting-more-and-its-impacting-the-bond-market.html <comment><AUTHOR> Some additional information and graphs in this thread [https://twitter.com/carlquintanilla/status/11706934775769169...](https://twitter.com/carlquintanilla/status/1170693477576916992/photo/1)

</comment><comment><USER2> > Out of about 4,000 non-retweets by Trump occurring during market hours from > 2018 to the present, only 146 moved the market.

I thought the impact was a lot larger than that.</comment>


Read and understand code faster with programming ligatures in Fira Code font - <AUTHOR> https://visualstudioextensions.vlasovstudio.com/2017/05/01/improve-code-readability-with-programming-ligatures-in-fira-code-font/ <comment><USER2> I would be very hesitant to use this. It's not "more intuitive" as the author would like to think. In fact , our visual system has been trained to instantly recognize a!=b in code, and I read code a lot more often than Math formulas. Plus code is not math (e.g. 1+(a>0)), confusing = with == will lead to lots of errors etc.

If I get used to this font on my machine, i will have a real problem when parsing code in another terminal/editor. Unless all the programmers in the world decide to switch to it simultaneously, this introduces a mental translation that's counterproductive.

<comment><USER3> > _In fact , our visual system has been trained to instantly recognize a!=b in > code_

Citation needed.

> _confusing = with == will lead to lots of errors etc_

This is more about NOT confusing == with = -- and several similar characters than the opposite.

Sounds like you have thought of all kinds of arguments to not actually try it and see whether it's any good in practice -- which is how anything should be judged (unless it involves some huge risk). In other words, a priori rationalization.

> _If I get used to this font on my machine, i will have a real problem when > parsing code in another terminal /editor._

The above argument advices to forever stick to a lowest common denominator coding toolset, lest one has to ever try to work in other environment.

How about maximizing the performance one gets from their own, and most frequently used, environment, instead of "what-ifing" for foreign systems they might have to use 1/10 of the time or less?

Plus, having a tool at our disposal and getting used to it doesn't mean we can't also do without if needed. Especially if it's a small improvement, like the one proposed by the ligatures here, and not some totally different notion that we can't ever go back to how it was without it...

<comment><USER4> The thing is, in general, if you are promoting some change, you need to show that it brings benefits.

So the onus is on promoter - to show benefits.

The onus is _not_ on everyone in the world to show whether the idea works or not.

<comment><USER3> Promoters (or, to be more precise, creator) might really not care to prove anything. And I wouldn't trust their arguments either.

If the change is harmless enough to try, one can just see for themselves.

And for things that work for some people but not for others, some general proof doesn't make sense anyway.

Nobody came and proved me how vim can work better for my editing than Emacs. I tried both myself and found out. Several for tons of other things that I adopted or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This isn't really what I thought it would be. I don't want != changed to ≠ because ≠ isn't a C++ operator.

What I thought would be true ligatures ("tying together") of "&&" which could still be recognized as a pair of ampersands, but by being conjoined cleanly appear to be symbol in their own right, which is what "&&" is.

However part of the value of ligatures is symbol tightness, which is defeated by the need for a monospaced font.

Still, I'm glad people are experimenting!

<comment><USER3> > _I don 't want != changed to ≠ because ≠ isn't a C++ operator._

A colored != is not a C++ operator either. It's about getting our minds to differentiate symbols faster, not about whether they exist as is in some language's syntax.

<comment><USER5> Indeed, I program with syntax coloring disabled for this reason.

<comment><USER3> Then maybe program directly in C++ AST. != will be converted to that too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does this strike anyone else as a gimmick? I'm not sure if parsing symbols is really the limiting factor when I try to understand code.

<comment><USER7> It is no more a gimmick than the standard mode of rendering. However, it does have an adaptation cost. A comparable example: I went to the trouble of creating a custom key binding for my old laptop that was a standard US layout, except the numeral row was symbols by default (i.e. Press shift to get numbers), because I only used the numpad for numerals. It worked, but relearning was too painful. If I'd learned it that way from the beginning, it would just be normal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very interesting but I hate this for programming, feels wrong when I'm so used to 1 char == 1 fixed with char. I'm sure I could adapt but for some reason it makes my sense of programming taste not happy. What do others think?

<comment><USER9> It takes some time to get used to and it's annoying to place the cursor correctly to backspace from != to =.

But it looks sexy and confuses the co-workers XD. Joke aside: I actually like making my PC mine and like the look. I don't think it makes me a faster or better programmer in any way...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> While these are cool for complete code snippets, they are distracting during coding. For example, the colon contextual alignment flickers as the context is typed, and that distraction alone outweighs any convenience of a merged symbol.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've been using this in IntelliJ IDEA for about a month.

The experience reminds me of adopting an anti-aliased font for coding, for the first time (many years ago). First half an hour of unfamiliarity and skepticism, then it just seems very natural, and reading code feels smoother and easier and more productive.

I absolutely cannot stand code in non-monospaced fonts, so I don't think there are any alignment problems. (The look of Fira Mono / Fira Code isn't really to my taste though, so I'm hoping for the same things to start popping up in other fonts too!)

<comment><USER12> There are lots of others - my personal favourite is Monoid. [http://larsenwork.com/monoid/](http://larsenwork.com/monoid/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Anybody else despise the look of many of these ligatures? One of the worst is the design of the ampersand.

<comment><USER2> I don't even think they add much to readability. If i could choose, the only ligatures i 'd like would be >= and !=

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I love typography and ligatures, but this introduces a layer of abstraction in your source code. I know it sounds depressingly uninternational, but I don't even like to use Unicode characters in my text files. I prefer a one-to-one mapping of keyboard button to on-screen character. Although I suppose even capital letters break that rule, so maybe one day I'll give it a whirl.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm not sure that I want my equality signs to be ligature'd together. I feel like using this might mess up alignment in a monospace font.

<comment><USER16> Usually the ligatures in these fonts are designed to fill the same width as the original combination of separate characters in monospace use. That does preserve the alignment of code to either side of the ligature, but unfortunately at the expense of either making some of the symbols much wider than normal or adding a lot of extra whitespace to pad them out. For programming, the ligatured version seems quite risky if it means the only visual difference between single and double equals or underscore characters is a bit of width and/or horizontal padding.

What I _would_ like to try is a language where = actually meant equality rather than assignment and a few other common operators like !=, ===, !==, <= and >= all appeared using the standard mathematical symbols at the same width as =, < and >. That way, some related cases would naturally line up and most lines with comparisons would become shorter and less cluttered, which seems like a modest incremental improvement in language syntax. Alas, you'd also need software and keyboard input to support that in a way that made those alternative symbols effortless and entirely predicable to use. This feels like a job for a standardised programmer's keyboard and AltGr, except that you'd need a standardised programmer's keyboard for each of the different languages that already uses AltGr for other purposes, and at some point it all becomes more trouble than it's worth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm assuming this doesn't take care of context?

For eg:

String s = "A != B";

would render the ligature inside the string?

<comment><USER18> I don't think Fira Code recognizes context. It just parses the characters and renders multi-character glyphs into a single one.

So the inequality inside the string will be afforded the same treatment as an inequality anywhere else in the code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Lua's not equals `~=` gets ligatured to ≃ instead of ≠. Expected but unfortunate.

<comment><USER20> Most of Lua was nicely obvious and intuitive, but ~= was always one of the weird sharp edges. I could _maybe_ see the argument for using it if ~ was already a negation operator of some sort (like C's bitwise complement) but Lua doesn't even have that. Instead you get something needlessly non-intuitive and subject to misinterpretation by anyone who isn't a Lua native, as ~= as an ASCIIfication of ≃ is pretty common.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> So far this font has worked really well for me for Haskell, C++, Python. I find it very readable

</comment><comment><USER22> I like the idea but the xml tags </ /> look horrible

</comment><comment><USER23> Ligatures aside, I tried this font in IntelliJ and found the letter spacing to be far too wide.

</comment><comment><USER24> I quite like the "contextual vertical align". Everything else I find either visually unappealing (eg. the ampersand, as already mentioned) or outright confusing (the equality glyphs in particular).

</comment><comment><USER25> If you want to use Fira Code in Visual Studio Code, use this in settings.json:

        "editor.fontFamily": "Fira Code"
        "editor.fontLigatures": true

</comment><comment><USER26> It looks pretty but totally does not work for my brain.

</comment><comment><USER27> It doesn't took us long to decode == or >= operator naturally.

</comment><comment><USER28> It would be cool if it turned .\ into a greek lambda as well.

</comment><comment><USER29> wow. someone worked really hard to solve a problem that doesn't exit</comment>


Evilginx2: Standalone man-in-the-middle attack framework - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kgretzky/evilginx2 <comment><USER2> Any ideas how a website can protect itself in this situation?

<comment><USER3> You can't reliably fix this as a website. You can try to resolve this on the client by using the websites origin as part of the 2FA challenge (which is what U2F does) but ultimately there's no good, universal solution for this.

It's also important to note that 2FA was never meant to solve phishing, it was meant to solve password reuse. Phishing is still pretty much unsolved.

<comment><USER4> CheckPoint (and likely other) firewalls can stop phishing via watching http post going north and blocking if looks phishy.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: login prompt - create user logins for your site in under a minute - <AUTHOR> http://beta.loginprompt.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Looking for feedback on this idea: we provide login as a service with one line of javascript. We support twitter, fb, email, google, etc.</comment>


Google Site Search Refugee? - ndusan-hn https://www.cludo.com/gssalternative/ <comment> ndusan-hn Google Site Search has been discontinued, and existing customers have been converted to Google's Custom Search solution, a rigid ad-supported product that offers far less than GSS.</comment>


Ask HN: Which editor is your favorite? - <AUTHOR>

Which editors do you prefer for programming and why? Different editors for different languages? <comment><USER2> Necessary to me:

1\. Reasonable syntax highlighting.

2\. Handles large files.

3\. Tab/Space configurable.

4\. Handles multi-line indentation in a user-friendly way

5\. Cross Platform

6\. Edit files via FTP connection.

Important to me:

1\. Some amount of "project" understanding.

2\. Column mode.

3\. Hex editor.

4\. Memory sensitive, quick startup.

UltraEdit - I haven't found anything superior to UltraEdit's project management, column mode, and hex editing (available for Windows, Mac, and Linux - but commercial).

gedit - You don't always need project management, column mod, and hex editing, and in that case gedit still supports edit over FTP and other standard perks that UltraEdit offers - and uses far less memory. gedit is also available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, but I've only ever used it on Linux.

vim - You need to be at least capable with some terminal editor, otherwise you'll be sorry when you inevitably need to learn one during an emergency. vi/vim, nano, emacs, whatever - I like vim.

<comment><USER3> gedit supports edit over anything that gnome vfs has to offer, in my case it means ftp, ssh, samba and webdav. I like gedit it's minimalism without being crippled, there are some plugins to offer extra functionality.

<comment><USER2> Great points, I didn't intend to make gedit sound crippled by explicitly noting FTP, it's a great editor.

Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> TextMate...like I'm guessing most Mac users will answer. Kod looks promising.</comment>


Ask HN: Why doesn't Hacker News allow comments on job postings? - <AUTHOR> Part of me understands them wanting to protect companies from the negativity. The other part of me feels like it is stifling transparency and conversation that can potentially be helpful to the startups posting these jobs.<p>Is there any job board or aggregator that allows comments on job postings? <comment><USER2> Here is the (really old) "canonical" answer, but it doesn't elaborate: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2022116](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2022116)

here is another relatively big discussion about it: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9083569](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9083569)

(searching "job posts comments" finds a bunch more, but those two seemed the most useful)

</comment><comment><USER3> They're for YC companies, why would they want to expose themselves to negativity?</comment>


Hackers invade safety system, halt plant operations in 'watershed' cyberattack - <AUTHOR> https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/12/15/world/crime-legal-world/hackers-invade-safety-system-halt-mideast-plant-operations-watershed-cyberattack/ <comment><USER2> I got quite a sense of whiplash just in the first page of the article. It is an article from Japan Times, with a leading photo from California, over a byline from Toronto, about an attack on equipment from a French firm in a site in Saudi Arabia.

...just in case you forgot that the internet is international.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why are systems like this connected to the internet?

As far as I can see, any safety monitoring system should be air-gapped, or, if remote control is absolutely needed, be connected via a robust physical interface, i.e a thick cable.

There is no good reason for any of these devices to have a public IP address. Physical access should be the only attack vector available when it comes to industrial sabotage.

<comment><USER4> If I'm not mistaken, there is no mention in the article that the system was actually connected to the Internet.

The Stuxnet attack (which as another commenter said was the real "watershed" event) managed to infect the target system even if it was air-gapped, by infecting the PC of someone that eventually connected to the private network of the target onsite.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet#Windows_infection](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet#Windows_infection)

<comment><USER5> Okay, then really the comment should be renamed to why is critical infrastructure allow to be tampered with. Say this infection was brought in via hardware or bluetooth exploitation or wifi exploitation. None of those attack vectors should ever be accessible. No human working there should ever be able to "by accident" infect the system.

<comment><USER6> That's nice in theory, but perhaps you have to change the logic of that SIS. Perhaps some parts need to be decommissioned, or added to. A security hot patch is needed or a backup taken.

There are thousands of reasons someone may need to connect to a system

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So, a virus-based cyber attack on the computer system of a Saudi Arabian industrial operation, supposedly by Iran.

If "watershed" mean fundamentally new, this isn't a watershed event since this event was proceed by the Stuxnet attack on Iran, by many accounted committed by the US and Israel.

Still, it seems to reinforce the general situation that the gloves are off between nation states, every cyber avenue of attack that can be pursued, will be pursued - a war of all against all. Since not only are cyber attacks cheap, they offer endless plausible deniability.

<comment><USER8> "Watershed moments" are those that cause everyone to take something seriously instead of beliving it couldn't happen to them. It's about people's reactions.

<comment><USER9> I still think we're a long way out from the real "watershed" moment, and I say that as a lifelong security engineer.

Nothing fundamental changed after Stuxnet. Nothing fundamental is changing from this. Nothing fundamental changed after Target, Home Depot, Equifax, nothing. We're still vulnerable to the exact same types of attacks in the exact same way, saved only by the fact that easier targets exist to draw away the attention of attackers. These "watershed" attacks only happen when someone specifically wants to go after _that_ target as opposed to just any target.

We've been at cyber WWIII for a long time, nation-state attackers are nothing new. Problem is, loss of life is the only reason we have any reservations at all about attacking other nations. Until cyber war ends the life of a Western media-friendly victim, we will continue not caring.

Actual human casualties will be the real watershed moment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _" The malware, which FireEye has dubbed Triton, is only the third type of computer virus discovered to date that is capable of disrupting industrial processes."_

This sounds incorrect ... Wasn't there (at least):

      1) Stuxnet (2010)
      2) Shamoon (2012)
      3) HAVEX (2013)
      4) BlackEnergy (2015)
      5) Industroyer (CrashOveride) (2016)
      6) Triton (??)

Naming it Triton is unfortunate since there has been a malware from 2004 with the same name[¹] that is totally unrelated.

[¹] [https://www.pandasecurity.com/cyprus/homeusers/security- info...](https://www.pandasecurity.com/cyprus/homeusers/security- info/43507/information/Triton.A)

</comment><comment><USER11> One of my relatives is a safety engineer at a plant. Remotely he can connect to a read only console, if there are any changes he has to call someone on the inside to make them.

I don't know how robust that read only aspect is, but it seems like a good middle ground if faithfully implemented.</comment>


Ask HN: Making closed-source software that handles personal data illegal? - seven-dev Basically, if someone is handling your personal data, you need to be able to know exactly what they're doing with it.
Of course they'll always have other ways to access that data but it would be a good start.
That would also mean that the server would have to be as secure as possible because the code would be open to the public.
What do you guys think? <comment><AUTHOR> Depending on what you call personal data you could argue all data is personal so all software must be open source?</comment>


Ask HN: What is your take on being a better writer? - <AUTHOR> In a world of hyperbolic tweets and biased content marketing, we all be should better at writing. What is your take on being a better writer? <comment><USER2> I have been using hacker news comments to improve my writing and I get instant feedback. After awhile I had ideas that were big enough to write blog posts. From my experience in writing poetry is you must keep writing to really get good . Another thing is that about 10% or less of what you write is going to be any good. And 1% is going to be acceptable. Life isn't like college where your performance is judged on each piece of writing. Your job is to maximize that 1% so you just have to keep writing so you have enough exceptional pieces of writing and then you will be a better writer .

<comment><USER3> I don't think most upvotes or commentary here are driven by quality of writing. For one, it's a given that there are many non-native English speakers on this forum, and in general critiquing grammar or style is discouraged.

<comment><USER4> People upvote persuasive writing. Which matters, to me, as a writer.

<comment><USER5> People upvote popular opinions. Say something volatile that creates any sort of friction against the HN hive mind and it will be downvoted, regardless of how intelligent and true.

<comment><USER6> ...which sounds like a great training field for persuasive writing ;)

<comment><USER5> And word games. Any voting outcome on my previous comment reflects as as "meta" and well thought out. As long as keep my mouth shut.

Damn it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the best writers actually enjoy writing. pg told me that to him an unwritten essay is like an uneaten piece of cake. I realized that that feeling is foreign to me. I'd probably be a better writer if I liked it more.

<comment><USER8> This is a fair point but it's worth noting that lots of good writers don't seem to enjoy writing. This where quotes like "writing is easy, you just take a blank page, open a vein, and bleed" come to mind.

David Foster Wallace seemed to use writing as a way to treat his various depressions and ailments - as a way to "continue" almost.

<comment><USER9> I often write because I NEED to. I don't necessarily _enjoy_ it per se, but I upvoted dang because I can relate to "an unwritten essay is like an uneaten piece of cake." That writing lives inside me and makes me crazy if I don't let it out. It may not be the most fun I have ever had, but it has a need to happen.

So perhaps enjoyment isn't the write word, but pg is describing a thing akin to a hunger that must be satisfied. Dang doesn't have that impetus. I do. So I write.

Perhaps someday I shall get read as well. ;-)

<comment><USER10> Same here, many of my diary pages are filled with garbage, just because thoughts make my mind crazy and to overcome with this craziness I write occasionally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> 1\. You need to write in a way that addresses your goals within the context of a particular situation. I review a good book on the subject here: [https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/06/15/writing- book/](https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/06/15/writing-book/)

2\. You need to understand the idea of style: there are _multiple_ styles, each with its own set of assumptions about how you address the reader, what "truth" is, etc.. "Clear and Simple as the Truth" is a great book about the idea of multiple styles, and one particular style (the classic one).

3\. Learn the practical style, which is suitable for many business writing situations. "Style: basics of clarity and grace" by Williams and Colomb is great book on the topic.

</comment><comment><USER12> Read the first few chapters of On Writing Well.

Omit needless words. There's a page in Stephen King's autobiography "On Writing" where he shows an editor's comments on an article he wrote as a teenager. Half of the words are crossed out. Remembering that example improved my writing significantly.

Also, understand that writing is an iterative process. It can take 5-6 passes to craft a good sentence.

<comment><USER13> See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style)

<comment><AUTHOR> I've read "On Writing Well". Then I discovered "The Elements of Style". On Writing Well opens your eyes to what bad writing is, "The Elements of Style" explains how to write clearly.

"The Elements of Style" belongs to that 1% of books that are truly able to change the way you think (and write).

I tried to apply what I learned in "The Element of Styles" and "On Writing Well" to my company blog: [https://medium.com/plainflow/how-we-write-at- plainflow-7e994...](https://medium.com/plainflow/how-we-write-at- plainflow-7e994f9c4097)

<comment><USER14> _The Elements of Style_ is contentious. Many of its prescriptions are linguistically sketchy. On the other hand, it points out many things that many people do badly.

E.B. White, the 'editor', was one of the best essayists around, but he didn't particularly obey the rules in his own book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Just as others before me have mentioned here, to be a better writer you'll need to put in time doing it. In addition to a lot of writing, I believe reading will also help in making you a better writer.

I by no means can call myself good at writing, but I do learn from books I've read and try to apply what I 'discover' in my own writing. Find an author you like, read up on his works and see how he writes. If you like his works, chances are you like his writing style and it might match what you're hoping to create.

</comment><comment><USER9> Good communication takes the effort of at least two parties: one "talking" (or writing) and one "listening" (or reading in good faith). Good writing is honed by finding some means to get your writing read and get some kind of feedback on how effectively it is conveying your message. You can't develop as a writer without that feedback.

In school, you get it from your teachers, but I was surprised to learn that what I learned about writing in school really was just scratching the surface. I have learned a lot more from talking with people online in forums like HN, blogging and doing paid freelance writing. I am still struggling to get real traction with my blogs. Although there is a long history of my comments in forums getting ridiculous overreactions from people, it has been surprisingly hard to translate that into meaningful engagement with my blog writing.

Writing is about communicating. Good grammar and all that matter, but it matters more that you have something you need to convey for some reason. Writing is merely the means to convey it. And that is wherein the work lies.

</comment><comment><USER16> I hate to dump a laundry list of reading, but these all helped me tremendously:

1\. Politics and the English Language (Orwell) 2\. The Age of the Essay (Graham). 3\. On Writing (Stephen King) 4\. On Writing Well (Zinsser) 5\. The Elements of Style (Strunk and White) 6\. Essential English for Journalists, Editors, and Writers (Evans)

</comment><comment><USER17> There are two steps required to become a better writer.

1\. _Read._ Read everything. Read omnivorously. Read fiction and non-fiction, books and newspapers and magazines and Web sites. Read works by live authors and dead ones. Read stuff you wouldn't normally read. Part of developing your own voice is learning to hear the music in other peoples'.

2\. _Write._ Write constantly. Write little notes and long essays. Write stories. Write a journal. Write down what happened to you today and what you dreamed last night. Write for an audience (even if it doesn't exist yet) and write for yourself. Writing is the process of trying on new voices until you find the one that fits you best. The only way to find the one that fits is to try on a lot that don't.

<comment><USER18> Excellent comment, I couldn't agree more! Just two things to add:

For general language skills, find authors who have good style and read as much of their work as you can. They might be well-known book authors (I personally enjoy CS Lewis and EO Wilson, amongst others) or a newspaper with a high standard of penmanship (to German readers I recommend Die Zeit, I'm not sure what an English equivalent would be).

You should read a bit of everything, but emphasize the type of writing that you are going to be doing yourself. For example, scientific papers require a very different style of writing to, say, newspaper essays. You need to be thoroughly acquainted with the type that is relevant to you. (Finding your voice comes later, first you need to master the basics.)

</comment></comment><comment> awinter-py Direct experience leads to relevance. Have you ever read a piece of fiction or journalism and been like 'this person lived this and is sharing the experience'? Half of the creative process is identifying familiar, personal things you take for granted that others will find useful.

Effective writers (from farm-content buzzfeed to copywriter bill bernbach to pulitzer-winning journalist bill dedman) distill the most relevant events they've personally seen into a structure that coneveys the experience in order.

The delightful parody version of this is 'write what you know' in george lucas in love [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0olm8478DE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0olm8478DE) (and every writing manual). But the reason this line shows up everywhere is that it's a good first step.

Also, spend only 30% of your time on the first draft. It's seldom any good. Cultivate editors you trust who can work with you and meet you at the right stage. Writer Julian Fellowes talks about 'editing stages' in the first minute of this [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RSYT2gQFlQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RSYT2gQFlQ).

</comment><comment><USER19> Hyperbolic? Being a better writer is useless...

I think the context that prefaces the question betrays a misunderstanding.

When you really start digging into crafting messages, you start finding out things like the medium you work in actually changes how you should structure your message. Famous examples of why this should be done exist, like the first presidential debate that was both televised and broadcast on the radio. People who saw the television thought one candidate had won the debate. People who listened thought the other had won.

Twitter as a medium promotes a certain kind of content. Learning to be a better writer isn't going to change that. If the goal of learning to be a better writer is to prevent some sort of decline in writing as seen on Twitter? Don't learn more about writing.

There are so many different kinds of writing and being better at one doesn't mean you will be better at another. So really you're safe learning most of writing. Unfortunately, you're bound to run across ideas like using a hook to attract attention as quickly as possible.

Then you run the risk of joining the hyperbolic tweeters.

</comment><comment><USER20> Are you talking about style, grammar or ethics? Hyperbolic tweets and biased content marketing can be written well, communicating exactly what the author intended.

<comment><USER14> I prefer my tweets hypergolic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Really good, short book that you will learn a lot from and can apply the next day when writing emails.

HBR Guide to Better Business Writing

[https://www.amazon.com/HBR-Guide-Better-Business- Writing/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/HBR-Guide-Better-Business- Writing/dp/142218403X)

Also, in general all "HBR Guide to _____" books are awesome.

</comment><comment><USER22> Writing takes a tremendous amount of time and effort to just gain basic competency, let alone master. You have to put in a lot of butt-in-seat time.

Though I've gotten paid to write for a technology website, I am not a strong writer. But, I currently spend about 10 hours a week writing for my blog and other mediums and am continuously trying to get better.

Assuming one is putting in the time and effort, the next thing that will most quickly speed improvement is having an editor or other competent reviewer provide critical feedback, including on grammar, structure, and style. Then, keep rewriting a piece until you are no longer unhappy with it.

</comment><comment><USER23> Practice regularly and non-trivially for a long period of time. Figure on years. (Joe Haldeman recommends writing 1,000 words a day for ten years).

Find an honest editor, someone who will give you objective feedback and correct your mistakes.

I wrote a bunch and thought I was pretty good at technical documentation, and hey, I've got this blog I maintain [well, less now]. Then a _real_ editor got hold of an effort of mine and it came back to me with many, many corrections. And you know, it was a LOT better; I couldn't argue with any of it.

And I know that Strunk and White is out of style, but I still recommend it.

</comment><comment><USER24> Write a lot.

Have people read it; especially people with no incentive to just "be nice about it".

Write a lot.

A great tip to improve your writing is that sentences of varied length seem more natural.

Write a lot.

Ignore most of the rules. You stick to most rules by default but breaking them is what can make a piece excellent.

Write a lot.

Get great at research. Unless you are writing about yourself, your life or your experiences then you will need data to make the work come to life.

Write a lot.

Remember the 10,00 hour rule. To be great at something takes work and practice. So find a way to practice regularly and daily. I spent ~10 years writing Wikipedia articles.

</comment><comment><USER25> Being able to effectively communicate ideas via written word is crucial in technical fields. It's not even about blog posts or tweeting -although that's perfectly valid. We work in thoughts and ideas and they don't exist if we can't accurately describe them.

If anyone is interested in writing better non fiction I recommend "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser. It's compact and full of easy wins that one can translate quickly into their day to day written correspondence etc.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is subject- and field-specific. Years ago someone pointed me at [http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~pam/papers/goodwriting.h...](http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~pam/papers/goodwriting.html) on _legal_ writing, which contains two excellent first points: "1) Have a point" and "2) Get to the point".

Technical writing is a genre all its own.

</comment><comment><USER27> 1\. Revise

2\. Practice

3\. Turn off the TV, and social media

(You can apply this to a lot of other things)

Not sure what you mean by "take" though. I think it is both good and important, if that is what you were asking.

</comment><comment><USER28> I started a habit of writing 1,000 words every single day with the intention of improving my writing. I've written at least 1,000 words every single day for the past 291 days (okay, I missed one day at day 264). The writing has been in a private journal, not on public blog, although I've published hundreds of thousands of words to my blog over the past 15 years, just not much in the past few years.

I'd say the greatest insight that I've had from writing 1,000 words every single day for nearly the past year has been that simply writing 1,000 words every single day is not enough to foster real improvement. The habit definitely helps you overcome the initial resistance that you might feel towards _getting started_ , and if you're not already good at typing or transferring thoughts in your head into words on the screen, I'm sure it helps with that too, but there comes a point at which, if you actually want to continue _growing_ and _becoming a better writer_ , you need a goal other than "write every day".

For me, the act of writing something that I intend to publish, to share with others, forces me to work on the writing, to tweak it, to think about how it can be made better, to question its clarity, to question the value of what I'm sharing. If what I'm intending to share contains a story, then knowing that it's going to be shared forces me to work on storycraft, to think about how someone else is going to interpret what I wrote. None of that happens naturally when you write privately, when your only goal is to see the word counter pass 1,000.

I've found that the greatest advancements in my own writing have come when I was blogging regularly (comparing posts from one year to another makes this very obvious). Whenever I've stopped blogging regularly for long periods of time, I find that my writing stops improving, even if the overall amount of writing I'm doing on a regular basis doesn't change that much (e.g., Slack messages, comments like these, etc.).

I'm not saying that you cannot improve as a writer when you write privately, just that improvement requires working toward specific goals that you know will challenge you to improve. Write a haiku. Write a short story. Look up from your laptop, find an object, and then try to write 1,000 words describing that object in as fine detail as possible. Do the same thing with an emotion that you've felt. And if you can, share what you write. Even if others don't give you feedback, the very knowledge that somebody, somewhere, will likely be judging your writing will cause you to subconsciously work a little harder to write better, to _rewrite_ and to _edit_ (which is the work that actually produces _good_ writing).

<comment><USER29> 1k words a day teaches you how to quickly write a lot of words. This is a great skill for a pulp fiction writer/freelance copywriter, but not so great when you're not getting paid by the word.

My goal is to write 1+ words a day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Reading a lot of good writers, and trying to notice and understand why they are good.

I think that's what has helped me the most. Sure a few rules of thumb such as "omit needless words" and "eschew obfuscation" but mostly just reading a lot.

</comment><comment><USER30> Like others I do not feel as if I understand the question and feel as if the question could have been phrased better by a better writer.

Do I think writing is important? Yes. I automatically disqualify a job candidate if their writing is poor.

Do I think writing skills have gone down? Yes. However this did not happen recently. I noticed it in 1997-1998 as my younger brother's generation starting to spend more time using instant messaging on the computer than they were doing their homework.

Do my views represent society at large? I am afraid they do not. I am continually flabbergasted by the comments that I see on YouTube and on news websites. In my opinion either schools are failing us or society is. Either way it has become clear that people are rewarded in the communities they deem important by being confrontational and derogatory without formulating and conveying a proper argument.

<comment><USER31> Youtube comments are written by people who would, in previous times, barely ever have written anything for general consumption. I'm not sure if the impression that everything was better in the past isn't a serious observation bias.

After all, with the advent of first SMS, then messenger platforms, the average teenager is probably using the written word a few magnitudes more often than the generation that grew up in, say, the 1990s. If you go further back, maybe young people still wrote letters. But there was definitely a gap of at least a decade or two where writing was strictly reserved for unpleasant things. Sure, they're using various shortcuts, emojis, slang, and not enough capitalisation. But it's hard not to see most of that as a rather creative adaptation of language to new mediums.

What has changed is the audience that people with rather strange views can now command. I'm not even talking about youtube celebrities or 'twitter thought leaders'; just your average Joe from Sacramento who thinks it's high times these lying journalists get stomped to ground. He's now writing that down, and maybe 10 people read it, and he reads 10 similar things about jews/scientists/the CIA virus to start the next civil war etc. Where before, your opinions were regularly brought back into something like a mainstream consensus, you can now find approval for almost anything, if you just try.

Let's see how that ends...

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Understand your audience.

Speak their language.

Say what you really want to say.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you want to get ahead, write persuasively. Cialdini's book "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" is good for technique.

</comment><comment><USER29> Say what you mean; lead with the idea you want to communicate; don't waste peoples' time.

edit: always be practicing, revising, improving.

</comment><comment><USER33> How much do they even teach this in school?

</comment><comment><USER34> That is aint's all that gol danged importunt?

</comment><comment><USER35> I don't understand the premise/motivation of the question.

<comment><USER7> We changed the title from "Ask HN: We should all be better at writing" to the question in the text above.

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you, Daniel.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: For a Facebook clone in 2019 what tech stack would you use? - <AUTHOR> Ideally looking for some framework or such that handles the boring stuff like automatically. <comment><USER2> My 2 cents, at Facebook scale there is no framework that will handle all the "boring stuff".

I am not even sure what you even mean by boring stuff. But if you are like some of the devs I have worked with I have heard over and over why do we have to write all this CRUD for forms and dashboards etc.

There are no shortcuts, and no frameworks that just magically solve all the problems without introducing tradeoffs.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Ideally looking for some framework or such that handles the boring stuff > like automatically

Lol, you're going to have to put in lots and lots of effort, no matter what stack you use. What do you even mean by "boring stuff"?

</comment><comment><USER4> You can stretch Rails a whole lot these days -- so much so that by the time Rails is the bottleneck, you can probably afford to hire primo engineers to refactor to better tools.

I would however build the real-time chat system with Elixir and Phoenix. Just knock that out and not worry about chat performance for a very long time.

So I would build the main app with Rails. And the chat system with Elixir.

</comment><comment><USER5> Translation: "Want to make a lot of money but don't want to put in the work"

</comment><comment><USER6> At Facebook scale, there can be no one solution, it has to be purpose built for use cases.

</comment><comment><USER7> Scala, scala.js, postgres and casandra. There are no shortcuts .

</comment><comment><USER8> React and firebase

<comment><USER6> React would be ok but Firebase at Facebook scale would be insanely expensive. There has to be something self hosted. And may be custom built.

<comment><USER8> Yeah but this person doesn't want to deal with boring stuff.</comment></comment></comment>


The daunting aftermath of releasing your dream game - <AUTHOR> https://www.pcgamer.com/the-daunting-aftermath-of-releasing-your-dream-game-as-told-by-the-devs-of-stardew-valley-owlboy-and-more/ <comment><USER3> We released our game in 2012. Since that time we have had 17 expansion releases.

You might think that by now it would be easy, or at least routine. Nothing can be farther from the truth.

Every time is a horrible ordeal. I often feel physically sick during the process.

To start, I will have just completed a bunch of crunch. We try as much as possible to reduce this for the team, but for the founders and at least a few key people it's always right up to the last minute. So we are already in a super stressful state.

The second stressor is questioning if anyone will even come to play the game. It's almost impossible to know.

Next up, will players even like what you made? This is a dread that is hard to shake, and in our case we have a bunch of players all hyped up for a release and if they don't like your new content there will be a lot of anger and disappointed people. People are brutal towards game developers in comments on the internet.

And then there are technical issues. We are an online game and it feels like every release there is some major issue.

When there are 150k people banging on the door and the game has a critical issue stopping them from playing, it's very hard to describe the feeling when you are the responsible person and you have no idea what is wrong.

Debugging in that scenario is like having an anxiety attack.

These 4 issues together make game release seriously awful.

You have the worst aspects of being an Artist, a Business Owner and Live Ops all in one nice package and right when you are low on sleep and after weeks of stress before hand.

It's a perfect storm of hell.

<comment><USER4> Why did you have so many expansion releases? I never doubt the work it takes to be a game dev, since you're essentially doing the job of an audio engineer, graphics designer, programmer, and marketer in one project, but wouldn't you rather get your game to a stable position, release maybe one expansion, and go on with the next big project?

Also if you really are the dev of PoE, keep up the great work. I've never even remotely come into contact with your game yet Ive heard so much about it. That says something.

<comment><USER5> It has to do with their business model and style of game. As a F2P product they benefit most from people simply playing the game as much as possible and occasionally seeing little things like ads or other players' outfits pointing towards the store. The game is very replayable so it works well with a regular content schedule to remix the game a bit and keep people coming back each season.

And I gather that you believe this is The one dev - there is a sizeable team making this game.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yeah, this all tracks. I made a "simple" Slack RPG because I was tickled about the concept and the potential pun of the name (Slack & Slash, though Slack very predictably asked for me to change it to something a little less affiliated-sounding). I figured I'd drop six months on it and release it and see if anyone liked it.

Cut forward two years later, a couple of rewrites (from idle game to turn- based combat, then from a monthly competition to a long-term progression with multiple classes), and finally I launch. It got approved by Slack, it goes up on the app directory, I make a couple key reddit posts, and... Like 5 new users.

I'm sure folks here can tell the problem already - spending 2 years on development and maybe a couple days on marketing is always a recipe for a shitty launch.

Over and over again, I read stories like this and think "thank God this is just a hobby for me and not my main source of income, not something I took out a loan to achieve." I like to think that if it were a more serious thing, I'd have been more serious about the marketing, but even still, that's no guarantee.

Oh, also - I'm up to about 20 daily users these days. Even with that few, I still get nervous pushing out any new code. Getting very polite "Hey, the game isn't working" emails while I'm stuck at the day job and can't go fix it is devastating. I've ended up with a weird release schedule because of it - <USER2> generally only roll out code on Friday evenings, so that I have as much time as possible to fix potential bugs.

</comment><comment><USER7> I really wish more people would appreciate the human cost of building things by themselves instead of just chalking it all up to 'the creative journey' or some shit. It could potentially open up some really interesting service business models.

If I start just about any other kind of business other than a creative one, I can buy products or services that will help me get to market 10x easier than if I try to go it without. But if I try to venture outside of established biz modes and start to wander into the creative, I don't have to go far before I'm in an awkward no man's land of ugly, no one cares kind of having to burn the candle at both ends in order to push through to some kind of stability, and this article shows that that stability is a mirage.

The historical answer has always been to collect your efforts into an industry. And yeah, that option is there. You can go work for EA.

But it would be so much better if the games industry didn't have to eat its young. Or at least, not _all_ of its young.

Hollywood's answer to the problem has been to double down on the community. If you want to be a screenwriter, first you need to realize that it's a hard hard thing to break into, there are always going to be more people looking to break in than there will be jobs, but you can still at least find a little bit of glory in the industry through YouTube or temping or whatever while you figure out what your plan B is. And everyone around you is going to help you figure these hard things out.

But you want to break into gaming? Haha fuck you buddy. Nobody gives a shit, go work for EA and get shit out when you finally stop making them quite as much $$$ as you did when you were young and stupid. Sure, go make your own games, I don't give a shit, don't expect any kudos from me, better hope you didn't dare spend any company resources on it because yes, we will sue the shit out of you for daring to get bigger than your britches.

I guess this is just my fervent hope that every industry can figure out how to be like craft beer.

<comment><USER8> >Hollywood's answer to the problem has been to double down on the community.

Hollywood's answer to the problem is unions. Screenwriters have unions. Actors have unions. Directors have unions. Even the people who provide food on the sets of movies have a union. Hollywood doesn't care about "community" any more than the video game industry. They just realized that there are more people who want to work in the entertainment industry than there are available jobs and a union was the best way to protect themselves from being taken advantage of because of that fact.

<comment><USER9> I think it's worthwhile pointing out that it isn't like game developers don't have unions. Maybe if you're talking about the US exclusively sure, but there are parts of the world where employees in the game development industry do have active union representation (which as one such employee is very much appreciated).

<comment><USER10> Curious to know where you are based. I've not heard of game developer unions in Europe either.

<comment><USER9> I'm in Sweden, where most people are in a union. It doesn't have to be a union specific to game development (although I think one may exist, I'm not sure). I'm in a general union called Unionen. Even though it's not a union specific to the game development industry, they have a lot of power and work with the government, companies, and employees to monitor and improve work conditions and employee protections. For example, last year a series of meetings was held at our workplace between interested employees and union representatives, resulting in a new collective bargain agreement which formalised a flex hours policy and gave us an extra paid week off per year (partly to address the overtime we tend to do). I've heard of cases where employees called in their union representative to help them work through issues with the employer, negotiate better termination agreements, etc. Basically it's a normal union that does union-y things :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My brother and I spent about 6 months in 2012 to make a game with unity3d to hit into the app store craze and we bombed pretty badly. The game had good looks, editors, customization, but lacked good game play. We basically sat down one day and said wouldn't it be cool if we made a game similar to an old arcade but with newer graphics and started to work on it. I think the most ironic thing about our efforts was that we weren't really gamers ourselves. I'm glad we did it though because we did use unity3d and C# knowledge for other things besides games (I guess we were pretty lucky). We didn't even make a single penny from our game. It was pretty depressing. Going for years on a project that you might not make a single penny on sounds terrifying.

</comment><comment><USER12> This all sounds so familiar.

I don't make games, I make comics. Four and a half years quietly working. Another year to do a messy Kickstarter. A year of feeling lost and empty afterwards. And then, finally, starting up the familiar grind on the next project, which I'd been kicking around on and off during those two years.

I know a few professional authors. They seem to be able to go from one project to another fairly easily; they also typically have much shorter schedules. I kinda envy that sometimes. A lot.

<comment><USER13> You still released a new work of art into the world. It's not a small thing. 99.999% of people give up.

<comment><USER12> I tell myself things like that when I'm in the post-release slump. It still happens. This thing has dominated your life for several years, it's done, it doesn't need any more work, it's out of your life. Now there's this big gaping emptiness where the project used to be.

The solution usually ends up being "a new project". After a while.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > _Sandberg's anxiety had continued after launch. He worried about his > financial security and felt like he'd wasted the last 10 years of his life._

As someone in a similar boat, the burn of "hey, I just wasted my 20s working on some project that didn't really go anywhere" is an incredibly painful pill to swallow, and perhaps something you never fully come to terms with. Life is so very short, don't waste it.

<comment><USER15> Better than wasting away in a corporate cube hell.

<comment><USER14> Usually corporate cube hell is a means to an end outside of said hell, but HN is littered with stories of people being utterly consumed (in a bad, soul- crushing way) by their workplace all the time, so good point.

<comment><USER16> Cube hell isn't the only possible situation for cube level workers either.

Working with people you like on projects with varying levels of appeal, while gradually improving your personal situation, can be a very satisfying way to spend your career. Grandiose goals are a risky way to look for meaning/value in life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I can relate to the feeling of 'emptiness' after release and don't think this is any different in other software fields.

After working on a project for close to 2 years with 2 other people (at work) we released it and just waited for the feedback anxiously. With a lot of crunching and last minute changes as well.

It was "just 2 years" and I already had such a bad feeling of not knowing what to do next that I can't even imagine what it must be like after 5 or let alone 9 years :o

<comment><USER4> You have to understand that you don't lose anything, no matter the outcome. Even if your game/software sucks you can remain sane knowing you gained a valuable skill (programming, design, w/e) and a working product that you might change a bit in the future and reintroduce to the market again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> My first programming experience was in game development (Flash games) but I never spent more than a few months on any game... Soon, I stopped working on games altogether and started working on open source developer tools instead. Games are awesome and exciting but they almost always have a limited lifespan. I didn't like the idea of spending so much time building something that had a limited lifespan. My goal is to build a project that will outlive me. That said I have huge respect for game developers because it's such a difficult area, game developers are true artists.

</comment><comment><USER19> I kind of expected this to be about Derek Smart and Battlecruiser 3000 AD:

[https://timhowgego.wordpress.com/bc3k/introduction/](https://timhowgego.wordpress.com/bc3k/introduction/)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlecruiser_3000AD](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlecruiser_3000AD)

</comment><comment><USER20> Not only games cause such effects on their creators. Any piece of craft-ware does pretty much the same. I'm an enterprise software creator/publisher and sometimes I have to go through the very same lows and highs described in the article.

Doing a product is hard. Much harder that you might initially think.

</comment><comment><USER21> Games (and books, films, music) exist in an interesting middle ground between commercial enterprise and pure art. Although I suppose most art these days has to sustain a business in some form. It wasn't always like this: art used to be sustained by rich benefactors sponsoring artists. In a way it's good that art has been somewhat democratised through capitalism, and on the other hand the stress of having to turn your art into a product must destroy quite a chunk of the creative freedom and drive. Would be interested to hear what some artists (not hobbyists who have other jobs to sustain them) would like to see happen with art in the future and its relationship to society and capitalism.

</comment><comment><USER22> shoutout to darkfall

[http://www.sickenger.com/articles/the_making_of_darkfall/](http://www.sickenger.com/articles/the_making_of_darkfall/)

\- was the creators' dream game

\- 10+ years in the making

\- team lost funding, went without pay, and moved from sweden to greece

\- not a commercial success

\- best game ever made.

</comment><comment><USER23> I can't even read about it.</comment>


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