Reputation management firms bury Google results by placing flattering content - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-1-scrubs-its-image-online-11576233000 <comment><USER2> > Afterward, articles about him began to appear on websites that are designed > to look like independent news outlets but are not. Most contained flattering > information about Mr. Gottlieb, praising his investment acumen and > philanthropy, and came up high in recent Google searches. Google featured > some of the articles on Google News.

So there's a startup right here in the US doing exactly what we accused a foreign government of doing during the 2016 election. Setting up fake new websites to generate content for clients to drown out real stores characterizing their misdeeds. All for just a few thousand per month.

This is unbelievable, and yet completely believable at the same time.

<comment><USER3> "Independent" news orgs do the same thing. Watch out for the next positive article about a person or organization and ask yourself if it was written by a journalist organisation seeking the truth or as a puff piece in collaboration with the subject. There is a pretty blurry line between news and advertising these days to a much greater extent than most realize.

<comment><USER4> Southpark has a pretty good episode on this - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z696bTiP8Ro](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z696bTiP8Ro)

<comment><USER5> This is so amazing. I love south park, thanks for sharing ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Mr. Gottlieb said in an interview with the Journal that he found his press > coverage unfair and wanted to fight back.

Favorable opinions and professional character praises are not the same as fake news as in conspiracy theories and outright lies. Really, this is just criticizing people for acting in their own rational self-interest to protect their reputation.

Idk, I guess you could make the valid criticism that this is bad practice because this is a privilege only the wealthy and influential have, but I'd argue that is (in most instances) the only class of people who likely have to deal with a barrage of negative news coverage to begin with.

Which begs the question: do wealthy and influential people have the capacity to reform their behavior, and are we willing to let people make mistakes and try again in life? If the answer is yes, then clearly they need some recourse against the astronomical influence of online search results and social media.

Wish the masses were just as open to forgiving people as they are for grabbing the pitchforks and torches.

<comment><USER2> Status Labs posted content on this site to improve the profile of their client:

[http://medicaldailytimes.com/](http://medicaldailytimes.com/)

That site is in no way legitimate in its construction or messaging. It makes no mention that it's run by Status Labs, or NOT run by a legitimate medical reporting outlet. Why obfuscate the true governance of such an online property? Why are there zero contributors listed in the masthead or contributors page?

How on earth do you look at this website and think "yeah, they're just trying to help the defenseless welathy"?

<comment><USER6> > How on earth do you look at this website and think "yeah, they're just > trying to help the defenseless wealthy"?

That's a bit of a straw man. 1) I don't think that, 2) I never said they were defenseless. Clearly they are capable of defending themselves.

My entire point is that people, all people, outside of obvious outliers like people who commit extreme violence, are capable of changing their behavior for the better and should have the opportunity for a second chance, and since socially there really isn't one, I understand why they take these measures.

<comment><USER7> Except this further increases our class divide. The rich can bury any and all negative coverage by spending loads of money creating fake websites and fake news. If you get arrested (not even found guilty, just arrested!) and your mugshot is plastered all over the Internet whenever someone searches your name, can you afford to do the same? Can all people?

<comment><USER8> > The rich can bury any and all negative coverage by spending loads of money > creating fake websites and fake news.

Ah, that's why nobody has negative views of anyone rich.

<comment><USER9> I have been hearing lots of positive reviews, even from comment boards themselves. It seems like there are some firms that are too good at it. I think the more positive things I end up hearing about someone rich, the worse feeling I get of them, as if they overspent.. the dirtier you are, the more scrubbing you do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is there a site which finds the whitewashing articles and collects them?

I used to work the conflict of interest noticeboard on Wikipedia. There are at least four rich ex-convicts with paid staff trying to whitewash their articles on Wikipedia.

<comment><USER11> Google search

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Boris Johnson's self-serve efforts are pretty interesting: [https://twitter.com/genmon/status/1169719026060320768](https://twitter.com/genmon/status/1169719026060320768)

</comment><comment><USER13> I worked at a startup in 2007 that did this. I didn't work on this product, but as far as I know, no "fake news" was ever posted. True stories and PR stuff was put out. The goal was to generate more "noise" then a bad article would and they would just disapear. Basically, standard SEO stuff everyone does.

</comment><comment><USER14> Not too different from a rich person hiring people to say flattering things in the press or basically paying journalists or subsidizing their access to favorable events to get positive coverage. Well, maybe amplified a bit more by the internet.

</comment><comment><USER15> Well, here's the broader question: why can't you, as an individual, opt out of showing up in Google search results altogether?

<comment><USER16> Why should you be able to?

A court may grant an injunction preventing publication of certain facts or identifying you in proceedings, but that's specific, why should it be possible to opt out of ever appearing?

And where would it end, because there's no reason for that not to be everyone's default position, but then if you run some business such that you need the exposure, you're going to want 'business-only' results.

Or do you mean that news would be allowed, it just wouldn't appear in search results? How would I find an article I recalled and wanted to revisit?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Another trick is using secondary meaning for words in your reputation management posts. So, if you were arrested, you post something like "John Doe Reviews TV Show Arrested Development"

Then, backlinks, and it ranks well for "John Doe Arrest".

</comment><comment><USER18> I worked at a company that did this about ten years ago. This was the only thing in the entire playbook. They also wanted to create an alternative to the current FICO score based on their data, presumably a score that could easily be influenced and increased by paying more money. Nowadays, the business is very pedestrian. Half the Internet is posting lies and bullshit online these days. These guys have just been doing it longer and for more money than most.

<comment><USER13> 10 years ago? Seattle? VT?

Would be a small world, if so

<comment><USER18> It was in the bay area.

<comment><USER19> Reputation defender?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> In addition to the many pre-Web / pre-Internet variants of this, there is the established Web history of firms such as Reputation.com (previously: ReptuationDefender):

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

</comment><comment><USER21> Same thing for Magic Leap. The billions of dollars in investment may not have given them the device they wanted, but it gave them the ability to bury all negative news.

For the longest time, it was impossible to find criticism that I had already read about the company. Try to look for the golem on google.

</comment><comment><USER22> [http://archive.is/gfZ9s](http://archive.is/gfZ9s)

</comment><comment><USER23> Here in Taiwan we have agency that helps customer to bury your negative articles or reviews for as little as 1.6k USD. If you have more budget you can ask the media to remove your negative news coverage.

</comment><comment><USER24> Heh, this article is 15 years late...

</comment><comment><USER25> Wait, how is this bad?

</comment><comment><USER26> Sounds a lot like The Orville episode "Majority Rule".

</comment><comment><USER27> I also got a broader message from this: there is a whole industry of services aimed at only the wealthiest 1%, and you don't hear about it. We're starting to live in a new class society, and for now the new nobility wants to stay out of view.

<comment><USER28> I'd be curious to see a list of them!

<comment><USER29> To add at least some substance, a big one is how you go about buying extreme luxury goods. If you want a private jet, million dollar car, yacht, down to bespoke ultra high end watches, suits, etc. you schedule an appointment and get vetted before you even walk in the door. It's not a showroom affair where you just walk in and buy something.

<comment><USER30> I'm young and don't make a huge amount of money but I'm a racing crew for a few yachts competitively so I'm exposed to and worked directly with some people with net worth's anywhere from a few million to a few hundred million.

The reality is that happens with dollar amounts even less than what you'd think. If you want to go buy a used $100,000 fishing boat. Nothing crazy, definitely not a yacht, the salesperson is likely going to run a background and credit check on you before scheduling a test drive or tour.

It saves everybody time and prevents those who are unable to even afford the fuel on the thing from wasting the salesperson's time or clogging up a showroom.

Even the realtor I used to find my $1XXX/month apartment had me consent to run a soft credit check before she would schedule tours with any of the higher-end buildings within my price range.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm not surprised. With the cancer that is SEO, removal of advanced search features, and mandatory and aggressive fuzzy matching, Google search has been increasingly broken for years. It is technical-user hostile and arguably even average user hostile at this point.

Today I switched back to ddg after not using it for months, hopefully it's more mature now. This way at least I'm less likely to be tracked. I was tolerant of the privacy issues when the search results were good, because the power behind Google really is phenomenal, they had at one point achieved a truly marvelous technical feat. But now scrolling through two pages of ads on mobile only to find crappy matches from conceptually different synonyms is simply intolerable. I imagine they're using some sort of transformer/encoder and clearly the difficult problem of disambiguation is still not quite solved. We're going to come up on a similar problem soon at the startup I work for, but our domain is limited so it should be easier to constrain, but I digress...

It's a shame to watch Google search gradually ruined by revenue driven features.

</comment><comment><USER32> Nothing "1%" about this, it's basic business PR.

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm not saying that these companies should exist for the example in the article, a high profile business person that failed miserably and tried to do the same thing a second time, yes it is just downright wrong he has a bunch of apparently fake PR about him claiming he's great and a genius and give him your money.

 _However_ , there are valid use cases for such a service. There are things you and I might say or do in haste that quickly get forgotten and are never even seen by most of the population but...

The "1%" are in the spotlight, they can't go an ice cream cone without articles about their ice cream appearing online [1].

What if a high profile individual is falsely accused of rape, or of fathering a child, and it turns out it was a false accusation. Those dozens or hundreds of articles/tweets/videos aren't going to go away. It will quietly be announced by a handful of places "so and so was cleared, person was lying" and for months or decades those accusation articles are going to stay high on search results.

If John Smith gets a DUI, unless he did a bunch of property damage or killed someone in the process, an article isn't going to be written. If a billionaire does it [2] articles get written.

If a billionaire calls someone a pedo in a heated exchange, articles are written about it [3]. If Jane Doe calls someone a pedo (or worse) on twitter, one of her 13 followers might favorite the tweet, if another human being even reads it.

I imagine a significant percentage of people using these services aren't trying to defraud people, but simply trying to hide something embarrassing that has been preserved digitally, widely, that John and Joan Public simply never have to worry about. (nipple slip, porn tape, telling someone to eff off when they're having a bad day, tweeting something in haste like calling someone a creepy pedo, etc).

What if someone was formerly a neo-nazi, and they've spent the past decade fighting against hate (several of these types exist [4]) and living a completely different life? Should they not be allowed to bury their past and be judged on their current works instead of the foolish things they did in their youth?

[1] [https://time.com/2982204/paul-mccartney-warren-buffett- selfi...](https://time.com/2982204/paul-mccartney-warren-buffett-selfie/)

[2] [https://money.com/a-billionaire-22-year-old-was- fined-30000-...](https://money.com/a-billionaire-22-year-old-was- fined-30000-for-drunk-driving/)

[3] [https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us- canada-50695593](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50695593)

[4] [https://www.npr.org/2018/01/18/578745514/a-former-neo- nazi-e...](https://www.npr.org/2018/01/18/578745514/a-former-neo-nazi- explains-why-hate-drew-him-in-and-how-he-got-out)

<comment><USER34> There is an article in the local newspaper about my brother being arrested for driving while intoxicated and being in possession of a controlled substance. He's certainly not a billionaire.

<comment><USER33> In a local newspaper, not on a dozen tech/finance major publications with dozens of video clips talking about it from national and international broadcast outlets.

Reporting crimes in newspapers at varying levels has existed effectively as long as newspapers as they were a convenient means of notifying the public of happenings. That's why you still have to publish certain things in newspapers in many states, like when you want to change your name (for something other than marriage/divorce) so companies/persons you might be trying to hide from (for non-life or death situations like a battered spouse) have a reasonable chance of detecting an attempted evasion.

What about when your brother buys ice cream? I bet he doesn't make international news within hours, that then gets talked about for months by radio/tv/online news/blogs/reddit/twitter/etc.

I bet when he flies somewhere he doesn't have paparazzi waiting for him at the airport to take his photo, or people waiting to shove merchandise at him to sign (this happens to a lot of famous people, people find out they're coming in on a flight via various means and are waiting at the airport to try and get merch/photos signed that they then go attempt to sell).

There is a world of difference between public notice of a DUI and international press coverage before charges are even filed.

I'm not justifying the example case listed in the article, but put yourself in the shoes of someone that has used one of these services. Are you telling me, that if your brother could write a check and make any public record of his DUI outside of a law enforcement system vanish, that he wouldn't? (also, you gave a bad example as DUIs can be expunged in many states under various conditions and a random newspaper article about him, if even found, would be dismissed by any employer/lender/investigator when they ran his record and found it if he had it expunged and if he didn't have it expunged they'd find it anyway).

If an ex-girlfriend accused him of something, I bet it never left facebook. It would likely stay in the post and get ignored by a few people, a few people would take her side and believe her, and that would be that. It would be lost to time next to impossible to find in a feed. But what if a major business person is accused (falsely, which is later verified as false). Guess what, there are gonna be tons of articles that stay high in search results, there might _never_ even be an article "the accuser admitted they lied, they wanted attention and money, they have a history of accusing people".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm actually okay with this development given that the media has devolved into an industry that manufactures villains for the sake of eyeballs and ad clicks.

</comment><comment><USER36> E.g. Bill Gates: [https://medium.com/@CitationsPodcst/episode-45-the-not-so- be...](https://medium.com/@CitationsPodcst/episode-45-the-not-so-benevolent- billionaire-bill-gates-and-western-media-b1f8e0fe092f)</comment>


Ask HN:Students, Review my startup:Peers - <AUTHOR>

I'd like to ask for some feedback on a product me and my team are working on.
http://peersapp.com
It's a social planner for college students. The idea is, we first build a network around the classes students are in.
They can manage school and social plans with friends. We want Peers to be a place where there is a good work life balance
Currently, we are in the process of developing the app
- Does the site convey the half social, half productivity theme?
-Is there something big you think MUST be included in a planner for college students?
- Do you like the look/feel of the site?
- What would make you not use this app daily? <comment><USER2> The app I wish I had in a college setting was a simple way of letting people know that I'm open to doing certain things at a certain time.

The best example i'm thinking about is like a pre-checkin feature for something like foursquare so friends can see I'm open to going to a bar/movie/dinner etc & they know it's worthwhile to call me, instead of having to do a bunch of back & forth messages to see who is up for any given thing at a time. Maybe this is because so many of my friends want to know "who else is interested" before they even express interest.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah! Exactly. We're including that in the form of a broadcast. Public broadcasts will appear like "James is at the pub" and then there's an option to join

But we're working on making this less creepy. Might shift more towards what you were saying

Thanks!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm no critic, but let me give you my opinion as a recent graduate. I think the site looks absolutely wonderful. I think the screenshots of the app convey a little bit of a clustered appearance. I don't think I would ever use the app. I much prefer writing plans down on paper, or just having a quick simple reminder in my phones calender.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback!

We are college students ourselves. So we want to make this as simple as possible.

Maybe we will revisit the clutter issue.

I also understand paper will always be a quicker alternative to bringing out a phone :)</comment>


Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-01/bitcoin-s-use-in-commerce-keeps-falling-even-as-volatility-eases <comment><USER2> A currency with no mechanism for monetary policy is not going to be adopted. Bitcoin is purely deflationary for more reasons than just people losing their keys.

For example, a fixed reward split between a growing group of miners will also cause a rising price floor. The miners will not sell for less than their electricity costs, which makes the smaller piece of the block reward they receive have a higher price.

So you have this asset you call a currency but it is always deflationary. No one will set prices in that. Think of it in terms of setting a salary. One month you are paying the equivalent of 1000 dollars, the next you are paying 2000. Since this has no way of stabilizing it will never become a true base currency.

Instead, at best, it serves as a pass through to a fiat currency. So it is acting as a payment processor but very inefficiently. Slow transaction speeds, expensive, difficult to acquire.

The price is driven by speculative demand. It honestly is more like a digital collectible than a currency (sign up to receive one of 21 million e coins, be part of history).

<comment><USER3> > The miners will not sell for less than their electricity costs, which makes > the smaller piece of the block reward they receive have a higher price.

That's not how it works. If you spent $100 in electricity and you have an asset that's worth $50, you can either sell it for $50 and only be down $50 on your electricity, or you can not sell it at all and be down $100 on your electricity.

Electricity cost of mining does not set a price floor. The price floor is 0.

<comment><USER4> > That's not how it works.

Obivously, the meaning of the original sentence is that miners will turn off the mining equipment when they decide that it's more profitable to leave it off than leave it on.

> …you can either sell it for $50 and only be down $50 on your electricity, or > you can not sell it at all and be down $100 on your electricity.

This is a false dilemma, the question is not just whether you sell the coins, but also how many, with what timing, on what markets, and in exchange for what. The "either sell it and make some money back, or don't sell it and eat the loss" is only true if you are paying for your electricity in Bitcoin to begin with, or if you know that the asset you have will only depreciate in value. If I spent $10,000 on a car that I don't need, selling it for $8,000 might be a good deal because if I wait I will only get less. For Bitcoin, the exchange rate fluctuates, and you can divide it and sell parts at different times.

<comment><USER3> Are you claiming that the cost of electricity sets a lower bound on what the price of 1 BTC can possibly go to? If not, you haven't really disagreed with what I said.

<comment><USER4> You said,

> …you can either sell it for $50 and only be down $50 on your electricity, or > you can not sell it at all and be down $100 on your electricity.

This is what I disagree with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It sounds weird, but I think a big part of Bitcoin's, and other crypto's value, isn't in the day to day ability to use it to buy and sell things, it's the inability of the government to devalue it.

This isn't as big a problem in many richer countries with relatively stable currencies, but I sure as hell would prefer Bitcoin to anything the Venezuelan government or the Argentinian government would issue.

The kinks are still getting worked out for Bitcoin, but I still think it is a big game changer.

<comment><USER6> I mean, what advantage does it have over gold?

Advantages of gold vs. Bitcoin:

\- gold is pretty easy to find, not that hard to buy for the average consumer; BTC is anything but

\- gold is physical in form and securing it is not hard; BTC is not physical, exchanges get hacked with losses to accounts, in the event of a natural disaster or some event where power generation and internet is lost you lose access to BTC. (Someone can come break in and loot your gold, but people could also do that with your BTC wallet credentials, and if people are doing that you have worse things to worry about)

\- gold at least has some kind of floor value, since it does have uses other than a currency store; the same is not true for BTC

<comment><USER7> Maybe its a generational thing, but i have no clue how i would go about buying/trading gold and i dont think anyone in my friend group does either. Bitcoin is far more accessible.

<comment><USER6> You can literally go to a gold dealer shop; it's like forex for gold. Even in my moderately sized American city there are twenty that show up in Google Maps within a twenty minute drive. And you buy gold and it's physically in your possession; verifying it is easy, and the best part is you can verify it at some other gold dealer if you're super paranoid.

With BTC, you have to find a trusted exchange and a trusted wallet. The average consumer doesn't really know anything beyond a google search and the first two results.

<comment><USER8> > verifying it is easy

Actually, it's not. It's nearly impossible to non-destructively distinguish gold from tungsten wrapped in gold.

<comment><USER9> Any SEM with an EDS system will tell you non-destructively if you have tungsten wrapped in gold. X-Ray diffractometry would also do the same. Rutherford Backscattering spectrometry too. All three of these techniques are non-destructive and the first two are quite common to find at universities.

<comment><USER10> That's quite a leap from "you can verify at some other gold dealer" though.

<comment><USER11> It is also a very large leap from "let's just drill it at random locations" that an actual gold dealer will try first if they suspect something like this. The drill bit not going through the bar like butter at the location will probably be the first tip-off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It has been clear for a while now that Bitcoin is an inferior payment system for the consumer:

* The fees are higher.

* The risk to the consumer is higher.

* The difficulty of use is higher.

* It is accepted at an extremely low amount of vendors and even that is falling.

So you really how to wonder why people ever thought consumers would use it en masse.

<comment><USER13> One of your points is of dubious validity: fees may not be higher.

Fees went very high when the network became congested; but when it's not congested, they're much lower than credit card systems are for normal businesses.

[https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/](https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/) suggests that right now, what equates to about nine US cents is sufficient for a basic transaction. And if you're happy to wait an hour, then two cents ought to do you fine.

I'm not sure whether this is a typical rate; I haven't been keeping an eye on it, and [https://core.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#30d](https://core.jochen- hoenicke.de/queue/#30d) is hard to read casually. But by the looks of it, a very substantial fraction of transactions have been going through at what will be under ten cents if they're simple transactions.

Your standard sorts of base rates for accepting credit card transactions are 30¢ + 1.75–2.9%, depending on certain conditions like country and card type.

<comment><USER14> Yes. But don't forget credit cards offer others services, such as charge refund and fraud protection

<comment><USER13> I am only quibbling on the statement about fees, not the rest.

<comment><USER15> The point is that credit cards offer very valuable services in exchange for fees. Bitcoin offers nothing for a higher fee.

<comment><USER16> really? nothing? do you even know what bitcoin is? the ignorance in this thread is baffling sometimes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I am not surprised. I am a programmer with decades of experience under my belt, and I have no idea how to install bitcoin in a way that would allow me convenient use of it. No, I _can_ install the apps, and I can spend a month or two waiting until it downloads the whole 40+G of current blockchain, or I can trust some site that says it'd fix it for me, or I can open an account on any of the exchanges and pray to cryptogods it's not the one that is going to be robbed or go bust next. But why would I?

Now, if I would plan to trade in commodities that local government is frowning upon, or speculatively invest in assets that make Las Vegas look like index funds, it would be worth my while. But I don't, so it isn't.

Now make a step from myself - the experienced professional who actually knows what Bitcoin is and can probably explain how it works without wading too far from the truth - to a person who doesn't know the difference between "browser" and "internet". Why on earth would they go through this trouble - and more importantly, why on earth anybody who cares about them would advice them to go there at all? My advice to anybody who is not an agressive risk investor or a person with interests misaligned with current law would be "not with a ten foot pole". Right now it's so ripe with opportunities for both unintentional screwups and intentional skullduggery that I don't see how people can do consumer commerce with it.

<comment><USER16> exaggerating a bit? bitcoin syncs within couple hours unless you run it on the computer you'd gain your decades of experience on :)

every mobile bitcoin app is a lightweight client - it only syncs block headers, much faster but not great for large sums of money.

so for a person that can't tell "browser" from "internet" there's no difference between introducing them to paypal or to bitcoin - it's just an app on your phone and you can press the "send" button.

<comment><USER18> > it only syncs block headers

I think what the parent comment is trying to say is: who cares about this? Not even many of us technical people care.

It's like saying, "Just get the mobile app, it just synchroaligns the ledger manifest distributable intra-block metadata! Duh! Simple!"

It's not accessible to people, and not even engineers who aren't familiar with the tech.

I don't need to understand the minting process to know how to use a dollar, but for some reason the Bitcoin community expects you to understand blocks, difficulty, ledgers, exchanges, and many other concepts that are relatively advanced and take _time_ and _effort_ to understand. A dollar is a dollar.

This continually seems to fall on deaf ears.

<comment><USER16> this is just weird.. i was addressing GP's concern about performance of syncing. of course i wouldn't bother explaining how bitcoin works and what are the modes of operation and performance differences between them to a lay person. they don't care. they care that it's just an app.

so what exactly did you want to say?

<comment><USER18> It's missing the forest for the trees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> When I was starting a BTC ASIC company (don't worry - it failed to attract investment) in 2011, one of the things that always spooked investors was the slide showing transaction volume. Even in those early days, one had to really stretch one's imagination to believe that Bitcoin could one day take over from Visa/MasterCard as a payment method of choice.

But we did understand its value as an alternative store of wealth, and potentially as a way to transfer money across borders more cheaply. I think the former utility has been somewhat dented by the steady drop in value since its peak. And the latter isn't really all that amazing of a value prop when you consider that regular old PayPal isn't that expensive and the set of situations in which it does not work is really small.

Not to mention that SWIFT is really ancient but also works well and can be endlessly improved...

<comment><USER20> What does it take to actually make BTC ASICs?

In my understanding, the hash functions are quite simple and just do things like XOR, and SHIFT, and perhaps ADD/SUB, but not multiply or divide. So the main difficulty would be to do everything at the lowest possible amount of power.

But I could be wrong.

<comment><USER19> You are correct. The ASIC engineering was routine. It was all about justifying the enormous NRE costs... back in early 2011, BTC was a curiosity and not well known at all. Investors were not easy to convince.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> When can we call Bitcoin a failed experiment? And don't tell me it was "always about storing value", that's not in the original paper.

<comment><USER22> A failed experiment to me would be one that wasn't able to run its full course, or from which no information can be gleaned. Bitcoin has run for a long time, we have gleaned a ton of useful information - as far as experiments are concerned this seems like it went bigger and better than expected, so it should be a very GOOD experiment!

<comment><USER23> I think it's really unfair to call Bitcoin "failed". It has unarguably changed the world. There was way too much hype about it changing everything.

<comment><USER24> > It has unarguably changed the world.

How so? I see nothing in my day-to-day life that's different because of Bitcoin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> First, use in commerce peaked when transaction fees went too high in 2017, and consumers didn't try the shitty user experience again

okay, temporary problem

the payment processor's user experience kind of sucks and the network didn't help that

better UX and lightning network will help with that. There are also some BIPs regarding signing transactions differently, as well as smaller transactions coming. This year, 2018, more people already use another form of smaller transactions and also combine them. Bitcoin would handle a lot more load this year.

Secondly, M1 is a tiny fraction of the supply used for goods and services, M2 and M3 are illiquid stores of value. Bitcoin isn't functioning differently to currencies in this regard so its a weird standard to put it at to proclaim it isn't a good value transfer mechanism.

<comment><USER26> > better UX and lightning network will help with that.

Lightning appears to be a bit of a joke - routing payments is almost impossible, lots of attempts seem to fail, and there also appear to be requirements like keeping a node up constantly.

<comment><USER25> yeah I read and repeated all of that stuff without investigating too, at one point.

they aren't fundamental flaws to the concept. just like with tcp/ip packets, routing will improve with robustness of the network. I saw a couple of work in progress efforts to address the full node requirements.

they'll be growing pains but bitcoin is interesting because the protocol doesn't go away, even as the payment processing companies themselves run out of money. so a different company or group of efforts will implement it with merchants when its better.

<comment><USER27> It's different than TCP/IP in that every transaction changes the topography of a payment channel network, by changing the maximum amount that can be sent across various channels. This is a fundamental difference.

Moreover, even if LN worked as a full substitute for on-chain transactions (all indications point to only a very centralized hub and spoke LN model working efficiently), Bitcoin's three transactions per second limit makes the maximum proportion of the global population that could participate in a LN very limited.

Afterall, LN payment channels do still need on-chain transactions to set up, and do need to be replaced from the time to time. Given every user would need, at the very least, a few payment channels, the math for global adoption of the LN with a 3 tps limit doesn't work.

<comment><USER25> Yes this is something I'm following too.

So although Bitcoin has a low transaction per second limitation, the database Transaction objects can contain hundreds of transactions between users. This is what batching does. Segwit further helps lower the size of Transaction objects. And further proposals also lower that further.

<comment><USER27> >>the database Transaction objects can contain hundreds of transactions between users.

Can you elaborate or provide a link?

If you're referring to off-chain transactions through LN that are 'batched' on chain: these cannot set up payment channels. On-chain transactions for payment channel set up are the necessary minimum for the LN, and even to do just this, Bitcoin's block size limit doesn't come close to being adequate.

As for Segwit, it's a one time limit increase to something like 1.67 MB per 10 minutes (~2 KB/s). The limit needs a couple order of magnitude increase to make Bitcoin viable as a global currency.

<comment><USER25> A "transaction" on the bitcoin blockchain can contain many peer to peer actions which are also colloquially called transactions.

I'm not referring to lightning. This is basic day-one functionality of bitcoin. I don't feel compelled to provide a link to this at this point. Many popular services' implementation of bitcoin wasn't doing this, and now they are, this is called batching.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The primary utility of money is this: it is the good that best lends itself to exchanges for other goods.

Its been clear to me for some time now, and I'm not alone in this, that as the properties of Bitcoin have moved further away from its primary function as a useful unit of exchange that its usage would decline.

There are other crypto-currencies which are now much better suited as a medium of exchange, which ones people will prefer as time progresses remain to be seen, but unless Bitcoin takes a major corrective path, I would be quite surprised to find Bitcoin in that final set of widely utilized currencies.

<comment><USER18> Isn't this issue inherent in its design? If you can only have 21 million Bitcoins, the value will skyrocket until the currency is worthless.

<comment><USER14> It's more than 21 millions since bitcoins can be divided. And no, it could serve as a digital gold / long term investment, and others crypto currencies could be used for day to day transaction

<comment><USER18> What? That's like saying it's okay if there's only 21 million US dollars, they can be divided into pennies.

Bitcoin has no intrinsic value. Gold does. There's no long-term investment there when even pizza places and Steam think the "currency" is bunk.

It's one thing if Goldman Sachs thinks the currency is worthless, but another issue entirely if the digital equivalent of Circle-K won't accept your virtual dollary-doos.

Let's see, would I rather invest in a company like Intel whose processors are in every American home, or McDonalds whose an international brand, or in Bitcoin whose sole usage is relegated to druggies and sole investment limited to grandmas and millennials who think they're going to strike it rich?

It's pogs for adults.

<comment><USER14> I didn't say it was "okay". It was not an argument. The fact that there are max 21 millions bitcoins is known to everybody but doesn't say much about the total supply since it can be divided. And it cannot be divided into infinity, the smallest unit is the satoshi, so why not talk about the max number of satoshis if you want to make an argument about the max supply of unit of currency ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> By no means am I a bitcoin-enthusiast, but I've shared this story before:

> We had to send a payment to someone who lives in a commonwealth country - > what a pain in the ass that was. For the first time I actually saw a use for > bitcoin, but the volatility and my general desire not to run afoul of any > weird money laundering laws got the better of me.

I do think there's a legitimate case for bitcoin as a means of getting around FX and just the general inaneness of international banking.

That being said, I'm sure that there are plenty of reasons why that'll never come to fruition (e.g. as I noted, AML rules).

<comment><USER30> > We had to send a payment to someone who lives in a commonwealth country

I use it for that purpose all the time. In general, People in developed countries don't have a clue about how painful and time consuming an international payment can be. Even with credit cards banks put very low limits that are unrealistic for someone who travel often and consume cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud.

That is why I think the Bitcoin narrative is misleading, the main point was to make P2P transfer, not holding. In this context stable coins like DAI are currently one of the killer use cases.

<comment><USER29> > I use it for that purpose all the time.

Not to dig into your business too much, but: Any weird tax/legal implications around that? I didn't want to dig into it too much (just because often these things are rabbit holes with unclear answers), but I'm really curious about it for the next time we have to send a payment.

> In general, People in developed countries don't have a clue about how > painful and time consuming an international payment can be.

I can definitely say I had no idea until I had to do it myself. Trying to figure out how to do a wire transfer to someone in another country was a huge boondoggle (and expensive).

<comment><USER31> In the UK a capital gain (or loss) may occur when you use Bitcoin to buy something, whatever that thing is. (Buying something with Bitcoin is effectively selling Bitcoin for that thing. The thing has a value, and that is some evidence that the Bitcoin is worth that much.) This is a taxable event and if the gain is large enough then you'll need to pay the tax on it.

I imagine many countries have rules that are quite similar.

<comment><USER29> Interesting - so wait, if I send someone in the UK bitcoin and they sell it immediately for GBP, does that count as a capital gain?

Or just if the price changes between when they receive it and convert it to GBP?

EDIT: I guess it doesn't really matter in this case since presumably short- term capital gains rate is similar (or equal) to the income tax rate, but just curious for my own sake.

<comment><USER31> The gain is the difference between the value when they got it and the value when they sold it, so probably nothing if they do both on the same day. I guess you may have made a gain when you gave the Bitcoin away, since it's treated as a disposal at the market rate... maybe? I don't know the rules for this.

(Regarding speed of selling - there's no short-term CGT rate in the UK, but there are rules about quick turnaround that may apply. Consult an accountant.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> _Bitcoin advocates have long suggested the virtual money would one day replace fiat currencies as a means of doing business_

That's not the case anymore either. We have few powerful miners than own more than 50%. Sure they separate entity per se, but if they talk and agree together, they can do whatever they want.

They whole premise that crypto is free and decentralized and "banks cannot control it" is a good idea.. unless you quickly realize the flaw that biggest miners can get together and form a "crypto mob" if you will, and control currency future anyways.

<comment><USER33> The whole system consists of flaws the authors would have forseen if they understood economic thinking. Instead, they pretended that all the tenets of economics magically go away if you apply a little cryptography.

The flaw you're pointing out is that whoever has access to cheap electricity and scale will be able to control the system. There is not sufficient incentive for others to jump in to a money losing proposition.

<comment><USER34> I propose Bitcoin and most other extra-legal (ie non state supported) currencies are going to zero. That said we can be grateful that the experiment was done and data was gained.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is a totally expected consequence of Bitcoin Core abandoning the original plan of raising the block size limit in favor of 'the Lightning Network', which is a technology that does not even work at the conceptual level, let alone being production ready.

A blockchain limited to 3 transactions per second cannot be a global currency. Before Bitcoin came up against its 1 MB per 10 minute (1.67 KB/s) limit, which is its life from launch to 2017, its daily transaction volume was growing exponentially, yoy.

</comment><comment><USER35> Cryptocurrency will never replace fiat money. Corporations will never put their money in a system that is controlled by only one password and that uses transactions that in case of error can't be undone.

<comment><USER36> Keep dreaming. You will see.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> My thinking, probably wrong goes like this:

what is money? It is a messaging system that allows people to decide what to do in a decentralized fashion. We need more food, the price of food goes up, more people grow food. What happens when you make money from money? Dysfunction. World currencies are increasingly dysfunctional - the most profit comes not from productive economic activity but from speculation, arbitrage, etc.

Bitcoins are completely dysfunctional because they are not tied to any productive economic activity, they are completely speculative. The idea of cryptocurrencies is great, but without being tied to real economic activity, they are ... well speculative.

Would love some explanations on why this thinking is wrong.

<comment><USER38> They're tied to economic activity — buying drugs, money laundering, paying ransoms, funding intelligence operations.

Just nobody is using them to buy legitimate products.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Bitcoin (and crypto) is not a currency, commodity, stock or bond. It's a combination which makes it a completely new and different kind of asset class. It's a programmable asset that primarily serves as a 'trading vehicle' in the mind of traders and Wall St. Understanding this helps to understand why Goldman and others are stepping over themselves to setup trading desks for most crypto now and in the future.

<comment><USER40> I totally agree with the assertion that it doesn't fall into existing asset type (or-- maybe that it can move between asset types in a novel way), but what do you mean by "programmable"? Isn't the simpler explanation or enthusiasm on the part of Goldman et al. just classic FOMO?

<comment><USER39> When you can engineer sophisticated scripts or wrappers around a globally accessible immutable tradable asset it increases functionality and innovation in financial products which includes autonomous machines trading crypto with one another in exchange for data. I think we're in for a world of fun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> With the small-blocker and big-blocker schism, BTC is not Bitcoin, and is not meant for commerce.

If you want fast, cheap, settled transactions, use Bitcoin (BCH).

</comment><comment><USER42> I think what people need to realize about cryptocurrencies is that they aren't going to derive their value from being convertible to fiat currency.

Rather cryptocurrencies are going to be revolutionary in the sense of how they can be combined with other technologies.

For example, what if World of Warcraft used a cryptocurrency based system for ingame currency? Where the ingame money was actually finite and that in theory the players in the game could suffer from an economic depression. Or a few players could hoard all the wealth in the game. etc. etc.

The game would be way different than it is now, which is to say that it just emulates an economy, not actually implements one.

This is probably a bad example to get what I am trying to say. So lets imagine a different scenario. Let's say we wanted to build a social network, where we didn't actually want everybody to just be able to say whatever they want without a threat of consequence. What we want is a social network where you have to do something to earn the ability to speak, and once you speak you lose the currency to be able to speak again until you do something once again to earn the ability to speak.

What you have to do in order to earn the ability to act depends on the service in question, but the same basic concept of a cryptocurrency is what underlying the system. In that the platform only has value when the ability to act is a limited and highly valued resource.

<comment><USER43> > For example, what if World of Warcraft used a cryptocurrency based system > for ingame currency?

Why would they need a distributed system? They already have an in-game currency with a central authority (their trusted servers) and can already limit the rate of currency creation (reduce monster's gold drop rate to zero or whatever).

EVE Online shows just how well a central authority can manage a virtual game currency. No crypto or blockchain needed.

> Let's say we wanted to build a social network, where we didn't actually want > everybody to just be able to say whatever they want without a threat of > consequence

Cool, so like a reputation system on old forums where you have to have a certain number of positive comments to participate in other private forums, and there's heavy moderation?

Oh woah, no crypto, no blockchain. I don't see how cryptocurrencies make the fundamental problems of building such a system any easier btw. Attaching a value to someone in a database is easy, and even distributed social networks like mastodon trust the participating servers (and if you don't, you block the whole server).

Cryptocurrencies are a problem looking for another problem, and it turns out rubbing two problems together doesn't make fire.

A central database is usually better (the WoW example), and they're often orthogonal to other ideas they're shoved into (reputation system, file storage, whatever).

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> The problem with bitcoin as a currency or a store of value is simpler than all these comments.

It is not secure.

If I own gold, I own the gold, nobody can take it from me without physical access to it.

If I own bitcoin, I own a transaction on a ledger. I don't own that ledger. The majority miners control the ledger.

A miner who has 50% of hashing power (actually less, when selfish mining) completely owns and controls the ledger. They can erase any transactions they want, block transactions and double spend.

You don't have that with gold, you actually own the gold.

Bitcoin Gold was the same source code and same ledger as bitcoin (no extra words) and it was double spent in exactly that way.

The whole system was designed to make the people who created the fake money a lot of money, it wasn't designed to run forever. They've made their 100s of millions+ and more. Beyond their wildest dreams. It's a simple pyramid scheme designed to run as long as possible.

It is not a currency. It is not a store of value. It is a worthless asset being traded back and forth by people losing money in a less than zero sum game. Less than zero because money is going to miners and exchanges who facilitate the game.

<comment><USER36> Selfish mining with less than 50% does not exist. False

Also.... see how they confiscated gold in the USA.

You cannot confiscate bitcoin, anymore than you can confiscate "internet"

Both are networking protocols

<comment><USER45> > Selfish mining with less than 50% does not exist. False

Incorrect, and this has been well known for nearly five years: [http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/04/bitcoin-is- broken/](http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/04/bitcoin-is-broken/)

<comment><USER36> Yes, Emin has been pushing that narrative for a while.

But we have not seen an instance of this yet

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> So many initiatives are currently in development to make it easy to accept crypto. Just wait 2 or 3 years...

</comment><comment><USER47> >And Bitcoin-based transactions can't be reversed, an issue when a merchant or a consumer comes up against fraud

That's the fucking point. Use multisig/escrow if you need it.

</comment><comment><USER48> Bitcoin != despite the wearisome and over-blown emotional 'bitcoin is bad see i told you so!' mentality on HN.

</comment><comment><USER49> Bloomberg's use in news keeps falling too. They have set up computational paywalls to prevent people from reading their articles. But for some reason people on HN just keep posting them. It's a weird exception to the no- paywalled article status quo.

<comment><USER50> ditto. used to be ok but now too much clickbait, low quality content, and now paywalls

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> It's pretty remarkable that the transaction layer (Lightning network) on top of Bitcoin hasn't garnered any discussion in this comment section - I would expect this to be the primary topic when talking Bitcoin commerce! It's not possible to have an intelligent discussion on Bitcoin commerce without discussing its most relevant tech.

From my experience, I see that most apolitical or politically averse techies (a lot of HN) are drawn heavily to Ethereum, which has been falling relative to Bitcoin ever since the January highs. Pretty sure there is a strong correlation between this and HN crypto frustration in general.

<comment><USER52> > It's pretty remarkable that the transaction layer (Lightning network) on top > of Bitcoin hasn't garnered any discussion in this comment section

I would say it's pretty encouraging since it barely works, doesn't deliver on any of its promises and much more convoluted to use that normal crypto- currency.

<comment><USER51> I can send less than a satoshi to someone across the globe for virtually zero fees, anonymously and without any need to wait for block confirmations? And all of this works right now on mainnet?

Bitcoin progress has always consisted of overcoming allegedly insurmountable problems, Lightning dev is no different. Next up is solving efficient routing and intermittent nodes.

<comment><USER27> >>Bitcoin progress has always consisted of overcoming allegedly insurmountable problems, Lightning dev is no different.

Bitcoin's founder solved one allegedly insurmountable problem: the Byzantine Generals' problem. It's irrational to believe this means Bitcoin Core's development team, who had no part in the original design of Bitcoin, will solve more problems of this class.

Bitcoin Core should have fully exploited the existing breakthrough in decentralized consensus, by simply raising the block size limit to provide enough space for the world to use Bitcoin, instead of pushing Bitcoin's luck, and premising its success on an uncertain technology like LN.

<comment><USER51> Ever since LN was first proposed, skeptics have asserted problem after problem as an insurmountable obstacle. And time after time they have been proven wrong.

If you really think that big blocks solve anything, then by all means just use Bcash - though of course Bcash itself is melting down into separate forks as we speak..

<comment><USER52> > If you really think that big blocks solve anything, then by all means just > use Bcash - though of course Bcash itself is melting down into separate > forks as we speak..

Try to look beyond all the censored /r/bitcoin propaganda - bitcoin cash and other cryptocurrencies scale fine with increased blocksizes.

Bitcoin cash is not melting down in separate forks at all. The increased blocksize obviously works without problems and has nothing to do with forking in the first place.

There was never a reason to restrict the blocksize of btc except to sell a complicated and unnecessary promise of a solution to a non-problem. Everyone outside of the /r/bitcoin censorship and propaganda bubble can see this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> How Google is entering the crypto space is [https://blog.usejournal.com/google-entering-the- blockchain-s...](https://blog.usejournal.com/google-entering-the-blockchain- space-f418793e1cb4) very telling. Bitcoin is not going away. Get over it.

<comment><USER54> Crypto space doesn't necessarily mean Bitcoin, could be another better technology that eventually becomes mainstream.

<comment><USER55> And when someone claims that they support Bitcoin or see a future for Bitcoin, chances are they too are talking about cryptocurrencies in general and not specifically Bitcoin.

<comment><USER56> True, it's just often easier to say Bitcoin because many people have heard of it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any good tutorials on iOS geofences? - <AUTHOR>

Hi, I am trying to implement geofences into an app I am working on.  We are able to implement geofences but we can not get it to be very reliable and it kills a lot of battery.  Are there any good write-ups on a good implementation of geofencing in iOS? <comment><USER2> <https://developers.geoloqi.com/features/geofencing>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this, but this was not really what I was looking for. I already have all my server implementation done and all coding for the geofences is pretty much done, I just need a way of making it more efficient. There is not point in signing up for a monthly service when 90% of the stuff the service provides is already done by me.

Are there really so few docs out there about efficiently coding for geofences?

<comment><USER2> They seem to have created what they call "profiles" which allow for less battery usage based on what data needs to be gathered.

You might also go and reach out to some of the fitness apps like RunKeeper and MapMyRun to see how they are handling their real-time geo pushes without killing the battery. Good luck.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why are Attribute-based Architectural Styles (ABAS) not used widely? - <AUTHOR> Attribute-based Architectural Styles (ABAS, http://wiki.c2.com/?AttributeBasedArchitecturalStyles) were created by the Software Engineering Institute of the Carnegie Mellon University in 1999. The purpose of ABASs is to describe the quality attributes of architecture styles and related trade-offs. Another purpose is to deliver questions to evaluate a certain architecture.
That sounds very useful to me and is essential part of the Architecture Trade-off Analysis Method (ATAM). However it looks like the idea of ABAS never really took off.
Think for example how useful an ABAS for the much discussed microservice architecture would be. It would be an systematic extract of all the blog posts discussing this topic. So why are ABASs not used more? There seems to be no at least somewhat update catalogue of ABASs. <comment><USER2> clickable:

[http://wiki.c2.com/?AttributeBasedArchitecturalStyles](http://wiki.c2.com/?AttributeBasedArchitecturalStyles)

<comment><AUTHOR> What is the trick to make it clickable? I've thought links were recognized by pattern (https?://...) .

<comment><USER2> Just putting it in a standalone comment. Links in the description of text submissions aren't linkified.</comment></comment></comment>


Turkish ISPs Block Several Google Services? - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2010/06/04/turkey-google-ban/

<comment><USER2> EDIT - I was wrong, corrected by studer. (Original comment wondered on the low score of this item compared the the Twitter #flotilla "censorship" rumor)

<comment><USER3> It could be that the other post about this on the frontpage is getting all attention...</comment></comment>


Electoral Fallout - <AUTHOR> http://www.snopes.com/harvard-professor-wants-electoral-college-to-reject-trump/ <comment><USER2> This is the problem with "fact checkers" on cable news, snopes, etc., and exactly why the new censorship push by Google, Facebook, et al is alarming: They pick and choose how to interpret the story according to their bias. They put a huge TRUE here, when this is false and they even admit its false: "Whether it's true that Lessig has 20 electors on board is impossible to verify unless they make themselves public. So far, only one Republican elector has publicly stated he will not vote for Trump — Chris Suprun of Texas." These fact check organizations take things literally when it suits them, and play loose with the facts when it doesn't. They are saying the CLAIM is true, not the substance. This is fake news designed to change minds by headline.

<comment><USER3> Is fact-checking in any sense worthwhile?

<comment><USER2> In my opinion, no. Choose who you trust, and if you find out they've deceived you, don't trust them any more.</comment></comment></comment>


Ireland not open for business, says Twitter innovator  - <AUTHOR> http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article5683931.ece <comment><USER2> Note that the article is talking about _Northern_ Ireland, not the Republic. There's a VERY large difference to the people here. :-)

As a new resident of Dublin I'm very interested to see if the transatlantic cable mentioned makes a difference in Ireland's ISP market. I'm lucky enough to have DSL with SmartTelecom which (almost) lets me escape Eirecom's iron grip on Irish telecommunications. I still have to pay €26/mo "line rental" for the copper pair to the exchange but EVERYONE not on wireless/cable has to pay that. Such a racket...

The article also notes that many businesses are incorporated in Delaware which has no income tax. But don't most states have laws which force the corporations to pay taxes in the state where the office is located? There must be other reasons for the Delaware incorporation.

</comment><comment><USER3> "He had to buy a car using his American credit card...he loses the entitlement to drive on his Canadian licence after a year..."

The article mentions all of the "red tape" involved, but these seem to simply be problems for people moving to (Northern) Ireland in general, not businesses.

Admittedly, not having a credit card for a few months could make it more difficult to live there, and having to re-take your driving test is a hassle, but why does this make (Northern) Ireland closed for business?</comment>


SpaceX gets Nasa's approval to test launch Crew Dragon - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/26/spacex-gets-nasas-approval-to-test-launch-crew-dragon/ <comment><USER2> Previous discussion of a different article on the subject:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19252350](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19252350)

And a more comprehensive article from NasaSpaceFlight:

[https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2019/02/spacex-gains-frr- gre...](https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2019/02/spacex-gains-frr-green-light- dm-1-iss/)

Launch is scheduled for 2:48AM EST on March 2nd.

</comment><comment><USER3> I know a guy working on the Crew Dragon module. He's been working 100+ hour weeks for the last 3 years.

Hope it was all worth it.

<comment><USER4> Given how I code at the end of a 60 hour week, that's a pretty scary thought when it comes to an environment where the simplest oversights can lead to a loss of life. Hopefully for those working crazy hours there's a couple well rested reviewers of the work.

<comment><USER5> If you're really into something or it's a necessary part of your life 100 hr/week is doable. Many small business owners put in those kind of hours. Once either of those stop being true your work output quality goes to shit pretty instantly though.

<comment><USER6> They do, but what kind of quality of life is that?

<comment><USER7> Your question implies that there is a right answer and there isn't. I think your question is more accurately stated, "why doesn't everyone think or feel like me?"

Dedicating one's life to one's work (including long hours) can be very high quality: if you have an active interest in what you do, pride in what you produce, and you see yourself as not just doing some task that some employeer/customer told you to do, but you see your work and its output as symbolic of your own personal standards, then the rewards are more than sufficient payoff for the time spent. And the time spent itself can be quite pleasurable, too, even if time spent is very high.

Of course, if you've not managed to find something in life that both makes you feel that way and allows you sustenance, you're probably going to ask the very question you did. Human experience is simply more broad than that.

<comment><USER6> You're right, but I also had health in mind that high of a work load over a period of time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For anyone who doesn't like to be jolted out of the article when you scroll down too far[0]:

[https://outline.com/LqnKkg](https://outline.com/LqnKkg)

[0] Seriously, I wish we could stop linking to techcrunch until they get their UI back in good shape.

<comment><USER9> I disabled javascript on techcrunch (and all similar sites). Makes many sites more enjoyable to use.</comment></comment>


Some writers who lied or plagiarized - <AUTHOR> http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2017/03/why-writers-lie-plagiarize-fabricate-stretch-the-truth <comment><USER2> >Indeed, the election of Donald Trump (bankruptcy; alleged groping of women; exaggerations, fabrications, "alternative facts") gives us a prevaricator in chief who demonizes journalists for daring to expect that a public figure's actions should have consequences and that his assertions should check out.

Ugh. I can't go a single bloody day without somebody wedging this into a story it is completely irrelevant to.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can the headline be changed to the article title: "Why Writers Lie (and Plagiarize and Fabricate and Stretch the Truth and...)". It more accurately represents the article than this.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, the altered headline makes it sound like a dry read on the order of a Wikipedia disambiguation page. Which it very much is not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The quote "Ours is the only profession in which any transgression, big or small, means the end not of your career at a certain outlet—it means the end of your vocation" made me think that what happens to hoaxsters in journalism in is very similar to what happens to scientists who get caught plagiarizing, falsifying or fabricating. The codes of conduct in many other professions seem to be more forgiving of breaches.

</comment><comment><USER6> Mildly entertaining read but not sure if it fits HN's "intellectual" requirement.</comment>


Peter Atkinson writes a brief history of Wizard of the Coast (1993) - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/rec.games.frp.misc/I92giyywlXc/jdPFC8jaeloJ <comment><AUTHOR> > _23 January 1993_

> _...Next week Richard came to DragonFlight and while we were in a vacant > parking garage across from Seattle Center [...] Richard described to me a > game that he 'd come up with that fit those specks--and went way beyond. And > this game was the single most awesome gaming idea I had heard of since 1978, > when I heard of roleplaying. I started whooping and hollering and yelling, > primarily because I knew at that moment that we had an idea that would add a > whole new dimension to gaming, and if executed properly, would make us > millions. This wasn't just a new game, it was a new gaming form. (Btw, if we > can raise the capital, this game will be coming out this summer. Wish I > could tell you more, but you know how it is...)_

The first _Magic: The Gathering_ card set premiered in the summer of the same year.

Source: [https://old.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/djotuv/a_histor...](https://old.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/djotuv/a_history_of_wizards_of_the_coast_and_magic_told/)</comment>


How to get hired as mature self-taught ex-freelancer? - <AUTHOR>

Hi, I'm a self-taught, 39 year old Python web/database coder, now looking to get into a full time position after 8 years of freelancing. My problem (I think?) is that I'm not what is considered a catch to the stereotypical founder: no CS degree, been working on regular Python+SQL projects, not young. I know I'm competent, I've been inhaling CS and coding books for years and have taught myself some tricky stuff like microcontroller assembly and real-time audio/midi app development in C.  But maybe I don't know how to properly present myself to people who might be interested in someone like me, or know who those people might be. Surely there are some companies who are actually impressed that someone has had to do all the running-a-business stuff in addition to coding, and has experience being completely responsible for the clients and the bottom line?
If anyone has thoughts on how to better position myself, or to whom I should be looking, or just wants to (constructively) trash my CV, that would be appreciated.  Or if the correct answer is that I'm barking up the wrong tree, I'd like to hear that too! I'm not here to whine and vent, I honestly want productive critiques.
Thanks hackers Iain http://www.xornot.com/pdf/Iain_Duncan_CV.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> If you want to send private comments, email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER2> Do you have a link to web projects? I know this sounds superficial, but a PDF resume only reinforces the perception, unfair as it may be, that you're "not nimble"enough. You seem to maintain your own website with projects...you should at least link to it from the PDF</comment>


Ask HN: Specialization - <AUTHOR> Hi HN. For my first internship I worked for a Microsoft shop. I don't want to work with MSFT technologies. I'm not sure why. The MS stack isn't attractive to me. I prefer the Linux stack of web servers, etc. How can I avoid getting stuck being another C# MS dev stuck in MS shops for my career? <comment><USER2> Take it off your resume, and start applying for jobs. Take advantage of the fact that most people assume your resume is complete. That's the approach I took. I've played with a lot of technologies and the ones I don't care to get stuck working with 40+hrs/week simply never make it on to the resume.

If you need to buff the resume so you've got concrete skills in another stack, well, you'll need to do that first then.

</comment><comment><USER3> You are right to be thinking about this now. Once you start on a path, it can be hard to switch (as much based on financial considerations as technical ones)

Can you get an internship at a company where the platform appeals more to your interests?</comment>