Ask HN: For Bitcoin to be ubiquitous, what must happen? - <AUTHOR>

As a believer in the utility and potential of bitcoin, I wanted to poll HN for additional opinions.
In order for Bitcoin to be HUGE, ubiquitous and common among the world's citizens, what specific things must happen? [List] <comment><USER2> Liquidity is the most important thing.

The thing that holds back bitcoin is that I can't buy my groceries with it. Once a currency can be used it is more valuable.

To overcome this, a company like Amazon would need to accept bitcoin or make some kind of passthrough system, where merchants can accept Bitcoin and Amazon takes their cut in bitcoins.

Once more companies accept it, it will be a prime candidate for the hold currency because no government can artificially inflate it's value. Right now the issue with having the USD, the Yuan or the Swiss Franc as the hold currency is that the currency becomes more valuable which makes items in that country more expensive for everyone outside of the country causing a decrease in exports.

So no country really wants to be the hold currency, in fact it's why China is manipulating their currency and artificially bolstering the USD by buying up US Debt. It depresses the Yuan and keeps their export business alive.

It's why a strong dollar killed US Exports. The stronger your currency is, the worse off it is for your exports.

Bitcoin doesn't have this issue, you can create a contract in bitcoin and not have to worry if that country is going to inflate it because their exports are decreasing. This gives the currency even greater liquidity.

</comment><comment><USER3> Price stability is one major factor.

Unstable currency is bad for both consumers and merchants. When the volatility is high, it is high risk for people that hold that currency. Consumers and merchants are not interested in hedging their currency risk and rather focus on using the currency.

Let's say that the value of USD fluctuates 10% per day, most people would not hold USD; they would rather hold a currency that is stable or move to gold. Same thing is happening with BTC.

<comment><USER4> Bitcoin will only be unstable as long as there is disagreement about the economics of it. Once we get reasonably close to consensus about that, price will stabilize to where the consensus model says it should be.

I suspect that won't happen until some time after the current crop of incoming economics PhDs are tenured.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Usability. Primarily of payments.

For something like PayPal, I can send money to an email address. For M-Pesa countries, I can send money to a phone number. If I'm in the UK, I can send money to a sort code (12-34-56) and account number (98765432). For international payments, I can send money to an IBAN (GB29 NWBK 6016 1331 9268 19)

For BitCoin? I have to send payment to "FHTbTN7omGUchDpmuHumii"

I can't read that out over the phone or easily copy type it - I certainly can't remember it. There are no checksums, and no routing information.

So, for me, there's a high barrier to entry for doing something as simple as paying someone back for a meal.

<comment><USER6> Bitcoin addresses do have a checksum[1]. And for most payments in person, people will just scan a QR code[2].

[1] [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1026.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1026.0)

[2] [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.schildbach....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.schildbach.wallet)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Bitcoin needs to be understood before it can be used by someone. People's ability to understand bitcoin is the current bottleneck to bitcoin adoption.

<comment><USER8> I understand Bitcoin, I just don't see any personal benefit verses my existing credit card, bank and investment accounts.

<comment><USER9> Credit cards companies charge around 3% per transaction, and charges are susceptible to chargebacks. ACH transfers take around a week. Wire transfers cost $40. Bitcoin transactions costs a few cents each and are done in less than an hour.

<comment><USER10> Credit cards pay me back around 1% per transaction, and if someone cheats me, I can chargeback. Isn't it far better than Bitcoin? :)

Btw, why isn't ACH/wire transfers a solution? If done properly (unlike USA), they cost a few cents and can be transmitted in less than an hour (not 24/7 yet, though).

<comment><USER11> People in developed countries with good credit scores and are not banned by chexsystems will get no value from bitcoin. For everyone else there's bitcoin(tm).

Being glib aside, there is a vast population of poorer people who either live in countries with unstable banking systems or are just not profitable for banking. These people will get the most value out of bitcoin.

It's like landline telephones. For people with established land line systems, the value of a cellphone isn't that much. For people who've never had a phone, and wont get land line service, a cell phone is amazing!

ACH/Wire transfers are very slow for Americans, and too much inertia makes it seem like they're not going away soon.

<comment><USER12> > It's like landline telephones. For people with established land line > systems, the value of a cellphone isn't that much.

I get what you're saying but...this just doesn't make sense. If this was true, how do you explain the now ubiquitous usage of cell phones? Neither I nor any of my (in their 20s) friends have a land line, because we all have cell phones.

<comment><USER10> Places with really bad landline systems generally got much faster and more widespread adoption & growth of cell phones and mobile services (such as mobile banking, etc) than the advanced countries.

Now cellphones are everywhere, but pre-iphone era USA was rather backwards in terms of mobile phone usage. Also, "majority of young people being mobile- only" was an obvious thing in many much poorer places long before USA. None of the people I know in their 30-ies have had a landline for more than 10 years now - as far as I remember this was not the case in USA back in early 2000's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It needs to be faster than 1-2 hours for every transaction because the store is waiting for confirmations.

When every other normal store only takes a minute to process, 1-2 hours is way too long.

<comment><USER14> if you only require 1 confirmation, and for a coffee or lunch this should be fine, which would take perhas 10 minutes at most.

<comment><USER15> Waiting 10 minutes for your coffee payment to go through?

Pitch that to Starbucks and see how far you get.

<comment><USER14> sorry i meant that for coffee you dont need to wait for a confirmation, a zero confirmation transaction for $5 is safe enough, no one is going to bother to double spend against that as the computational power required means it is not economical to do so. Zero conf transactions are almost instantaneous

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think a big driver of ubiquity would be a transaction processor / guarantor similar to how Mastercard or Visa work on top of USD; then using BTC would be as easy as using a credit card.

Why is this not an option right now?

\- Volatility of BTC exchange rate

\- Endpoint security

\- Trust in a big organization like this to securely handle BTC

\- Uncertain political future of BTC

\- Need to roll out merchant point-of-sale solutions globally

All these are being worked on though, and really there's nothing stopping anyone from making this a reality Real Soon Now with a lot of investment.

The biggest risk might be a huge negative reaction from entrenched USD players such as banks, financial corporations, Wall Street, and the Fed. With the extent that they control the legislative branch, BTC might be excommunicated and fizzle out.

</comment><comment><USER17> Device security is a must, that looks like a showstopper, if at the very least rotten apples in the NSA can take your bitcoins anonymously you are in trouble, and most people don't have enough clue on how to be secure (i.e. average windows users) to put "real" money there.

And of course, big adopters. For services and digital goods is a natural method of payment. But it should have some price stability for that.

</comment><comment><USER18> Silk road was one example of a use case that could drive adoption. Liquidity, usability and speed are important for mass adoption; for a niche, that's not necessarily as big a concern.

Remittances and international transfers might be one niche where BTC could shine. The currency isn't ready to beat VISA when you're buying a coffee, but it could be a hell of a lot better than Western Union.

<comment><USER16> But, remember that Visa doesn't transact immediately in cash-equivalent USD either.

There's no reason why they couldn't settle accounts on the merchant and consumer side using BTC instead, with equivalent convenience at the point of sale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> A way needs to be found to scale the network to a size that can't be interfered with by a nation state(s) before a nation state(s) interferes with it. (e.g. if btc network gains serious traction yet is small enough a nation state can interfere/control the network, a nation state will eventually interfere/control the network)

<comment><USER10> For most of 'money' users 'scaling the network' would mean liquidity and convertibility - it should be transparent, easy, safe and fast to interchange bitcoin with all other currencies. This implicitly requires cooperation with the nation states, not expecting no interference whatsoever.

For the billions people in the world who use money, "can't be interfered with" is not even near the top of properties money must have. Above all, it should be liquid (i.e., accepted in most places w/o hassle) and at least somewhat stable in value. Heck, for most uses the old Zimbabwean dollar was a better currency than Bitcoin - sure, it was under full state control and falling in value like a lead weight, but millions of people could and did successfully use it for their daily money needs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> QQ: when you say you're a believer in the potential of Bitcoin, do you mean BC itself, crypto-currency, or decentralized and fee-less ways to pay for things and exchange funds? Is it the extra-governmental aspect of BC that you like or what being extra-governmental has allowed it to be?

<comment><AUTHOR> I mean that I believe in the fundamental need of BTC, the potential for significant adoption and the reality that it can be simplified for all consumers. I think BTC will win out versus other crypto-currencies because its adoption thus far, which makes it hard for a secondary one to scale beyond BTC. I own and wish I doubled down earlier...

<comment><USER20> Ok but what part of it makes you believe in it, not just over other crypto, but why it's needed in general?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Volatility must be reduced. BTC's price fluctuations reduce its usefulness as a store of value. I'm curious if the Winklevis attempt to list a bitcoin ETF is a play for this: an exchange traded BTC security could make it easier to hedge currency risk.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think there are 2 major categories of risk: one political/legal, the latter technical/security. I have no realistic way of helping with the former. I've started trying to help with the latter. We'll see.

<comment><AUTHOR> Would you be interested in sharing how you are helping with the latter (technical/security)?

<comment><USER22> Gladly, in private conversations. Esp with people that could be key stakeholders or contributors. :-) Otherwise not ready enough to go very public.

Emphasis on building and validating and iterating rather than too much talking or guessing. Though a little of the latter is good and necessary sometimes I think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It needs to have secure-by-default consumer applications which are trivial to use.

</comment><comment><USER24> Well, I'm ready to declare that cryptocurrencies are here to stay, even if BTC itself loses. In that sense it is already pretty huge to me.

For some other definition of HUGE, the first thing that comes to mind would be any top 20 GDP government accepting it as a way to pay taxes. Switzerland is #20, so if they started accepting it, that'd be a HUGE deal, and doesn't seem nearly as unrealistic as, say, Mexico accepting it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you think another cryptocurrency can come in and surpass BTC at this point? If so, how can the concept of cyrptocurrency be big if alternative options of the same core concept exist (relative to consumer adoption)?

<comment><USER24> Yes, because it is such an unproven area there is a lot of room for changes. For example something Litecoin is working on is verifying Litecoin nodes with as little as 200-300MB of disk storage. Now _that 's just an example_, but I could see stuff like that making a currency in the future based on BTC more popular than BTC itself is all. The arena is too new I think for me or anyone else to say BTC is going to _be it_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> In the long run, it must become something "your mom" and "your grandfather" use. Notice the use of quotes, speaking in metaphors/stereotypes by intent. Essentially it needs to become understandable enough, and perceived as safe enough, for the least sophisticated and/or most conservative or more financially fragile.

<comment><USER4> I don't think this is true. There's no reason why it couldn't be infrastructural like high tension power lines or crude oil. I have no idea how to use either of those things, but they underpin almost everything I do.

Maybe you never use bitcoin but your landlord uses it to pay the mortgage, and your cousin uses it to send money to your grandmother in Iran for you. Even if it's only used by "pros" it can be huge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> FED/Fiat collapse. Which maybe sooner rather than later given their inability to ween QE and ZIRP.

<comment><USER26> I think it would be a fundamental flaw in the philosophy of Bitcoin to require a global economic collapse for it to become relevant.

If anything, I think that for Bitcoin to become ubiquitous, it need to work and be seen to work within the very system it seems designed to undermine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> It needs to have a more intuitive user interface.

<comment><AUTHOR> That will be inevitable with the growing attention and efforts of startups, developers and tech ecosystem, don't you think?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It would need to be better than a credit card for the average consumer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you think it can be? Wallets on mobile devices an POS technology can make this happen

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> hell must freeze over... twice

<comment><AUTHOR> As a non-believer, what are your thoughts on its progress thus far?

<comment><USER28> I believe it's a pretty fine technological achievement and i would totally be buying into it if it was pegged to major currencies. As it is i can only see it as a globalized casino.

As others have mentioned upthread, it's just not user friendly enough for widespread adoptance. I code ASM at times and i find it difficult -- cant see any 60 yrs old getting into it. And guess what? 60 yrs olds have the most money..

Also some things about it sound so fishy i cannot think i'd ever put any money into it. Like say, for example... what if quantum computers can find all hashing collisions in a split second? That's what they were designed for more or less.

And really, what kind of message does it send when you realize that the creator(s) are unknown and anonymous? Great for a cypherpunk thriller, not so great for a supposed store of value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Trust.

<comment><AUTHOR> Current price at ~$500 means that a growing trust is evident. I believe that lack of awareness is a bigger hurdle than trust right now

<comment><USER30> Current price at $600 means people are speculating like crazy - it's not a measure of trust by any means, people are in it to make a quick (and easy) buck.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you have any information on Raspberry Pi 4? - <AUTHOR> It's been awhile since the Raspberry Pi 3 came out, I'd like to know if you have any information about a potential raspberry pi 4? <comment><USER2> There was an interview with Wired where Eben Upton mentioned Raspberry Pi 3 being a 3 year product. We may not see a new Pi in 2018.

Source: [http://www.wired.co.uk/article/raspberry-pi- future](http://www.wired.co.uk/article/raspberry-pi-future)</comment>


Startups that launched at Y Combinator's S18 Demo Day 2 - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/21/all-59-startups-that-launched-today-at-y-combinators-s18-demo-day-2/ <comment><USER2> There are maybe, _maybe_ 10 promising companies in the mix these past two days. YC has really lost its prestige by diluting its batches so much, IMO. There are better pathways to funding nowadays for promising startups that don't require surrendering 7% equity.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious as to your opinion on the better ways right now.

<comment><USER2> Skip the accelerator and go straight to seed funding via convertible debt. No need to give up any space on your cap table until series A, and you can probably raise more than $150k or whatever YC is giving these days.

Of course this discounts other benefits of YC, but those are arguably becoming less useful as the batches have been diluted with so many lackluster startups. At this point YC almost seems like something people do not for their startups, but for themselves. It attracts prestige collectors that are more concerned with how they look on paper than how they perform in reality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What is up with listing the pedigree of the founders? I noticed it on the demo day 1 article, also. Does being an ex-FAANG employee correlate with successfully running a startup, or is it just the easiest signal VCs have for "This person is probably smart"? It seems like a lot of YC's current model is to throw money at ex-FAANG employees with ideas.

<comment><USER5> As someone who went through YCombinator (my company failed), an Ivy-League and one of the tech giants——I can certainly say they're screwing up. To invoke Dyson, should you be investing in the frog or the bird? Let's see:

Every single company in YCombinator's portfolio these days, with rare exception seems visionless, they're single product businesses, that's why they always exit (how many went to IPO?); which is inherent with the 'people they invest in'. What is the intersection of characters of the founders of Microsoft and Apple, of Bill Gates and Paul Allen compared to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak? One was an idea man, whose credentials or lack there of allowed him to be, and partly the predisposition for the former to be the case, a subversive generalist; the other was a technical specialist who spent much time focusing on the intricacies of engineering. Who do you think will have a better idea? The individual who did everything right because he was told it was right or the man who didn't do everything right because he tried to trust himself? The latter's neglecting of extreme specialization along with making his own choices, which forbid him from certain credentials of supposed proof of success, gave him the time to explore more areas than the exhausted specialist. As a specialist I can tell you my ideas suck, I haven't been able to understand the big picture yet because I've spent all my time thinking in terms of these small technical details that don't allow for creativity. I'm a frog, that's why my company failed.

The specialist chose problems because he was told to do so, he never had time to exercise this broad judgement, while it's the opposite for the apparently less successful generalist. Who would be more likely to correctly identify a market niche in an overall anthropological system, the frog or the bird respectively?

Regardless, given that this is controversial, should a VC really be investing in people over the quality of the business? Whatever happened to finding people who work smart not hard? Are VC's so inept that they can't trust themselves on potential businesses and instead are forced to trust institutional credentials which signal the exact opposite of a capability for original rigorous, creatively destructive, thought?

The portfolio of YCombinator actually sucks. They invest in products that almost always exit and get bought for their single product, they all sell because they have no vision. Those products are almost always shut down eventually too: they're just bought for insurance purposes of potential disruption from the same VC delusion. Who doesn't sell? The people who have vision, the people who don't have the credentials like the founders of Stripe.

Whatever happened to investing in the Goddards, the Newtons, the Wrights, the Pitts, the Edisons's, the Jobs, the Rockfellers, the Jack Mas, and the Cubans of the world? And let me tell you, you'll reject these people, everyone will, but they're use to it——that's why they become so great. They'll find a way to make the next Fortune 500 company without you.

<comment><USER5> Just imagine if public equities were invested with this VC/YC approach. Our economy would be dead—imagine Blankfein boasting, "who cares about potential for future revenue, the CEO and his minions went to Harvard". Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffet, et al. all invest without a single care for the credentials of the education of the top 10 executives. Buffet invested in the Korean stock market without understanding a lick of Korean.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can't help but wonder what would happen if YC and all its influence was to be focused on only a bunch of startups per year doing truly far fetched things - namely space, biotech, finance, robotics, computing and VR. Is focusing on social networks for grandkids, instant food, the 50th sticker app and countless B2B products truly worth it when it could be directed towards the former? Who could possibly, genuinely want to work at such places by the way (I mean, for anything else but money)?

As for this year, I'm extremely pleased to see so many startup trying to replace meat and dairy. Ditto for aerospace.

<comment><USER7> I get the point you're tryin to make, but, then again, who are we to judge what is and is not worthy, especially this early? A lot of "unworthy" things have been extremely value to us as a society in hindsight, let alone things that have stemmed from them.

> countless B2B products truly worth it?

"B2B" is a very vague and extremely overarching term. Computers, internet, and cell phones were all, at one point, very much "B2B".

> Who could possibly, genuinely want to work at such places?

For starters, I can imagine some people would fancy having a large impact on the world and the subsequent 10-12 figures attached to their name from all the value they created. Microsoft was "B2B", Amazon was an online bookstore (some people would imagine "instant food" in a category close to that), etc. It can be hard for many to see the value of something at its origin and not be able to see how that would shape a society, let alone an exponentially changing one. I think Peter Thiel would call some of these things "secrets".

<comment><USER6> Microsoft owns the end user experience. I'd say it's as much B2C as it is B2B.

Being able to purchase any book (any knowledge) it's amazing. Definitely not even close to instant food.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There are so many startups that are getting funded by YC of which "I had the idea (first)". Of course I could think of the idea but this truly shows that the nitty gritty part is actually building the dream instead of coming up with an idea. On the bright side, if you ever find one of your own ideas or a derivative thereof being funded try to see it as market validation and get to work!

<comment><USER9> There's one startup on the list where I've had the idea, done some non-trivial work towards it in very garage-ey conditions, and applied to yc for it, and failed to get in. Still looking for funding. Oh well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can barely read a list of 60 new start-ups without melting my mind. The names and value props turn into soup after about 20. I can't imagine being there, making decisions about all 60 and then coming back repeating for a second day!

Does demo day work for the audience?

<comment><USER11> Demo day is i guess spread across a couple of weeks ?

> making decisions about all 60

Numbers game for them now ?

<comment><USER12> It's back to back days...back to back to back if you count Alumni Demo Day where all startups go in one day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Anima seems really cool and ambitious; modernizing design <-> code seems like an obvious necessity and next step to modernize workflows in the front-end.

My prediction would be that, if successful, this would empower designers and commoditize front end developers (or optimistically, let them focus on more complex logic)

Good luck to the team.

<comment><USER14> Anima does seem really great. As a front-end dev seeing this stuff makes me happy and slightly anxious for the future. On one hand, styling basic marketing sites manually is boring and I would happily use this if it fits easily into my work flow. On the other, I hope it doesn't start making complex React apps soon or I'm in trouble :)

<comment><USER15> Not sure if you're just starting your career or not, but every time i meet a freshly graduated junior that tell me he's a "x developer" where X is a technology, i make a point telling him "no you're not, you're a developper, period. Don't think of yourself as being stuck to a given tech or you'll be in trouble pretty soon".

<comment><USER14> That's good advice. I've worked up and down the stack but recently have had great success in marketing myself as a front-end dev. You're right though, I shouldn't get stuck in that mindset. Thanks for the reminder :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There are some cringe worthy ones, but also a couple which I think are suprisingly good. I think ShopWith is brilliant (although I expect HN is not the audience to discuss this with).

<comment><USER17> Apps like ShopWith are a good idea. However, what's going to break it is the network effect.

For them to be found, the influencers on whatever medium they are on, be it YouTube, Steemit, D-Tube, BitChute, YouNow, etc, etc then need to tell their audience to install another app and find them on there to purchase "stuff".

It's this extra few steps that limit engagement and incur huge drop-offs. Besides, with YouTube now adding in built in stores and Patreon like services. It makes it easier for influencers on there to stick with YouTube. For the other platforms that I mention, once they start doing the same. Well, the days of ShopWith would be numbered.

Finally, will ShopWith fall fowl of the same problems as Busker.co as they were forced to pay a Google/Apple Tax on purchases through the app and this lead them to close. Having not used the app, I don't know if any purchases then redirect to a webpage to do the purchase rather than on the app. Again, an issue which may cause drop-off points. As genZ may just wish to push their thumb rather than having to fill in a form, which may be a drag.

Disclaimer: I'm in the Ecommerce space and I think of this stuff down to a minute detail. I know all the different verticals and competitors in the space and what they are doing. I don't think I would have accepted them as the next 3 years are going to be very interesting and I don't think they will survive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> 64-x jumped out at me as having George Church as one of the co-founders; I've read his 'Regenesis' book and it's a good detailed read.

</comment><comment><USER19> Monetizing game modding?! Nooo

<comment><USER20> That's what Roblox is basically already doing. Except it's more like "create your own game from these blocks" kind of thing, the content there seems to be of remixing lot of existing ideas and concepts.

The monetization apparently works there:

[https://venturebeat.com/2017/07/21/the-deanbeat-robloxs- kid-...](https://venturebeat.com/2017/07/21/the-deanbeat-robloxs-kid- developers-make-enough-robucks-to-pay-for-college/)

<comment><USER21> Get Free Robux codes : [http://robuxcodes.ml](http://robuxcodes.ml)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm not in SV, and very much outside the startup community in the rest of the world these days, especially since I no longer work in a coworking space.

I have to say, some of these legitimately look like parodies, like something out of the Silicon Valley TV show. Emojer cannot be a legitimate company with real funding. It just can't.

<comment><USER23> _Emojer cannot be a legitimate company with real funding._

There's a very clear exit route to selling to a phone manufacturer that wants to add more "fun" functionality to its camera app..

<comment><USER24> I honestly wish to have the skills of people who pitched and found investment for Emojer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Get Free Robux codes : [http://robuxcodes.ml](http://robuxcodes.ml)

</comment><comment><USER25> I have been reading YC lists for so many years. And this list has set a record for number of facepalms. Companies like Papa are stuff of nightmares. While others like AnchorUSD, SparkSwap etc seem like an attempt to ride a wave which was been gone for long.

<comment><USER26> I think Papa solves a legit need. By the time we (ie millennials) are old, we'll be so damn connected, hopefully loneliness will be low. But between now and 30 years from now, there are millions of seniors suffering from loneliness, and I think Papa could help with the problem. I've definitely thought about this exact idea before.

<comment><USER27> it's attempting to use technology to solve a social problem - that we don't value family or community any more. The root problem is that people just shove their parents in a home as soon as they get old, and don't bother to visit them.

<comment><USER28> Using technology to solve a social problem is usually cheaper and more effective than other ways of trying to solve it.

<comment><USER27> cheaper? yes. easier to approach? yes. More effective? hell no. Technical solutions to social problems are papering over cracks in our society at best. They trick us into thinking the problem is "solved" where we've just hidden the problem from view. Do you think you can really solve the loneliness problem for seniors by setting up a skype chat with a complete- or near- stranger? There's no depth to that relationship, no intimacy or realness, it's just more superficial social interaction. People need more than just a social check-in with random college students to feel fulfilled.

volunteering to visit older people is already a thing. Yet loneliness in seniors continues to be a problem. Perhaps the direction we're taking as a society is wholly wrong? It's hardly the only social symptom.

<comment><USER28> > Do you think you can really solve the loneliness problem for seniors by > setting up a skype chat with a complete- or near-stranger?

I think there's a better chance of solving it with that than by looking at "the direction we're taking as a society". (Note I'm not saying a good chance)

> There's no depth to that relationship, no intimacy or realness, it's just > more superficial social interaction.

What does that even mean?

<comment><USER27> > I think there's a better chance of solving it with that than by looking at > "the direction we're taking as a society". (Note I'm not saying a good > chance)

as I say, we can use tech to paper over the cracks. That's better than nothing, but it's not a great solution. We don't really have a way to solve societal issues yet.

> What does that even mean?

Do you think superficial social interactions relieve loneliness? Think casual bullshitting/small talk at work, on facebook, and so on. In my experience, the thing that takes away loneliness is real interaction with people you're close with. Talking about real issues that matter to you. It's basically what therapy is a substitute for. Do you think senior citizens talking to college students is going to provide this kind of deeply personal interaction, or something more superficial? I suspect the latter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I am curious what it is exactly the process of this Demo Day?

Is the normal flow: pitching for a couple of minutes, then Q&A and then at the final day a decision?

If someone who participated could share, that will be great!

<comment><USER30> There is a FAQ at: [https://www.ycombinator.com/demoday/faq/](https://www.ycombinator.com/demoday/faq/)

Each startup gives a two to three minute pitch with slides, one pitch after another. No questions. They have 15 to 30 minute breaks every 20 pitches or so.

Investors can express interest via a web app, and meetings are set for later. It is also possible to talk to founders during the breaks and in the hallway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Titan sounds interesting, but I feel like the value they provide is dubious for the fee (1% of AUM!) they charge.

</comment><comment><USER32> Frankly I've found both days completely underwhelming and the only companies that have even a hope of approaching unicorn territory are the Pharma startups and even then they don't seem terribly groundbreaking.

YC has gotten stale.

</comment><comment><USER33> In depth analysis here: [https://twitter.com/pinboard/status/1031952446795522048](https://twitter.com/pinboard/status/1031952446795522048)

<comment><USER24> I wouldn't call that tweetstorm "deep analysis". It's just pinboard arguing about other people's startups, meanwhile its own search doesn't function properly.

<comment><USER33> More like Pinboard making fun of YC. Obviously, I didn't really mean it was deep analysis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Great but no chance!

</comment><comment><USER35> Click link, ctrl-f "robot" or "autonomy"

:(

</comment><comment><USER36>
       According to Ixora, major film studios produce 100 blockbuster
       films each year that feature than 1,000 CGI shots —
       each costing them roughly $10,000 a pop

English is not my mother tongue, does "a pop" mean each second ? Anyway USD/(second of VFX) is a bad metric. Curious about the startup though, looks like they are putting the idea out there to see if people are interested because there's no information online about this

<comment><USER37> "A pop" means "each" in this case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Looks like a typo in the very third word of the post.

</comment><comment><USER39> Great batch. I'm especially impressed by the hard tech companies that produce atoms. But unfortunately, on demo day 1 there was a company that makes the world uglier and is supporting the massive ongoing trend of middle class and sometimes even upper class people imitating an aspect of the underclass. On demo day 2, there was a shamelessly partisan company that makes the world worse. It wants to get more people to support a process that, contrary to entrepreneurship, brings out the worst in people who actively engage in that process.

May the companies from the S18 batch flourish, except those two.

<comment><USER40> Which companies are you referring to?</comment></comment>


Plumbing for Joy? Be Your Own Boss - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203917304574414853397450872.html#mod=WSJ_hps_sections_careerjournal

<comment><USER2> One thing the WSJ does not notice is that the business owner category definitely self selects for success. If you are one of that majority of businesses that fail, than you soon stop being a business owner and you won't be measured by the survey. Also if you do not like being a business owner, or you are not good at it, it is a very easy category to exit.

So the survey will tend to measure at least relatively successful business owners. Nevertheless, I have noticed that business owners tend to be happier.

One thing that worried me about the survey is that it put professionals second. I do not know much about doctors but I am a lawyer and know many of them, and if we are anywhere near the second profession in terms of happiness and wellbeing there must be a lot of suffering out there.

<comment><USER3> Yeah happiness isn't something (in my short experience) that comes with the early days of starting a business/being self-employed.

Perhaps once you are established and successful sure, but until then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Told you you could get rich being a plumber.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=800487>

</comment><comment><USER5> I would never call pg wrong (especially not on HN ;), but I side with DHH on this one:

[http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1159-you-dont-have-to-sell- yo...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1159-you-dont-have-to-sell-your-company- to-have-financial-security-and-the-freedom-to-do-what-you-want)

I suppose they're both correct in their own ways, but that's a pretty good description of why I'm working on a startup right now.

<comment><USER6> Whether selling a startup is a good idea or not is really different for each and every startup. Some good ideas would probably be youtube/twitter, some bad ideas would be more along the lines of facebook, skype(especially considering market but you can't go wrong with pricetag so probably better they did). In the end though it comes down to weighing price to what you value.

I'm gonna say I must belong to the don't mess up parentheses for smilies group (seriously ;)) I prefer Aliens.</comment></comment>


Ask YC:  Why not release your email statistics involving strangers to the public to reduce spam/uninteresting email to you? - <AUTHOR>

The idea here is to release the topics of emails from strangers as well as whether or not you generally liked emails on those topics.
This should serve as a guide for others to determine whom to email about various things.
For example, if you want to talk to someone about topic X, you can perform a search to see people who generally liked emails on that topic from strangers. <comment><USER2> While it's a good idea in theory, it would ultimately fail if we tried to apply it to reality. Think about it. Ignoring the fact that we are releasing personal information (no matter how trivial), attached to our email address, how often do you personally recieve spam that is useful or interesting to you? If the answer to that question was anything other than "never", guess what? It wasn't spam. Spam emails are mass emails that generally want you to click on their link. This will most likely direct you to their site, ask you to complete other offers, populate your screen with popups, etc etc etc. Perhaps some people like completing 5 offers which cost them X amount of money, in order to recieve an Xbox six months later. Perhaps some people like being asked if their breasts need to be twice as big. Perhaps some people like their computer crashing repeatedly because of a virus they've infected their computer with by opening an email, going through a link, or downloading an attachment. Personally, I am none of these people. Spam is classified as such for a reason. They are emails that we don't want, and don't ask for, the internet version of junk mail--only without the tiny bit of irritation that comes with getting the latter, thinking of all the better things someone could have done with the millions spent sending out glossy paper that immediately goes in the trash. Either way, regardless of whether or not I personally like spam emails, someone has already implemented the idea of sending people advertising emails based on what they like: mailing lists.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not referring to that kind of email, but rather, I'm referring to serious emails that are sent only to a few people. You may not like receiving all such email, especially if you get lots of email.

Some people are more likely to respond to email from strangers on various topics than others. This is useful knowledge for everyone to know.

<comment><USER3> It's also useful knowledge for spammers. If they have a list of people who are interested in topic X, then they can craft an e-mail with a subject and body that is relevant enough to topic X that the people will be likely to click on a link in the message. The reason that spammers do not already do this is because it is too much trouble to track the topics associated with e-mail addresses and because the number of e-mail addresses easily found for a topic is too small to justify the expense of writing a custom e-mail. With your proposed service, it sounds like it would be easy to both track topic associations and retrieve large numbers of addresses.

Really, it sounds like you're trying to solve two different problems: (1) given an e-mail address, find relevant topics and (2) given a topic, find relevant e-mail addresses. A solution to either of these problems has the potential to enable spammers, if it is standardized to the point where address/topic extraction can be automated. In this regard, it's hard to beat the current system of listing your interests on your web page (which at least solves problem 1).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I saw a proposal for spam whitelisting which involved users publishing a hashed list of email addresses. This allows people to receive messages from friends of friends but without revealing your address book. To prevent the data being aggregated, each hash would include your email address in the form:

firstname.lastname@example.com:email@example.com

This prevents spammers aggregating large lists and then rainbow cracking the hashes to find valid addresses. You can also bulk the list with bogus entries to reduce spam and to increase your ego.

<comment><USER5> That's just a semi-public form of greylisting. Greylisting works fine, but a large number of spammers have definitely figured out how to get around it at this point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So, you're basically proposing that people voluntarily opt-in to a world-wide database of email address/topic-of-interest pairs?

No way. Absolutely, no f-ing way would I ever let my address get in there, and I would strongly advise against any of the users I support ever volunteering such information either.

If you're truly seeking interested parties to email about a topic, a few minutes spent on Google should let you find folks who blog, post to public mailing lists, or otherwise mark themselves online as interetsed in that area.

The only value to a fully machine-readable database of the sort you describe would be for lazy cold-calling salespeople and spammers/phishers...though the separation is really only one of degrees.</comment>


Made in NY - Why Your Startup Should Be, Too - <AUTHOR> http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130219190155-4421225-made-in-ny-why-your-startup-should-be-too

<comment><USER2> I moved to the Bay Area in 2006 seeking out the very strong labor market. When I'm not situated for going through another risky startup, I want to be floating on a deep reservoir of high-paying employers desperate for every specialty I can conceivably claim. Nothing I've read convinces me NYC has that to the same extent yet, at least not when I don't want to become a quant. If you aren't here, you're selecting against people who responded to incentives I found very compelling.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've always believed Silicon Valley to be the Mecca for entrepreneurship by an overwhelming margin, but more and more I'm seeing NYC mentioned as the next best place to start a startup, with Boston being mentioned less and less.

Thoughts?</comment>


Ask HN: Do I need to setup a business for my side project? - <AUTHOR> Been looking at https://stripe.com/atlas<p>Seems easy enough, but was wondering when is the appropriate time to actually set up a business? <comment><USER2> First, if you sell software for money, you have a business.

What you're really asking is "when should I setup complicated legal structure to represent my business"?

Are you making money? If not, then you don't need complicated legal structure.

Are you making a lot of money? If not, then you probably don't need complicated legal structure.

Even if you make a lot of money but are a solo owner, they you don't need complicated legal structure.

Note "need" vs. "want". There are "want" reasons to setup complicated legal structure even if there's no "need" reason.

I've been selling software under DBA (sole proprietorship) because setting up and maintaining an LLC (which is the simplest/cheapest business structure) is an expense and time sink.

DBA allows me to sell under a fictitious name (e.g. "Awesome Software" vs. using my name like "John Doe") but is trivial to establish and very cheap.

So when do you need establish a business structure?

Do you have partners? Investors? Will hire people? Your accountant told you can save on taxes if you setup LLC or S-Corp?

Those are good reasons to setup complicated legal structure.</comment>


Password Live - <AUTHOR> http://passwordlive.github.io <comment><USER2> Nice one. I always found password managers a bit annoying to use, so this is a great alternative

<comment><USER3> The idea is admirable, but it's a really bad alternative to having unique, random passwords for each site. With this, it's trivial to recover all other passwords if you know just one of them.

<comment><USER4> As opposed to a password manager, where it's trivial to know every password within if you know the master password?

<comment><USER3> Well, the difference is that if I compromise any of the sites you use, I now know all your passwords. If I compromise any of the sites you use when you use a password manager properly, I'll only know one password that'll be fairly useless to me.

<comment><USER4> Compromising one of these passwords does not at all mean that all the other passwords are compromised. You can't figure out the original master password from a hashed, compromised password.

<comment><USER3> Yes, you can. To understand why, compare:

This:

      'facebook' + 'mypassword'
      'twitter' + 'mypassword'
      'foursquare' + 'mypassword'

Password manager with unique passwords:

      'mSX32ZyKZXptY3E'
      '33RiKbc3n6sA6IY'
      '4kGzFtWDd0rnti6'

All I have to do is figure out what you named the site that I compromised, then do exactly what I'd usually do to recover your password, and, voila, I can now access all sites you use it for. Compare this to the password manager example where each password has been generated at random--one password communicates no information whatsoever about the other.

<comment><USER4> Ok, so you know that "facebook" is part of the original hash. Not following how you can also derive "mypassword" from it. If you have a good strong master password, rainbow tables won't be able to crack the hash.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Games.directory – A new gaming community for avid gamers - <AUTHOR> http://games.directory <comment><AUTHOR> Evening humans,

Over the last few months I've been working on a web app which allows you, among others, to connect your PlayStation Network, Xbox Live and Steam accounts and sync your games, achievements, progress and more. Although trophy/achievement sync is not Live yet, you can sync your games and your trophy/achievements will sync automatically when they're ready.

games.directory is currently in Alpha and I'm hoping a BETA will be ready by the end of May. There is a lot more information on the website.

Looking forward to see you there.</comment>


Run Django tests in docker environment from emacs using .dir-locals.el - <AUTHOR> https://grimeywebsites.com/#/snippets/elisp?id=run-django-tests-in-docker-environment-from-emacs-using-dir-localsel <comment><AUTHOR> [http://archive.is/QL2rh](http://archive.is/QL2rh) in case my home server can't handle it, or you're browser doesn't support js.</comment>


Php-o: metaprogramming PHP to give it a saner API - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jsebrech/php-o <comment><USER2> Interesting concept, the chainable object specially showcases well what PHP is missing by neglecting data types as objects. Makes you wonder whether it could be simplified further though; ie, combining s(), a(), o() and c() into a single one letter function that does it all, jQuery style. I think it'd have a better chance of adoption that way.

<comment><USER3> You wouldn't be able to do the JSON stuff and the string wrapping with a single function, but otherwise that could be a good idea.

<comment><USER2> Why not? You could test if the string is valid json, and if it is do object wrapping, otherwise do string wrapping. This method is used often in jQuery, figuring out what to do depending on what you pass to it. EDIT: and I guess a second, optional argument to force a specific data type could be added for those rare cases where you have a json string and you want to run string functions on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a PHP programmer the inconsistency of the string functions is not only bothersome, it's embarrassing. This seems like an interesting fix for that.

<comment><USER5> This doesn't fix that, it just makes it worse.

 _This is an experiment in meta-programming PHP to give it a saner API._

Sweet.

 _s() turns all the standard string functions into methods with identical behavior:

s($haystack)->pos($needle)_

OK. Cool. Sounds good.

 _- >preg_replace(), ->in_array()_

Yep. Awesome.

 _The s() function also implements JavaScript's string API:

->charAt(), ->indexOf(), ->lastIndexOf()_

...

......

.........

<comment><AUTHOR> The javascript API is there because it's the only one I can keep remembering, I always forget the exact PHP functions and have to keep the php docs open. There also didn't seem to be any naming collisions, so it is harmless. Having developed some test and demo code on top of it, I've come to realize it feels too alien inside of PHP to actually use, so that part is probably going away.

<comment><USER5> JavaScript uses camelCase; the C functions use_underscores. Mixing and matching the two has been a complaint about the entire PHP library for a long time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The biggest draw card here is the multibyte string handling by default and sanitization of argument ordering in string and array functions.

The object stuff, kind of started to lose me. The chainables is cool but for me I could have stopped reading at s() and a() and been happy.

I think it'll definitely be worth experimenting with even if just for those two things, thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER7> Aside from anything else, the function call and object instantiation overhead of this library is insane.

The string comparison function provided as an example is _4 times slower_ than the code it's based upon, and 3 times slower than a completely equivalent multibyte-aware version.

<comment><USER2> Libraries like this are bound to introduce overhead, but in the javascript world you don't hear many people complain about the overhead of jQuery, and it is there. I think for most people a string comparison 4 times slower won't mean much. That's not to say it's "okay" to be slow, just saying it may not be big for those not pushing PHP to its boundaries. In fact last time I checked Symfony and Zend had a tremendous impact in terms of overhead, but you (almost) never hear negative comments on them. Heck, even something OOP is slower than the same thing written in procedural style in PHP.

<comment><USER7> The example I'm talking about is the first non-trivial example in the readme - 34 lines of believable code, not an individual function of the library.

The library is used about once every 3.5 lines, which feels less dense than most jQuery code I see, but that whole function runs 3 times slower than the plain MB-aware equivalent.

Some of the library functions might be implemented inefficiently but from a quick glance they're nearly all very thin wrappers.

Overhead from libraries like Symfony and ZF is quite acceptable since they offer much higher level features which you'd have to code yourself otherwise.

However making all your code (excluding I/O) run up to 3 times slower, just to add some syntactic sugar, is insane.

<comment><USER8> What causes the overhead? Is there a way to get the sugar without the calories?

<comment><USER7> A trivial example:

      $len = mb_strlen("wtf");
        # call function mb_strlen

      $len = s("wtf")->len();
        # call function s
          # allocate string object
          # instantiate string object
          # call string ctor
            # set property
        # call method len
            # get property
          # call function mb_strlen
        # destroy object

There's no way to use a syntax like this without either massive overhead, or massive changes in the engine.

There is a somewhat similar experimental project - <https://github.com/nikic/scalar_objects> \- but that's not meant for real world use either.

Personally I think the language, despite its flaws, does its job fine. I don't think it needs turning into Javascript-with-sigils.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like the three one-letter functions and their effects. It's not entirely unlike how jQuery spices up DOM elements, and feels natural that way.

Then, suddenly, however, there came a validation engine with annotations and reflection and whatnot. Huh? Isn't that a whole different thing? Why is this bundled with my nice little jQuery-for-PHP-scalars? It's not just that it feels like it's a different problem entirely and thus should be separate, the code _feels_ different. Like it has a different philosophy behind it.

It looks pretty nice, but why can't I use the validation engine without PHP-o? Or the other way around?

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. It's called an experiment for something. I'm going to productize it by separating it in the way that you propose. The validator API was ripped straight out of java, i'll see about normalizing its style.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think this type of approach will never stick with PHP community (at least with the "serious" developers).

This hurts so many principles and directions that PHP community is FINALLY diving into, like SOLID and stuff. Accepting simple things like strings are not objects is the way to improve how PHP devs build their stuff and start focusing on important things like defining de-facto libraries and joining forces to make them the best and most flexible available.

Don't get me wrong, the idea is pretty good (even if it's a simple try to mask procedural PHP functions)... but it seems like a swiss knife in the end.

<comment><USER11> I don't think this is a project that I would see being used anywhere, but I do think it introduces an interesting idea for the language's evolution. I am glad to see it here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks neat. Although I doubt that "hacks" like this will become popular among PHP users any time soon, a proliferation of similar hacks might give the PHP core devs some ideas about how to clean up the language in the next few major versions. PHP could introduce a native object-oriented way to interact with built-in types in PHP 6, just like they did with SPL in PHP 5. Then, in PHP 7, they would deprecate the old functions, and in PHP 8, finally remove them in favor of the new style. After all, new major versions are for backwards- incompatible changes, right? The whole cycle might take a decade, but it would be worth it.

Anyway, here are some suggestions.

1\. "echo 'error message' and exit" isn't a particularly elegant solution, and in fact symbolizes everything that is wrong with PHP. What about throwing an exception instead?

2\. The ability to specify the charset at object creation and convert to another charset later would be quite helpful, because nobody can remember all those mbstring functions. s('str', 'EUC-KR')->convert('UTF-8') maybe?

3\. Why is O.php checking whether magic quotes are enabled? Since you're not even touching GET/POST variables, magic quotes have nothing to do with your library. Are you going to throw an error every time you discover suboptimal settings in the user's PHP environment?

4\. Don't modify session settings until the user calls session_start(). They might not want to use your session handling functions, only your string and array functions. Simply including the script should have as few side effects as possible. This helps integration with existing apps.

5\. Some of the methods that I'd really love to see in the string class are startsWith(), endsWith(), and contains(), copied straight from .NET. It sucks that I have to do strpos() === FALSE every time I want to check whether a string contains another string, or !strncmp($a, $b, strlen($a)) every time I want to check whether a string starts with another string.

6\. While we're trying to clean up PHP's API, why not merge the case-sensitive and case-insensitive versions of string functions into a single method with an optional flag? This is another area where the API is terribly inconsistent, what with 'i's thrown in at random places and sometimes even 'case' to denote the _case-insensitive_ version.

EDIT: Related to 5 and 6, I wrote a similar library back in 2010 for fun, which I put online just now [1]. It doesn't use the clever iterator interface that you incorporated into your library, but I do think that my method names make more sense.

[1] <https://gist.github.com/kijin/4736544>

<comment><USER13> This is probably overly cynical of me, but I feel like a lot of what's keeping PHP alive at this point is inertia, and if some major version ahead required that literally every standard library call be differently expressed (and by consequence, every PHP app essentially be rewritten), the case for continuing to use the language would get weaker than I think it already is. At that point, why not jump ship for something more powerful/performant/whatever?

<comment><USER12> Large code bases are rarely rewritten from scratch. They evolve over many years, and over time, old code gets replaced with new code, piece by piece. If a language evolves over a similarly long time span (10 years or more), and new features are adopted gradually, I don't see why a backward-incompatible change would require anything more than the usual amount of change when the last of the old code is retired. Call it inertia if you want, but this looks to me to be a good thing if you have a large code base to maintain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Having to go through the pain of the almost arcane APIs everyday, I appreciate this project and the author. Looks neat.

</comment><comment><USER15> the sanest thing ive seen about php in a long time.

<comment><USER16> Maybe, but if several people develop several APIs like this, it will mostly make everyone's lives more difficult. This should be a part of the standard distribution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> i have something similar on the back-burner that i haven't pushed public yet, but only a single, one-letter function like jquery that takes any type. there are soooooo many functions to abstract. even though most are one-liners, i ran out of steam :)

certainly not something to use all the time, especially in perf-oriented code, but it's nice sugar.

</comment><comment><USER18> Cool, love it - the multi-byte support and baked-in validation is awesome, going to play around with this.

</comment><comment><USER19> This library looks like it will make my life a lot easier. Many thanks, Joeri!

</comment><comment><USER20> *facepalm

<comment><USER21> It kind of resembles of what a wildly popular javascript lib does isn't it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> How good is PHP? I was thinking about peer review the other day, and how one measures peer review. One of the most important metrics is the number of citations an article acquires. If an article is published and, over the next 20 years, is only cited 3 times, we can say that it failed to influence its field, but if an article accumulates 1,000 citations, we can say that it definitely had some impact.

Then I thought about PHP, and how it compared with other languages. I went to Google and started searching:

influenced by gosling java

influenced by hickey clojure

influenced by matz ruby

influenced by Stroustrup C++

influenced by larry wall perl

and then finally:

influenced by lerdorf php

You look through some of those links and you notice a difference. A lot of people write about the brilliant things that have been said by Gosling and Hickey and Matz and Larry Wall and Stroustrup but no one ever cites Ramus Lerdorf as an inspiration, nor does anyone seem to think he has ever said anything especially brilliant or insightful. I'm sure if you dig you might find exceptions, but as a rough metric of who has influenced who, I think this reveals something important about how computer programmers perceive the quality of PHP and one of its core contributors.

(You could counter-argue that PHP has several core contributors, in which case, I would counter-counter-argue by asking that you please suggest a core contributor to PHP who is quoted with the same admiration expressed for the other architects that I've listed here.)

<comment><USER23> Symfony2 gets quite a bit of love here on HN... as much love as anything PHP- related can get.

Its creator, Fabien Potencier, is usually cited as someone bringing sanity and quality to the PHP world.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Bug – "distributed" issue tracking tool using plaintext files and git - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/driusan/bug <comment><AUTHOR> This is something I threw together that I've been finding pretty useful in the last couple days, and I figure other people might be interested in trying out. It's a tool to treat an "issues/" directory on the filesystem as an issue tracker, which can be tracked via git (or any other source control) and viewed/edited from the command line with the "bug" tool.

I've been using it as a lightweight "What do I have left to do on this branch?" tool that fits into my workflow without having to go to an external service (ie. Redmine) or leave the terminal. The fact that it's context sensitive (it just looks for the nearest issues/ directory) means I can just do a "bug list" to get an instant list of outstanding tasks in whatever I happen to be working on whenever I switch branches or get interupted and need to remember where I was.

(I wanted to call it "context-sensitive," which is more accurate, in the title, but HN said the title was too long, so it became "distributed," since anything in git is "distributed".)

</comment><comment><USER2> Is there something this does that bugseverywhere doesn't?

<comment><AUTHOR> The bugseverywhere web page currently tells you to clone from a broken gitorious URL.. so.. installs?

The main difference is the design. BE keeps a hidden directory where everything is referenced by hash, which means you need to take the time to set up BE and have the client installed to use it. This is based on human readable file and directory names and isn't concerned with title collisions, which means that if you're stuck you can manage your issues with ls and cat (and mkdir, I guess.)

BE is probably more powerful and mature, but this is lighter weight, has no dependencies, and I find easier to use (possibly because I wrote it.)

<comment><USER2> Yeah, it's a shame about the BE site. They've moved to [https://gitlab.com/bugseverywhere/bugseverywhere](https://gitlab.com/bugseverywhere/bugseverywhere) for reference.

I do like your approach actually, particularly as it could be easily expanded a little, e.g. to use markdown (or similar) content and present a web view (aka Gollum for Bugs).

Any chance you could be convinced to add support for Mercurial? :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing that out! I thought the project was dead. I was really interested in it when it came out and disappointed that it didn't seem to go anywhere, but I think part of the problem is that it was too complicated to use and it was either all in or nothing (either the whole team uses BE, or no one is going to..)

So my approach is sort of an attempt to simplify things by going back to how an organized person might have tracked their issues in 1970 before project management software or source control, and then adding a couple hooks for SCM. "bug" is just a tool to streamline it without a lot of pushd/cd/popd.

Which means that you can use all of the commands except purge and commit in Mercurial, and then manually commit the issues directory (I think "hg commit $(bug pwd)" should work for commit, but "hg purge" seems to require an extension and not be built into the base install.) I'm not opposed to supporting hg (or anything else) as a first class SCM, except that I don't use it and wouldn't know if things were working as expected.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Security-Minded Container Engine by CoreOS: rkt Hits 1.0 - <AUTHOR> https://coreos.com/blog/rkt-hits-1.0.html <comment><USER2> > "Despite the importance of a shared standard, after six months of effort the > Open Container Initiative (OCI) body has yet to decide whether it should or > should not develop and standardize an image format. Today, the primary focus > of the OCI community is creating standards for the container runtime > environment, rather than the container image. Specs for container runtime > features are also a worthy discussion, but we think there is a more urgent > need – and a more open, industry-wide upside – for a standard container > image specification."

I haven't been following the OCI at all, but could somebody shed some light as to why the runtime is the most important part to standardize? Also, any insight as to whether or not the container image format should be standardized?

<comment><USER3> I want to assume good faith, but OCI is starting to look like standard- washing. What good is runC if you have to use docker pull to download images first?

<comment><USER4> runc doesnt use docker format containers, you just provide a filesystem. You can store your containers for runc by curling a tarfile if you like.

<comment><USER3> That isn't adequate. The reason LXC languished and Docker took off is because of immutable images, layers, Dockerfiles, and push/pull. If OCI has none of those then it is pointless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Systemd-approved, nonetheless?

"I believe in the rkt model," said Lennart Poettering, systemd lead developer. "Integrating container and service management, so that there's a 1:1 mapping between containers and host services is an excellent idea. Resource management, introspection, life-cycle management of containers and services – all that tightly integrated with the OS; that's how a container manager should be designed."

</comment><comment><USER6> I think we're seeing a shift in focus in the container world from container runtimes such as Docker, to container orchestration systems such as Kubernetes. At some point the container runtime becomes just an implementation detail.

Unless Docker finds a way of moving up the stack they are going to have a hard time defending their current valuation. Their current efforts provides close to zero monetizable value.

<comment><USER3> If only Docker was working on orchestration... oh hey Swarm/Compose, I didn't see you over there.

<comment><USER7> I'm pretty sure that comparing Swarm/Compose's feature set to Kubernetes would yield large gap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Congratulations to CoreOS and the rkt team. I've been waiting for this to really dig into rkt, as I am a big fan of how CoreOS has been approaching this project, and eager for a container system that is _not_ Docker.

</comment><comment><USER9> Security is good, but it isn't a big problem for my current local container apps. However, I've found Docker clumsy in various areas. Does this improve on the design any?

Also, is there a PPA planned for Ubuntu, or plans to get it into Debian soon, now that it has reached 1.0?

<comment><USER10> I can only speak for myself, but for me it does, by forcing you to do stuff differently.

Eventually you realise that Dockerfiles are fine and dandy, but this mechanism isn't really needed and it can be an obstacle. You realise that a good package manager is your real friend. So now I use wonderful xbps-install from Void Linux to create a complete rootfs + actool to make an ACI file and that's it. A basic webserver can work as a repo for your xbps packages and your ACI images. No need to use Docker Hub or Quay, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If I'm developing on OS X, would it still be possible to use rkt?

How are the tools for managing your rkt deployments? Since Hashicorp supports it, I'm starting to think that I would be better off using their tooling to abstract myself from the specific container implementation.

<comment><USER6> You can use kubernetes to deploy rkt containers.

<comment><USER12> more like, "you will be able to", its not released yet. but lots of active work.

<comment><USER13> rkt support in k8s has been in for a while. See: [http://kubernetes.io/v1.1/docs/admin/kubelet.html](http://kubernetes.io/v1.1/docs/admin/kubelet.html) (search for "rkt") and [https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/tree/master/docs/ge...](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/tree/master/docs/getting- started-guides/rkt).

<comment><USER12> yes, support exists today, its just not complete, i.e. its close but not completely feature parity with docker as the runtime. When it does get there we will all be happy.

So I should have been more clear, you can specify rkt today, but many things wont work, a lot of things have improved for the upcoming 1.2 k8s release but still not perfect. hence what I meant by "released", something that is can be viewed as a complete replacement for the docker runtime.

<comment><USER14> Care to elaborate whats missing?

<comment><USER15> A lot of the remaining work is being tracked at [https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/8262](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/8262) and [https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues?q=is%3Aopen+...](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3Adependency%2Frkt)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> OT: Is rkt pronounced 'are kay tee'?

<comment><USER17> It says 'rock it' in the README [1].

[1]: [https://github.com/coreos/rkt](https://github.com/coreos/rkt)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Any plans on supporting rkt for ARM? That would be a killer feature for me :)

<comment><USER19> >Huawei has contributed to rkt in multiple ways, both with a container registry and by providing ARM support.

It looks like it already supports a bunch of different ARM targets[0].

[0]: [https://github.com/appc/spec/blob/3972f6a1b657f38e30100d2a7e...](https://github.com/appc/spec/blob/3972f6a1b657f38e30100d2a7ef377cc8690c8db/schema/types/labels.go#L23-L27)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Good to see they are confident enough to cut a 1.0 release. We have been happily mixing the cgroup and kvm/Clear Containers runtimes for a for a couple of months now.

</comment><comment><USER21> TPM support caught my eye. Brushing off the controversy surrounding EFI secure boot, the TPM is the under-appreciated "Secure Element" in business laptops and high end servers.

</comment><comment><USER22> Open source project hitting 1.0 - truly breaking news, especially when looking at all these JavaScript libraries.</comment>


'Babylon 5' is great, so why does it look so bad? - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2018/06/22/babylon-5-digital-video-quality/ <comment><USER2> While Babylon 5 is certainly ambitious, and it has some great moments it was always pretty uneven.</comment>


Dropbox: DMCA Takedown in Personal Folders - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/s3avwcB.png

<comment><USER2> Link to the original tweet. He goes on to explain that the folder is private, but had a shared link. Bit strange?

[https://twitter.com/darrellwhitelaw/status/45009647606079488...](https://twitter.com/darrellwhitelaw/status/450096476060794880)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

I had the same issue some weeks ago but did not manage to create a screenshot back then …

You can provide links to private files, I do it all the time. On the other hand, I do not rely on Dropbox, I use it for temporary storage and as a glorified temp folder only.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I dropped Dropbox completely two years ago because I considered them to be insecure and unsafe. (Like all the rest of cloud storage.)

I have since set up my own personal cloud. It's more secure and nobody else has any control over it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you sure that your own setup is more secure? Dropbox might be the wrong comparison but there are without any doubt cloud storage services with reasonable security … the necessary firewall configuration alone – you need a DMZ if you want to host your own server at home – can be quite challenging if you have no experience in the field.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do you have any more details on this? When did this happen?

<comment><AUTHOR> See [https://twitter.com/darrellwhitelaw/status/45009647606079488...](https://twitter.com/darrellwhitelaw/status/450096476060794880) (from @nickjackson above).

It happened to me as well but I didn't manage to create a screenshot back then. Dropbox should be blamed, however, as an American company, there's no way around the DMCA I guess.</comment></comment>


I'm a DWP call handler and have no time to care about your disability claim - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/public-leaders-network/2016/aug/20/work-pensions-disability-claim-call-handler-benefits-dwp <comment><USER2> Welcome to the world of call centers, they were the most crushing 3 years of my existence before I finally managed to get a lucky break and land a software development job. Thankfully, all the ones I worked at also had CSAT metrics I was judged by, I may not have gotten my "bonus" (really, I just had reduced pay instead, let's be honest) but always getting high CSAT scores allowed me to have higher handle times without having the managerial fist brought down on me. It's mind-bending to think that there are places where CSAT isn't even a thing and you are measured purely on your handle time, especially for what by all means counts as a civil servant even if the job is outsourced to a third- party contractor.

<comment><USER3> Had to look the acronym up:

CSAT = Customer Satisfaction from 0% to 100% or completely dissatisfied to completely satisfied.[0]

I do not envy that job at all. Congratulations on the new job.

[0] [http://www.impactlearning.com/resources/metrics/customer- ser...](http://www.impactlearning.com/resources/metrics/customer-service- satisfaction-rate-csat/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _I have had absolutely no training in how sickness benefits work. I don't know what happens when I send a claim to be processed, so I can't answer any questions about what will happen next or when somebody will get a payment._

How about you take responsibility and actually learn what your customers want you to know and call you to find out? How can you advise your customers on things you do not know? Frankly, this work environment sounds like hell but I am not sure if it's _purely_ a managerial problem.

<comment><USER5> You have no clue what it's like. What you want them to do is NOT allowed. It is not on the script! They were not officially trained or authorized to give out such information. They would quickly be fired if they were found to be going "rogue". Most of these environments are numbers games, with robotic managers who simply spout "you're not hitting your numbers", rather than improving working conditions, employee training, or customer experience. They work for the numbers, and that is ALL that matters. Thinking outside the box is a quick way to being out of a job.</comment></comment>


Mathematicians Solve Minimum Sudoku Problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27469/ <comment><USER2> 7.100.000 hours on a 640 hexcore Xeon cluster is only 1.848 hours. That is ~6 hours a day for January-December.

I always had a suspicion that all these super powerful grids are only used to play Sudoku..

</comment><comment><USER3> "These guys have solved the problem using the tried and trusted mathematical technique of sheer brute force.

In essence these guys have examined every potential 16-clue solution for every possible Sudoku grid."

I was actually hoping for a formal solution or proof here by reading the title.

<comment><USER4> I believe that would have far-reaching implications, seeing that Sudoku has been proven to be an NP-Complete problem.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NP- complete_problems#Ga...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NP- complete_problems#Games_and_puzzles)

<comment><USER5> Proving something about a NxN grid does not have much to do with a problem being NP-complete.

For example, the fact that it is not very hard to proof that a 1x1 sudoku requires 1 clue does not prove that sudoku is not NP-complete.

<comment><USER6> Surely a 1x1 grid requires 0 clues?!

<comment><USER5> A classic off-by-one error. That is not what I was thinking of, though. A 2x2 grid requires a single clue.

A 3x3 grid requires 2 (1 and 2 across a diagonal suffices)

So, we have a sequence 0,1,2,?,?,?,?,?,17,...

I checked the OEIS, but it does not seem to contain this sequence. Does anybody know more values?

<comment> T-hawk It's not really valid to treat this as a sequence, since most side lengths don't form what we think of as a Sudoku puzzle. The side length of a true Sudoku must be a perfect square in order to create the interior boxes that are (geometrical) squares. For the counterexample, think of a 7x7 puzzle (or any prime)... how can a square box contain seven cells?

A 4x4 puzzle gives you four 2x2 boxes. The standard 9x9 puzzle gives nine 3x3 boxes. A 16x16 puzzle gives sixteen 4x4 boxes. Sudoku variations sometimes have rectangular boxes; a 6x6 puzzle can have six 2x3 boxes, or a 12x12 puzzle can have twelve 3x4 boxes. But that is a different form of constraint logic so we shouldn't expect that the minimum number of clues for these sizes would follow a recognizable sequence.

<comment><USER5> I had to check Wikipedia (which, as we all know, always is right :-)) to see that you are right. I have seen so many variations on sudoku's that I forgot what the original looked like. I was just thinking of Latin squares.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Suppose there is a unique 15-clue solution. Then add another clue by adding any number from the unique solution. The solution must still be unique (because it contains the 15 clues), so we now have a unique 16-clue solution, which is impossible.

So isn't this article missing the obvious?

<comment><USER8> I don't get where the article makes this assumption:

"It's easy to see why. A grid with 7 clues cannot have a unique answer because the two missing digits can always be interchanged in any solution."

let's say these are your 7 clues: (row 1) 123 456 7

the article suggests that IF there is a full solution with 123 456 789 then there is a full solution with 123 456 798

but what guarantees that the second (or first) of these 9 clues don't lead to an "impossible" scenario, so that only one of the two is actually possible to solve?

Maybe I am misunderstanding the article.

Turning to what you say: "Suppose there is a unique 15-clue solution. Then add another clue by adding any number from the unique solution. The solution must still be unique (because it contains the 15 clues), so we now have a unique 16-clue solution, which is impossible."

Can you elaborate on why a unique 16-clue solution is impossible?

<comment><USER9> For the first question, about why 123 456 7 doesn't have a unique solution:

Let's say there is a unique solution to 123 456 789 . In that solution, swap every 8 and 9. It's not hard to see that this will be a correct solution of 123 456 798. Therefore, 123 456 7 must have an even number of solutions.

For the second question, about why a unique 16-clue solution is impossible: that's the result mentioned in the article, with the proof that took a year to calculate.

<comment><USER8> For the first question: thank you, I didn't realize that the article meant that those two numbers are supposed to be swapped THROUGHOUT! (every occurrence in the grid, like find-and-replace). This makes sense to me. Likewise, it seems to me true that you can swap-and-replace any two numbers in any completed graph. (Really, they're just symbols, it could be turning the original numbers into A B C D E F G H I in the first step - then you can map these 1:1 to one through nine in the second step however you want) and, therefore, you could do that operation on the original clues and get a valid sudoku as well.

In other words, it seems if you see some sixes and some fives in a sudoku, you can just swap them before you solve them, getting a different, but still valid sudoku. Interesting.

For the second question, thanks. I thought your parent meant something different - that the 16-clue solution was "obviously" impossible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's interesting that we are reaching an era where we can prove things through computational brute force before coming up with an elegant proof, even if it means running computers for 12 months.

I wonder what implications this has for other mathematical complexities. Obviously it helps that Sudoku involves concepts that are very discrete... you can't really do brute force regarding the number line... but there have to be other discrete issues. (For example, every now and then I have the occasional fleeting terror that a sudden technology breakthrough will instantly render all pre-existing SSL encryption worthless.)

Back to the Sudoku, I'm also now interested in how many 17-clue solutions there are, and how many 18-clue, and if there's any sort of pattern.

</comment><comment><USER11> This article reminded me of the computer-assisted proof of the Four-colour Theorem:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem#Proof_by_com...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem#Proof_by_computer)

<comment><USER12> It reminded me of what Dr. Doron Zeilberger has been repeating ad-nauseam ( eg: <http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/Opinion36.html> ) Ultimately automated theorem provers are going to rule. Dr.Z actually takes the very radical stand of calling all paper-pencil math proofs of Paul Erdos trivial, whereas "Theorems that only computers can prove...are not quite as trivial". The fact that we have to reach out to a computer to assist in solving min- sudoko is unfortunate but at the same time, inevitable. Dr. Z mentions Four Color Theorem, Kepler's Conjecture, and Conway's Lost Cosmological Theorem as other theorems only computers can solve.

<comment><USER13> But note that the proofs for the 4-Color Theorem and this Sudoku theorem are "merely" computer-assisted. The part of reducing the Sudoku search space, for instance, seems to have been done pencil-and-paper style. What Zeilberger wants is completely automated proving.

Oh, and thanks for introducing me to Conway's Cosmological Theorem. Very interesting!

<http://mathworld.wolfram.com/LookandSaySequence.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's funny because the way I play Sudoku is often through sheer brute force as well.

<comment><USER15> In college I wrote a little Sudoku solver for an algorithms class which was more or less brute-force with backtracking (and a little intelligence about which part was the weakest and should be brute-forced first). A fun exercise, but for better or worse, I don't play Sudoku anymore. I solved it; the slowest part of getting the computer to do it for me now is the _data entry_. I've lost all motivation to do it by hand.

(Online + GPL'd: <http://random.fennecfoxen.org/webtoys/sudo/sudo.html> )

<comment><USER16> I wrote an intelligent solver (doing set elimination, etc) in Java back in high school, but couldn't get it to solve the harder puzzles. Clearly I was lacking one of the essential implications that allow you solve them manually. I actually never even considered brute forcing it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This has been posted before, but for those who haven't read it Peter Norvig has an excellent article on Sudoku solving algorithms.

<http://norvig.com/sudoku.html>

</comment><comment><USER18> Sudoku: crack for intellectuals.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm glad we've got our top minds on this.</comment>


ITT TechStars - <AUTHOR> http://www.techstars.org/site/page/pg5897.html <comment><AUTHOR> Why does it feel like this:

<http://youtube.com/watch?v=rVLiAvZ_N1w></comment>


Google and UT's 2011 AI Challenge: Ants - <AUTHOR> http://www.gareth.es/2011/11/07/google-and-uts-2011-ai-challenge-ants/

<comment><USER2> I'm pretty sure that the contest is hosted by the University of Waterloo's Computer Science Club; Google is a sponsor, UofT is definitely not a host -- <http://aichallenge.org/faq.php>

<comment><USER3> We are no longer directly connected with University of Waterloo's CSC and have never been affiliated with UofT. There are a few current and past UofW students that are still admins in the contest but also a few others that have stepped up from around the world to help put it together it.

Google is and has been our primary sponsor.

</comment></comment><comment> muuh-gnu Interestingly, the leading bot language this year seem to be Java, while last years winner, Lisp, isn't among the current top 100 entries any more.

<comment><USER4> In order to succeed on this year's contest, you need good path-finding, which you won't be able to do easily in lisp within the time limit.

<comment> wes-exp Why is lisp worse at path-finding?

<comment><USER4> Lisp isn't _worse_ at path-finding; it's _slower_ at path-finding, simply because it's slower at _everything_.

Lisp has its place; performance-critical code isn't it.

<comment><USER5> This is incorrect.

Lisp is not slower at everything.

When properly tweaked it can be pretty close to java in speed.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


VMware introduces log analytics tool - vCenter Log Insight - <AUTHOR> http://cto.vmware.com/introducing-vmware-vcenter-log-insight/

<comment><AUTHOR> I have been an engineer on the Log Insight team since prior to VMware acquisition (which happened 10 months ago -- see [http://cto.vmware.com/vmware-acquires-log-insight- technology...](http://cto.vmware.com/vmware-acquires-log-insight-technology- and-team-from-pattern-insight/)).

To make it interesting to the Hacker News crowd, I can provide some insights into how our acquisition went -- from a small startup to launching the product at a huge company with a large sales team.

Please let me know if you have any questions, comments, etc.</comment>


Browser extension to hide read links on HN? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for a extension that will be able to know what I've read and remove it from the pages of hacker news. I think I've seen this extension before but couldn't find it.<p>If there is none, I'll do the pleasure myself. <comment><AUTHOR> Searched for one hour straight now and 5 seconds after posting this thread, voila: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/iehdghlmjofgenldgf...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/iehdghlmjofgenldgfcllfemkdbmgbbl) Edit: don't mind this. The extension only greys out the links (like :visited does without the extension...) so the search is still on for a extension that removes the links.</comment>


The Benefits of Time-Blocking, and Some Tips to Get You Started - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/monolist/the-benefits-of-time-blocking-and-some-tips-to-get-you-started-57937ffc2446 <comment><USER2> This is great and I do it down to 15 minute increments.

But inevitably, several times a day: "Can you jump on a quick call?" And sometimes that call is an hour and then my blocking attempt is completely hosed and needs to be dynamically adjusted to accommodate "schedule bombs" like those.

I also recommend padding meetings/work wherever possible. Back-to-back activity increases chance of being late to next thing of there is overrun (out of your control sometimes), and that can add up like a rubber band effect in traffic throughout the day. Then you end up managing disappointment rather than meeting expectations.

Also, learning to say "No" is effective, useful, and empowering. Don't let outside influences steal your time without good reason.</comment>


Validation Board, A Free Tool to Vet Your Startup Idea - <AUTHOR> http://betabeat.com/2012/10/lean-startup-machine-validatio-board-test-your-startup-idea-eric-ries-trevor-owens/

<comment><USER2> I found the breakdown between customer and problem hypothesis very interesting. I'm currently working on a tool to store ideas(blatant self promotion: <http://www.255ideas.com>). I was very interested in the customer/problem/solution hypothesis model. I think having directed fields may help guide the user in writing down their idea. But I also have to wonder, does it force the idea into a structure that it wouldn't take otherwise? Perhaps it would filter ideas that aren't focused on creating on solving a problem. Awesome ideas might not make the cut, for example, draw something.

IMO the most effective way to show an idea is with a prototype. It's also the hardest.

I also like the ability to add assumptions that are validated/invalidated. The focus on business plan is very cool.

Thanks for the link.

</comment><comment><USER3> I did a Lean Startup Machine workshop the other weekend where we learned to utilize this board. It was an awesome workshop and I learned a lot.

This board helps you iterate over your idea. It's like agile development, but focusing on the idea.

</comment><comment><USER4> Whenever I see tools like this I look up at my whiteboard and go "this does it better" :-)

Never underestimate the power of a big chunk of wall you can write on and stick things to.

</comment><comment><USER5> seems inspired by this: <http://www.ashmaurya.com/2010/08/businessmodelcanvas/>

</comment><comment><USER6> Great tool!</comment>


Coding School vs. M.S. In Computer Science - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I am stuck in a dilemma right now. I have already earn my bachelors degree, albeit it was in Economics. I started programming two years ago and have taken the Computer Science prerequisite courses at a community college(data structure, computer assembly, object oriented programming, etc). I really want to do full stack development.
In my position, is it better to go to a coding camp (i.e. hack reactor, app academy, general assembly) or get a masters in Computer Science?
Thanks in advance Software Gurus! <comment><USER2> Checkout bloc. They offer a full stack course: [https://www.bloc.io/web- development](https://www.bloc.io/web-development)

It will be more focused than a general CS degree, and and a lot faster. Given your previous coursework in the CS fundamentals, I think this is what you're looking for. If its not, I can put you in touch with the founders to see about doing something custom.

bloc.io

Full disclosure: I went to school with the founders. They buy me beer sometimes.

</comment><comment><USER3> Honestly you should just work on a personal project for a few weeks, and apply to a few places as a junior dev. Or go to some local meetups and see if someone will give you a shot. If you're okay with taking below market pay, you can always find a startup to work for that will give you valuable experience on your resume.

If you already have a few Comp Sci courses under your belt, all you need is a project and a local mentor to help you land your first gig.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the advice! What are you thoughts on immersion schools like hackreactor where there is a 99% hired rate at average of 105k starting. Although it comes with a hefty tuition of 17780. I know you should never do anything for the money but it looks pretty attractive. They do have a bunch of startups/companies that hires from there, streamlining the process to get your projects out. Thoughts?

Thanks for your advice!

<comment><USER4> There was an Ask HN on the subject of HackReactor and similar a little while ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8148345](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8148345)

a HackReactor graduate was very positive:

 _" TL;DR: I graduated from Hack Reactor last year and received four job offers, the one I accepted was close to the average salary Hack Reactor advertises, and the 99.XX% hiring rate is actually true. I credit the program's success to their selectivity, the resources they pour into hiring instructors from the industry, and choosing to focus on JavaScript. You can read my review of HR on Quora: [http://www.quora.com/Reviews-of-Hack- Reactor/review/Jake-McG...](http://www.quora.com/Reviews-of-Hack- Reactor/review/Jake-McG...") _

Another thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6040234](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6040234)

Edit: I would take online reviews with a grain of salt. It would be best if someone you know who attended can tell you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Most of coding schools would not explore full stack, as their goal is to get you trained in that specific language for that specific platform using a limited set of tools the instructor prefers.

MS curriculum is more likely to get you exposure to operating systems concepts, database theory, multiple programming languages, introduction to subjects like artificial intelligence and machine learning, so that you get a more holistic picture.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that a MS curriculum would give more of a holistic picture. I figure if I get a job first, I could always do a masters part time. Money is a bit tight right now. Thoughts?

Thanks for your advice!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you go the MS/BS route, you need find time on the side to actually learn to program. It doesn't happen in the coursework.

Disclaimer: I run a bootcamp in San Antonio.</comment>


Sweden is a small pond with a few big fish - <AUTHOR> http://blog.brokep.com/2012/07/13/sweden-is-a-small-pond-with-a-few-big-fish/

<comment><USER2> Wow, didn't realize Sweden was such a candidate for ending the phrase: "something is rotten in the state of..."! Was floored to learn that:

\- Jurors in court cases appointed by the political parties in power.

\- Apparently, the current Minister of Justice doesn't see any conflict in the fact that police officer involved in a ongoing corruption case has started working for one of the sides.

\- The current Foreign Minister was recently a board member of a company being investigated for genocide and has given conflicting statements about his involvement.</comment>