> The market for bounties is a circus, breadcrumbs for free work from people trying to 'make it'.
> The number of CVSS vulns with a score above 8 that have floated across the front page of HN in the past year without anyone getting paid tells you that much.
You make it sound like there's a ton of people going around who can just dig up CVSS vulns above 8 and is making me all confused. Is that really happening? I have a single bounty on H1 just to show I could do it, and that still took ages and was a shitty bug.
A lot of Chinese apps still do. Mostly cause I guess they don't allow Google play store in China (? I think it's blocked, can't quite remember for sure)
I'm curious about this though, does a rich man actually wear the same pair of boots for 10 years?
That being said, I've noticed that a lot of clothes that I bought 10 years ago or so are of pretty high quality compared to today, (and no, they are not rich man's clothes). Some of them I actually have been wearing for more than 10 years now.
Oh hey I'm uniquely positioned to answer this; though I'm in tech (and at this point frankly speaking well-compensated) my family have been bootmakers for decades.
I'm sitting at a tech office right now wearing a pair of boots that my father made for me in 2015 - regardless, they're absolutely spotless and I'd wear them to a formal event without hesitation. Every 6 months or so when I'm by his store I shine them up and put in a fresh pair of leather laces. Every 3 or so years, he re-soles them when the soles eventually wear out and lose traction. Eventually they'll require a rebuild, but they've got probably another 5-10 years of daily wear in them before that. I've got a few more pairs I swap between every so often, like a pair with OD green canvas that looks nice with khakis, but these solid black ones are my daily wear.
While 10 years sounds like a good run for boots, my father has a pair at ~35 years old now that he still wears frequently. IIRC they've been through one or two rebuilds and few re-soles in that time.
Were these commodity sneakers, I'd be purchasing a new pair every few months. Even nice running or trail shoes only tend to last a few hundred miles in my experience, but I've put tens of thousands on these and will get ten thousand more easily. Re-soles and rebuilds aren't free, but they're less than a replacement and put years of lifetime back on the boot. They're also comfortable as hell and fit me like a glove.
So in short: yeah, rich men do wear the same pair of boots for 10 years, or even far longer.
Not all boots are made the same though. I had some bad luck with a pair of veldtschoen welted boots from the English firm Crockett and Jones in a custom leather. The commando sole split twice at the toe, which they repaired, but after less than five years of wear the lining at the heel had worn through.
I took them in to be rebuilt, but after inspection they said the stiffener had come loose, and nothing could be done. Here have your expensive and now broken boots back.
I'd assumed when I got them I'd be wearing them for decades, and at least a few rebuilds. Maybe there was something wrong with that specific pair, but I did have a goodyear welted sole randomly detach from a pair of six month old city shoes from the same firm. And yes I had been looking after my shoes (frequent cleaning and polishing, always using shoe trees, skipping days between wears, etc).
When I had a pair of Church's fall apart I put that down to them no-longer being a quality brand, but now I don't think you can guarantee a long life just as the shoe was expensive and from a reputable brand. I have many shoes that have lasted better (and now since covid I don't wear polished shoes daily), but that does sometimes feel like luck of the draw.
Yes, that's my family's business, I'm glad to hear you've had such great experiences. Similar to you, I've never looked back; every time I put on trail shoes I yearn for my boots again.
Purely anecdotal, but I know friends have used Nicks without issue. The basic advice I got was to buy jackets and leatherware from places in Washington and Oregon.
I bought Levi's 501s at a farm supply store in the 80s, $12 on sale. About 10 years ago I gave away my two remaining pairs. They were a little thinner but still intact, no holes anywhere. Modern 501s are made of much thinner fabric; I'd be surprised if they would last 5 years. Looks like the sale price is $45 now, which seems comparable.
I bought a pair of 501s recently and they barely lasted 6 months. I do a fair bit of cycling which seemed to very quickly wear through them. I'm really not sure what to buy if I want things that last a long time now.
Levis are fashion products, not workwear. But even if they were, if you want things to last a long time then buy things made for a specific purpose. Denim products made by cycling brands are a rarity for a reason.
Of course. And also it may be less expensive to buy 5 pairs of shoes that last 3 years each than 1 pair that last 15 years. Anyway the rich don't get rich because they can buy better clothes or appliances, they can buy them because they are rich.
Feels equally plausible that there would have been an across the board increase in tariffs just to look tough. There is no logical analysis of the current situation.
I just buy during big fucking crises, either individual stocks or index funds. Front page of the NYT type shit, "existential threats" to 100+ year old concerns. Boeing, Toyota, pandemic. Such opportunities only come up every 2-3 years or so. Sell after 1-2 years to get the lower tax rate.
DCA and time in market beat trying to time the market. If you're doing nothing all day but refreshing Twitter and Robinhood maybe there's some alpha but that's too much involvement for me.
The first sentence is a thought-terminating cliche and is not true. Correctly guessing the shape of the Trump tariff crash was worth an entire year in the market. Crashes that don't instantly reverse themselves tend to be more like ten years.
From the way they keep asking for donations, I thought they were constantly about to go out of business. Props to them though, good journalism is important
He comments a lot on politics, actually. He just makes intentional efforts to obfuscate them, likely because they are controversial (yet weird. The weirdness may be a part of the obfuscation).
My VERY TLDR of his political world view is that he thinks the current world politics are f'ed to an extremely serious degree, so much so that we are in "lets get rid of democracy" land, and I think he wants a technocratic authoritarian strongman/"hero" to enforce some sort of libertarian paradise.
Its those controversial, obfuscated, and wacky ideas mixed with a healthy tech focus that leads to an entertaining read.
You make it sound like there's a ton of people going around who can just dig up CVSS vulns above 8 and is making me all confused. Is that really happening? I have a single bounty on H1 just to show I could do it, and that still took ages and was a shitty bug.