Comment by souprock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by souprock | Hacker News Reader

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Maybe you really can't afford it, but given the job opportunities this is a bit like saying that you can't afford college. The cost with all 5 decompilers is about $15,000. That is comparable in cost to a semester of college. It might be a better deal if you bother to really learn the tool.

I guess there aren't student loans for IDA, but there definitely is employment. Once you become competent with IDA, you can apply for jobs like these at my workplace: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19284153 Being competent means you can navigate around in a binary without symbols, that you can mentally convert assembly to C, and generally that you can find things of interest in the binary and understand them.

Binary Ninja (binja) is $149 from Vector35. That might be optimal for you.

I feel you may misunderstand me. I do have a nice comfy job at a big company, in the Bay Area, as a software engineer. My career is still young, so I don't have a ton of savings. I couldn't afford college; I went to a cheaper one, took about a year's worth of classes before my debt became too much higher than my income and gave up. That's a big part of the equation, along with a car loan I still owe a fair bit on. Luckily I found most employers did not care about the lack of a degree and so began my career without much trouble.

I realize someone's probably going to comment that I'm an idiot for living in the Bay Area, but consider this: after living expenses, I still make a fair bit more than I did in Detroit, and I much prefer living here. So it is what it is.

I think in a few years I should be more than capable of buying an IDA Pro license, but as it stands I am not taking on that debt for a hobby. As for whether or not I will get a job doing reverse engineering, I think it's unlikely any time soon, though certainly possible in the future.

That's a lot more context than I feel is necessary to explain why I can't casually drop $3k-5k on a hobby, but hopefully it makes more sense.

That depends on the country. In Germany college costs 300 bucks per semester. I'd bet 90% of students in Germany wouldn't be able to attend if it was more than that. $15,000 is just unbelievably high.

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