Virus time

Im thinking about sticking to virus farming but
1: people tell me it is highly unrecomended
2; i dont know what bonus i should get for hacking

If you're talking about crimes, then planting a stealth virus is the safest of those crimes.
If you're talking coding virus's then there is a merit for coding 100 virus's and a BB block to speed it up but there isn't really much money in it at all so not sure what you mean by Farming...I could be miles off though.

If you're talking hacking crimes then be set for a world of pain. Sure, you'll make some nice cash but at the trade off for your NNB development. Plus you'll spend a lot of time in jail, so if there are no friendly folks willing to bust you then you'll either spend some nerve trying to escape or just wait the time out.

I did about 4 months of it but my NNB has been stuck at 35 for ages. I decided that if I was to finish 10k computer crimes then planting stealth viruses would be the best idea. I also did 10k drug crimes before hand so I have a lot of catch up to play.

I've found the ratio of fails to successful hackings provides enough money to buy lawyer cards while still making money. But I do have 10/10 in crime success and the education crime related things.

Hacking does provide more money than viruses, but will prevent progress towards reaching 60 NNB and being on a Political Assassination OC team. According to this, Hacking FBI does about 40 Arsons worth of damage to Crime Experience (and that is under the new CE loss mechanics).

The optimal approach to going the Hacking route is to maximize your chance of crime success (Wireless Dongle enhancer, education, merits, and faction upgrades) - and plan on doing other crimes after each failure.

Isn't it a little unbalanced to mention the damage without mentioning the benefit? Because if the damage is 40x an arson's benefit and damage is capped at 20x the benefit, that suggests that a successful hack is worth 2 arsons.

So then it becomes a question of how many successful hacks you get before you draw a fail:
0 (successful hacks):40 (arsons to stay even)
1:38
2:36
3:34
4:32, etc. and needing to get 21 greens without a red to get positive CE growth (again, at twice the rate).

Add the new meat warehouse perk and it looks more like this-
0:20
1:18
2:16
3:14
4:12
5:10
6:8
7:6
8:4
9:2

and any past 10 to get positive CE growth at twice the rate provided by arsons.

My conclusion- it isn't the fastest, but Meat warehouse may be a good offset between CE growth and cash in some circumstances. I expect to be in a position to try it in a couple months, so perhaps we'll see.

It's a little unclear in the referenced post, but the CE damage indicated is net of growth from the successful crimes.
You can't test the CE loss from a single crime directly when you can only measure NNB changes.

The test method was to reach NNB change, repeat crime attempts until failure causing NNB loss, commit Arson until NNB change.
Repeat test and average results until confident that the average number of Arsons needed to recover NNB stops changing.
Publish results.

Okay, so we can't conclude a hack is worth 2 arsons, it is probably more like 2.5, 3, (maybe more) if it more than offset gains of previous hacks by 40 arsons. And in his notes, he said he was having trouble nailing that number down to something consistent. He also said that once he thought he had a consistent behavior identified, he would stop because all of this is a serious hassle (and frankly expensive). So it sounds like adding to the data out there would help.

By farming i mean making multiple viruses

You'll earn somthing like a whopping $5,000 a day making viruses, I'd just stick to simple viruses to get 100 for the merit.

As far as hacking, planting viruses and hacking are two different things, hacking doesn't use viruses in any way.