Peter Thiel: Startup CEO Salaries Shouldn't Be Above $150,000 - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2012/04/19/peter-thiel-on-ceo-salaries-and-motivational-indicators/ <comment><USER2> I don't understand the example of Reid Hoffman taking a $15k salary as CEO of LinkedIn. IIRC, Reid was pretty well off from from being a very early PayPal employee and board member. When you have $X million in the bank (X >> 1), do you even care if you make $15k or $100k or $250k per year?

<comment><USER3> I agree it's window dressing and almost meaningless to me. Steve Jobs taking a $1? So what? He has money already and is trading that for future upside. And actually for the thrill of making his vision a success. My guess is that for many people (and especially Jobs) he could be paid $4 million and that wouldn't change his commitment to Apple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "...Thiel believes that a CEO should not be paying themselves more than $150,000, even after a Series A investment. Anything above that shows a lack of motivation to the company and to the future success of the company."

Anything above? Really?

This assumes a few things. First that the cost of living is the same for any CEO. A CEO at a startup in NYC or SV has considerably higher cost of living than a CEO located in many other places.

Second, what if the CEO of the startup is older, has 9 children and expenses?

Coming up with an absolute number like "$150k" or whatever doesn't take into account a particular persons circumstances and seems to be biased toward unmarried people or people without children with no other obligations.

<comment><USER4> Most people with kids and mortgages get by on less than 150k. If you really can't make ends meet on 150k you've overextended yourself.

<comment><USER5> Not in sf or nyc.

a low end (not dumpy, but definitely not high end with a doorman) 2 bed apartment is going to run you $650k in the decent bits of sf and more in nyc.

In sf, you end up paying approx $1100 per month per million dollars of value in property taxes. So $715 in taxes, $300 or so in insurance, a $2500 mortgage, and you can easily be spending $3500-$4k/mo (after taxes) on housing. Using the rough rule of thumb that your salary should be 40 times your monthly housing payment, that's $160K already.

It isn't hard if you're an adult, with a family, or housing obligations, or kids, etc. If you wish to restrict the universe of ceos to relatively recent college grads with no life obligations who are content to pay $1500 to share a crappy apartment, then maybe Thiel is being reasonable.

<comment><USER6> >> Most people with kids and mortgages get by on less than 150k.

> Not in sf or nyc.

It's still trivially true that most people in SF and NYC, including married adults with families, get by on way less than $150k. Even Upper-East-Side Manhattan, one of the wealthiest zip codes in the U.S., has average incomes "only" in the high 5 figures. Maybe there is a small section of Nob Hill where $150k incomes are normal, but even in most nice parts of SF that's not a typical family's income.

Part of the reason is that in areas where housing is the major cost, the 40x-your-housing-cost rule of thumb is too conservative, and would lead to a conclusion that almost nobody can actually live in the city, whereas clearly many people do. And anyway I believe the usual mortgage-company rules of thumb are 30% of your gross income on the mortgage payment itself, but up to 40% on mortgage+insurance+etc. So that'd lead to $120k in your hypothetical.

<comment><USER7> NYC is a bad example, the real estate costs really sky rocketed over the past 25 years or so...so it's very possible that someone could have gotten one of those buildings on a $40K/yr teacher's salary.

Good luck doing that in this day and age

<comment><USER3> As a matter of fact I dated such a person (UES of NYC). Her salary was, IIRC, actually about $80's. She was divorced with one child. They had a 1 bedroom and shared the same bed. And she wouldn't have been able to afford that without family help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can we also have rule that VC salaries should not be more than $150K? And they will be paid only from funds profits and there will be NO management fees for their funds?

<comment><USER9> Let's not be silly here. If it weren't for VCs doing all the hard work, what would ever ship?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The CEO's salary should be the amount that maximizes the startup's chances of succeeding.

For a young/single or independently wealthy founder that's as close to zero as possible.

For a founder with family (like me) that's the lowest amount that puts all concern about supporting his/her children out of mind, so the CEO can focus. That number can really range.

</comment><comment><USER11> ~95% of Americans individual income is less than $100K [1] and while there are sadly many people living in poverty, that the other end of the scale. $150k a year is more than enough for a multi-person single earner family, you just might have to forgo that penthouse with a Central Park view for something that, shock horror, is in the outer boroughs. You know, like most New Yorkers. (I'm sure there is a similar analogy for SF and East Bay, or something)

So, have some respect people. Stop acting like spoiled children. Oh wait.

[1] [http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/cpstables/032011/perinc/new01...](http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/cpstables/032011/perinc/new01_001.htm) via Wikipedia

<comment><USER12> This. In your 20s and earning more than £20k? Well done. Now shut up and ship.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ehhh, $150k is a rather broad generalization.

I'd say that a startup CEO shouldn't make more than mid/senior level engineers. This allows food to be put on the table and some decent quality of life, while not sucking cash away at the expense of growth.

At the same time, if you're capable of not taking a salary _at all_ , I think it is wise.

</comment><comment><USER14> Making blanket statements about how much people should make is fairly pointless. If spending $X on a CEO is a clear value proposition for the whole company, X can = just about anything.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'd contend CEO salaries shouldn't be much above that. If you limit compensation, it may be hard to hire people like Leo Apotheker, Carly Fiorina, Stephen Elop or the RIM guys. OTOH, there are people who can do the job as well as, if not better, than them for a fraction of their cost to the companies they run.

</comment><comment><USER16> I never really understood this idea of positions (especially the owner/CEO) being pegged to an arbitrary salary figure.

If profits are good, reward yourself. Any smart business owner gets the long term rewards of reinvesting in the company and will likely do that where appropriate.

</comment><comment><USER17> Thiel is missing the point. The point is that you need to pay people enough so that money ceases to be a factor.

For certain people money is not a factor so it doesn't matter whether it pay them $1 or $1MM. To others $150k is just enough money to live very comfortably but not enough to do nothing.

Buffett once commented, "I want to give my kids just enough so that they would feel that they could do anything, but not so much that they would feel like doing nothing".

</comment><comment><USER18> You can put any sort of artificial limit on CEO salaries. The only thing you'll never be able to touch is their true source of wealth, which is stock.

<comment><USER19> That's the whole point though. You want the CEO to be able to live comfortably, but you want her hungry to grow the company. Having the bulk of her assets in stock, which is worthless until the company is a success, aligns the interests of the CEO with the Investors. Startup CEOs are more savvy than ever about retaining equity. It should be clear that their path to wealth goes through building a successful company, not just waiting it out until they've used up their runway.

<comment><USER20> If they have no money for the present, and the only possibility to make some money is to have an IPO or sale, then the CEO is not necessarily aligned to the long-term interest of the company.

<comment><USER19> There's a big range between "no money for the present" and some salary at or below 150k a year. The point is that the CEO shouldn't be "getting rich" from their salary. They should be able to live comfortably, but not necessarily extravagantly (anything over 75k a year in SF or NYC should really suffice). If the CEO has aspirations of some day living extravagantly, she needs to have a successful exit.

It sounds like you're arguing that an "under paid" CEO might push for an exit quicker and at lower value than they might otherwise, if they had a higher salary. Almost every exit is successful, and not at all a guarantee. A CEO so short sighted that they take a much smaller early exit, probably is short sighted enough to fail at running a business and will likely end up with no exit at all.

As long as the CEO can pay for rent, food, family expenses and has at least 1k left over for whatever each month, that's more than enough. If a startup CEO is making a million a year, there's not as much incentive to get to a successful exit. Instead, there's more incentive to keep things going as long as possible to milk that salary. Reducing salary to a reasonable rate (I don't think anyone here is advocating ramen and a sleeping bag under the desk) and keeping incentives tied to a successful exit keeps the motivation where it needs to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think it makes more sense to say something flexible like, "startup CEOs should not make more than 2x their market salary". I say 2x because they might be working twice as many hours. I'm not saying they should get 2x, because that's an argument about whether they should be working harder for equity or for salary, but I think 2x market salary is a reasonable, hard to argue with cap.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm blow away by the reactions here. It's as if everybody expects to make a lot of money while taking a lot of risks with other people's money. This isn't wall street ;o This is business and hard work.

You get paid when your business is successful and you are acquired. At least that's how VC's see it.

If you don't go to bed with VC's or external investors you can pay yourself whatever you want.

</comment><comment><USER23> Of course, this would have the handy side effect of exerting downward pressure on engineer salaries as well. Huh.

</comment><comment><USER24> The reason this makes me sick has nothing to do with the number. I think that number is more than reasonable for most cases.

No, the reason it makes me sick is that VCs and three-digit millionaires and billionaires really should stop copping this attitude. We get it, you guys don't need generous salaries, or salary at all.

</comment><comment><USER25> Actually the 1$ salary is a well known tax dodge - its a aggressive way of avoiding income tax - everyone will have there own take on what this says about them as an individual.

<comment><USER24> It's not exactly a "tax dodge". It's a consequence of the fact that capital gains taxes are lower than the income tax. It's a problem with the game, not the players.

<comment><USER25> Well as a small shareholder/investor id be realy realy Pissed off if the IRS clamps down on my valid lower CGT just because some billionare CEO is taking the piss to be blunt.</comment></comment></comment>


The Rise and Fall of Quicksand (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2010/08/terra_infirma.html <comment><USER2> I used to drive a truck on a beach cleaning crew.

We were driving along at about 3 in the morning when the truck suddenly stopped. The wheels were in quicksand. The front of the truck eventually sank up to the headlights.

There was a buried outflow pipe from street sewer drains that emptied into the ocean. The pipe broke and the water/sand mixture turned into quicksand at that point. On a beach at 3 in the morning this wasn't the least bit obvious.

Needless to say, the boss was not amused.</comment>


Intel Begins EOL Plan for Xeon Phi 7200-Series 'Knights Landing' Host Processors - <AUTHOR> https://www.anandtech.com/show/13111/intel-begins-eol-plan-for-xeon-phi-7200-series-knights-landing <comment><USER2> Well... It's not to be expected the old processors would remain available after the introduction of their improved successors.

<comment><USER3> What newer HPC product is replacing this? It seems like the Phi might be dead end, at least for the foreseeable future.

<comment><USER2> It's the Knights Mill family - [https://ark.intel.com/products/series/132784/Intel-Xeon- Phi-...](https://ark.intel.com/products/series/132784/Intel-Xeon- Phi-72x5-Processor-Family)

<comment><USER4> These seem pretty insane, you'd be better off with two POWER9s in just about any dimension including cost, TDP, thread count, cache, memory bandwidth, I/O bandwidth including PCIe lanes, FLOPS and integer performance.

<comment><USER5> The power9 chips don't have gigs of memory locally attached do they? Knights Mill has 16G/socket it looks like.

Knights Mill without an apostrophe - Mill is a verb?

<comment><USER4> With CAPI (cache coherent interconnect) I don't see why you couldn't do this in a more open way. i.e. optane, HBM2, whatever comes next

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's really sad, I always wanted to get my hands on some of these. For certain tasks (that work poorly on GPUs in the same cost ballpark, particularly ones that require large amounts of local memory bandwidth) they had rather excellent price / performance ratios. But I guess that didn't coincide with what people wanted.

<comment><USER7> The tools killed it. By all accounts it was terrible to program for. It wasn't as simple as writing a standard x86 piece of software.

<comment><USER8> Well, for good performance, no it's not like your desktop. The first generation or two were more like packaging experiments, like a toolkit for developing specialized silicon parts. Like things you'd sort of prototype on a phi and then build custom silicon for and if you used intels custom shop, maybe your firmware would be done. Or something like that. That is my guess, I think if I was intel, I'd be thinking of ways to corner the custom accelerator market as that's where it looks like things are going. Phi lacked fpga type stuff though.

I think the deep learning stuff really took over though and people wanted phis for other things that it just doesn't fit. It's an even more odd looking beast through those lenses.

<comment><USER7> Intel's problem has always been the libraries in the hpc world. Nvidia understood this early on, and they dumped an ungodly amount of money into getting people onto their platform by investing in libraries and tools. Intel thought that by just releasing a card with a bunch of Xeon cores and not a whole lot of accompanying Library support would do the trick.

Their mkl library is a good example of that. There are a bunch of different ways/libraries to accomplish the same task, and it's not always clear which to use. Further, the documentation is basically just an API printout with very few examples. You can't rely on stackoverflow to document things for you.

This isn't unique to Intel either. I'm looking at you AMD. It wasn't until recently that rocm started picking up steam and amd realizing is important -- long after their Enterprise GPUs were out.

<comment><USER9> > Intel thought that by just releasing a card with a bunch of Xeon cores

Atom cores, actually.

> This isn't unique to Intel either. I'm looking at you AMD. It wasn't until > recently that rocm started picking up steam and amd realizing is important > -- long after their Enterprise GPUs were out.

Between 2010 and 2016, AMD reverse-mortgaged their headquarters and fired roughly 20% of their staff. The highly successful "Small Cat" line of CPUs was cancelled (basis for PS4 / XBox One / and Laptops). There was a significant chance they'd go bankrupt.

AMD finally makes money these days, which is probably why ROCm is able to get the proper investments that it deserves. But yes, its way late. But their company definitely couldn't afford to compete against NVidia before Ryzen.

<comment><USER7> It's a modified Atom core, and is closer to the Xeon cores. It was the first to have the AVX-512 instruction set, followed by the Xeon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nice to see Yolo County get some love.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Landing,_California](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Landing,_California)

<comment><USER10> I didn't expect upvotes for this but I'm surprised by the downvotes.

Anybody care to tell me what's wrong with commenting on the name of the processor series when that name is in the headline?

(And Knights Landing is a lovely little place which most people who aren't from Northern California may never have heard of. Worth a visit, especially if you fish.)

<comment><USER11> Because it's off-topic. Same as commenting on Java the island on an article about the JVM.

(I didn't downvote you, though)</comment></comment></comment>


Explore 700,000 Unsecured FTP servers - <AUTHOR> http://exploreftp.host/ <comment><USER2> Previous related article (tl;dr: many of these are "unsecured" deliberately):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12523455](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12523455)

It might just be my luck, but the first 4 I got were completely empty.

<comment><AUTHOR> >It might just be my luck, but the first 4 I got were completely empty.

It depends on luck, and there are indeed many empty ones. But I have found both full of content(Photos, Music, Films, and software sources), and even some servers where(even though I shouldn't) I could write or edit data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The servers on this list allow anonymous logins, which is not the same as being unsecured.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not all of them are deliberate.

<comment><USER4> Still doesn't mean they are insecure. As long as they only allow read access.

<comment><AUTHOR> Some allow write.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Heres a easier version [http://s.codepen.io/icodeforlove/debug/KgggqA](http://s.codepen.io/icodeforlove/debug/KgggqA)

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice work. Maybe add a link to ftp:x.x.x.x to open in a new tab for further exploration.

<comment><AUTHOR> Added.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Currently only accessible through google dns until it propagates further.

<comment><USER7> Propagates, but 504.

<comment><USER6> Turns out HN is a really effective DDoS (jk).

<comment><AUTHOR> Back online, had to cut off the directory listing for each one of them unfortunately, but as a bonus now it's much faster.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is Haskell really the language of geniuses and academia? - <AUTHOR> https://habr.com/en/post/441350/ <comment><USER2> There's is an interesting supposition: if Haskell wasn't pure functional (had imperative constructions) it would be more popular. But Ocaml is not pure functional and is not popular.</comment>


Tr.im Resurrected - <AUTHOR> http://blog.tr.im/post/160697842/tr-im-resurrected <comment><USER2> What bothers me about the whole tr.im story is that they are basically complaining they are losing money hand over fist _at the same time_ that they are saying that twitter will send their traffic to bit.ly.

So, what's the problem then ? Seems like your cost just went down, you should be happy about it, not complain.

If you can't make money at traffic level X because the model you are pursuing is broken then at level N*X you are in much worse shape. And yet, they seem to want to be in much worse shape...

<comment><USER3> With the caveat that I found the general whiny tone annoying:

Direct costs may go down, since they have less URLs to worry about. But value goes down as well, since they have less data to mine. There may be some critical mass of data required to have anything of value.

<comment><USER2> They're complaining about development costs and bandwidth costs.

I don't buy it.

A url shortener is relatively trivial to operate (at least, compared to some of the stuff I'm doing right now). It works, or it doesn't, once you've got it there isn't much you can do to make it better or add features.

So development costs are almost a one-time affair and it seems they had already done that.

What's left is the bandwidth cost.

A Mbit is about $5 /month in bulk. The average 'GET' reguest from a device is maybe 500 bytes, the answer, the redirect is maybe another 500 bytes. So say 1 Kbyte in total (generous!). 1Mbit / sec = 128 Kbyte, so that is roughly 100 requests / second for $5 /month. Serverload is trivial, a single table with a unique key, you can do 1000's of queries like that per second on a single box. It is a trivially parallel problem, simply distribute all urls across all machines. A single box could push maybe 100K requests / second using varnishd or some other front end cache (tr.im uses nginx), so that's maybe 800Kbit/sec out of one box.

You'll need a bunch of IPs otherwise you'll run out of sockets and you'll need some memory for the cache.

Calculate in some margin and you can cut that down to maybe 500 Mbit/sec, so that box would cost you $2500 / month and it would handle a staggering 62500*86400 = 5 billion requests / day.

No way tr.im is at that level, more likely a few tens of millions of requests per day, reduce bandwidth costs accordingly, say $500 to $1000.

It wouldn't take more than a bunch of google ads displayed to the makers of the urls or a donation to keep a service like that going, that's not a whole lot of $ to make on a site. One of my sites which converts absolutely horrible does that kind of money on 27000 visitors / day (mostly from Finland, don't ask...).

This will never be a business, and personally I really don't understand why the likes of twitter do not give a short url out on their own service. But it also does not cost a fortune to run, that's bs.

And if you want to create 'value' you should do something a little more sticky than a url shortener, it literally is a throwaway relationship with your audience.

And if you lock them out for a couple of days because you can't make up your mind if you're going to sink or swim you have really tossed your investment into the water.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not a PR stunt? Sure seems like one from my perspective.

<comment><USER5> Not from mine.

They're one of many competitors in an eco-system that's relatively easy to enter, other competitors have a significant advantage over them, and I have no idea what their business model is. When they said they no longer wanted to sink money into their project, I understood why.

I also understand that people often feel entitled to free services, would complain when one goes away, and they might not have been prepared for that kind of social pressure. I understand giving in to it.

<comment><USER4> I understand that too, but most of the people I saw talking about tr.im were saying "Go figure" not "Please stay". This on top of the asking bit.ly for money rather than saying "Ok" to keep the links working, while complaining about money issues.

It seems like this was a ploy to get people's attention for tr.im so they could try to sell it.

<comment><USER6> Why would they want to give their work to a company that cuddled up to Twitter thanks to connections and took the entire market in a matter of months? I'd want some money out of that too.

<comment><USER7> I understood the bit.ly absorption to be more of a courtesy than an attempt to profit. Giving their redirects to a company that has the infrastructure and the long term support to keep them on-line, rather than just let them go dark, would be responsible and really wouldn't help bit.ly increase it's user base at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "This was not a public-relations stunt. At all."

 _Please._

Why exactly should anyone have any trust in such a statement from people who shut down their service with little or no advance warning, but could bring it back up "indefinitely" after some "appeals"?

<comment><USER9> They weren't shutting down their service; they were actually being very responsible about it -- they were going to stop taking new URLs for redirection, but continue to maintain the previously-created ones until the end of the year.

It's not like they suddenly announced "we're pulling the plug, screw you all." It seemed like a considered decision, made from a position where they could afford to wind down the service over 6 months.

I think their decision to _not_ shut down may be frankly irresponsible. Their reasons for closing seemed fair: bit.ly has a monopoly on URL-shortening due to Twitter; there's really not a market for more than one or two URL- shortening services; there's no clear way to monetize URL-shortening unless you're the dominant player (and can sell stats); any sale to a third party risked turning the service into something evil that they had ethical problems with; keeping the service open would just burn money and effort better spent on other things. All, to my mind, valid reasons for closing.

Deciding to reopen (or not close) because a bunch of people complained -- people who aren't going to solve any of those fundamental issues -- that seems like the questionable decision.

They were doing the right thing, but seemingly got talked out of it. It doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER8> 1) Suddenly not taking new URLs _is_ a partial shutdown.

2) It _is_ a questionable decision that doesn't make much sense. One of the few scenarios that seems remotely sensible is that this was an attempt to attract attention, particularly from investors who might be interested in a service with such an enthusiastic following that they'd "appeal" to the company to keep it going.

3) If not investors, then buyers: [http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/trim- cuts-off-bitlys-30...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/trim-cuts-off- bitlys-301works-idea-wants-to-sell/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> They could save space by letting me choose my own default URL shortener. I've got my personal domain listed on my twitter page. Say my home page is <http://example.com>. Just put something like <123456> into your tweet and your client would interpret that as http:/example.com/12346.

Otherwise they are the new Microsoft. ;)

</comment><comment><USER11> They keep listing bit.ly's monopoly by way of Twitter. But there is a better solution to the whole URL shortening issue, how about Twitter assigned a fixed length to URLs. So a url in your tweet is say 5 or 6 characters. And it always converts to ">link" (that's 5 characters).

Done, the URL shortening destroying the internet problem is solved. We've had URL shorteners forever, they've only become an issue because of Twitter. Twitter should just do away with it all.

<comment><USER12> Stop making sense!

The only solution would be for Twitter to acquire Bitly and their complex code base, how else are the inflated prices going to be justified ?

[http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/30/if-bitly-is- worth-8-mil...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/30/if-bitly-is- worth-8-million-tinyurl-is-worth-at-least-46-million/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Since the tr.im saga has brought url shorteners to everybody's mind: anybody have an idea for a winning business model? I can't seem to think of one...

<comment><USER14> I like Awe.sm's approach. You own the domain and they do the URL shortening and analytics for you. Costs $99/year. I haven't used it, but it seems like a good way to make money in that area.

[http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/04/its-awesm-create-a- powe...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/04/its-awesm-create-a-powerful- custom-url-shortener-for-your-own-domain/)

<comment><USER15> This is also the the service we offer with TinyArrows:

<http://➡.ws/info/custom/>

For statistics, we provide info down to the IP address and user agent that clicked on the link.

<comment><USER14> Cool, checking it out now. Do you have to use the arrow for shortening? I think it can be confusing.

<comment><USER15> We support lots of different short URLs for lots of different domains, the arrow is just one of the fun ones. ( See <http://tinyarro.ws> )

The people who sign up for personalized domains can use whatever domain they want and we'll help them track down a good tiny one if they need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm really meant to believe that Twitter can be expected to foster an _ecosystem_ of URL shorteners? Can I instead be pissed that Twitter hasn't simply ended these efforts by not counting URL characters?

</comment><comment><USER17> Traffic looks attractive, but it's a problem when you don't get any benefits at all. By the way, I still don't see how is bit.ly going to stay alive.

But what if we had our own url shorteners? I could have my own shortener on my own domain (twitter won't re-shorten it), so there wouldn't be any privacity or volatility issues.

Anyway, we're still "lazy" people... so we have to live with it.

<comment><USER18> Twitter won't re-shorten it _now_ , but that could change at any time. What if Twitter wrote every URL to a bit.ly URL regardless of length? Would anybody stop using Twitter because of it? I doubt it. If they can find a way to make money w/ bit.ly then why wouldn't they?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> darn.

</comment><comment><USER20> why is this site consistently relevant? It's a minority url shortener. If it were bit.ly or tinyurl, id understand. Even then, it depends on the spin. Flag button activated!</comment>


Stripe Connect v2 - <AUTHOR> http://stripe.com/connect <comment><USER2> I mean god damn stripe has some great front-end engineers.

<comment><USER3> +100.

It looks modern yet very readable thanks to great typography. Loads fast. Fully usable on mobile as well. E.g. Gets a hamburger menu on Mobile. The featured client animation is simpler. The spinning globe icon is replaced by a static image. They have absolutely top notch front end engineering talent.

This is in huge contrast to the current trend where they want to hijack browser's scrolling behavior for absolutely no gain to the end user.

<comment><USER4> Some tradeoffs though; this is what it looks like on IE9 [http://i.imgur.com/EkH81zN.png](http://i.imgur.com/EkH81zN.png)

<comment><USER5> Stripe's product is for developers. I highly doubt there are developers using IE9. It's an audience Stripe can comfortably choose to ignore.

<comment><USER6> Whilst that sounds logically. You're replying to someone on HN, who is presumably a developer and detected this bug in IE9.

<comment><USER7> More than likely that developer checked it in IE9 after seeing the great front-end design, and does not primarily browse the web in IE9 (what sane person would?)

Edit: he commented below saying it was IE11 with the IE9 emulation enabled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In retrospect, the global P2P marketplace that we've launched in 2010 on top of PayPal's API may have been 5 years too soon. Requiring all our buyers and sellers to have a PayPal account was detrimental to our brand. But, we concluded that we "didn't want to be in the nasty business of dealing with fraud, ID verification and international payments" so it made sense back then to leave that up to PayPal. But I would have given anything for a white label solution such as Stripe Connect. Also makes me wonder why PayPal wasn't able to come up with this in 5 freaking years. The technology, the platform and ecosystem was clearly there, just not the insight.

<comment><USER9> It's likely this was a conscious business decision; PayPal derives value through its _brand_ , which is lost to consumers (buyers) using the platform if the platform becomes a white label solution.

PayPal wants customers to know they can pay _with PayPal_ at business/merchant X, not just their credit card.

<comment><USER10> Indeed, Paypal doesn't want you to pay with your credit card, and won't let you change your default PayPal payment method. You have to go through a process to select it Every.Single.Time, if you remember, and if you overlook to do it - well, what do you know, PayPal just saved the CC fee...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Kudos for the great explanation here: [https://stripe.com/docs/recipes/on- demand-app](https://stripe.com/docs/recipes/on-demand-app)

However I still have one question: is it possible to delay payments to service providers? In other words to do escrow.

Here is our use case: a client books a service (maybe with 30 days in advance), we need to charge the client at that time, but we won't pay the service provider until 24 hours after the service has been provided (so that we've made sure everything went fine).

<comment><USER12> > However I still have one question: is it possible to delay payments to > service providers? In other words to do escrow.

Yes: "You can control the transfer schedule for your recipients, which should effectively cover what you need to do. (Sorry this isn't clearer in the docs.) Feel free to email us, too. I'm email@example.com."

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9200224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9200224)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I assume you need to file a 1099-MISC with the IRS for each managed account that's setup on the system?

If so, you might want to make this reporting requirement more visible in your documentation.

<comment><USER14> Actually only if account does 200 txns and $20,000.

[http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/New-1099-K-Reporting- Requireme...](http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/New-1099-K-Reporting-Requirements- for-Payment-Settlement-Entities)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> If Stripe is charging 0.5% of funds paid out to managed accounts, does this mean you're "double dipping"?

<comment><USER16> We're getting rid of the $0.25 transfer fee and replacing it with 0.5% of funds paid out to managed accounts. We do more work (and incur more cost) if you're using managed accounts, so we think it makes sense.

<comment><USER15> Seems like it would require the same amount of work to pay out $10,000 vs. $100,000.

Why scale the fee?

Does this apply to marketplaces/accounts migrating from Balanced? There was an assurance that Stripe would honor Balanced's pricing. [https://www.balancedpayments.com/stripe/faq#will-our- pricing...](https://www.balancedpayments.com/stripe/faq#will-our-pricing- change)

If you require marketplaces to use managed accounts then it's an extra tax, no?

<comment><AUTHOR> > _Seems like it would require the same amount of work to pay out $10,000 vs. > $100,000._

We want our pricing to align with the best product experience, and a flat fee would encourage marketplaces to pay out _less_ frequently. This pricing makes it easy to do daily transfers. In addition, there are actually reporting obligations and such that kick in at higher volumes, so it's not completely scale-independent.

> _Does this apply to marketplaces /accounts migrating from Balanced? There > was an assurance that Stripe would honor Balanced's pricing. > [https://www.balancedpayments.com/stripe/faq#will-our- > pricing...](https://www.balancedpayments.com/stripe/faq#will-our-pricing..). > _

No; we'll grandfather both Stripe Transfers API (the old system) users and Balanced users. That said, this works out to be cheaper for most people -- most users aren't doing $100k payouts.

> _If you require marketplaces to use managed accounts then it 's an extra > tax, no?_

We don't require that they use managed accounts. Over time, I think standalone accounts will become the better option, since it's _much_ less work for the marketplace.

<comment><USER15> > We want our pricing to align with the best product experience, and a flat > fee would encourage marketplaces to pay out less frequently.

I don't understand how increasing pricing from a flat fee to a percentage encourages marketplaces to pay out less frequently. The cost is so nominal that it far outweighs any percentage fee.

> We don't require that they use managed accounts. Over time, I think > standalone accounts will become the better option

Better for whom? [edit] My customers are not tech savvy and only want to deal with one fintech vendor, exposing Stripe to my customers seems like it's Stripe's best interest.

<comment><USER17> > I don't understand how increasing pricing from a flat fee to a percentage > encourages marketplaces to pay out less frequently. The cost is so nominal > that it far outweighs any percentage fee.

Our goal, as Patrick said, is to allow people to pay out _more_ frequently. A flat fee ties your costs to number of transfers, which seems unnecessary in a lot of cases. If a seller just earned $10, they should get their $10 (at a cost of a nickel).

> Better for whom?

For customers and platforms. If we do our job right, standalone accounts should be so easy to use and user-friendly, even for non-tech-savvy customers, that it's clearly the better option for everyone.

That being said, it's not like we'll kill off managed accounts: there'll always be a good reason to have a fully customized experience. Making standalone accounts good enough to be the better option more often is a goal we strive for, but that's for our customers to decide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Lots of great changes that make a world of difference for marketplace builders. From someone who used to use Authorize.net and spent a lot of money building tools around it... I love Stripe. So simple, so smart. Best YC company yet.

</comment><comment><USER19> The final piece of the puzzle - for me at least - is the ability to collect money as a business, then pay out my service providers through Stripe.

There's a temptation to just let the money sit in my Stripe account, then payout using a "Special Case Transfer" [https://stripe.com/docs/connect/special-case- transfers](https://stripe.com/docs/connect/special-case-transfers)

But this approach seems non-compliant.

How long before we can payout service providers so the charge is seen as coming from my business, instead of from my customers? (This appears to be the compliance issue.)

An ACH "source" is potentially a good solution (and apparently in beta), but I imagine I'll incur additional fee. Perhaps using my own bank account as a source will be free, but using others will be paid? (Kinda like managed accounts)

<comment><USER17> Do you mean a situation where the service provider is not directly providing the service to the customer, like paying out a caterer for your office lunch? I'd love to better understand exactly what you're trying to use this for.

The short answer is that we're also really excited about the "many-to-many" use case of moving money around. There are many hurdles to getting there, and we're checking them off one by one. This is a leap towards that eventual world.

<comment><USER19> "like paying out a caterer for your office lunch"

Pretty much. But it's a little hard to envision at that scale.

Think instead about a large company with a set of approved vendors. Execs submit purchase orders to the vendors. The vendors get paid out by check.

Instead, you can payout the vendors through Stripe.

Edit: As I think about this more, I don't think it should be free from my own account, but it's hard to reason what ACH pricing should be. I can send an automated check for $1.50 with Lob today.

<comment><USER20> Exactly.

It'd be great to be able to do with Stripe what we can do with POs. Here are Three POs for three vendors associated with this purchase (80%, 10% & 10% respectively).

And then directly push the funds to each with separate transactions, without having to have a 'master account' that pulls in 100% (and takes the full fee structure on the nose), then internally/itself pushes out 80% and 10% to others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Does anyone know if Stripe have plans -in the rather short term- to come to Asia? Japan, or maybe Singapore?

I know this question always comes up so it must be getting obnoxious, and I apologize for asking it yet again, but it's a testimony to how great Stripe is. I'd go further: I think it is a competitive advantage for a startup to be in a country supported by Stripe vs others.

I have a Japanese tea subscription service ([https://tomotcha.com](https://tomotcha.com)), so my business is anchored in Japan. Yet because there is no acceptable payment system here I take payments abroad with all the tax headaches that it entails... It's ok for now because Tomotcha is pretty small, but when it grows I will have to switch.

I'm looking forward to the growth of course, but not to the switch...

<comment><USER22> Check out Webpay for payments in Japan. Their API was originally supposed to be a clone of the Stripe API, but have gone off with their own API updates based on the JP market. [https://webpay.jp/](https://webpay.jp/)

<comment><USER21> I know webpay, but it only issues payments in JPY while I charge my customers either in USD or EUR... It's great for Japanese companies targeting the Japanese market, but my customers are mostly in North America and Europe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Did you just merge "Connect" and "Marketplaces" so that there is no "Marketplaces" anymore? I saw that stripe.com/marketplaces is a redirect to stripe.com/connect

<comment><USER16> Yes, they're the one product now. We didn't want divergent products for similar use cases. One feature we think is neat is you can mix-and-match standalone accounts (where the seller uses a regular Stripe account) and managed accounts (where the seller never goes to Stripe).

<comment><USER19> Is this a change in price for $0.25 per transfer, to 0.5% per transfer? I guess there's additional value-add from tax management.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, the $0.25 transfer fee is going away. We didn't want to penalize platforms for transferring earnings to their sellers more frequently.

<comment><USER24> If you're paying out on a $10,000 job, the fee is going from $0.25 to $50.00? Is there a way to keep the flat-fee pricing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> You know Stripe attracts great talent when an API company has some of the best front-end work you've seen.

</comment><comment><USER26> All of the links on rotation images and company text go to DoorDash for me. Also, only a short line of text is shown and the rest is cut off. "Lyft uses connect to Create an integ"

This is on IE10 Version: 10.0.9200.17267 (work machine).

Screenshot: [http://imgur.com/lddIlhz](http://imgur.com/lddIlhz)

<comment><USER27> wow some people still use IE on HN.

<comment><USER28> Wow, some people on HN access the site from work where corporate IT policy may limit the software that runs on their machine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Heads up, another broken link. On this page: [https://stripe.com/docs/connect/connecting-to- accounts#manag...](https://stripe.com/docs/connect/connecting-to- accounts#managed-accounts)

There's a link to learn more about managed accounts: [https://stripe.com/docs/connect/managed- accounts](https://stripe.com/docs/connect/managed-accounts)

Which just shows "An unexpected error occurred" [http://cl.ly/image/3V2k333n0d32](http://cl.ly/image/3V2k333n0d32)

<comment><USER17> Sorry about that! Should be fixed now.

<comment><USER29> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'd like to be able to capture someone's credit card for a given amount (deposit), and then charge it later (manually) if certain terms are met. Is this possible under this new system?

<comment><USER31> Yes, I believe you've been able to separately auth and capture (up to 7 days) later for a while

[https://support.stripe.com/questions/does-stripe-support- aut...](https://support.stripe.com/questions/does-stripe-support-authorize- and-capture)

<comment><USER30> Seven days isn't helpful.

I've been looking at performing this functionality with utilizing a free trial; setup a subscription payment of one year with a three month trial.

If the client meets the requirements, let the subscription charge after three months (then cancel all subsequent subscription payments). If they fail to meet terms within the three month window, cancel the "trial" all together.

Feels hacky.

<comment><USER32> If you attach the card to a customer object[0], you can create one off charges whenever you'd like. Stripe will even update the card's details on the customer if the card is reissued[1]. You can then create charges against the card manually through the dashboard (which seems to be what you were looking for based off of your original comment).

[0] [https://stripe.com/docs/tutorials/charges#saving-credit- card...](https://stripe.com/docs/tutorials/charges#saving-credit-card-details- for-later)

[1] [https://stripe.com/blog/smarter-saved- cards](https://stripe.com/blog/smarter-saved-cards)

<comment><USER30> Does there always have to be an initial charge (in the example $1.00)?

<comment><USER32> No. Creating the customer will charge the card $0.00 or $1.00 (depends on country/bank) and immediately refund the charge to verify the card itself, the CVC, the address, etc. In most cases, this tiny charge won't be noticed because of the refund.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Does this require people who want to be paid to sign up for accounts on stripe? Or can the application initiate bank transfers to the seller, on behalf of the buyer or from escrow.

<comment><USER16> You have two options: you can have sellers link a Stripe account (and we'll do all the downstream work, like collecting their bank account info and verifying their identity). Or you can create a managed account via API, where the seller does everything from within your app and never needs to go to Stripe.

<comment><USER24> Can you do the following (in this order): 'Provision' a standalone account with just an email address (with zero work by the account holder to-be) > Initiate a charge (to a buyer) that will ultimately be paid out to that standalone account > Have the seller setup their standalone account (so it's then capable of receiving funds)

I'm trying to figure the work flow that has the least toing and froing for both parties.

<comment><USER17> Indeed you can: [https://stripe.com/docs/connect/deferred- accounts](https://stripe.com/docs/connect/deferred-accounts)

<comment><USER24> Brilliant!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> What does this mean for those of us who already use Stripe Connect? Do we get support for more countries automatically - do we have to change our code - will the v1 API stop working soon? Please send out an announcement current to Stripe Connect API users with upgrade information!

The new site is very pretty, but also very sluggish in Firefox.

<comment><USER17> Existing Connect integrations will still work: no changes are necessary. Connect has always allowed you to connect directly to accounts in other countries, so no major changes there either.

We're getting some emails out now with more specific "what can I do not"-style information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Any stripe engineers here to explain how the new multi-party payments work? The documentation has a new "destination" field but doesn't explain if it can be used as a third party in a normal Stripe Connect charge.

I see a new Stripe-Stripe programmatic transfer, but is that the only way to do multi-party setups?

</comment><comment><USER36> Should clicking on the companies (lyft, Kickerstarter..) open in a new tab instead of navigating away from Stripe?

</comment><comment><USER37> I was just looking at Connect a few days ago and had one issue - the fact that the customer account needed to bear the fees. Very happy to see the option for the platform account to bear the fees. Much simpler for the customer to understand!

</comment><comment><USER38> How much of this decision was based upon regulatory / payments compliance pressure?

</comment><comment><USER39> So the blog post on connect says "Managed Accounts" are available to anywhere that stripe is supported. However, on the docs, it says that it can only be used in the US and Canada. Which one is it?

<comment><USER17> You can create managed accounts anywhere Stripe is, but your platform needs to be in the U.S. or Canada. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

<comment><USER39> OHHH! That makes SO much more sense. Okay, yeah you guys should clarify that, that's a huge selling point. Thanks for the response.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> > _...our platform can support sellers anywhere Stripe operates (18 countries, > more coming this year)._

Asking from New Zealand, any hints on the "more coming this year" countries?

</comment><comment><USER41> probably OT: Is it possible to link Stripe to a credit card so I can perform an online shopping transaction on behalf of my customer without handling their credit card data?

<comment><USER16> What's your use case? You can't use cards stored in Stripe on non-Stripe sites, if that's what you're asking.

<comment><USER41> What I was imagining is stripe issuing a credit card that my system can use to perform credit card payments on any generic webshop (either manually or some web scraper) and have that linked to a payment into my stripe account by a specific customer. I am not aware of anyone offering this service.

<comment><USER42> Why on Earth would you need to be able to do that?

<comment><USER43> Sounds like an extra layer of card fraud protection might be a use case.

Automating some shopping cases might be another.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> One question that came up when browsing thru the api doc. What are the advantages of "Charging through the platform" vs "Charging directly"?

<comment><USER17> Charging through the platform has you pay all of the fees and take on chargeback liability, whereas charging directly passed those on to the managed account. This also affects the default statement descriptor and contact info on statements.

<comment><USER44> Hmm correct me if i'm wrong, but it doesn't seem like it would be that advantageous to take on the chargeback liability just for the statement description unless 'charging thru the platform' also provides a escrow system for the safety of the buyer.

<comment><USER17> When you charge through the platform we issue the charge on behalf the connected account, so you are never actually in the flow of funds.

Re: chargebacks, there are 2 situations where this becomes relevant:

\- With managed accounts, you're responsible for losses in the end anyway. This mostly dictates which account balance the fee comes from.

\- Generally if you're providing the customer support it can make sense to take on liability. Take Lyft for example: they don't debit driver bank accounts if they get a chargeback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> What is the name of the person that created this design?

<comment><USER17> Philipp Antoni made the gravity header - [https://twitter.com/phlntn](https://twitter.com/phlntn)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Does Stripe support all the EU countries yet?

<comment><USER16> In our defense, they keep adding new EU countries. But no, we're not in all of them yet. We're in 13 EU countries, Norway, and Switzerland: [https://stripe.com/global](https://stripe.com/global)

<comment><USER47> If it helps, they seem to also be on the brink of losing some. Congrats on the launch!

<comment><USER48> Pluses: Stripe increases EU coverage

Minuses: global financial earthquake

Hmmm.... :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> That is not how orbital mechanics work...

<comment><USER50> They are aware of that ;)

[https://twitter.com/aphyr/status/580060489796829184](https://twitter.com/aphyr/status/580060489796829184)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Any timeframe on when managed accounts are expanding beyond US/Canada?

<comment><USER52> I work at Stripe. We're looking to expand as soon as we can in the 18 countries we support ([https://stripe.com/global](https://stripe.com/global)), but no ETA yet I'm afraid. If you're interested in helping us test a private beta, shoot us a note at email@example.com.

<comment><USER53> How does it look with transfers for other countries than US?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> current balanced customer who is soon to be a stripe convert.

very thrilled about this and being able to payout internationally as a marketplace!

</comment><comment><USER55> This is great! Well done!

</comment><comment><USER56> Love it, awesome stuff.

</comment><comment><USER57> gorgeous!!!

</comment><comment><USER27> I want to start a code marketplace using Stripe connect. someone posts a job, people bid on it, someone pays the person doing the job, I take the payment and release it when the work is confirmed to be done.

Is there an existing script that I can use and integrate stripe connect with?

</comment><comment><USER58> Dat landing page tho</comment>


Elon Musk's Mars Dream Is Worth Rooting For - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-06-19/elon-musk-s-mars-dream-is-worth-rooting-for?utm_content=view&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&cmpid%3D=socialflow-twitter-view <comment><USER2> How much would it be worth to have a sustainable city of one million people on Earth? What's preventing that from happening?

By "sustainable" I mean a nearly closed loop system, with little need for water or air from the rest of the Earth, and little in the way of waste.

Because it seems like that is the biggest hurdle to this dream.</comment>


Xcode 4.4 is available (for Lion and Mountain Lion) - <AUTHOR> http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/xcode/id497799835?mt=12

<comment><USER2> Any idea why literal syntax would only be for OS X?

<comment><USER3> I requires runtime support that hasn't yet shipped on a public version of iOS.

<comment><USER4> Isn't it a compile time feature?

<comment><USER5> Only partially.

Mike Ash goes into some detail on his excellent blog: [http://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday- qa-2012-06-22-objective...](http://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday- qa-2012-06-22-objective-c-literals.html)

Long story short, some of it is compile time, but some of it involves classes in Foundation (like NSArray and NSDictionary) implementing new methods (like objectAtIndexedSubscript).

iOS needs a base SDK update before those methods will be available there. Or you could monkey-patch them in with a category yourself in the meantime.

<comment><USER4> Literals and object/container subscripting are different things, even though they appear at the same time. Container literals should be compile time too and available to all versions of iOS (or at least v4 and above).

I also think it should be possible to support container (NSArray, NSDictionary) subscripting for foundation classes at compile-time for all versions even if the new functions aren't around. They just have to translate to the existing functions. I bet they do this too[1]

(upvoted you, it is a very informative link).

Edit: some more thoughts.

[1] No, they don't do that in v4.4. But maybe they will in a future version of Xcode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I like especially the fact that now I can use initializer lists to fill a vector (just like in Gcc).

<comment><USER6> At this point, they seem to have better C++11 support than any gcc release. Is it possible that Xcode has now become the most viable C++11 development platform?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> their way of dealing with command line tools is rather annoying in this release

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, I wasn't able to install the Command Line Tools from the Xcode Preferences. It works if you do it manually ... by downloading the Command Line Tools from:

<https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action>

and now I have in my path clang 4.0!

<comment><USER8> Both the June and July command line tools give me an error saying they don't support 10.8.

<comment><USER9> Same here; the late July update is only installable on 10.7. Looks like we're still stuck waiting for Apple to sort out the 403 error for XCode 4.4 on Mountain Lion.

<comment><USER7> I found a link to the 10.8 tools somewhere on SO. It was that or build everything from source...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> xCode 4.5 Beta versions are available too</comment>


Mansa Musa: The richest man who ever lived - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-47379458 <comment><USER2> In a very real sense an average American like me is incomparably wealthier than Mansa Musa or anyone else living in past times if we measure wealth in terms of things we are able to own and buy. Mansa Musa certainly had a lot more power over more people than I do but he couldn't go across the world in day and didn't have access to healthcare products like I do. Unfortunately humans tend to compare themselves to those around them and especially to those who are better off so I don't feel as though I'm incomparably wealthier than Mansa Musa.</comment>


Best Affordable Houston Interior Designer and Decorator Services - <AUTHOR> https://telegra.ph/Decorating-and-Remodeling-Tips-from-Top-Interior-Designers-07-30 <comment><AUTHOR> Our Best Houston Interior Designers have the creativity, training, and experience to select only the best materials for your individual project. We bring you highest quality selection of products to create unparalleled interior design. For more info visit our website.</comment>


What people get paid to work in journalism - <AUTHOR> https://www.cjr.org/cjr_outbox/google-doc-journalism-media-pay.php <comment><USER2> I was in broadcast journalism for 20 years, and these numbers seem about right to me.

When I started out, small market media outlets would find ways to pay recent J-school graduates sub-minimum wage and make them feel grateful to even get that. A surprising number of journalists, even TV news anchors, will have second jobs in small markets.

A place that tried to recruit me in Indiana wanted me to report the news in the morning, then sell advertising for the news in the afternoon, and half of my pay would be sales commissions. Naturally, I turned it down. I dated a newspaper reporter who did her reporting second shift, then worked third shift at a small factory.

Once you get to a medium-sized market (30 and up), you can make enough to survive, if you don't have a lot of debt or expectations.

It really wasn't until I got into a top ten market that I was able to keep up enough to stop getting calls from bill collectors. Once I got into a top-five market, then I could live well.

I loved journalism. I loved reporting. I loved telling stories. I hated the pay and the industry and got out.

<comment><USER3> What does it mean when a market is "size 30"?

<comment><USER4> The size of the viewing audience.

Here's the list for the us [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_televi...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_television_markets)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So with 15 years of experience as a New York Times editor, you make about 80% as much money as a newly hired software engineer at Google with zero experience. No wonder traditional media is bitter about the tech companies.

<comment><USER6> Jeez, are entry-level devs really making 180k at Google?

<comment><USER7> 'Entry level' at Google means someone who is already top of their field so it's not surprising.

<comment><USER8> Bollocks. I know quite a few Googlers, most of them hired well above entry level but also mostly not top of their field. Entry-level devs at Google, Facebook, etc. really are paid obscene amounts of money. Non-entry-level devs are paid even more, but it's not quite as obscene because at least they've done _something_ to justify it. Don't listen to sour-grapes talk from people who washed out of FAANG interviews.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can confirm. Spent 12 years at a tech magazine and was making $70K at the end. Was laid off for being too expensive. Now I work at a large tech company and make double that. Oh, and no one threatens my life if I get a detail wrong anymore, so that's an improvement. Honestly, being a journalist is like working in a kitchen. Super high stakes and everyone is always 1 step away from complete panic and super stressed out, yet no one is paid enough to make that kind of pressure worth while. At least in journalism, you get access, a modicum of power, and the ability to change the world around you. As a chef, it's just insane pressure for no real world-changing reason.

<comment><USER10> In my senior year of high school I was heavily involved in my school newspaper. I and put more effort into that then I did 90% of my other classes and some of my best memories from high school are because of that class. My teacher would bring in local reporters in every so often to talk to us about the field and answer our questions, and there was a very common theme of 'landing lob in this field is hard, the work will always be hard, and you won't get paid very well' among most of the speakers.

Luckily for me I was also learning how to program in C++ in my spare time and decided to take some computer science classes my freshman year of college to see what the field had to offer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yes, the salaries for journalists are low but another factor is that even those poorly paid full-time staff positions are _hard to get_.

For CS students about to graduate, there are recruiters competing with each other at campus actively looking to hire you. On the other hand, the newly minted Journalism/English/Communications majors often struggle with freelance gigs with low rates[0]. They hope to impress editors and get their "foot in the door" to a salaried writing job.

[0] [https://contently.net/rates-database/rates/](https://contently.net/rates- database/rates/)

<comment><USER12> The same is true for most fields of academia, the arts, or professional sports.

In fields where people are doing things primarily for love, they are willing to accept comparatively low salaries, crowded labor markets, and poor conditions to get a chance to do what they love for a living.

Source: am physicist.

<comment><USER13> has more to do with scarcity of talent and demand rather than "things people love to do." Coding pays well because it is important and few people are smart enough to do it well. Service sectors jobs are not fun and pay poorly and there are a ton of job seekers relative to demand due ot low cognitive barriers to entry. Most job that would be considered "fun" either have low demand and or low cognitive barriers to entry.

<comment><USER14> I'd say physics is a lot harder to do than your average SV developer's job. Even more so playing sports at a level that brings in real money.

<comment><USER15> What is "physics" as a job? The problem with physics is that there are few applied physics jobs compared to CS and applied CS (software developer) jobs. Similar things can be said about CS, there aren't very many CS jobs and I'd say it's comparable in difficulty to physics.

<comment><USER16> > The problem with physics is that there are few applied physics jobs compared > to CS and applied CS (software developer) jobs.

Isn't every engineering job essentially applied physics?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Reporting, like teaching, sadly falls into a category of jobs where the demand (for the jobs themselves) far outstrips the supply of jobs. It seems almost wrong because journalism (and teaching) is so important to our collective understanding of the world, but the other side of the coin is that it is that very importance which makes the jobs so desirable.

<comment><USER18> you forgot the important part -- ability to leverage others to make them pay you.. it is the "elephant in the room"

<comment><USER19> >ability to leverage others to make them pay you

That's an interesting phrasing. In other words: ability to provide a valuable and scarce service that people are willing to pay for?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Background: I'm an engineer who has previously worked on research related to misinformation and built data tooling for news organizations, and I now work at a news organization myself.

Journalism is in a bad place in the United States. The number of journalists has shrunk dramatically, particularly at the local level, over the past decade. (In case it isn't immediately clear that journalism is a public good, the decline of local news has been linked to increases in local corruption and borrowing costs/debt as well as a decline in civic engagement in communities: see [https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/news- media/l...](https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/news-media/local- newspapers-civic-engagement/) for a roundup).

I think there's a lot of work to be done from a number of angles in this space, including exploring new and innovative business models for news organizations; leveraging advances in technology and data science to improve existing products; and encouraging shifts in consumer attitude (similar to the way that attitudes towards paid entertainment content - movies, music, etc. - have shifted over the past 15 years).

<comment><USER21> I sincerely believe news orgs are hugely (not wholly) responsible for their own demise. I'll explain using print news as an example.

For newspapers, the internet changed the competition field, from one or two competitors to dozens (maybe hundreds).

When that happened, US news consumers noticed some things. A multitude of (or maybe most) editors & journalists are profoundly, unconscionably lazy.

I'll offer some Examples.

1) Lots of ink but not a lot of news gathering: Most (hundreds?) US news orgs all lead w/ the same ½doz headlines - and those are likely Reuters/AP/UPI reprints. How many national stories are in play any given day? Six? I think there are dozens and dozens - and they're all ignored in favor for whatever editors think is sexy. (I suppose editors tend to have similar tastes.)

Local stories are likely to be original. Well, except when they're parroting press releases. Or worse - they're parroting PR without any analysis or historical context. In this case the readers are given no tools to tell if the PR is crap or not. This turns the journalist into the official spokesbot of the police, government or local corporation. It's publishing but it isn't journalism.

2) Fluff: Sports journalism. Celeb journalism. etc. Is it journalism? Lets go in that direction some more. Stamp collecting journalism. Paint swirl journalism. Concrete curing journalism. There are people who like those things. Is that enough?

Consider this. Journalists are afforded extra 1st Amendment protections, to encourage them to unearth and reveal misdeeds by the powerful. The intent seems to be to help citizens learn where their rights and liberties might be being eroded. Reporting that depends on those protections would seem to be a strong candidate for what constitutes journalism.

I suggest that reporting on paint swirls and sport stats is probably a pretty safe thing.

3) Lastly, uneducated journalists: One example. During the Obama administration I'd participate in journalism chats. I had a regular question. Did the reporters know that Pres Obama prosecuted more whistleblowers for espionage than all previous presidents combined?

Now this could be a good or bad stat, depending on one's perspective. Regardless, it was an undeniably powerful, historical statistic. Depressingly, that stat wasn't well known by journalists. In fact most journalists seemed resistant to believing it or they felt the stat misrepresented some larger situation.

This lapse was a terrible thing. Whistleblowers have always been a incalculably valuable to journalists, who were oblivious to what seemed to be a crackdown by that administration.

(Fortunately, that's changing a bit & whistleblowers are suddenly revered again. Or at least that's the lip service.)

Conclusion: To me, if news orgs want to survive, they each need to bring something to the table. Some do. Some are exceptional. Some are consistently exceptional. Some screw it up occasionally but that's reasonable in the larger context.

But if news orgs are largely reprinting others' content, then they are largely not serving a critical public function. Worse, they're abdicating the duty inferred by their extra constitutional protections.

I believe those news orgs should die.

<comment><USER20> I think your reply misses a powerful factor: economics.

Newspapers used to rely on print advertising to make the majority of their money. And they made enough of it to do a good job.

It's much harder to report original stories when you have no revenue. Nowadays, advertising revenue is mostly driven by clicks, hence the rise in clickbait, reprinting of Reuters/AP/etc. (as opposed to "real" local stories) and fluff journalism as you mention. Local news has been hit the hardest because these newspapers made more of their money, percentage-wise, from advertising and classifieds.

(Also, worth noting: the link I provided contains studies showing that local news _nowadays_ provides an important net good to society. So while you may be of the opinion - anecdotally - that all local news is just PR, that hasn't been found to be true in the academic literature.)

As to your third point, the prosecution of whistleblowers was heavily covered during the Obama administration. While I obviously can't speak to the specific conversations and interactions you had, it seems to me that you're tarring journalism with an incredibly broad brush by calling journalists uneducated based on a few chats (also, journalists cover a wide variety of subjects - were the journalists you were chatting with covering national politics?). There are more and less educated journalists, just as there are in every profession.

Obviously the old models don't work for journalism, and a lot of the onus is on journalism to change and to innovate. But if we value journalism as a society, some of it is also on us to change the way society works. I think the challenge is not dissimilar to what we saw with movies/music in the early 00's when piracy was rampant. The rise of streaming and the willingness of the general public to pay for entertainment media again has been a game-changer in that industry.

<comment><USER21> The flaws and issues I brought up weren't caused by post-1995 realities. They were what news consumers had been given for a long time, in exchange for their subscription dollars & eyeball time.

The demise of news kingdoms happened when it became impossible for us to ignore what we were getting for our money.

Going forward, the economics issues are as stark and complex as you say. A new challenge is they're being used to justify feeding us the same diet of crap (not exclusively - wonderful exceptions abound) that our parents were served.

In the midst of all this is a comprehensive lack of self-awareness by news orgs who exist to state reality in helpful terms. Step One should be clearly stating the core reasons that quiet Americans lost their trust in the press. It's been 20 years and news orgs are still unable (again, lots of exceptions like CJR) to discuss these crippling flaws. How can any economic solutions help if news orgs offer little more than fluff, recycled content and 1st- impression reporting?

<comment><USER20> I don't agree with your assertion that "the demise of news kingdoms happened when it became impossible for us to ignore what we were getting for our money," and I haven't seen any literature which would back up the argument that people suddenly woke and realized "we ain't paying for this shit anymore." There is, however, plenty of literature showing that with the advent of the internet the shortfall in print advertising was not made up for by online advertising.

The "diet of crap" that you bemoan has always existed to a certain extent because of economics. More people want to read about celebrity gossip or sports than the CJR. The internet has simply exacerbated this issue because the online advertising model rewards eyeballs and clicks, and what you would call "crap" content generates more of them.

<comment><USER21> Your rebuttal places responsibility for what news orgs print - on everyone but the news orgs.

So your argument seems to be this. News orgs have to defer their 1st- Amendment-inferred duties in favor of printing pap because otherwise they'll go broke. In the mean time they're going broke.

Americans have more sources of pap than ever before yet that is the arena where news orgs want to compete. Like news orgs, you appear to have zero concern with this plan.

As an aside, did you know that House voted to reauth Sect 215 surveillance? WaPo barely mentions it in their own article. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/11/19/house- pa...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/11/19/house-passes-short- term-spending-bill-avert-thursday-midnight-shutdown/)

I doubt you knew because 1000 news orgs are thoughtlessly, compulsively covering [SUPER SEXY STORY] today, to the exclusion of all else. I don't know how much other critical information I'm missing bc (like every day) the vast bulk of news orgs can't be bothered to fulfill their constitutionally- protected purpose for existing.

Do you have a specific argument as to why news orgs are not earning their collective death? Other than some belief that they should continue to profit at pap, I mean.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I would like to see this for other fields. It seems as if few really understand how the other half lives, which is a general cause for confusion, and the unwarranted animosity that can arise from it, in society.

You could also apply the principle to diets: I feel as if weight management is so difficult for so many because they have no real idea of what their meal frequency and portion size are in the grand scheme.

In fact, can anyone think of any examples of issues that affect most of the population, wherein lack of general knowledge of the spread of circumstances leads to more amenable outcomes, individually or overall?

<comment><USER23> For software engineering, levels.fyi is my go to

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Link to spreadsheet: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SP3Sqqdv6R8chFamjtgd...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SP3Sqqdv6R8chFamjtgdNlOrUar- hJXvkMSeha2mHQ8/htmlview?sle=true#gid=1665107219)

<comment><USER25> Clean the data, normalize, make some multiple regressions and you may have something interesting

Edit: The data is honestly a mess. Good luck to anyone that want's to make any analysis. They should have done a proper form.

<comment><USER26> On the Google form, under the Salary header, there's a text box. Which imho is fine, given the inherent complexity of the potential input (some salaries are annual, others are by the hour or by the story, with a cap on the latter), and without adding multiple fields to the form.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > A web producer for Wirecutter, the consumer review site now owned by the New > York Times, makes just $45,000, according to the list. An editor at the same > site with three years of experience has a salary of only $62,000. For a job > based in New York City, that seems barely livable.

The median _household_ income in NYC is ~$51k: [https://project.wnyc.org/median-income- nabes/](https://project.wnyc.org/median-income-nabes/)

<comment><USER21> That'd be excellent pay in most of rural America (the ~99%).

<comment><USER28> That's not what the 99% means. Most Americans live in a city. Relatively few people love in rural areas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> How many people actually pay for news? I certainly don't, not in the traditional sense of paying for WSJ or NYT subscription (I donate to youtubers that cover current affairs).

Most revenue from news must come from advertising, and I think advertising is a poisoned chalice. It makes the news organisations beholden to corporations they should be reporting on, and fulfils the adage "news is what they don't want you to hear, everything else is PR".

<comment><USER30> For the NY Times, the assertion that most of their revenue comes from advertising just isn't true. 60% of their revenue now comes from subscription fees, and advertising's slice of their revenue has shrunk consistently.

[https://dashboards.trefis.com/no-login- required/5gNimvTR/New...](https://dashboards.trefis.com/no-login- required/5gNimvTR/New-York-Times-Revenues-How-Does-New-York-Times-Make- Money-?fromforbesandarticle=nyt191029)

<comment><USER26> To be fair, getting high percentage revenue from subscriptions is a very recent phenomenon, and the NYT is one of the exclusive few (arguably the only one) that is finding this strategy and trend to be viable.

<comment><USER31> I think they're mainly benefiting from the Trump era. When it ends, I think their subscription numbers will plummet, since there won't be so many shocking things happening every day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Wow, reporters make squat. Editing is a bit more lucrative.

<comment><USER14> Leaving aside copyeditors, etc. editors tend to be more senior. Furthermore, a lot of "editors" also write stories; it can be more an indication of seniority than an indication that they just assign stories and edit other people's work. (Which there's often not a huge amount of these days.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Its not great but its not terrible. Just software is way overpaid.

Median Household Income 2017

Bronx $37,397 Brooklyn $56,942 Manhattan $85,071 Queens $64,509 Staten Island $79,201 New York City $60,879 New York State $64,894 United States $60,336

[https://www.baruch.cuny.edu/nycdata/income- taxes/med_hhold_i...](https://www.baruch.cuny.edu/nycdata/income- taxes/med_hhold_income.htm)

<comment><USER34> > Just software is way overpaid.

That indicates to me how underpaid most other jobs are, not that programmers are way overpaid.

<comment><USER35> Or, you know, the market is dictating the rate.

<comment><USER36> The market is rarely as good at setting prices as its most ardent defenders claim. (Or, to be fair, as bad at setting them as its most ardent critics claim.)

<comment><USER37> What does this statement tell anyone reading it? Or, in pretentious terms, this involves an argumentum ad temperantiam (fallacy that you can compare two unquantified extremes and get something useful)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Relative: [http://whopayswriters.com](http://whopayswriters.com)

</comment><comment><USER39> Low pay, long hours, difficulty of obtaining employment, low long term stability of employment for most places.

The state I used to live in had two newspapers employing maybe 1000 people between them.

Now, there is one newspaper that went bankrupt and lost the building they were in. For several months, there was no statewide newspaper. The bankrupt newspaper was resurrected and now employs less than 20 people, and is primarily an AP news reprinting service with two pages of local news on the weekend.

I worked there one summer in college and briefly after college. I filled in on the city desk a few times, and it was an interesting experience putting out a good daily rag that had excellent content for the most part.

The resurrected paper doesn't even have their own printing press anymore. A local print shop runs them out.

</comment><comment><USER40> > A web producer for Wirecutter, the consumer review site now owned by the New > York Times, makes just $45,000, according to the list. An editor at the same > site with three years of experience has a salary of only $62,000. For a job > based in New York City, that seems barely livable. A deputy editor with the > Times with 15 years experience reportedly makes $145,000, but those kinds of > figures are the exception rather than the rule. A senior video producer at > USA Today makes just $50,000.

Nothing wrong with any of those salaries. It's more than I earn.

<comment><USER41> Do you live in New York City? I think that's the point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> The spreadsheet ([https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SP3Sqqdv6R8chFamjtgd...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SP3Sqqdv6R8chFamjtgdNlOrUar- hJXvkMSeha2mHQ8/htmlview#)) could use some normalization and sanitation, but this would make some very interesting data stories.

I tried to find data on media trends to cross-reference the salary data with industry revenue to get a better understanding, and the best source I could find was Pew Research ([https://www.journalism.org/fact-sheet/digital- news/](https://www.journalism.org/fact-sheet/digital-news/)) but it only covers Digital News.

Overall, my initial gatherings from perusing the spreadsheet are:

\- Don't expect to see Software Engineer salaries in the dataset (6-figures is the exception, not the norm).

\- Biggest surprise was a Reporter in Boston with a 22-year career making $62k/yr.

\- The most frequent locations seem to be NY, DC, Boston, and LA (perhaps unsurprisingly), so I'm not sure how capturing that is of wider domestic and international salary information/trends for the industry.

Another question: I wonder how profitable these companies listed in the spreadsheet are, and how much their owners are making?

</comment><comment><USER14> Journalism has never paid great. And a lot of jobs for those who weren't at the top of the heap weren't that great in other ways as well.

The stark contrast is with software jobs at a few companies in a few locales. But, in general, it's hardly surprising that journalists often end up in other, sometimes adjacent, jobs that value being able to deliver quality prose quickly.

I know a lot of people who have worked as journalists who work for tech companies in various roles.

</comment><comment><USER43> As one of the founders of [http://levels.fyi](http://levels.fyi), it's great to see transparency enter journalism. We're working on some new tracks including media / publishing and hope to provide some nice visuals alongside some of the data.

One of the things that we do on our site is collect official offers anonymously, which we use to benchmark non-verified submissions. Might be interesting here too!

</comment><comment><USER44> This links to the U.S. Department of Labor's prevailing wage database. Sort by geography, then job: [https://flcdatacenter.com/OesWizardStart.aspx](https://flcdatacenter.com/OesWizardStart.aspx)

<comment><USER26> This seems to be a direct link to "Reporters and Correspondents", for employment and wages through May 2018: [https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes273022.htm](https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes273022.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> For every 1 good journalist and editor that has their career stagnate because they are not sensational or biast (or bends the knee to management agendas), there 4 shitty journalists and editors that progress because they are masters of bullshit and manipulation.

The salary and cut throat competition is why the worst rise to the top and we have this cesspool of a news feed we see now on a daily basis. I just stick to WSJ, Bloomberg, and this website to get the headlines that actually matter and ignore the rest of the bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER46> It's harsh, but it really just comes down to supply and demand. The barrier to entry is basically zilch, and lots of people want to do it. Same story with acting.

Frankly (and this is just my opinion here), a lot of reporting is just very low value. Analysis is shallow, or just plain wrong. I find that reporters are way too credulous, have limited quantitative faculties, and tend to start from a narrative and find facts to fit that narrative.

Talking about this reminds me of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect, in which people read a news article about something they know a lot about and realize it's riddled with errors (and then promptly forget about it; I try to avoid that second bit). I so often read things that are either only part of the story or incorrect. Is it any surprise that there's limited value in reporting that can be inaccurate as often as it is accurate?

I don't think this will ever be "fixed". I just try to pay for news sources I like, and that's probably the best thing anyone can do (right now that's thecity.nyc and ProPublica. I also pay for WSJ and NYT, just because they get shared around so much and the paywalls annoy me).

</comment><comment><USER47> And judging by how crappy content they produce they are overpaid ...</comment>


Friendly Floatees - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_Floatees <comment><USER2> Not only is this super interesting but it is also an example of something negative becoming useful with the application of some creativity. A spill of toys or nike sneakers would normally not be something to celebrate of course, but in this case it revealed information about ocean currents and deepened our understanding. Normally we see this type of effect in medical cases where someone has suffered an accident or has a genetic defect which, while terrible for that person, can still be used to learn something with is either hard or unethical to reproduce in experimentation. For me the Floatees are a reminder that we should work to avoid medical, ecological, societal, etc. disasters but once they have happened there is a silver lining of learning we can gain with the right mindset.

<comment><USER3> Also see

[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/nuclear-bombs- made...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/nuclear-bombs-made-it- possible-to-carbon-date-human-tissue-20074710/)

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

Blindsight is an amazing phenomenon with its implications for intelligence without consciousness and a great book by the same name.

<comment><USER4> _> One monkey in particular, Helen, [...] was a macaque monkey that had been decorticated; specifically, her primary visual cortex (V1) was completely removed, blinding her._

Wow, go humans. But I guess this is nothing in comparison with what the commercial farming industry gets up to :(

<comment><USER5> Yeah, if that got a squick reaction then don't go looking up too much animal- based research. We do all sorts of ugly things to animals in the name of science. :/ But we learn all sorts of interesting and useful things from it, so... it's one of those trolley problem things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Oh cool, I have a 1997 edition of the first children's book inspired by this ( _Ducky_ , written by Eve Bunting). Wikipedia didn't know about it so I just updated the page, giving her the due credit as the first author to publish on this. Thanks, HN!

</comment><comment><USER7> reminds me of the beaches where you can find lego pirate accessories. [https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28367198](https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28367198)

</comment><comment><USER8> You can play with simulations based on this data at [http://adrift.org.au](http://adrift.org.au)

</comment><comment><USER9> Shouldn't something like this be relatively simple to do with some kind of system with mobile connectivity & GPS housed in some kind of floatable shell?

It wouldn't have to be powered on for the whole journey (to preserve power) as long as it pings back it's location from time to time.

And since it's location is known it should be possible to recover every unit so as not to pollute the oceans with them.

Shouldn't cost more than $200 per unit, I'd even tend to say that it's doable for around $100.

This would have the benefit that you can plot the exact course each unit has taken (in real time). And for where there's no mobile connectivity just save the location locally and push it once connection is regained.

<comment><USER10> "Relatively simple" is probably relative.

As others note keeping the electronics alive is going to be hard enough, but the "ping back" is probably the hardest bit.

There is no such thing as mobile connectivity in the middle of the ocean, because there are no cell towers, so your only bet is to use satellite hookups.

Satellite connectivity for things like this is pretty good today, with providers like Iridium providing low bandwidth ping services like their Iridium Short Burst Data Service.

You would use something like the Iridium 9603[0] which idles at 34mA and uses 0.8W to send a message.

That is to say it's all definitely doable, but probably not that simple and much much easier to do today then even 10 years ago.

[0] [https://www.iridium.com/products/iridium-9603-3/](https://www.iridium.com/products/iridium-9603-3/)

<comment><USER11> I would think that one hybrid option would be for the balls to enter into a low-power mode when out of cell signal range and simply store their coordinates once ever five minutes. Then when it washes upon the virtual shore, it connects and uploads its track.

<comment><USER10> What percentage of the coast lines around the world are covered by cell towers, I wonder?

It would be an improvement over having to find them manually, but if you've gone to the effort to engineer an electronics package capable of connecting to a cell tower after years at sea you can probably get it to ping a satellite regularly "for free".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This seems like a nice example of chaotic system ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory)).

<comment><USER13> Any kind of atmospheric studies (or studies of currents) would indeed be an archetypal example of a chaotic system -- although much simpler dynamical systems would exhibit chaotic behaviors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Also related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16530506](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16530506) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9970336](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9970336)

</comment><comment><USER15> Wow, I've been 10 Rubber Ducks to my daughter for weeks and had no idea it was inspired by a real event.

</comment><comment><USER16> What I would give to see their journey graphically represented!

<comment><USER17> I can make it happen. What would you give?

</comment></comment><comment> village-idiot Polluting, for science!

<comment><USER13> I know you jest, but it's not like the scientists pushed the container overboard.

So - using disasters to discover new things, for science!

My favorite example of that is still the discovery of radiotrophic fungi[1] in Chernobyl.

It's just so _cool_ to find out about species that feed on radiation. Too bad it takes a local-nuclear-apocalypse level of disaster for that to have happened.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus)

<comment><USER18> When all planes were grounded after 9/11, scientists collected some really interesting data on how airplane contrails effect the weather. (It's more than you'd expect.) [https://globalnews.ca/news/2934513/empty-skies- after-911-set...](https://globalnews.ca/news/2934513/empty-skies- after-911-set-the-stage-for-an-unlikely-climate-change-experiment/)

<comment><USER19> Huh. "9/11 proves that global warming caused by vapor trails" sounds absolutely nutty, but apparently is rather accurate.

<comment><USER13> This is offtopic, but can you _please_ post that article with this title to /r/nottheonion? "Contrails" instead of "vapor trails" might make it even better, but it's damn near perfect as is.

<comment><USER18> That's actually a good idea.

Edit: Sadly they only allow recent news.

<comment><USER20> Also, they only allow the original headlines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Cant they use this data to find MH370?

<comment><USER22> These data are about low-altitude wind and surface ocean currents. Models based on those things are part of the toolkit being used as a matter of course in such searches, but unless MH370 spent months floating at the surface of the ocean, these models can't find it _per se_ , though they can offer indirect hints.

Models of surface wind and currents were used to both predict, and trace back the possible origins of flotsam and debris from the crash that washed ashore[0][1] around the rim of the Indian Ocean in the following months and years.

As a side note, the Friendly Floatees event occurred in the Pacific, with drift around the Pacific, Arctic, and far north Atlantic oceans. MH370 was lost over the Indian Ocean.

[0] [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/world/australia/malaysia-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/world/australia/malaysia- airlines-mh370-debris-mauritius.html)

[1] Part of my sources include personal knowledge, as I lived in Canberra and knew employees at the Australian Transport Safety Bureau during the early months of the search.</comment></comment>