Mexican mammoth trap provides first evidence of prehistoric hunting pits - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/07/mammoth-trap-mexico-prehistoric-hunting-pits <comment><USER2> > Hunters may have used torches to scare the mammals into the area with the > traps, which are about 6ft (1.70m) deep and 25 yards in diameter, but one of > the skulls found also had marks of a spear wound on the front.

I find humans amazing. An adult mammoth is something even the more largest predators would not attempt to hunt. And yet, here is a band of puny 2 legged mammals armed with sticks with a flint at the end, hunting and killing masses of these mighty beasts.

Our most amazing ancestors were not kings and emperors, but rather these pre- historic hunters and gatherers who carved out a niche as alpha predators using brains, language, and primitive tech.

<comment><USER3> >I find humans amazing. An adult mammoth is something even the more largest predators would not attempt to hunt. And yet, here is a band of puny 2 legged mammals armed with sticks with a flint at the end, hunting and killing masses of these mighty beasts.

Humans are the only animal with the ability to communicate complex abstract future plans (e.g. "today we all shore up the pit, tomorrow you guys wait over there and we'll drive them into this pit"). And it's not like animals can outrun us either. We're quite slow in a sprint but out cooling system is optimized for a very high duty cycle so we can just keep on chasing. Imagine being hunted by Terminator or Agent Smith. That's what the water buffalo or mammoth feels like

<comment><USER4> How much of an advantage is our cooling system in colder climates?

<comment><USER5> I first read about persistence hunting in an article about a family in Siberia [0], so I'd assume that it's still feasible (if difficult).

0: [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this- rus...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-russian- family-was-cut-off-from-all-human-contact-unaware-of-world-war-ii-7354256/?no- ist)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Related interesting info:

Eating bone marrow played a key role in the evolution of the human hand

[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180711105725.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180711105725.htm)

Prehistoric humans ate bone marrow like canned soup 400,000 years ago

[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191009142902.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191009142902.htm)

<comment><USER7> > Eating bone marrow played a key role

This conclusion is a big leap, even as per the article you shared. "The strength required to access the high calorie content of bone marrow may have played a key role in the evolution of the human hand and explain why primates hands are not like ours, research has found."

It's just a possibility. They can't even make a strong claim about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Both species later became extinct in the Americas.

It might sound odd to suggest that the extinction was caused by people. The conventional view is that there weren't many of them in North America. So how could anything have been hunted to extinction back then?

As documented in 1491 by Mann, this view of a sparsely-populated North America prior to Columbus may not be correct. As many as 10x more people might have lived there, wiped out by one European-borne plague after another. Before they went, they had developed sophisticated technologies to change the landscape and surrounding ecosystems to suit them.

Given all of this, it's much easier to imagine that the mammoths were indeed hunted to extinction by the inhabitants of North America.

</comment><comment><USER9> Blackfoot natives used to hunt buffalo in Alberta using a similar method, dressed up as coyotes and wolves. One of the known sites has the awesome name of Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-Smashed- In_Buffalo_Jump](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-Smashed-In_Buffalo_Jump)

My favourite part of the given history:

> According to legend, a young Blackfoot wanted to watch the buffalo plunge > off the cliff from below, but was buried underneath the falling buffalo. He > was later found dead under the pile of carcasses, where he had his head > smashed in.

</comment><comment><USER10> Confused. What evidence was found, to indicate these mammoths didn't just stumble into the pit? Was the pit man-made? Tool marks on the mammoth bones? Evidence of hunting implements?

One spear mark is pretty slim evidence, but that's all they mentioned.

<comment><USER11> Notably, the classic story of fur-clad prehistoric humans digging pits to trap mammoths is quite unrealistic in colder climates (where wooly mammoths lived): digging large pits in frozen soil with nothing but bones, sticks and maybe shoulder blades (as spades) is extremely hard.

I wonder what the average temperature of Mexico was during that time...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> >Parts of a jawbone and spine of a camel, and the tooth of a horse were also found at the site. Both species later became extinct in the Americas.

I didn't know that.

<comment><USER13> I just watched a PBS video about this yesterday [1]. Horses evolved in North America, walked across the land bridge to Asia, died out in North America during the ice age, were domesticated in the Eurasian Steppe, were transported back to North America by Europeans, and then became feral on the plains that they initially evolved on.

1) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZoTvXvV02A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZoTvXvV02A)

<comment><USER14> Didn't Native Americans use horses? So they were using European horses?

<comment><USER15> Yes they were European horses, first brought by the Spanish. Once they arrived Native Americans started using horses quite quickly.

<comment><USER16> As an interesting cultural bullet. The American Cowboy tradition is heavily influenced by the Northern-Mexican Vaqueros.

<comment><USER17> What about gauchos? Argentina used to supply a lot of beef to the word such that they had been prosperous at one time.

<comment><USER16> Vaqueros, Gauchos and Llaneros(Venezuela) probably have the same origin in horse riding country side people on the Iberian Península. But I doubt the Gauchos influenced the Cowboys since they are far, far away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Regardless of the scientific or historical significant here; imagine how amazing it would have been to be a prehistoric hunter and to kill one of these.

It's like the modern version of winning the lottery.

One of these could feed your family for the entire winter.

<comment><USER19> > One of these could feed your family for the entire winter.

Aaawwwwww, dad, mammoth meat agaaaaain?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> "The left shoulder blades are missing."

800+ bones from 14 mammoths, but only right shoulder blades. I'm not quite sure what the chances of that being an accident are, unfortunately they didn't say how many right shoulders they found which would make the math easier.

</comment><comment><USER21> Presumably there would have been a giant feast afterwards because the meat doesn't keep. Would have been fun to attend.

<comment><USER22> I'd be interested to see ancient solutions to this.

For example, if you were to tie the mammoth down, you might be able to cut off a few legs and eat them, while bandaging up the mammoth to keep it alive for a week or so till you kill it and eat the rest.

<comment><USER23> I can't imagine trying to deal with a mammoth. Especially with only stone cutting tools.

The only thing I can think of would be luring one near a winter camp and killing it nearby, when it would be cold enough to keep or freeze.

Even if you could butcher the several tons of meat and get it dried or smoked in time, transport and storage would be huge problems.

It's enough of an ordeal to process a moose, with modern tools and machinery.

<comment><USER18> > Especially with only stone cutting tools.

If they were using obsidian other than the issue of constantly having to knap new blades it should have been somewhat easy to work with.

The only reason we don't use this in modern times is that the blades break apart over the long term.

<comment><USER24> Nevertheless, there are ceramic blades for sale. I don't own them but I can imagine that they are more difficult to sharpen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Do people seriously believe ancient humans hunted mammoths? I thought it's just a popular myth (some people even believe they rode dinosaurs, you know). Weren't there other animals handier to hunt?

<comment><USER26> Ya, but a single mammoth could provide exponentially more meat for the same efforts of hunting multiple smaller animals.

<comment><USER27> One mammoth - 2 boars, three mammoths - 8 boars, ten mammoths - 1024 boars? That's what exponential means.

Sorry, I couldn't help myself.

<comment><USER28> He said exponential returns on effort.

i.e. Hunting a rabbit = 1 unit of effort and 1 unit of meat

A boar = 4 units of effort and 16 units of meat

A mammoth = 8 units of effort and 256 units of meat

So it actually kind of makes sense here

<comment><USER27> Then can we expect that if blue whale hunt requires 800 units of effort, we can feed entire observable universe with its meat?

I understand what was said, I just don't like when people use "exponential" as a synonym for "huge". There's nothing inherently exponential in meat to effort ratio.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Strategic Approach to IT Budgeting (March 2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/Issues/2012/Mar/20114439.htm

<comment><AUTHOR> This article provides recommendations for improving communication between business planning and engineering. The authors claim that in many cases increased understanding on both sides can change the label on the IT department from 'cost center' to an investment, resulting in more more resources being placed at the disposal of engineering.</comment>


Microsoft Edge Secret Whitelist Allows Facebook to Autorun Flash - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-edge-secret-whitelist-allows-facebook-to-autorun-flash/ <comment><USER2> Mitigating factors: the largest demographic of FB users are the 50+ crowd and they're still using IE8 on Win95. That, and who uses Edge?!? /s

</comment><comment><USER3> "Whitelist" is no longer an acceptable term. Please change the title to use a less oppressive word.

<comment><USER4> This is a joke, right?

Check out the history of the word blacklist: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting)

<comment><USER3> No, oppression isn't a joke. [https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-knodel- terminology-00.html](https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-knodel- terminology-00.html) You're going to need to just get over your bigotry at some point and stop oppressing others.</comment></comment></comment>


Pragmatic D Tutorial - <AUTHOR> http://qznc.github.io/d-tut/

<comment><USER2> It's great to see this.

The D front page doesn't really do a good job of giving you a feel for the language. Even worse, the important-looking "D Book" link is actually just a teaser to buy the product.

To see what I'm talking about with "fresh eyes", imagine that today you overheard your coworkers talking about two great new languages: one called "D" and another called "Elixir". You decide you want to learn a new language but you only have time to learn one.

First you visit [http://dlang.org/](http://dlang.org/) and then you visit [http://elixir-lang.org/](http://elixir-lang.org/). Staying within a small "link radius" of the main page, which one are you more likely to get a feel for and get excited about?

My guess is Elixir, and I have no dog in this fight whatsoever.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the insight. Ali Çehreli has a free book in the works, and once that's ready it'll be visibly featured on the front page. Also, obviously we will add a link to this very tutorial. Thanks again!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I got interested in D, so I borrowed Andrei's book from the library. The talk is that the publication of TDPL marked the stabilization of D version 2. I tried out the examples in the first few pages of that book. An example in Chapter 1 itself didn't compile (page 8). Well, is that what you call a stable language? I don't want to waste time when the API is still changing so much. I thought, I'll come back may be for D version 3.

[edit] Oh BTW, the Pragmatic D tutorial is awesome. Thanks for sharing.

<comment><USER4> [http://erdani.com/tdpl/errata/](http://erdani.com/tdpl/errata/) is helpful here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is there some way I can submit corrections? I've found a few typos/grammar mistakes on the first few pages, but can't seem to find any contact information.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Hop on here, the author is around: [http://firstname.lastname@example.com](http://email@example.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What are the most complex programs/projects that are written in D?

Has anyone tried to port any of real world open source projects such: Nginx, Apache, make, VLC, VNC, XBMC, eclipse, wireshark, etc into D and write up the +/\- of those project in C/C++, etc v.s. "D"?

<comment><USER7> I seriously doubt it.. A language usually takes off (business wise) once a major player starts using it in production, so developers can now tell their managers "Look XYZ is using it". Now that D got the Facebook plug it will now get more promotion and push to be used more widely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> For those who missed it, a recent HN headline: "Facebook using D in production starting today" [1]. I'm pretty sure it made the front page.

I'm planning to put type inference in a new programming language I'm creating [2], so I looked up the Wikipedia article on type inference [3]. So the parent headline is the third mention of D I've run across this week!

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6532322](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6532322)

[2] [http://picomancer.com/blog/foil-compiler-tech- preview/](http://picomancer.com/blog/foil-compiler-tech-preview/)

[3] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_inference](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_inference)</comment>


And Then Steve Said, 'Let There Be an iPhone' - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/and-then-steve-said-let-there-be-an-iphone.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all& <comment><USER4> Reading this makes me think of Jobs as a Railroad baron of old. Kind of heartless, gruff, and willing to crush anyone in his way, but a guy with a vision so strong he will do anything. And it changed the world, it's hard to overstate that.

I remember seeing the iPhone unveiled and thinking "It's cool, but will people really buy such an expensive phone?". I think it was $600. That was pretty expensive at the time. I also remember thinking about how they wanted all apps to be web-based. A disaster for certain I thought. The phone market was all over the place and brand loyalty was in short supply. I'd seen compaq go from dominating PDAs and nosedive off the cliff. Motorola took their brand loyalty (remember how many people had Razrs?) and went into hiding. Time and again I'd seen phone platforms rise and fall. I was skeptical.

All I knew was one thing - _I_ certainly wasn't going to buy one.

Years later and I now program for iOS a lot. Everyday pretty much. I'm a full blown Mac convert and I'll be honest, the iPhone was what caused it. I bought my first iPhone at version 4. Then I _specifically_ bought my first Mac so I could use the SDK for that phone. I fell in love with the platform, in all its insane glory.

I might move to another platform one day, but I can honestly say I never imagined this is what I would be working on.

<comment> at-fates-hands >> I'm a full blown Mac convert and I'll be honest, the iPhone was what caused it.

This will be Apple's saving grace. They're already entrenched several generations deep. For every kid getting an i-pod touch or i-pod nano today, in a few years, it's such a seamless jump to an iphone. Nothing to learn, no additional software to learn, no new interfaces to spend time getting familiar with. It's the same device, just with more functionality.

For me this is the most brilliant thing Apple has achieved. Being able to move a consumer from platform to platform with ZERO new investment on the users part? Genius.

<comment><USER5> That's exactly what Microsoft was counting on with their UI for Windows Mobile (even down to a Start menu) and why they make such a big deal about Office being available across all their platforms.

I'm sure that when the time comes, Apple will be prepared to throw away the UI and start over with whatever suits the next form factor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I always like stuff like this because you see that these people who knock it out of the park apparently effortlessly actually _struggle_ like all the rest of us normal humans behind the scenes. They couldn't figure out how to make a touch screen, the processor wasn't available, Sir Ive's case was impermeable to RF, the LCD was causing interference on the multitouch display, etc... This stuff is _hard_. Really, really hard. Any one technical obstacle could have killed the whole thing.

<comment><USER7> "But Apple just took existing parts and smashed them in a case!"

I love articles like this, even though the people who need to read them the most don't have the attention span for them :-)

<comment><USER8> Reading the article, I think even Apple thought it was just a case of taking existing parts and smashing them in a case - until they actually tried doing it.

A lot of the stuff Apple had problems with is almost certainly routine for the big existing phone players like HTC, Samsung, Nokia... I mean, Jobs and Ive didn't even realise that metal cases block radio waves, which is basically common knowledge. Many of their problems seem self-imposed in general - <USER2> example:

"Even people within the project itself couldn't talk to one another. Engineers designing the electronics weren't allowed to see the software. When they needed software to test the electronics, they were given proxy code, not the real thing. If you were working on the software, you used a simulator to test hardware performance."

Apple could apparently get away with this, but I expect their development techniques would have killed lesser companies. Maybe, in some alternative universe where things worked out just a little differently, the iPhone killed Apple too rather than being their biggest success.

<comment><USER9> I'm sure this can't be what you intended, but it sounds as though you just said that developing something like the iPhone is a matter of routine for companies like HTC, Samsung and Nokia, and that Apple only found it hard because of poor technique.

<comment><USER10> Some things are always hard, but doing them for the first time is harder.

Building buildings is always difficult, but if you've done it ten times before, you know a lot of the caveats. If you're doing it for the first time, you'll go slower due to more learning-by-doing.

Sometimes it takes an outsider to come in and build with no preexisting design or engineering prejudices (or even overt knowledge) to change the world.

<comment><USER11> > Sometimes it takes an outsider to come in and build with no preexisting > design or engineering prejudices (or even overt knowledge) to change the > world.

Yes, this is probably the main reason why Apple was willing to spend extra time and effort reinventing the wheel rather than hire some experienced smartphone engineers. This decision may have been influenced by the experience of the Lisa project, where the influence of engineers from HP has often been blamed for some of the shortcomings. (Mind you, on the other side of the coin the Macintosh barely survived the conviction that a hard disk or more than 128KiB of RAM were unnecessary, a mistake which seems to have been based in the Apple II background of the Mac people.)

(It's not a uniqutely Apple practise either. In the heyday of Japanese electronics companies, several times a firm made a successful leap into an area which was completely new to them, often into a technology which was still in a very early stage or already had strong players or both. See /We Were Burning/ [http://www.amazon.com/We-Were-Burning-Entrepreneurs- Electron...](http://www.amazon.com/We-Were-Burning-Entrepreneurs- Electronic/dp/0465091180/) .)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Talk about literally "fake it till you make it"

\----- (regarding the presentation)

They had AT&T, the iPhone's wireless carrier, bring in a portable cell tower, so they knew reception would be strong. Then, with Jobs's approval, they preprogrammed the phone's display to always show five bars of signal strength regardless of its true strength. The chances of the radio's crashing during the few minutes that Jobs would use it to make a call were small, but the chances of its crashing at some point during the 90-minute presentation were high.

<comment><USER13> Bringing a COW (Cell on Wheels) in seems like a reasonable precaution - <USER3> have a presentation with lots of people showing up, you want everything to work correctly.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I don't really begrudge them there. As anyone who's ever had to do a tech demo should know, tech demos are the living embodiment of Murphy's Law.

<comment><USER15> Happened to me at a Microsoft event. Me and my friend got up on stage to demo our Software and BAM!! it crashed :P right in front of a hall full of big shots!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> i am glad to be old enough to remember the time before the iphone. seems like a stupid thing to say, right? but go to any tech forum and it seems like all of it is forgotten already, 2007 is kinda blurry and Apple producing smartphones completely normal.

when the rumours started swirling about apple launching a phone people could not believe it. like at all. apple, the ipod guys, building a phone?! no way, what a joke. you had the photoshops of ipods with a dial, etc. analysts explaining why this was completely wrong, impossible and apple was doomed.

same at the launch of the iPad. same at the launch of the iPod (less space than a nomad, no wifi, lame). what the fuck is a nomad one might say today.

those great photoshops of steve holding a giant iphone to his ear, hilarious. an iPad, buhaha, bunch of retards at apple. but now the galaxy note makes perfect sense. to exactly the same neckbeards who laughed at apple's idiocy before.

apple is indeed the most frustrating company. it somehow has defied gravity in the second jobs era and proven that large swaths of the tech world couldn't define taste and style if their life depended on it.

and perfection, like the iphone launch, is a matter of style and taste.

<comment><USER12> Let's not get too patriotic there,

Apple introduced flops as well, see apple TV

<comment><USER17> I have, and do, all over the place.

I don't know how you can consider the Apple TV a flop. The first generation one was built of OS X instead of iOS for reasons that this article makes very obvious but it hammered out a clear path for the future Apple TV. Much like the MacBook Air, it's really only a "flop" if you're talking about the first generation product and not the establishing of a product line.

Neither took the world by storm, but they both launched a product category that was ill-defined at the time and Apple sells millions of both. There were internet connected set top boxes and ultraportables before the Apple TV and the MacBook Air, but there were only Smart TVs, Rokus, Google TVs, and Ultrabooks after.

Maybe it's just me but establishing a successful and profitable product line that exists to this day hardly qualifies as a flop. Just a shaky first generation. Which, keep in mind, also applies to the iPod.

IMO, the iPod can hardly be considered a flop. The iPod HiFi, THAT was a flop.

<comment><USER18> The iPod isn't a flop. People I know who got one (including the nontechnical) used it a ton, and it was awesome.

The iPhone isn't a flop. Same story, everyone I know who got it loved it.

My parents got an Apple TV, after enjoying their iPods and iPhones. As far as I know they haven't used it since the first week, and after seeing them try, I don't blame them. The problems that the Apple TV is trying to address are real, but IME it's not there yet.

<comment><USER19> On the other hand my father has been consistently using his Apple TV non-stop since last christmas. I didn't even have to instruct him on how to use it aside from a 5 minute intro course.

I've heard similar rave reviews from 3 people over 60 about how great the Apple TV is. None of which I would position as tech-savvy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> _" Very rarely did I see him become completely unglued — it happened, but mostly he just looked at you and very directly said in a very loud and stern voice, 'You are [expletive] up my company,' or, 'If we fail, it will be because of you.' He was just very intense. And you would always feel an inch tall."

"Compounding all the technical challenges, Jobs's obsession with secrecy meant that even as they were exhausted by 80-hour workweeks, the few hundred engineers and designers working on the iPhone couldn't talk about it to anyone else. If Apple found out you'd told a friend in a bar, or even your spouse, you could be fired."_

Christ, what an asshole.

<comment><USER21> But holy fuck, what a phone.

"You had me at scrolling."

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's easy to forget how far Apple had already come by this point. I re- discovered this super-insulting dude asking an obnoxious question to Steve at WWDC 1997: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6497475](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6497475)

<comment><USER23> As `teovall noted, any particular reason you linked a version covered with SEO keywords with only a few views of the video instead of the one with 2.5 million (which has the exact same title but is remarkably lacking in SEO spam)?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF- tKLISfPE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE) is the original, for anyone who's curious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Articles like this help to show all the work involved in the path from a vague idea to a finished product. That's the hard part. Guess that's why they get upset when some other company just sees the end product and just makes a clone of it, without having to face all the hurdles to arrive there from the initial idea..

<comment><USER8> Except that the other companies have done essentially all of the hard work this article talks about themselves, and more, and have been doing it for years before Apple entered the smartphone market. I mean, many of Apple's problems were with stuff like baseband development and antenna placement which their competitors have been dealing with successfully since before the iPhone even entered development.

If anything Apple were the ones that came along after other companies had done all the hard work and piggy-backed on their work whilst claiming the credit. Companies like Nokia and Motorola literally developed the technology that made mobile phones possible, and had to build stuff like phone radios in an era where no-one had ever done it before, whereas Apple could rely on pre-existing chips, software and design experience. Then Apple sued Motorola to stop them selling phones whilst insisting they didn't have to pay Motorola for the patents they'd obtained through doing all that pioneering work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> >> The 55 miles from Campbell to San Francisco make for one of the nicest commutes anywhere. The journey mostly zips along the Junipero Serra Freeway, a grand and remarkably empty highway that abuts the east side of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

While scenic, the 280 is certainly not 'remarkably empty'. I make the commute from San Jose to SF everyday and wish I shared the enthusiasm of the author. Apologies for commenting on something completely orthogonal to the point of the OP.

<comment><USER26> Traffic on 280 (and to a lesser degree 880) seems to track pretty closely how inflated the current SV bubble is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> "The thinking goes, why let bad Internet or cellphone connections ruin an otherwise good presentation? But Jobs insisted on live presentations. It was one of the things that made them so captivating. Part of his legend was that noticeable product-demo glitches almost never happened."

What is interesting is that product-demo glitches happened all the time. We went to one presentation in which Steve had to ask for people not to use the Internet because they had not enough bandwidth.

But mistakes were so "naturally handled" that people just did not care.

I think Edison said, you will not be remembered by your mistakes, but from your successes.

<comment><USER28> Chamberlain?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29>
        "The solution, he says, was to tweak the AirPort software
         so that it seemed to be operating in Japan instead of the
         United States."

Great solution, but illegal. Did they get permission or just do it?

<comment><USER30> Better to be a pirate than join the Navy, I suppose...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The technical details of the presentation are interesting, but less relevant than how well the device worked at launch. It worked. The iPhone was a success not because it was the first, but because it was the first really usable device, it put everything that came before it to shame.

<comment><USER31> > The iPhone was a success not because it was the first, but because it was > the first really usable device

This is both true and a horrible rewriting of history. People _loved_ their Blackberries. The term Crackberry was invented before the iPhone was even a rumor. And don't tell me it wasn't mainstream, it had taken over most of the business and government market. It was confined to those markets, but within those huge markets it was utterly mainstream. But even before that other people _loved_ Palm devices.

The capacitive touch screen was a clear advance - but don't tell me there was no "usable" device prior to that.

<comment><USER32> Suits loved Blackberrys. Not normal people.

<comment><USER33> I could type faster on my Blackberry Curve (a consumer targeted device) than my current Galaxy Nexus or any iPhone/iTouch touchscreen (plus I could literally type a full message and send by touch-typing, without any doubt as to what I was actually doing without looking at the screen).

I admit I prefer the button-less form factor in many respects, but boy do I miss that well-designed tactile keyboard.

<comment><USER34> Even with Swype/Kii keyboards?

I find they're quite fast!

<comment><USER33> You probably can type faster than I can using Swype/Kii/etc. But for whatever reason, I do best with tactile feedback.

(I use a Das Keyboard for the IBM Model M "clicky" experience, and hate my laptop or other keyboards after getting it. I completely understand that I may be in the minority, but regardless, I loved the response of my Blackberry keyboard).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Amusingly, there was one technical snafu during the presentation. Steve's clicker stopped responding [1]! Of course, the way he handled it, in my opinion, made the presentation that much better and that much more human.

1) [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hUIxyE2Ns8&feature=youtu.be&...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hUIxyE2Ns8&feature=youtu.be&t=1h14m39s)

</comment><comment><USER36> "In the span of seven years, the iPhone and its iPad progeny have become among the most important innovations in Silicon Valley's history. They transformed the stodgy cellphone industry. "

What other stodgy industry is there that Apple could easily disrupt? How about this: how does it make you feel when you use the DVR box that your cable / satellite company forces you to use, to watch tv? I know the answer for me. Seems like low hanging fruit with potentially enormous payoff for Apple.

<comment><USER37> It's not low-hanging fruit.

On the technology side Apple has actually built everything necessary (AppleTV + iTunes streaming) but the problem is dealing with the content silos.

If Apple could it would simply license all the content and stream it to customers either for a standard price (e.g. $1.99 per episode of 480p programming, $2.99 per episode of 1080p) or via subscription (e.g. MLB/Netflix) or ad-supported (e.g. Hulu Plus).

The _only_ reason AppleTV isn't TV nirvana (at least in the US) is licensing issues. (BTW you can program an AppleTV to recognize any remote, so you can seamlessly make you TV remote also control your AppleTV, without even switching modes).

In case you're wondering, the basic problem right now is that TV networks get paid about $2 (I did a bunch of back of envelope calculations, so I may be significantly off, but it's in this ballpark) in advertising per viewer-hour, so if a family of four watches an hour of TV, then the network gets about $8 in ad revenue. Apple is offering $1.40/h, and it's also messing with DVD sales and syndication so there's a big gap there.

Now, I seriously doubt that the production company that makes the content gets much of that $8, so if Apple could deal with content producers directly...

<comment><USER38> _If Apple could it would simply license all the content_

Sure, but that won't work: the content is _paid for_ by the cable companies.

It's, what, $30 billion per year going to content creators straight from the cable companies, up front? The content creators absolutely need the cable companies today, there's no other way for them to operate. They don't self- fund, period.

So Apple would need to pony up. If they came to the content creators and said look, we want to do this thing, here's $100 billion for the first three year, up front—it'd happen. Money talks in Hollywood. It might be the only thing that does.

Sadly, there's no way in hell Tim Cook could (or would) make that happen. He's way too conservative. Hell, he couldn't even handle Scott Forstall.

Apple certainly has the money and doesn't know what to do with it other than buy their own stock. Well, _that 's_ what they could do with it. $100 billion and you own cable television.

<comment><USER37> I'm curious about the $30B figure. How did you arrive at that?

<comment><USER38> I didn't arrive at it, it's a well-known industry figure, I'm not sure where I heard it first. (I live in Los Angeles and lived in Hollywood for years, working mostly on the film side, but I know a lot of people in TV, too.)

Here's an article for consumers on unbundling[1] I found after one Google search that says that _ESPN alone_ receives $7.2 billion per year from US cable companies, which sounds about right to me. (They also earn money for ads, I don't know if any of that is kicked back to the cable companies. I doubt it...)

It shouldn't be surprising even if you crunch the numbers yourself. There's ~100 million cable subscribers, and the average combined bill (Internet/Cable/Phone) was $128/month in 2011.[2] So that's $153.6 billion per year. It's not hard to imagine that ~20% of that goes to the people making the content that's playing on cable. If anything, it'd be surprising if it were lower than that.

[1] [http://money.cnn.com/2013/08/02/technology/cable-a-la- carte/...](http://money.cnn.com/2013/08/02/technology/cable-a-la- carte/index.html)

[2] [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020347910457712...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203479104577124494272500550.html?mod=e2tw)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The unsuccessful partnership with Motorola (& Cingular wireless) mentioned in the article was probably w/ the "Rokr"

See press release: [http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/09/07Apple-Motorola- Cin...](http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/09/07Apple-Motorola-Cingular- Launch-Worlds-First-Mobile-Phone-with-iTunes.html)

</comment><comment><USER40> The timing of the project launch is pretty remarkable. It seems that Jobs wanted to do this for some time, but was waiting and watching for technical feasibility. From the effort they had getting the demo to work, it seems that they launched the project something like immediately after the progress of the component technologies brought that feasibility into view. And even then they had to manage risks, and then they had to get the thing into production.

And while that suggests some pretty deep technical savvy at executive levels, they still had heartburn over seemingly simple questions like "can you put radio waves through aluminum?"

It seems to me that the genius of Jobs was 1) to envision customer experiences based on really remarkable extensions / integrations of existing tech and 2) to judge the moment when those visions had gone from "someday" to "now".

</comment><comment><USER41> Watching the original iPhone unveil, it was pretty surprising to see all the Google love from Steve, and Eric Schmidt come bounding onto the stage [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxUDiS3AR0M](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxUDiS3AR0M)

<comment><USER42> Maybe surprising now, post "thermonuclear war", but not for 2007.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I thought I had it tough as a Sales Engineer but I am a piker compared to these guys.

</comment><comment><USER44> >What worries Apple fans most of all is not knowing where the company is headed.

As a former Apple fan, I actually find the iPhone's hemorrhaging of market share and Apple's uncertain future extremely encouraging. I always attributed the things I liked about Apple to their struggling underdog status. They lost that with the iPhone, and they've never been the same since.

It will be fascinating to see if some of the old Apple shines through in the years to come.

<comment><USER45> If you look at the general course of Apple, they've generally been quite consistent in their road map. I think the incredible success of the iPhone might cause a slump for a while, but then they'll just continue what they've been doing for a while: releasing good, high-end and profitable products and comfortably occupying multiple niches.

Alternatively, they might create a few more iPhone- and iPad-like successes and continue ruling new and existing product categories.

In both cases, they'll keep 'shining' for quite some time. If that stops, it'll suck for people like me who are fully invested in their ecosystem. That said, I switched to a Nexus 4 recently and it was surprisingly painless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I think it is hilarious how Jobs basically reinvented the wheel when it came to operations security, when there have been major organizations doing secret things for decades that he could have pulled the lessons from.

</comment><comment><USER47> I always thought Apple took the iPod and added phone radio to it, then they took out the radio, made the screen big and called it iPad. Not anymore. This is interesting stuff.

</comment><comment><USER48> A nice reminder that the screen sharing built for the initial demo still doesn't exist without jailbreaking a device. :)

</comment><comment><USER49> Keep this story in mind when idiots on the internet talk about a "rectangle with rounded corners".

<comment><USER50> I am not seeing what relevance this story has to patent disputes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I'm still on 4s with ios 5. don't use siri.

</comment><comment><USER52> iOS is starting to regain marketshare from Android. Now that Apple is making serious downmarket moves with the 5C, it may soon be time to rethink whether Android was ultimately successful at competing with Apple.

Within two years, non-iPhone smartphones will be niche players with partisan user bases, but the bulk of mobile development will be once again for iOS.

<comment><USER53> _iOS is starting to regain marketshare from Android._

They just released a new iPhone. It's probably fair to say that that will be a short-term bump that will flatten in good time.

I think it's seriously disingenuous to describe the 5C as a "serious downmarket move". It's a token move at best, and doesn't get anywhere near the price point a "downmarket" device would require.

<comment><USER37> Based on the pricing we're seeing on the 5C (some offers for $50 or $100 less than announced price) Apple is putting some flexibility in its wholesale pricing to give third parties more wiggle room with the 5C. So it's by no means a "cheap" phone, but it's not as expensive as it first appears.

As for Apple gaining market share in the US, I think what we've seen is that Android is starting to run out of feature phones to replace, so it's now in a fight for the high end space with Apple, which will probably see movement in both directions for a while. I suspect a significant portion of the iPhone market and a larger portion of the Android market is really just phones with touch screens -- these are people who don't buy apps or use most of their phones' capabilities. The "network" effects that will determine the fates of the ecosystems depend on people using their phones as computers rather than merely phones.

In Europe recently Windows phone (i.e. Nokia) is doing very well. It will be interesting to see how that plays out too.</comment></comment></comment>


Suggest what's missing from the list of resources for entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://coursebirdie.com/resources/

<comment><USER2> Form templates for various documents such as MoU, pro bono, Letter of Intent. It's so hard to unless write those up unless you have a lawyer.

Also why not link the articles directly?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi thanks for the suggestions. We earlier linked the articles directly. We were told by the developer that it might have some issues with domain authority or something.</comment></comment>


Not Sharing Is Caring - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2304425/

<comment><USER2> I'm going to drag out another cstross quote (from _Accelerando_ [1]):

 _"[...] his suitcase is on its way to Mombasa, where it will probably be pithed and resurrected in the service of some African cyber-Fagin. That's okay by Manfred — it only contains a statistically normal mixture of second hand clothes and toiletries, and he only carries it to convince the airline passenger-profiling expert systems that he isn't some sort of deviant or terrorist"_

At what point is it going to be statistically abnormal to not be sharing the minutiae of your life in this way, and what are the consequences to anyone who wants to retain some level of privacy? Will they be required to maintain some sort of statistically-average social network profile, occasionally updating it with something plausible?

[1] [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/fiction/accelera...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html)

<comment><USER3> That would be terrible but I blieve it's one of those "what if everyone did x?" situations. The people who refuse to be tracked voluntarily will always be a large enough group for that kind of profiling to be ineffective.

The friend spam fad will recede eventually and become one of those iconic crazy things from the past that everyone shakes their head about. Kind of like the shoe fitting x-ray device: <http://www.museumofquackery.com/devices/shoexray.htm>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The author is completely missing the point. Implicit sharing allows for everything to go into the graph in a structured way. This is the most important aspect of implicit sharing and the new Open Graph.

This doesn't mean that you're going to get inundated with meaningless shares. That would be a horrible user experience. In fact, Facebook put a lot of time and effort into making sure that is exactly what didn't happen. It's the very reason why timeline was built. It's why ticker was built. They did this because they want a place for the increased sharing to go, without degrading user experience.

But here's the really exciting part. Once all this data is in the graph, timeline and ticker will pale in comparison to what developers can do with all of this new, structured data. That is the really important thing here.

Implicit sharing is not so that you can get a notification every time someone listens to a song. It's so that a talented young developer can come along and create a beautiful application that visualizes all of your song listens, how it makes you similar or different from your friends.

Don't worry Farhad. Explicit sharing and taste isn't going away. I will still pay more attention to the link you posted of that song you love than the song that blips by in my ticker. I wouldn't criticize the new graph until its matured and we've seen the next generation of amazing apps that are going to be enabled.

<comment><USER5> Not sure why this was voted down.

You make a good point about the possibility of mining all this data, but I'm not sure I want to give it away. We (well, some of us), go to lengths to maintain separate online personas. Why do I care if Facebook knows what my most-played songs are? I can get that info from iTunes, etc.

They're going to need a strong pull (killer app, privacy controls, whatever) to get my data.

<comment><USER6> So instead of sharing data with your friends, family and a corporation you just want to share it with a corporation? Someone already has your online data the only difference is who that someone is. That someone can still choose to sell your data on to anyone who will buy it in most countries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I agree with a lot of what this article is saying. Sharing everything by default is pointless and misses the point of sharing.

I want to share something with my friends because I think it might inspire them or make them happy. Or, in the case of news, let them know about important stuff that's happening in the world. They do the same thing when they share with me.

So to blindly share everything just creates a lot of noise. If everything is shared by default, you'll need to start sifting out the signal from the noise. Which is annoying because I trust my friends to only share stuff that's relevant.

We all love lolcats but know how to find them on our own.

<comment><USER8> I disagree. I feel we shouldn't have to have an extra step to share what we search for. The act of searching can be sharing and also in itself what people search. I do agree facebook is the wrong medium to achieve this though, google maybe; it needs to be at the browser level and open sourced as much as possible.

<comment><USER9> I don't know. I mean imagine google sharing a post in google+ whenever you run a search query on their search engine? Perhaps, you would like to qualify the type of search? There are various levels of specificity of searches and you refer to those deep,precise levels? In that case, i can see the point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't agree with everything the author says but I think I agree with the sentiment. I think frictionless sharing is a departure from how people express themselves in real life. During real world interactions we present our carefully tailored selves to the rest of the world. We don't tell everyone everything we are doing for a reason.

One positive with reducing friction is that it might be easier to find common ground with someone. But overall im not sure I like it- social grooming is a good thing

<comment><USER11> I've personally had this play out with a number of services. LastFM comes to mind.

I really enjoyed having a persistent record of what I listened to for my own use and for finding new music.

However, I stopped using the service because, honestly, I'm not exactly proud of every song that makes it to my most-played list. LastFM let's you remove a song from your profile if I remember correctly, but it was easier to not share at all than to remove specific types of sharing.

Facebook has this problem times 100. I try and tell everyone I know that isn't technical that Facebook knows every website they've been on that has a like button on it (and then I make a serious face and say _evverry site_ ) most people have no idea. The idea that Facebook has this kind of info and is going to start "autosharing" makes me uncomfortable.

<comment><USER12> "I'm not exactly proud of every song that makes it to my most-played list."

It would be very interesting for me if you might write up a few lines on "why", if you can.

<comment><USER13> For me, it goes to the fact that I'm not the same person to different people. The fact that I'm willing to share some things with certain people does not imply that I'm willing to share everything with those people.

Very few systems make it easy to manage multiple (and shifting) sharing relationships, so not sharing by default is the easiest thing to manage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Google wants to keep real names (just like Facebook) and they get scolded for it, because some people say they really care about their privacy, and they want to be able to use a different name than their real one.

Now Facebook wants to automatically share everything about you, essentially killing whatever privacy you had left on Facebook, and people applaud it.

Maybe not related (yet), but it does remind me of this quote:

 _"Freedom is lost to the sound of thunderous applause."_

This is a great opportunity for Google put a spin on what Facebook is doing with all this, and say they are going the opposite direction, and instead of auto-sharing everything about you like Facebook does, Google+ allows you to choose exactly what you share and to who.

Facebook's features may seem cool today, but they have the potential to turn into the biggest PR disaster for Facebook, bigger than their "privacy settings" issue from last year.

<comment><USER15> Where did you see automatic sharing of everything. From what I read, you will always have control of what you share. They can't afford to repeat the past mistakes around sharing. It'd be fatal now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Frictionless sharing without proper curation could kill Facebook. Friction naturally encourages the crowd-sourcing of curation - by having to click a share button or fill out a simple form I'm forced to think about what I'm sharing and the context to present it in. Knowing what songs my friends are listening to right at this moment isn't very useful information. Having a friend reminisce on their wall or tweet about about the one time they heard that song live, in-person and the epic good times that followed - THAT is truly "sharing", that is the "why" and not just the "what" that makes sharing addictive.

Can a bot or algorithm augment or emulate the magic of crowd-sourced sharing? Or will it throw Facebook into a Myspace-esque clusterfuck?

<comment><USER17> > Knowing what songs my friends are listening to right at this moment isn't > very useful information.

It's even more useless when it's from six hours ago. I just checked FB this morning to see the news that a friend listened to a certain album last night. I'll make sure to block that so it never comes up again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It could be that this is just a separate world though. In my world, I wish to opt in and choose what I share. Perhaps in someone else's world, they wouldn't even consider not sharing something. Following what my family on Facebook do certainly convinces me that at least some people think that way.

For me, on the other hand, Facebook has put a ton of friction into sharing. Although I am a normally candid person, I find myself overconsidering whether or not I really, _really_ should post what I'm about to. In the end, I go with self-censorship.

</comment><comment><USER19> I agree, I feel like these days people share much more than what is relevant or necessary. The easier they make it to "share" the more worthless crap were going to see. Do I really care that my buddy is listening to lady gaga? Nope. But I figure if he listens to something good he'll TELL me. That "friction" that Zuckerberg is talking about is the filter that stops worthless information from getting through.

</comment><comment><USER20> I worry about the extreme fan-out that goes between content producers, datacenters packed with algorithms and content mills packed with hacks, dedicated to rewriting and excerpting that content, and then all these sharing mechanisms broadcasting this massaged crap out to the world. Is the Internet getting better from all this? What is the ratio of thought invested in producing quality content, versus thought invested in simply distributing any content?

Sorry for the rant :|

<comment><USER21> This is true and thanks for the rant. :)

Marco.org just had a post (<http://www.marco.org/2011/09/23/business-insider>) about how biz insider slices and dices his stories for their benefit. (After reading and thinking about his post, I removed BI from my morning reading list).

Honestly, I don't see this getting any better - and I'm usually an optimist. I think FB will make more of these deals with partners and we'll get more and more of the reactionary media type broadcast. All bites of info, very little substance; ADD to the extreme.

I'm in the middle of the argument that FB is bad and FB is here to stay get over it and assimilate. I developed a few FB apps in 09-10 and at first I thought it was awesome. The last app I did asked for a bunch of permissions because we needed access to someone's feed so we could create/read posts that were specific to our app. That was all good, but then I would look at the logs in our server for the feed updated callback and not only would it never stop (was kinda amazing to watch this), but we had access to all these people's feeds - like everything.

I have to think this is typical now and I _know_ most of my relatives (young and old) grant this type of access and don't really understand what it means. In my mind, they clearly do not grep what is possible. And why should they? They're not programmers, they're just regular people.

This coupled with the FB copyright rules pushed me off the platform. My girlfriend still uses it (too much imo), my family uses it, and I still have my profile on there, but I'm not adding any more content. I think at this point it's more important to me - even as a programmer - to live life and create my own things. That's the only counterpoint I can see to a world where it's garbage in, garbage out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> More than sharing it is closer to broadcasting all my activities to my friends. But I think Facebook is onto something here. What if this broadcast in future can be curated and only interesting things get displayed automatically. What if it looks at what our friends are doing and gets recommendations? Excessive sharing is just the first steps towards this.

<comment><USER22> Exactly. And this is the scariest part that the author and everyone else in this thread missed.

TL;DR: Facebook is tightening its filter bubble around you and getting more in between you and your friends.

Ignoring the new features that were added, there is one feature that has disappeared -- the full list of your friend updates in the News feed.

Previously you could click on "Most recent" and get a list of all updates. Now they are filtered and it is totally inconvenient to get around this: you must explicitly check "All updates" from every friends context menu (by default it is "Most updates").

It may seem like a feature until you realize that you may miss the news that your friends are OccupyingWallStreet or criticizing Facebook or doing other twoplusbad things.

Now I am not against filtering and ranking most news (as in media) automatically. I think it is a great achievement that we are able to do this. However I am strongly against anyone deciding for me what is important for me and my friends. There is a line that should be drawn somewhere and you should not ignore this.

<comment><USER15> The full list of updates is still there on the left side where you have a live stream of updates flowing all the time. Of course it fills up real quick but its still there. Also on the left side they have list tabs using which you can go to the old familiar UI. I for one like the newer UI better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> While exposing everything will be noisy, I think facebook wants to collect all your activity so that it can learn and automatically share what you might manually share... It's the hard way of ultimately removing friction from manual sharing.

<comment><USER24> In other words taking the "you" out of sharing. "You" isn't you, it's facebook.

<comment><USER23> But it would be influenced by you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> About as Orwellian as you can get

<comment><USER26> I'd disagree. Feels more like Zamyatin's "We" or Huxley's BNW.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I used to enjoy the way many FriendFeed entries were side-effects of actions friends were taking elsewhere, e.g., adding a movie to their queue on Netflix. And often these would spark interesting conversations.

</comment><comment><USER28> This man is crazy. He told us about not sharing but you can find like buttons everywhere! Shame on you.

</comment><comment><USER29> Zuck is simply trying to build a site that improves our ability to be social.

<comment><USER30> Yes, and to be social, you must. share. everything.

EVERYTHING!</comment></comment>


Tax Non-Compliance Detection [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://taxprof.typepad.com/files/taxpaper.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> I know that this was originally posted as a write-up by the New York Times, but I figured it would be nice to have a look at the actual paper. This goes in-depth on the various approaches taken, which may be of more interest to some people here.</comment>


Ask HN: How to handle equity for small project with lots of cofounders? - <AUTHOR> I'm a college student working with 5 other people on an app, 3 of us on iOS, 2 of us on Android, and 1 person on a web portal (so 6 people total). We are trying to figure out how to distribute equity and how the company should be structured.
Currently, we are thinking about doing something where every 40 hours of work is considered 1 "share" of the company, with all work being valued equally. We will first spend money on the company as needed, and then each person will receive any profits in proportion to the number of shares they have. This way, if any of us decide to leave we won't feel cheated out of all the hard work we have put in.
So if I have 3 shares, and there are 10 shares in total, with 1000$ in profit, I will get 300$.
I have some problems with this main structure as it can be hard to figure out who is going to be making decisions in terms of how to spend the company's money, and how final say on direction/vision is decided, as we have no person who is a clear CEO or executive.
So far I have just been making most of the calls as I sourced our first client and it was my idea, but I'm not sure if that is the best way to handle things.
I'm looking for any advice on how to set up equity and how to decide who is making the larger decisions for the company. Thanks! <comment><USER2> This was Joel Spolsky suggestion. In the past.

[https://gist.github.com/isaacsanders/1653078](https://gist.github.com/isaacsanders/1653078)

</comment><comment><USER3> Run. Seriously. Here's why:

You are running a business, or at least trying to. Ruling by consensus doesn't work, eventually. And that's when shit will start hitting the fan.

The work you've done isn't nearly as i.lortant as the work you'll have to do. It's unclear if you have the right skill sets to get to the next level now. And the skill sets you may or may not have, but will need, are worth way more than the nth developer. And if you all don't see why building to support 3 channels first, when you don't have customer validation is a problem, you don't have the right skill sets

If you are all friends now, you won't be soon; no matter what path you choose.

My advice, find someone who has the experience with running early stage startups and figure out what terms they would need to step in. That should give you an idea of a reasonable way to structure the deal.

Some things to note, the CEO is timely responsible and that's worth way more than each incremental dev, in terms of equity.

Profit-sharing is a great idea. But, it doesn't have to be tied to equity per se.

Figure out if you are all serious about turning it I to a start-up or just having fun coding. Then, go from there.

</comment><comment><USER4> That's a very big team. It gets complex past 3-4 people.

I wouldn't split it by hours worked because it screws over the most effective people. Some parts of the code are harder than others. I would argue that Android is more work than iOS and yet you have three on iOS and two on Android, meaning the iOS guys are lifting a little less. The web portal guy could be doing most of the heavy work, especially if he's doing back end too.

There's also sales. Sales is painful if it's B2B and yet possibly the most important role in a tech heavy team.

With a team that size you also need someone who is handling the non-deep tedious stuff - company registration, dealing with partners, investors, project management, filling forms.

And you definitely need a product manager, a visionary who has high level view and makes sure everyone is on the same page. This can be the CEO too.

The CEO doesn't necessarily need a larger share.

I would honestly just split equity up equally. Extra results will go in the form of bonuses and salary. You probably have to assign someone as the mediator for this, but this can be done democratically too. Maybe even write up some contract to agree on how bonuses are paid out.

</comment><comment><USER5> Unless any of you have done work that is not proportional to the others (for more, or for less) I believe that everybody should get the same amount of equity.

The leaving problem is easily fixed by adding a vesting period where no one would be actual owners of their part before N months/years.

Payment should be also equal. Otherwise, at some point resentment is going to build and things might get weird and start to fall off (I speak from experience). If one person adds more money at the start of the company they should be repaid (reimbursed) as soon as there is company money. Unless, once again, it is a disproportional amount of money. If that's the case some other arrangement (maybe more equity?) should be made.

Leave the unequal payment thing for when (and if) things go really well and the company actually has profits to distribute. At the beginning, everybody gets paid the same as salary and it's also all or nothing. Unless all involved get paid, no one gets paid.

When it comes to deciding who calls the shots I believe it doesn't really matter unless there is someone who clearly is a better fit for it. Also, being the CEO or giving directions to others doesn't mean someone is more important than the others. It just means that it is a different role.

My last bit of advice is about all the other things you guys didn't think about. Especially when it comes to things that can go bad. I would leverage the fact that this is the beginning and everybody is committed and excited and use this time to think about what to do when bad times come (they will). You should never get into a contract without knowing how to leave it. Find a shareholder agreement and use it as a base to come up with your own rules and agreements.</comment>


Show HN: Monitor webpages and get fresh data sent to your webhooks - <AUTHOR> https://monitoro.xyz/?ref=hn <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN,

Monitoro is a service I built to watch websites for changes, scrape data, and whenever the data changes send it to a webhook of your choice.

It started as a scratch-your-own-itch kind of situation where I wanted to monitor the prices for some stuff to buy, until I decided to make a product out of it to help others solve similar issues.

I am available to answer any questions you might have.</comment>


Coq 8.6 is out - <AUTHOR> https://coq.inria.fr/news/134.html <comment><USER2> I've been looking for an excuse to play with Coq ( _cough_ ) for awhile now. A new release is as good an excuse as any I suppose.

Does anyone know how this compares to something like Idris?

<comment><USER3> FWIW you would pronounce "Coq" much more like "kuhk" than "cock", if that makes sense. But that depends on the accent :)

<comment><USER4> I think it's actually "coke", isn't it?

<comment><USER5> In French "coq" is \kɔk\, compared in to "cock" and "coke" which are \ˈkɑːk\ and \koʊk\ in English.

It would be closer to "caught" \kɔːt\ with a short vowel and a \k\ sound at the end.

<comment><USER6> maybe i've got a weird accent, but "caught" with a "k" replacing the "t" is how i pronounce cock.

<comment><USER7> "Caught" is a terrible word to use for any examples here. The parent's IPA is handy, but betrays the fact that they actually distinguish between cot and caught, something that by this point is pretty much a regionalism: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Englis...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_low_back_vowels#Cot.E2.80.93caught_merger)

EDIT: I may have a slight bias as a "General American" user, but I just noticed the parent actually also includes a length suprasegmental modifier, which probably means they're a Received Pronunciation English speaker, or copy-pasted the IPA from somewhere :-D. At any rate, my point that "it sounds like the vowel in 'caught' is pretty ambiguous" still stands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice book that uses Coq: [https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/sf/current/index.html](https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/sf/current/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Has anyone here ever used Coq to verify a non-trivial piece of production software? What was the experience like? (I have experience with other formal methods, a good amount of TLA+ and tiny a bit of Alloy and Why3, but I've never used Coq)

<comment><USER10> Sorry for the offtopic, but have you ever used TLA+ to verify a non-trivial piece of production software? I recently found out about it, and was wondering if there are good public use-case details on it! I know Amazon has used it for some of their production systems, such as S3, and DynamoDB, but couldn't find many details.

<comment><USER11> This is the one paper I know of: [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/lamport/tla/am...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/lamport/tla/amazon.html)

I know of some small scale use at Facebook (where I work), where it has been used to verify a non-trivial protocol under various combinations of failures.

<comment><USER12> I've been referred to this paper before when asking this question.

Whilst it does discuss that Amazon used TLA+ in nontrivial circumstances, it's still a long mental leap to me to get to "TLA+ for AWS S3 looked like this, and this is the sort of bug it helped quash".

It'd be great to see some of that sort of thing.

<comment><USER9> If you want to see what TLA+ specifications of distributed systems look like, there's this lecture series, each on a different distributed algorithm: [https://github.com/tlaplus/DrTLAPlus](https://github.com/tlaplus/DrTLAPlus)

The kind of bugs you find when verifying distributed systems is, if this machine was in that state and that message was in transit, and then the other machine failed, then data was lost".

Basically, because formal verification of this kind ensures the specification is correct, it _will_ find any kind of bug there is. But it's those bugs that are either a result of a severe flaw in the design, or bugs that would be hard to find in testing but their results may be serious, that make this worthwhile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I guess this is as good a place as any, but has anyone used Microsoft's Lean before ([http://leanprover.github.io/](http://leanprover.github.io/))? How does it compare to Coq?

I'm really interested in getting started with formal verification, but I have a more "engineering" background and don't really know where to start. Coq, Isabelle, Lean... There's quite a few of these tools out there!

<comment><USER9> Most of the tools you mentioned are general theorem provers. They can be used for formal verification of software, but they are mostly research tools. Isabelle is probably the most production quality of those you mention. Industrial-grade formal verification tools -- designed for use by engineers and made to handle larger, more complex software -- include Z, TLA+, B-Method, Why3, SPIN, SCADE. My personal favorite is TLA+. You can start verifying real software in TLA+ in the same amount of time it would take you to get through the first one or two chapters in a book about Coq, and the size and complexity of systems you can affordably specify and verify are larger than you could ever hope to do in Coq.

If you absolutely must have end-to-end verification, namely you must verify that global program correctness properties are preserved all the way to the machine code, then you should probably use SCADE if you're writing embedded real-time software; otherwise, consider Isabelle.

<comment><USER14> Have you used Z? How does it compare to TLA+?

I'm thinking of trying out TLA+ this holidays to spec a couple of algorithms at work.

<comment><USER9> > Have you used Z? How does it compare to TLA+?

I haven't used it but I've seen some examples of it. In many ways it is similar to TLA+, and Lamport says it's a nice, mathematical language. From an aesthetic point of view, it is less elegant: it has many more built-in concepts. From a pragmatic point of view, I think it does not support concurrency at all. Before creating TLA+, Lamport had intended to add TLA to Z for concurrency. This was the result: [https://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/lamport/pubs/...](https://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/lamport/pubs/pubs.html#tlz)

Anyway, here's a comparison by Lamport: [https://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/lamport/pubs/...](https://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/lamport/pubs/spec-book-chap.pdf)

> I'm thinking of trying out TLA+ this holidays to spec a couple of algorithms > at work.

Cool. Apart from being very useful, it's a lot of fun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am currently hearing "formal Systems" at my university and that got me interested a bit. Can somebody comment why in practice it's so hard? In and ideal world I would image that certain languages are easier to prove (haskell vs C) and with the right tooling it should be able to prove many things quickly. Some things will always remain hard, but right now i don't see formal proofs of programs at all (i only hear some rumours that some companies use it at some small scale). So what's holding it back from being practical? Not enough engineer Man-power? Or is our theoretical understanding still not developed enough?

<comment><USER16> > In and ideal world I would image that certain languages are easier to prove > (haskell vs C)

It is. That's why Coq is a pure functional language, rather more like Haskell than like C.

> and with the right tooling it should be able to prove many things quickly

Yes, this should be possible, and it _is_ possible.

If you mean you want it to be automated: Isabelle/HOL has more automation than Coq. For many simple things, it suffices to tell Isabelle, essentially, to perform induction on a given variable and from that to try to find a proof automatically. It builds on several external provers to implement this.

What is difficult is for the system to know which existing lemmas to reuse and how to combine them. It's a bit like your math homework, except that these systems know more lemmas (i.e., have a larger search space) and are not always good at ranking them by relevance.

> right now i don't see formal proofs of programs at all (i only hear some > rumours that some companies use it at some small scale)

Look up SEL4 and CompCert for a start.

<comment><USER15> OK, so if i want to build a program that proves my haskell code with a similar ease as using quickcheck[0] it would be possible, its just that nobody has done it yet and not that i would be nearly useless because i wouldn't be able to prove the most basic every-day functions.

I would guess an database of previously proved lemmas for all the used libraries would help, so that you don't have to recompute everything.

[0] quickcheck is an awesome library that generates unit-tests for specified properties (like: "for all lists s: length(sort(s)) = length(s)", i would then just generate a few hundred lists and check whether the property got violated)

<comment><USER17> Liquid Haskell is worth a look

<comment><USER15> i was not aware of what's going on with Liquid Haskell! This dissertation[0] just came out and looks like to be exactly what i had in mind!

[0] [http://goto.ucsd.edu/~nvazou/thesis/main.pdf](http://goto.ucsd.edu/~nvazou/thesis/main.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The first link in the post is a 404 for me: [https://coq.inria.fr/coq-86](https://coq.inria.fr/coq-86)

</comment><comment><USER19> any reason to prefer Coq to Agda? And remind me what is the advantage over Haskell?

<comment><USER20> Coq and Agda are both based on dependent types, but Agda is more of an in- progress research language whereas Coq is currently quite useful for doing proofs in practice.

Haskell doesn't have full support for dependent types (yet). The Haskell community is very cautious with adding features that make type inference undecidable (like dependent types), so what people do is gradually add type system features onto GHC and then gate them behind feature flags. So you can do _some_ of the things you can do in Agda in Haskell (like GADTs, kind promotion, limited type functions, etc.) but not everything.

The advantage of Haskell's conservative approach is that it's actually very useful for writing programs, whereas Coq is only really meant for writing proofs and Agda is more of a research testbed than a production language.

<comment><USER21> Even when Haskell gets dependent types, they won't be quite as powerful as what agda/coq/idris have with the termination checks I believe. Which is fine, I don't think that many people want to program via proofs for everything.

I'd say Idris is the closest to a useful general purpose programming language with proofs. At least that I've found so far, unless isabelle is? Not used it just came across it a while back and have to have a look. [https://isabelle.in.tum.de/overview.html](https://isabelle.in.tum.de/overview.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is there a good book about more advanced usage of coq?

<comment><USER23> Just say "cock", with a straight face, not laughing and serious, and people will not laugh. People will know it's the proof assistant.

Same when saying "Hoare logic".

<comment><USER24> Ignore the children. Coq is a fantastic tool!

It's unfortunate people think of Coq as an academic language. I really think it's something more people should pull out at the workspace and not confine it to college experimentation.

However the academic side of it is pretty slick. First, it's amazing how a few dozen lines of Coq can help explain the ins-and-outs of Hoare logic. ([https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/sf/current/HoareAsLogic....](https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/sf/current/HoareAsLogic.html)). If you're into some really heady stuff and into homotopic types, the HoTT/Coq community has been explosive lately. While it's a great community, they can be a little particular when it comes to pull requests. Don't take it personally,

Writing secure software will become a huge priority over the next few decades. There are many tools out there to create verifiable software, but I suspect there will always an opening for someone who can crank out rock solid Coq.</comment></comment></comment>