HTML5 Fullscreen Video - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jilion.com/2011/07/27/world-s-first-true-html5-fullscreen-video <comment><USER2> The article seems to imply this is due to a new feature introduced by the SublimeVideo team which really isn't the case. They've simply added support for the fullscreen API that has been added in Safari 5.1 (and is coming to other browsers--something noted only in the footnote).

Not that I'm down on the Sublime Player; but this is a browser feature that they could have been coding for all along (as the specs started to surface months ago) and now "just works" because there's finally a browser that implements it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's the documentation for Safari's 'webkitEnterFullscreen': <http://tiny.cc/uw00x>

<comment><USER4> And for when your shortened URLs break:

[http://developer.apple.com/library/safari/ipad/#documentatio...](http://developer.apple.com/library/safari/ipad/#documentation/AudioVideo/Reference/HTMLVideoElementClassReference/HTMLVideoElement/HTMLVideoElement.html%23//apple_ref/javascript/instm/HTMLVideoElement/webkitEnterFullscreen)

FTFY

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is full viewport, not fullscreen. Which I guess is fullscreen if you tap F11.

Edit - Scrap that, only works in Safari. My mistake.

</comment><comment><USER6> As nice as the Sublime Video player is, I wish their pricing model wasn't subscription-based. It's been a barrier to using it in some client sites where they don't want a recurring fee for their video player. Not everything needs to be cloud-based. My video player's javascript is one of those things.

<comment><USER7> There are quite a few free options out there. Here are a few:

<http://mediaelementjs.com/>

<http://www.projekktor.com/>

<http://dev.mennerich.name/showroom/html5_video/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> _"Until now, the lack of true fullscreen playback has been the biggest limitation of HTML5 over Flash video."_

I thought the biggest limitation was protecting premium video from being downloaded/accessed. Isn't that why Hulu won't go HTML5 yet?

<comment><USER9> People having been saying "feature X is the biggest limitation of HTML5 over Flash, but it's coming so Flash days are counted" for years now. Don't expect it to change any time sooner.

<comment><USER8> whatever, dude

<comment><USER8> That was a joke re: his username. Thanks for the down votes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is not HTML5 fullscreen video, this is Safari 5.1 fullscreen video.

</comment><comment><USER11> I can't wait for HTML5 full screen spec implementation on major browsers, not just for videos, but for web pages in general including canvas. It will deliver a more richer User Experience.

<comment><USER12> Agreed, it should be generalized so that games can run fullscreen without having to go futz through the menu.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> That Helvetica Neue (UltraLight) is seriously unreadable. It's a beautiful typeface for headlines and accent text, but blocks of it are mush.

</comment><comment><USER14> Firefox has had fullscreen HTML5 video for some time. So no, this is not the first HTML5 fullscreen video.

<comment><USER15> I was confused, too. From what I gather, this is to allow authors to control fullscreen mode from script.

I don't think you deserved the downvote. The linked article certainly could have afforded to be clearer. After a reread, I'm still not convinced that what they're trying to say is clear without some outside intuition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Are there some mechanisms to prevent advertisers from annoying behavior?

<comment><USER17> Currently not it seems. It doesn't seem to matter from where I call videoElement.webkitEnterFullscreen(), it always works (in Safari)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Surprisingly, this also works in Opera

<comment><USER19> What version are you using id I may ask? I've 11.50 and it's not working for me (as it is not full screen, just full window).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This works fine for me in Chrome.

<comment><USER21> In Chrome, Firefox and IE the video don't go fullscreen but instead the div with the <video> does span all over the page.</comment></comment>


Dropbox is hiring a Web Engineer - <AUTHOR> http://www.dropbox.com/webengineer <comment><USER2> The first thing listed under "Requirements" is "Bachelor's degree in Computer Science", which you would certainly not need to perform this job.

<comment><AUTHOR> thought i'd weigh in on this

obviously if you are an amazing engineer without a degree, of course come talk to us. arash, my cofounder and the slacker that he is, does not have his bachelor's degree :)

so hope you can give us the benefit of the doubt that we didn't intend to exclude qualified people

<comment><USER3> why ask for it then - esp if your co-founder doesn't have one yet you trust his skills enough to found a company together?

 _asks someone who barely has the UK equivalent of a high school graduation (because he was programming for his first startup at 16), no degree, and had a very successful engineering-orientated career so far_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Now I understand why most YC job postings don't allow comments.

<comment><USER5> Could you elaborate on that? What's the harm of getting comments (even if they are negative)?

<comment><USER4> There is almost no discussion about _the actual job_ , instead it's almost all talk about completely unrelated minutae.

<comment><USER5> 1) If comments are turned off then there is no discussion about the actual job AT ALL. 2) Different people have different opinion about what relates to actual job discussion and what's not. 3) Do you have any tool that can successfully replace comments and facilitate discussion about actual job? 4) Sorry, it wasn't me who downvoted your comment. I disagree with you, but because I value opposing opinions I actually upvoted your comment to encourage to elaborate further.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting, Zed Shaw is no longer listed on their about page. I wonder if he quit or was fired.

<comment><USER7> Anyone can enlighten me why I keep seeing Zed Shaw being mentioned on HN compare to other star programmers? He appears to be the superstar among all star programmers. But I checked his wiki, and I thought not many are using mongrels nowadays.

<comment><USER8> He did a good job of promoting himself through controversy. There are a lot of women out there who are smarter and more attractive than Paris Hilton, but she knows how to play the game and stay in the spotlight.

<comment><USER9> No, I promoted myself by writing insightful pieces and voicing my opinion in an interesting way which got lots of people talking while also creating either interesting or useful projects at a faster rate than most people.

People like you however seem to like to only focus on my humrous rants as if that's all I've done, but whatever, I'm having fun and making awesome shit while getting to play guitar so if it pisses of a whiner like you then rock on.

<devil horns>

<comment><USER8> This is getting weird, so I'll lay my cards on the table.

 _People like you however seem to like to only focus on my humrous rants as if that's all I've done, but whatever, I'm having fun and making awesome shit while getting to play guitar so if it pisses of a whiner like you then rock on._

That's a bilious response to _"He did a good job of promoting himself through controversy."_ People like me? I made a neutral statement (even if it's incorrect), not anything malicious like "Zed's a loser because of X." This reminds me of the last time you thought I was attacking your character after a similarly neutral comment: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1292335>

Several months ago, you had a similar response on Twitter that involved a "quit talking smack or let's meet up and 'sort it out' in person" response after I made a casual quip in response to your then-latest rant. I e-mailed you an apology as a gesture of good will, to which I got no response.

You appear to interpret neutral comments as attacks or passive aggression. They aren't - at least from me. Or perhaps you're having the same back and forth with 1001 other people, I don't know :-)

Are these reactions because a page on my site ranks #4 for your name on Google and is packed with negative _third-party_ comments about you? [http://www.rubyinside.com/zed-shaw-goes-nuclear-on-our- commu...](http://www.rubyinside.com/zed-shaw-goes-nuclear-on-our- community-683.html) .. You've mentioned online comments affecting your job prospects before, so it's just a wild guess. If it is, I'll delete the negative comments and change the headline or something, because these responses are worrying and sure, I'd rather focus on the cool things you're up to than have this old "stuff" bubble up every few months.

<comment><USER10> It's easy to misinterpret being compared to Paris Hilton as an insult. It's also easy to see how it wasn't intended as an insult, but it could've gone either way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just FYI, the older Box is hiring 9+ engineers

<https://www.box.net/jobs>

<comment><USER12> older, bigger company, and less successful?

<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/box.net+dropbox.com/>

no thanks.

<comment><USER13> compete is _CRAZY_.

Check their quantcast figures and you see a drastically different picture, with box.net way ahead. But in any event, page views probably are a very bad measure of these sorts of companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> They call this a challenge? Closures and a nested unordered list CSS menu. Wow!

What's with the CS degree _requirement_ too? You don't really need 4 years of algorithms, data structures, operating systems, etc. to do what they want.

Meh, do not want.

<comment><USER15> The challenge questions are to filter out completely inappropriate candidates. They aren't meant to determine if you're a genius or not.

As for the CS degree requirement, not having one myself I run up against this all the time. A good company will be able to test for equivalent capabilities. A CS degree from DeVry in 1995 is probably not the same as one from Stanford in 2006. But by setting it out as a requirement, you're sending a message to candidates. They don't want a programmer that stumbles about their job. They want one with certain analytical skills and a calculated approach to their job. No, you don't need a CS degree necessarily. But you probably want to be familiar with the material that having a CS degree would suggest you are familiar with.

No hiring manager worth their salt would turn away an exceptional candidate because of a lack of formal education unless there were some very specific professional requirements (e.g., you're hiring a professional engineer in countries that recognize them and you need somebody with a B.Eng. degree).

<comment><USER14> They shouldn't call it a "challenge" then, it should be called a CAPTCHA or something to that effect.

As for the CS degree requirement, no candidate worth their salt would send their resume to a place knowing that they lack the first item on the requirements list. You need to make it clear that you read and understood the post before applying (a.k.a. following simple directions).

They didn't put it under "nice-to-have", they didn't tuck "or equivalent experience" at the end. It's the first bullet on their "minimum-requirements" list.

I do not have a CS degree either, but I believe I can code with the best of them and I can rock their front-end world (I do not want this job though).

Had I been seriously looking for another job, I would have simply ignored their post and moved on regardless of compatibility because of that one liner.

<comment><USER15> You don't just send a resume, you send a covering letter too. In the covering letter you can write "I understand that the position calls for XYZ as a requirement..." and go on to explain why you think you are qualified none-the- less. That means you have basic comprehension skills and an ability to think outside of the box too.

<comment><USER13> I disagree. If any job asks for degree etc I just ignore it. I don't think I'd enjoy working at a place where they value that sort of thing.

<comment><USER16> By doing this, you're probably filtering out many good employers. Just like the places that ask for degrees are probably filtering out many good candidates.

I just ignore the requirements - mostly - and if the job sounds interesting, I'll send them a note saying why it sounds interesting and why I believe I'm qualified. Let 'em reject me later, once they've got a bit more information, or vice versa.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The proliferation of web design jobs is beginning to make me wonder if I should, on the side, finally learn advanced page design.

My aesthetic skills are weak, and I am pursuing other goals long-term (much closer to the hardware), but do people think it would be a worthwhile tool to help prop myself up in the short-term?

</comment><comment><USER18> By engineer, they mean programmer or developer, of course.

</comment><comment><USER19> <http://jobs.hiidef.com/>

So is HiiDef, creators and operators of Flavors.me, Goodsie, Dashboard.me and more!

Django, JQuery and/or *NIX administration.

We are distributed around the east coast of the United States, Canada and Australia. Everyone works on multiple sites simultaneously, making for a uniquely challenging and constantly changing work environment.

Email: firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER20> So, I've worked out the Javascript problem several times in my head. Could it be because num is in a difference context when it is being called by setTimeout()?

I just can't figure it out, and it is bugging me. (Guess I won't get the job...)

<comment><USER21>
      function countdown (num) {
          for (var i = 0; i <= num; i += 1) {
              var make_cb = function (n) {
                  return function () {alert(num - n)};
              }
              setTimeout(make_cb(i), i * 1000);
          }
      }

<comment><USER22> I understand the scoping issue here, but the recursive solution is just all around better:

      function countdown(num) {
          if(num < 0) {
              return;
          }
          setTimeout(function() {
              alert(num);
              countdown(num - 1);
          }, 1000);
      }

Note: I'm aware that the dropbox version shows the first alert without any delay, whereas this waits a second before showing anything. This is slightly different behavior, but arguably acceptable.

<comment><USER23> You can make the recursive solution work without any delay:

      function countdown(n) {
          if(n >= 0) {
              alert(n);
              setTimeout(function() {countdown(n-1);}, 1000);
          }
      }

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is news?

<comment><USER25> this is a message board created by the ycombinator founder, its audience is pretty much made entirely of people who would like this job.

there is an entire section dedicated to jobs at yc companies, it is not off topic

<comment><USER26> Funny, I'd actually have expected it to be an audience full of people who'd like to _create_ this job. :)

<comment><USER27> Or rather, postpone creating this job as long as they can ;-)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The C language is purely functional (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://conal.net/blog/posts/the-c-language-is-purely-functional <comment><USER2> In case someone misses the point of the article -- I know I did, originally! -- the author explicitly lays it out in a comment:

> _" Sadly–and here is the real intent behind my post–many Haskell programmers > believe that IO is necessary to do "real programming", and they use Haskell > as if it were C (relegating lots of work to IO). In other words, monadic IO > has proved to be such a comfortable "solution" to I/O in a functional > language, that very few folks are still searching for a genuinely (not > merely technically) functional solution. Before monadic IO, there was a lot > of vibrant and imaginative work on functional I/O. It hadn't arrived yet, > but was still in touch with the Spirit of functional programming. With the > invention and acceptance of monadic imperative programming, it's like the > Haskell community wandered into an opium den and are still lying there in a > fog._

> [...]

> _" By relating Haskell+IO to cpp+C, I'm not trying to lower the former or > elevate the latter. Instead, I'm trying to waken functional programmers out > of the opium fog and remind them how fun and creative genuinely functional > programming can be."_

I love Haskell but I'm not well-versed enough to know why other alternatives to monadic IO were discarded. I do know Haskell predates the IO monad.

<comment><USER3> Another functional approach to I/O is "effect systems". I'm not aware of "stable" functional language with them in it though. It's mostly academic at this point.

Here is some research on it: [https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/research/publication/koka-pr...](https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/research/publication/koka-programming-with-row-polymorphic-effect-types/)

<comment><USER4> You can take a look at Effects in Idris: [http://docs.idris- lang.org/en/latest/effects/](http://docs.idris-lang.org/en/latest/effects/)

<comment><USER3> Oh I didn't know Idris had an effect system. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've gotten good results annoying type theorists by mocking Scala and Haskell for being less pure than C++ template metaprogramming.

<comment><USER6> How many type theorists do you know?

<comment><USER5> A couple?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Java language is purely functional.

"Java programmers" really program not in Java, but in a purely functional language called 'cat'. As with any purely functional language, cat consists only of expressions, not statements. Now here's the clever part: when evaluated (not executed), a cat expression yields a (pure) value of type Java, which is an ADT (abstract data type) that represents imperative programs. That value of type Java is then executed (not evaluated) by the cat language's RTS (run-time system). As a clever optimization, cat's RTS actually includes a code generator, considerably improving performance over more naïve implementations of the Java abstract data type.

</comment><comment><USER8> Discussed in 2015: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9088676](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9088676)

and in 2009: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=618817](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=618817)

<comment><USER9> I wasn't using HN back in 2015 (let alone in 2009) so I'm glad this was re- submitted. It's been more than 4 years which is sufficient time for new users or for people to come back to it with new opinions.

<comment><USER10> It's interesting to see what people thought 4 or 10 years ago about the same article. Those links aren't to chide the submitter that it has been submitted before, HN explicitly allows reposts after a year or so.

<comment><USER9> Ah, thanks for explaining that. I'm more used to Reddit where re-posting links is more common but also more frowned upon, so I'm still unfamiliar with the culture here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > (or char *, for you type theorists, using a notation from Kleene)

I chuckled.

<comment><USER12> 10 years on and that one still gets a laugh from me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> _#undef_ isn't impure. It isn't an assignment, but an unbinding; it asserts that in the remainder of the translation unit, the preprocessor symbol is not known. That symbol's status in the prior parts of the translation unit hasn't changed.

Consider that lambda or let will also unbind:

      (let ((x 3))  ; #define x 3
        )           ; #undef x, effectively

<comment><USER7> Not really, because in your lisp example, there is proper scoping. Variables will always be unbound in the reverse order they were bound.

You can do something like this in c:

        #define x 3
        #define y 4

        #undef x

        // more stuff
        #undef y

Which is essentially equivalent to [(])

<comment><USER13> > _there is proper scoping_

Rather, there is nesting. Nesting isn't the same thing as scoping.

> _Variables will always be unbound in the reverse order they were bound._

Counterexample:

       (let* ((x 1) (y (* 2 x)) (z (+ x y))) ;; bound in sequence
        ) ;; unbound in parallel

We could have an _unlet_ operator which introduces a new scope that explicitly removes a binding:

       (let (x)                      ; #define x
         (let (y)                    ; #define y
           (unlet (x)                ; #undef x
             ;; y bound, x free
             )))                     ; #undef y, #undef x

Basically, #define and #undef can be regarded as having proper nesting: each one creates a new scope that lasts unti the end of the translation unit, nested relative to the previous scope.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting article indeed. If anyone was curious and wanted to drill down to the source of the "Scala is Not a Functional Programming Language" discussion, surprise, the link is dead. Here's an archive link: [http://web.archive.org/web/20090517065705/http://enfranchise...](http://web.archive.org/web/20090517065705/http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/posts/scala- not-functional/)

</comment><comment><USER15> See how far you can get with:

        #define int const int
        #define float const float
        etc...

It makes for some interesting patterns

</comment><comment><USER16> I was about to comment to snarkily refute the claim in the title, but then the author seemed to sarcastically do that in the article.

<comment><USER17> If you don't have that interrupt in your brain that fires when you read something so outlandish that it surely _must_ be deliberately provocative, you're going to spend a lot of time very upset about articles from The Onion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> From a previous Obfusticated C contest winner- towers-of-hanoi purely in cpp (evaluated at compile time)

[https://www.cise.ufl.edu/~manuel/obfuscate/vanschnitz](https://www.cise.ufl.edu/~manuel/obfuscate/vanschnitz)

</comment><comment><USER19> On a different note, the book "Functional C" teaches C programming to ML functional programmers. Quite interesting and gives a new perspective to C programmers on their favourite language.

</comment><comment><USER20> Technically the C preprocessor is purely functional!</comment>


July 12th: Internet-Wide Day of Action to Save Net Neutrality - <AUTHOR> https://www.battleforthenet.com/july12/ <comment><AUTHOR> Here is an article with journalistic details about the parties involved: [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/06/net- neutr...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/06/net-neutrality- amazon-etsy-kickstarter-protest)</comment>


How heavy use of social media is linked to mental illness - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/05/18/how-heavy-use-of-social-media-is-linked-to-mental-illness <comment><USER2> Several years ago I realized that checking Facebook was more annoying than rewarding and quit using it. I then moved onto Twitter and I eventually found that the endless outrage cycle is equally taxing. I took all social media apps off my phone and only use them on my desktop now.

Social media removes people from the present oftentimes to our detriment. We didn't evolve to always be connected.

<comment><AUTHOR> While I'm not much of a fan of social media overall, I'm not sure I agree with your last point. There's lots of evidence to suggest that a huge amount of human evolution rests on social connection. Without it, we are way less healthy, from an empirical standpoint. The issue with"social" media is that it gives us some neurological rewards but doesn't really make us feel less lonely; and sometimes may increase our feelings of isolation if we're not really connecting, just seeing superficial information or, as is increasingly the case, information that isn't social at all (news or other forwarded content).</comment></comment>


Ask YC:  Anyone know of a search engine for finding the WORST of the web? - <AUTHOR>

People probably have a fascination for embarrassingly bad web sites.  I think something like this can be quite popular. <comment><USER2> This is going back a little ways: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirsky's_Worst_of_the_Web></comment>


My dad left me $7M and I have no idea what to do with it - <AUTHOR> https://sevenmillionblog.tumblr.com/post/106499637110/my-dad-left-me-7000000-and-i-have-no-idea-what <comment><USER2> Use the All-weather investment strategy to generate a neat return every year without worrying too much about a market crash. All weather strategy means something like: 80% index funds 12% bonds 8% gold/Cryptos

Do that with the $7M and you'll have around $350K every year (after taxes and inflation) for the rest of your life. And best of all, you'll still have $7M (+inflation) to give on to your own children when that day comes.

Your gift is my dream!

</comment><comment><USER3> Altruistic: building a foundation to pardon medical debt, or tackle some low hanging fruit type problems in your neighborhood.

Pragmatic: Invest most in index funds, and use the proceeds to fund your startup.

Crazy: Alt-coins :D

</comment><comment><USER4> Invest a third, give a third to charity, and enjoy a third traveling or doing other things that make you happy with the people you love.</comment>


A janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin' Hot Cheetos (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://thehustle.co/hot-cheetos-inventor/ <comment><USER2> This article ends right before the actual interesting part begins.

Janitor takes some food his company produces, adds spices, makes a shitty pitch deck and profit? Cool, but... this could have easily happened in a dozen different configurations and gone nowhere. This is more luck than anything else.

The interesting story begins _after_ that. This guy didn't end his career there - so, presumably, he was't a one-hit wonder. We have an illiterate janitor who suddenly got swept into the orbit of the CEO, without any business or operational acumen. He somehow -how??- managed to learn the ways of the new tribe, learn business, learn to read and write, learn how to lead a business unit, and do it well. This guy came out of nowhere, and had to zero-to-sixty from manual laborer to - what? executive? What position did they put him in? How did he ramp up? What kind of support did he get, if any? What kind of education did they provide him with, if any?

There's a long, interesting story between "janitor" and "successful VP", and they neglected to tell almost any of it!

<comment><USER3> The point is that the CEO was open minded (he took a phone call from a janitor... and actually listened to him and then gave him a chance). He saw past this mans lack of education and experience and focused on his dedication and enthusiasm. There's value in everyone, everywhere (even the lowest employees). We need leaders who can put ego aside and see that. IMO, that was the point of the story. The subsequent success of this man is another story entirely (and a good one I bet). I'm just glad that someone recognized his talent.

Edit: Credit also goes to the secretary for putting the call through to the CEO and not acting as a gate-keeper. She could have ended the call. Thankfully, she was open minded too.

<comment><USER4> My takeaway was that not only was a janitor directly employed by the company (as cleaning services are basically 100% outsourced in my experience now) but was paid well and felt part of the company such that he was motivated to stay interested and contribute.

<comment><USER5> Yes that is quite the anachronism these days.

<comment><USER6> Too bad. Perhaps there is an opportunity cost argument for a better alternative.

<comment><USER7> I imagine it's super hard to quantify the profit of "ideas from janitor", but super easy to quantify the savings of "no longer paying for a janitor".

Plus, if every company has a gentleman's agreement to ignore the help then there's no lost opportunity that the competition can jump on.

<comment><USER6> Sure there is, they all just agree to ignore it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My takeaway: there are huge potential markets in people who are not like me. The execs were probably completely unaware of this market, and it took an outsider to hold their hand and bring it to them. I love flaming hot cheetos and know tons of people who do, but there is no way I would have thought of taking the hot pepper / other spices from a traditional Mexican food (elotes, which I had in LA) and adapting them in this way. The fact that everyone I interact with forms an upper class monoculture (white/asian, college educated, 20s-40s, mostly US-born) means that I have huge blindspots. I wonder what huge businesses could be created catering toward senior citizens, for middle aged people working retail, recent Asian immigrants, working single fathers, and so on.

<comment><USER9> This is why diversity is so important! Not only in business, but in general — everyone has huge blind spots, no matter what background they have. Life is much larger and more diverse than people usually imagine. Interacting and learning from people with different backgrounds than yours is a fundamentally rewarding experience, although it can be hard at times.

<comment><USER10> I 100% agree.

But it's important that diversity be considered in all forms, not just based on race/sex.

If your "diverse" team is made up of different ethnicities and genders but only consists of ivy league members who grew up in California... well, not really diverse then, is it?

<comment><USER11> Class diversity is pretty hard to achieve because you usually need some baseline class to actually be able to succeed in a role, i.e. you can't show up to a meeting with customers or shareholders chewing dip and wearing camo jorts. And social mobility from lower classes into corporate-ready roles is rather low in this country, so while there certainly are people who grew up poor and would be useful for companies to figure out what lower class consumers might need, there aren't many of them; furthermore, for the people who did grow up that way and into being a person able to function in the corporate sphere, it's probably in part due to their rejection of their poor background.

Maybe we just need more focus groups.

<comment><USER12> Here's the real divider: Viewpoint diversity.

Are you ready to have some conservatives/Republicans on your team?

<comment><USER13> Viewpoint diversity? Republican/conservative seems to be the default state in most corporations.

<comment><USER12> You clearly don't work in Silicon Valley :)

<comment><USER14> Yes, it's possible bzudo is one of the 99.9% of people who does not work in SV.

<comment><USER12> If we're only 0.1% who work, I understand why I've been feeling tired...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Frito Lay was a great place to work at because they did promote up, and they also hired the best. I would often be in meetings where one logistics manager went to MIT and the other logistics manager would be someone who started at a plant boxing chips.

<comment><USER16> My dad literally went from putting the chips in the boxes when he was 23 years old, to overseeing the construction of a brand new manufacturing plant (and running it), to managing scores of plants at HQ in his 40's.

Frito-Lay however, is not immune from boneheaded decisions. After 20someodd years of employment, and a trophy case full of awards, he and some of his [white male] colleagues were laid off in favor of creating a more 'diverse' management roster.

Lacking the experience of those whose positions they took, performance tanked with the new management team, and the person who set it all in motion was fired.

At the end of the day, revenue-per-share is pretty indifferent to age, race, or gender.

<comment><USER17> > At the end of the day, revenue-per-share is pretty indifferent to age, race, > or gender.

Except, as the article shows, diversity _often does_ increase revenue share. Flamin' hot cheetos were invented by a Mexican immigrant who realized that Frito-Lay didn't have any products which appealed to Latino people.

EDIT: Changed Latinx to Latino.

<comment><USER18> >Latinx

There is no faster way to discredit your argument than using absurd language like latinx. I've yet to meet a latino person who referred to themselves as anything else.

<comment><USER19> I'm interested (and somewhat taken aback) by the intensity of the reactions to this term. Maybe it's a generational/political thing? For my part, I know significantly more people who refer to themselves as "Latinx" than "Latino".

<comment><USER20> I don't like being called Chicano, Latin, or Hispanic. It's seemingly only a US thing afaict. My family is from Mexico and "Mexican" suffices.

It seems like they're just terms to lump a bunch of legitimately different people and cultures into a single, convenient demographic. That's how I feel about it anyway. Not saying people shouldn't identify with it, if that's how they feel. :V

<comment><USER21> > It seems like they're just terms to lump a bunch of legitimately different > people and cultures into a single, convenient demographic.

I'm an Indian living in the US. If I see another brown skinned person who does not look Indian, what should I call them? There are many Mexicans into the US, but there are also people from other countries in South America etc. I have no idea what Hispanic actually means, but I've heard it (and Latino) commonly used to refer to that group of people in general, and those the words that I use too.

If you were in Africa and saw a white skinned person, would you call them American or White? Calling them White would "lump a bunch of legitimately different people and cultures into a single, convenient demographic," but that lumping is necessary since you can't know someone's culture just by looking at them - or even after you have known them for a while.

<comment><USER22> To be technically accurate, you should say they are Native American, or of mixed Native American and European ancestry (btw, the Spanish word for this is "mestizo" which means mixed).

I'm aware that nobody actually says this in real life, but this is what people in the US usually mean when they think of "typical Latino-looking person".

In reality though, "Latino" is not a very precise way to describe someone with that phenotype, because just like Canada and the US and other countries with a major history of colonialism, there are people of all racial ancestries in Latin America. This is largely ignored in the Western US, I suspect because most of the "Latino" people there are from Mexico and Central America, where most of the population looks like what you describe.

But Latin America started out with all the same major groups that the US did: Native Americans, European settlers, African slaves, Asian immigrants, etc., and so you would expect to find all the same ancestries there as you would in the US, just in different proportions.

And indeed, in places like Uruguay and Argentina, the majority of people would be considered "white" according to US racial classification norms. In the Caribbean, many would be considered "black". In Brazil there are a lot of people of Japanese descent.

But even in Mexico there are people who look like this: [https://specials- images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5b147c3d4bb...](https://specials- images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5b147c3d4bbe6f74868b747c/416x416.jpg?background=000000&cropX1=1318&cropX2=3259&cropY1=77&cropY2=2020)

That guy is Mexican and Latino and Hispanic by any possible definition of those terms, and also "white" (I.e., of primarily Western European ancestry).

The point is: "Latino" and "Hispanic" are not directly connected to phenotypes or biological ancestry in the way you are assuming.

In general I don't understand why it is so important to describe people by their ancestry, as opposed to their actual culture. If you see a white person in India you can be 99.99% sure they are not culturally Indian, but you can't really conclude anything similar in the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is a fantastic story. There are a few ethical problems including Montañez plagiarizing parts of his presentation and having friends and family buy out the products in the test market, but overall he refused to accept imposed limits and accomplished something phenomenal.

One interesting thing is that Frito-Lay had no products targeting Latinos, and no one on the highly paid marketing team did anything about it. The janitor saw the problem immediately, but for some reason the entrenched interests were unable to see it. The CEO by contrast was humble enough to take Montañez's call, let him give a presentation, and overlook that presentation's weaknesses to see the good idea at the core.

Also interesting is the backlash he faced from those same executives, jealous that someone less qualified was being successful. As humans we hate to see others doing better than us and try to push them down. No wonder social mobility is so difficult.

<comment><USER24> (Note that I reductively throw around cultural class labels like "lower-middle class" in this comment for purposes of clarity: I don't mean to suggest that a person's social class is fixed, or well-defined, but it's just a brief way to get at the concept of different subcultures and their mannerisms, as well as the rough income bands that people tend to associate with them)

> Also interesting is the backlash he faced from those same executives, > jealous that someone less qualified was being successful. As humans we hate > to see others doing better than us and try to push them down. No wonder > social mobility is so difficult.

This dynamic is far more dominant than most people realize. I grew up around lots of rich people, coming from a historically-wealthy family with little money[1] (yay scholarships!), so my default mannerisms signal upper-class pretty strongly. I've always been pretty disgusted with the notion of treating people differently based on their background, so I decided it wasn't a system I would personally participate in, and semi-consciously changed my diction and habits to be more déclassé over the course of my teen and college years (to my parents' minor annoyance).

Once I entered the professional and adult dating world, I noticed the degree to which even otherwise-decent people could't resist pre-judging you based on the class that your mannerisms signaled. Depressingly enough, I got by far the most friction from my lower-middle class friends for the mannerisms that I had retained from my childhood[2]. Note that I'm not talking about things like fussing over which salad fork to use (habits that I'm happy to have jettisoned when young), but often-minor differences in diction, habits, and manners (eg, when and how often I choose to thank you to service employees, how comfortable I am expressing how a piece of art or music makes me feel, etc).

After a certain amount of pushing against the tide, I eventually stopped trying to casualize my mannerisms, and over a fairly short period of time ended up reverting to communicating pretty much the way I used to when younger (adjusted for age, obviously). It's been simultaneously amusing and depressing to note the difference in how I've been treated, most notably with respect to female attention and my professional life. I won't even try to delve into the female attention side, but my best guess for the way the baseline of every professional conversation has shifted is that I went from "scrappy & unusually talented" to "bred for success". Again, I find this pretty repulsive, but it's been pretty hard to argue with results. The differences are often hard to articulate, but it's almost like I start every professional conversation from an implicit position of power that I didn't have before.

I'm not really sure what to do about this: my initial thought that trying to change society to treat individuals like humans instead of branded cattle needed first movers, and I was happy to be one of them. But discovering the degree to which class distinctions are subtly maintained by _even those who suffer the most from them_ was enormously dispiriting.

People are weird.

[1] by which I mean, I grew up in a historically-well-off family that had little money growing up due to some severe mental health issues in my immediate family

[2] oddly enough, it's been my experience that the most zealous enforcement of class segregation in social contexts is from the bottom-up; I've never had trouble bringing random lower-middle class friends to hang out with friends who grew up with upper-class mannerisms. It's a rather dejecting thought that class segregation in a social context has so many (implicit) enthusiastic supporters among those being hurt by it the most

<comment><USER25> > _it 's been my experience that the most zealous enforcement of class > segregation in social contexts is from the bottom-up_

You perceive subtle rejection a lot more strongly than you perceive someone else being subtly rejected. The effect you perceive could be explained by pointing out that all of the negative interactions involving you were "bottom- up," while the ones involving the "random lower-middle class friends," were top-down.

<comment><USER24> That's a very insightful point, but I'm not comparing the way my friends interact with me to the way I interact with them, but rather the way friends in a lower social class interacted with me vs the way those in a (sort of) higher social class interacted with me. I feel like not having much money meant that there were ways in which I was out of place among my childhood milieu too. And yet somehow, I don't recall ever being made to feel out of my place by anyone.

This is obviously partially attributable to the fact that everything about my parents' and my mannerisms fit in well, despite not actually having money. But I feel like the actual (significant) financial gap between me and my social circles provided plenty of opportunity for social friction, and I literally don't remember a single instance of it coming from that group.

More importantly, it would be predictable for people to enforce the advantages that a rigid class system affords them, but it's unexpected to me for those getting the short end of the stick to be enforcing the system more zealously (albeit in a limited context) than those benefiting from it.

(It really bugs me that my comments keep referring to class as if it's a real, important thing about someone's character, but I guess that's sort of the point of my comment: the perhaps-naive disillusionment that I felt upon realizing how insistent most are on enforcing it)

<comment><USER25> Class comes from behavior, which is I guess what you are saying - but it's real, as real as body language or your native language. This would also imply that if you talked enough about how art made you feel around your people, you would be exempt from getting rejected by your extended family. I'm not sure if there is a class in America higher than rich (Zuckerberg class?) but if there was, you would have to hang out around them to really test your theory.

<comment><USER24> > This would also imply that if you talked enough about how art made you feel > around your people, you would be exempt from getting rejected by your > extended family.

First off, this is a pretty bizarre interpretation of what I said: no one cares if you _don't_ talk about how art makes you feel. It's the rule that you _can't_ talk about it that gets enforced, in certain circles. I should also note that this isn't some esoteric desire: I've been on drugs with these friends enough times to hear them talking about how art makes them feel, but the difference is that, when sober, they not only feel too inhibited to do so but they feel like they have to mock others who do as "pretentious".

Secondly, I dont know what you mean by getting rejected by my extended family. That's certainly not something that's ever happened, either with my family or other people of the same class. The positive treatment I noticed from class signaling (unitentional or otherwise) was entirely from women or in a professional context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Very impressed with the janitor's vision and the CEOs good leadership. A poor leader would have quashed the process when the janitor could not justify his idea. Being a good leader, the CEO came up with a solution to determine the viability of the janitor's idea.

The difference between seniors and juniors is experience, and that experience can partially be defined by your "moveset". A janitor would not know it is possible to run a limited trial, but the CEO would. I have found that managers are often amenable to ideas from their workers. But, if a worker does not have a full moveset, it will be difficult for the worker to pitch an idea in a way that is actionable, and he will be turned down.

<comment><USER27> Great comment. It takes a hell of a CEO to squash any ego they have and stop to listen to the janitor about what direction their business should take.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > "It hit me that I had no idea what he was talking about, or what I was > doing," Montañez recalled. "I was shaking, and I damn near wanted to pass > out…[but] I opened my arms and I said, 'This much market share!' I didn't > even know how ridiculous that looked."

>The room went silent as the CEO stood up and smiled. "Ladies and gentlemen, do you realize we have an opportunity to go after this much market share?" he said, stretching out his arms.

Huge smiles from me here.

This really amplifies the willingness of this CEO to listen and promote good ideas. I don't have a ton more context but I can relate to this janitor in many ways and this reaction from the CEO would be incredible.

I'm so glad it happened this way and that it came from the janitor's perspective.

<comment><USER29> That quote is missing some context that I think makes the story even more impressive.

So, this was before the Hot Cheeto idea. Montañez was looking for ways of advancing inside of the company and had asked a salesperson if he could trail him as he did his routes. This was on Montañez's day off work, so it was unpaid. The advantage to the salesperson was an extra set of hands for unloading.

He saw the shelf or whatever the terminology is and how much FritoLay product they were selling in the individual stores. That's what he had in mind when he used his arms to say how much market share. The question scared him (apparently he and his wife hadn't gotten to the "market share" chapter in the book they got from the library) until he remembered that day following the salesperson and so the punchline is that he thought he nailed the answer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> "I do have a Ph.D.," he responded. "I've been poor, hungry and determined."

Love that.

<comment><USER31> I hate it. I think it belittles Ph.D's and denigrates the people who don't have them suggesting that you need to deflect the question because you [sarcasm] couldn't possibly have a skill set that's of high worth unless you actually had done a Ph.D [/sarcasm].

Bleurgh.

FWIW my highest level of qualification is a bachelor's degree and I work in a position that doesn't require any formal training at all.

<comment><USER32> His Ph.D response was a retort to people questioning his qualifications to conduct lectures. Almost every real Ph.D certainly deserved them, recognising their knowledge or research in their field. However many of those with Ph.Ds were not the best lecturers and teachers they could be when I was an undergraduate at university. They actually hadn't been taught to teach effectively and present their knowledge in way that others could absorb. (Thank God for good text books and helpful tutors in my case). It sounds like Richard Montañez' experience in the "school of hard knocks" may well have set him above many regular Ph.Ds in capability to lecture and teach.

<comment><USER31> Well, exactly. You don't have to have a Ph.D to be an expert, to be a good lecturer, etc..

But having a Ph.D is nonetheless a demonstration of a particular high-level of learning, research, and technical ability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I love this story. It's not about how Montañez "got lucky" \- it's about how he, in several key spots, set himself up so luck would find him.

It's a great American success story.

<comment><USER34> Also from the article:

> Six months later, with Montañez's help, Frito-Lay began testing Flamin' Hot > Cheetos in small Latino markets in East Los Angeles.

> If it performed well, the company would move forward with the product; if it > didn't, they'd scratch it — and Montañez would likely return to janitorial > duties.

> So Montañez assembled a small team of family members and friends, went to > the test markets, and bought every bag of Hot Cheetos he could find.

> "I'd tell the owner, 'Man, these are great,'" he recalled. "Next week, I'd > come back and there'd be a whole rack."

:-)

<comment><USER35> If I remember correctly, Sid Meiers would call up computer stores and ask if they had his games in stock because he wanted to buy it. He'd call several times and eventually the stores would reach out to him to buy it.

<comment><USER36> I wonder if he had to come up with different voice disguises.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The days when someone can start as a janitor or in the mailroom and climb to the top is done.

Companies used to hire everyone in the company. Janitors were part of the company. So was mailroom staff. So were secretaries. Everybody was part of the whole.

Now, companies contract out everything but their core thing. Janitors come from a low-paid 3rd party service. Mailrooms are no longer a thing (there's no such thing as emailrooms, unless you count exchange admins). All those things that allowed somebody to start at the bottom rung in a company and climb up have been systematically destroyed and/or removed.

<comment><USER38> It may just look different now.

At my company (Mixpanel), the modern equivalent is our support team, which is filled with smart, hungry people who want to get their foot in the door in tech.

Now, we have former support folks all over the company (sales, sales engineering, services, software engineering, product - just to name the departments I can think of offhand), who are often our top performers as ICs or who have grown into leadership roles. Some have left to start their own companies.

It's actually been one of our most effective hiring channels!

<comment><USER39> At your company, the modern equivalent is the janitor, who cleans your office -- but doesn't work directly for Mixpanel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Great story. When I read the headline, I immediately thought of D'Angelo Barksdale's cynical speculation about the inventor of Chicken McNuggets being a "just some sad ass down in the basement of McDonalds, thinking up some shit to make some money for the real players": [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyg_v7Vxo4A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyg_v7Vxo4A)

</comment><comment><USER41> This is one of the best business stories I've ever read. It embodies the core principle of the American dream: that you can really make it if you are dedicated, work hard, and strike out on the right idea. It also highlights the importance of good leadership, to recognize good ideas no matter where they come from, and bottom-up management techniques that emphasize collective ownership of a company's products and success.

</comment><comment><USER42> Inspirational.

I'd love to hear names of companies today where folks feel their work place culture might allow something like this to happen.

<comment><USER43> I work at Nucor and know of several people who have done exactly this in the 20 years I've worked here. They started working in a entry level production position and worked their way up to department manager, division manager/VP, senior VP and even CEO in one case.

<comment><USER44> I've almost finished reading "Good to Great" (an excellent read, for whoever hasn't read it already) which analyzes Nucor's company culture. Nice to hear the reality matches the analysis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I just wish they'd make them hotter. Takis are kicking their ass in the spicy snack aisle.

<comment><USER46> I have never found any flavor of takis to actually be "hot"

<comment><USER45> Not "capsicum hot" per se, but very flavorful. More salty and acidic I guess. But it's a very bold and complex flavor, a top tier snack imho.

<comment><USER47> I recently moved to Europe and can not find any vendor that supplies Takis. For me they are basically crack and I can't get my fix. Maybe it's for the better, as I can go through two large bags in one sitting..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> The real hero of this story is the CEO who decided to take this guy _and_ his idea. He could have easily taken the idea and ran with it on his own, with Montañez spending the rest of his life mopping floors.

I wonder how likely this scenario would be in today's world. I have found personally that many companies are unwilling to take risks on employees who aren't formally qualified, even if they demonstrate the skills to operate at far beyond their current pay grade.

Second real hero of the story is his wife. How important is it to have people around you who will enable you do things you aren't qualified to do because they believe in you unconditionally? All of the importants.

<comment><USER49> _> The real hero of this story is the CEO who decided to take this guy _and_ his idea. He could have easily taken the idea and ran with it on his own, with Montañez spending the rest of his life mopping floors._

A practical question, and a moral one:

Would it be have worked out had the CEO tried to steal Montañez's idea, given Montañez came up with the spices himself?

Does someone merely not doing something unethical, at no cost to themselves, make them a hero?

<comment><USER40> "real hero" is definitely overstating it – I'd hope we as a society haven't reached the point where doing the decent thing is seen as going above and beyond. Hopefully the CEO saw it not only as just the right thing to do, but also the smart (and legal) thing to do – Montañez's story could in the long- run inspire more innovative ideas and culture at the company.

<comment><USER48> Sorry, but we have _definitely_ reached that point. Granted I'm extremely cynical, but stories like this are outliers and not the norm. And not simply because of the scale of the success.

Read my other comment on why I consider the CEO the hero of this story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> This is a great story. I'm surprised to not see Ketchup Cheetos[1] mentioned in the linked timeline[2], those are by far my favourites so I wonder what the story behind them is.

1 - [https://americanfizz.co.uk/image/cache/catalog/european- prod...](https://americanfizz.co.uk/image/cache/catalog/european- products/cheetos/cheetos-ketchup-85g-800x800.png)

2 - [https://www.timelinemaker.com/blog/featured- timeline/history...](https://www.timelinemaker.com/blog/featured- timeline/history-of-cheetos-timeline/)

<comment><USER51> I've always found it interesting that ketchup flavoring on frito lay products were not a bigger thing. In canada, ketchup flavored chips etc. are a very popular flavor and have been around for decades. Just never seems to really have caught on elsewhere until somewhate recently.

<comment><USER50> Oooh, another reason to visit Canada. My love for Ketchup Cheetos comes from Poland, where ketchup flavoured crisps are fairly popular as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> > "How much market share do you think you can get?" "I opened my arms and I > said, 'This much market share!'"

Brilliant answer for a stupid question that was probably meant to put him down.

> Frito-Lay began testing Flamin' Hot Cheetos in small Latino markets in East > Los Angeles. If it performed well, the company would move forward with the > product; if it didn't, they'd scratch it

So Montañez assembled a small team of family members and friends, went to the test markets, and bought every bag of Hot Cheetos he could find.

Also brilliant, as such a "test" would certainly fail due to no marketing, likely intentional by the exec's and politics.

<comment><USER53> This was the same CEO who took a call from a janitor. It wasn't a put down. This was an interview, and the question was open ended on purpose to see how he responded.

<comment><USER4> The CEO wasn't the one asking the question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> That's an incredible story and props to the guy, but let's not tapdance around the fact that this is incredible specifically because social mobility on this scale is extremely rare. It took both exceptional determination and unbelievable luck to make this happen. How many others have the doggedness and skill, but not the luck? How many of them are still mopping today?

<comment><USER55> >because social mobility on this scale is extremely rare

Rare only works as a qualifier when comparing it to some other probability of social mobility, either in an ideal or real system. The US has higher social mobility than most actual countries in the world and is pretty much middle of the pack in social mobility when it comes to developed (OECD) nations [0]

If I recall correctly, there was another case of a janitor working her way up to becoming a C-level executive at Microsoft and HP. Capitalism with a social safety net is what affords this social mobility because it doesn't matter what your credentials are if you can find a market for a novel product like Montañez did. You can argue about how much of a social safety net is required to prevent the poor from staying poor forever, but it's still capitalism that provides the impetus that lifts people up to where they don't need the social safety net anymore.

Compare this to a society where you're hooped if you're born into the wrong caste or without party connections and US social mobility doesn't seem that rare anymore.

[0]: [https://www.oecd.org/inclusive-growth/inequality-and- opportu...](https://www.oecd.org/inclusive-growth/inequality-and- opportunity/The-Issues-Note-Social-Mobility-and-Equal-Opportunities- May-4-2017.pdf) figure 2

<comment><USER54> I'm left unsure what your point is.

Saying that you have to look at social mobility as a relative thing is certainly false, because we have an optimal yardstick: perfect fairness. If measured against that goal we don't do very well.

Then you go into what the relative numbers are, and it turns out we don't do very well there either, being behind China, Hungary, South Africa and perhaps a dozen others on your preferred yardstick.

You then note that there are at least one or two more cases of this happening (which I believe), and that it requires capitalism with a social safety net to do so. In current application the first part is right, but isn't broadly correct, and the second part just isn't true.

Regarding the first part: for such a huge change in life circumstances to happen you have to have both the extreme poverty and extreme wealth. Capitalism is very good at generating those huge disparities, and is by far the most common system with that characteristic today, but monarchies like Saudi Arabia also experience it (extreme individual changes in SES in Saudi Arabia are most downward, however). The presence of a social safety net doesn't seem to play much of a role in these extreme cases, and certainly didn't in this case. Examples of self-made millionaires going back to early colonial history abound, and certainly there was no strong safety net in place. Given the relative infrequency of such events, I would be skeptical of any attempt to compare between two historical periods or societies based on relative count between those societies or periods as well.

After all that the only thing I can think you were trying to say is that the US is doing a-ok, which just isn't supported by the points you made.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> > "it's not about who you know — it's about who knows you."

I've never heard that before, its an awesome quote.

</comment><comment><USER57> I loved this article but I loved their Newsletter conversion page the most! I never thought I would feel warm and fuzzy after giving away my email address to subscribe to a newsletter of all things! Live to learn something new everyday!

</comment><comment><USER58> What a great and inspiring story.

> "Nobody had given any thought to the Latino market," recalls Montañez. "But > everywhere I looked, I saw it ready to explode."

It's incredible what a new set of eyes with different perspectives can bring to the table.

</comment><comment><USER59> What about those 300k employees in the 80s? That just sounds way off-scale and hints to sloppy editing elsewhere. The only number close to this is what they call their direct distibution system customers.

This article NYT from 1986 mentions 26.500 employees: [https://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/02/business/frito-lay-s- go-i...](https://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/02/business/frito-lay-s-go-it-alone- ploicy.html)

</comment><comment><USER60> What a nice feel-good story which is totally not a marketing/PR concoction, albeit a brilliant one. The story is literally the Cheeto version of Good Will Hunting.

Do you all honestly believe none of the hundreds of food scientists working at Frito-Lay thought of making a spicy version their snacks?

</comment><comment><USER61> This is my favorite part of this story: _"It seemed there was a group of [executives] who wanted it to fail," he later told the podcast, The Passionate Few. "They thought I got lucky. They were paid big bucks to come up with these ideas… they didn't want some janitor to do it."_

</comment><comment><USER62> When he broke the news to his family, his grandfather imparted a piece of advice that would always stick with him: "Make sure that floor shines," the man told his grandson. "And let them know that a Montañez mopped it."

As a Latino with humble beginnings, this brought tears to my eyes.

</comment><comment><USER63> Here's an insightful interview with the man himself - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADnYF7srPK0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADnYF7srPK0)

</comment><comment><USER64> Best thing i ever read on HN

</comment><comment><USER65> Inspirational story, but let's not forget about the nutritional value of the Cheetos (or lack thereof)

</comment><comment><USER66> man I love this story. And I wonder how many huge multinationals are smart enough to let something like this happen?

And this is why VCs often say they prefer teams with just domain expertise to teams with just the technical expertise, if the team doesn't already have both.

</comment><comment><USER67> "How much market share do you think we can get?"

Arms spread wide, "This much!"

That is just too perfect. Who's cutting onions in here?

</comment><comment><USER68> Read the whole article but did not see any mention of if he was compensated at all for his idea?

<comment><USER69> It didn't say anything about him being compensated directly for the idea. Presumably as he moved up the ranks he got compensated via profit-sharing. In the same way the highly paid guys who were SUPPOSED to be inventing new things like this (but didn't) were also compensated. And the same way they would have been compensated if they developed some hot new product (eg, at their same rate relative to the profit sharing of the whole org).

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> What an awesome story.

....he was going to be the "best janitor Frito-Lay had ever seen"

That's the enabler, right there.

</comment><comment><USER71> Wonderful story. Both the janitor and the CEO epitomize Ayn Rand's "ideal man":

> "The moral issue is: how do you approach the field of work given your > intellectual endowment and the existing possibilities? Are you going through > the motions of holding a job, without focus or ambition, waiting for > weekends, vacations, and retirement? Or are you doing the most and the best > that you can with your life? Have you committed yourself to a purpose, i.e., > to a productive career? Have you picked a field that makes demands on you, > and are you striving to meet them, to do good work, and to build on it -- to > expand your knowledge, develop your ability, improve your efficiency?

> If the answers to these last questions are yes, then you are totally > virtuous in regard to productiveness, whether you are a surgeon or a > steelworker, a house painter or a painter of landscapes, a janitor or a > company president."

(HT: [http://gusvanhorn.blogspot.com/2019/06/a-janitors-multi- bill...](http://gusvanhorn.blogspot.com/2019/06/a-janitors-multi-billion- dollar-idea.html))

</comment><comment><USER72> This is very well written. They get in, they tell the story, they get out.

</comment><comment><USER73> Wow, its been a while since I've read something that inspirational!

</comment><comment><USER74> My asshole would like to have some stern words with that guy

</comment><comment><USER75> love this

</comment><comment><USER76> Very interesting.

<comment><USER48> indeed</comment></comment>


How Do You Create a Tech Startup as a Non-Technical Person - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/swlh/how-do-you-create-a-tech-startup-as-a-non-technical-person-3f5dd0572230 <comment><USER2> > A few hours later I found my self with 50+ data scientists experts sending > me complete details on how exactly they will solve my problem, which > tools/programming language and libraries they plan to us, How the algorithm > needs to look like and much more valuable information.

So you did not compensate any of these people for their work at all, is that right?</comment>


Some Corporations Pay a Lot More Taxes Than Others - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-19/why-wal-mart-pays-a-lot-more-in-taxes-than-amazon <comment><USER2> This is why corporate taxes are a dumb idea. Firms should not keep one set of books for management accounting and another set that they use for tax purposes.

When money is paid to an individual, tax it as income tax. Very simple. Don't give firms an incentive to act as tax shelters or tax avoiders.

Think about all the legal fees that have been spent by the firms on that list to avoid and reduce corporate taxes. It's outlandish.

Not only do the complicated tax avoidance schemes waste lots of money getting created/maintained, they also drastically reduce transparency and make auditing the company (by regulators, shareholders, etc.) far more subjective and complex.

There is no issue of fairness, since all the firms can conceivably do any of the avoidance schemes any of the others are doing if it offers positive ROI. The issue is that so much time, money, and energy is spent on corporate taxation that should be spent on things that benefit society.

<comment><USER3> Yes, and what happens when those corporations keep hundreds of billions in profits in the bank for years - see eg Apple?

<comment><USER2> If shareholders do not demand the money as a dividend and prefer instead to have it kept in the company's control, then so be it.

Shareholders in Apple want Apple to be able to make big investments or acquisitions and are willing to let the money sit there rather than take it as a dividend. This would not be true for most firms.

<comment><USER4> It sure would be in Jib Inc, the company that will launch about 5 minutes after no corporate taxes and will handle all of my personal finances. :)

I'd pay myself a very basic salary, and if I needed emergency cash I could always borrow against my holdings in Jib Inc until I could adjust my salary appropriately.

That would let me defer paying tax indefinitely on anything that I don't need for day to day living, and I would be able to play the margins on a number of major expenses as well, with very little overhead work, since I dont need to worry about taxes for corporate income anymore.

<comment><USER5> That's called "piercing the corporate veil" and nobody is going to fall for it.

<comment><USER6> Ya if you make a one person company to avoid taxes, the second the irs looks at it you're gonna have a bad time. This is already true today, and would be especially more true if they drastically lowered corporate taxes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is because some corporations make a lot more profit than others.

"Amazon's corporate income tax bill is so small, though, because its corporate income (aka profit) is so small. Wal-Mart's pretax income since 2008 has totaled $209 billion, Amazon's less than $11 billion. So while Amazon's rise to fifth-biggest market cap in the world on the strength of such small earnings is a fascinating and perhaps disturbing phenomenon, it doesn't necessarily signal a problem with our system of corporate taxation."

<comment><USER8> The author is acting like this wasn't an intended phenomenon. I don't understand the mental gymnastics required to NOT see this.

Bezos decided, "we need to grow, and to grow we need equipment and real estate, so I'm going to spend the profits on those assets, since we will get more bang for our buck than just holding onto after-tax cash."

A corporation doesn't just accidentally conduct business that way lol, for better or worse.

<comment><USER9> I didn't think you could spend revenue directly on assets without booking it as profits and paying tax on it. My understanding was you can discount part of the cost of an asset each year against revenue but not all at once.

<comment><USER10> Depends on what you're spending on. If you're spending on capital equipment, it's depreciated and spread over many years. But if it's discounting your sales so that you have razor-thin profit margins, then you're just cutting your income which directly cuts your current-year taxes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Walmart has high taxes(profit) because it has run out of ideas. Amazon has low taxes(profit) because it reinvests almost everything it makes.

> Wal-Mart's pretax income since 2008 has totaled $209 billion, Amazon's less > than $11 billion.

Of course many unprofitable companies invest poorly, but Amazon's massive sustained growth indicates they've invested well.

<comment><USER12> No, Walmart has always been a careful, profitable business by necessity (thanks to extremely low margins). It's not just because they ran out of ideas to fund in the last ten or N years.

For most of their early existence, they didn't have bubbly capital markets to ride as Amazon did during the dotcom bubble and presently. What made Amazon possible turned out to be a very short-term fluke of history that Bezos took great advantage of. He needed to thread the needle and did just that. Amazon nearly collapsed into insolvency specifically because rather than rely on a profitable business they were leaning on funding to subsidize their vast red ink (as eg Uber is currently). That's an approach Walmart never had the option of taking, and in the decades since they've also never had the luxury of routinely being valued at 200x earnings. Amazon isn't a special alien organism, they're one part retailer (boring old retail), one part platform for distribution (eg retail and media), one part software company (cloud etc); they are particularly good at what they do.

Walmart pays high taxes because they generate most of their income in the United States market. Which is the same reason that Delta has a high corporate income tax, and the same reason Whole Foods does. It's the reason Foot Locker paid a 34% corporate income tax rate last year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is there any way to determine how much Amazon employees, contractors, and third-parties have paid in taxes? Even if Amazon only pays 1.4 billion itself, doesn't the company still contribute to government taxes paying employees and buying other goods, which are then taxed in turn?

<comment><USER14> Of course it does. They also collect sales taxes in all (or nearly all?) states now based on customer address, so they contribute to state revenues as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's hard to imagine a tax that would be sensitive to this difference unless it was a tax on market cap, which would be very odd because shareholders are the owners. So it would be a tax on one entity for the value of assets owned by another.

<comment><USER16> Startup stock options, if you exercise before a liquidity event, are given a cap gains tax based on the de facto market cap.

<comment><USER17> > Startup stock options, if you exercise before a liquidity event, are given a > cap gains tax based on the de facto market cap.

That's not really the same thing. ISOs are taxed (as _income_ ) because you're purchasing something for below-market price, so the difference between the market price and the price you pay is income. If you hold onto it for long enough, you may then be able to qualify for capital gains tax when you sell it, but that's different.

And in addition, that's the individual who's being taxed on it (the value of their own income).

If you think of how this works similarly for publicly-traded companies, it's easier to understand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Amazon decided to "re-invest" all profits back into equipment and etc for the business. Thus there are very few profits to tax.

Wal-Mart decided to what, I guess keep all the cash on hand or something. I didn't look up their 10K or 10Qs, but that's what I assume is happening.

I'm glad Amazon doesn't pay that much in taxes. 609B in tax money per year goes to the US Military, which has been responsible for more death and destruction on this planet than could ever be imagined previously.

So, thank you Amazon for making sure the warmongers don't get too drunk off of your success.

<comment><USER18> A lot more tax money goes to non-military parts of the government[0], like welfare and education. I'm not happy that Amazon doesn't pay its fair share.

[0] [https://www.usafacts.org/government- finances/spending](https://www.usafacts.org/government-finances/spending)

<comment><USER19> Seems bizarre to only think taxes go into the Military Industrial Complex. I mean, sure they take their cut--but I'd like to think that our taxes go towards maintaining our civil society as well!

Edit: Seems very much cutting off your nose to spite your face, if one is 'happy' a corporation isn't paying taxes

<comment><USER8> Per my other comment, the military's cut is 16% of 3.8 trillion.

Energy, Environment, and Science take a combined 2%.

Social Security and Medicare take a combined 60% (!), which are funded by entirely separate taxes (payroll taxes). Amazon still pays those.

Trust me, you don't want a corporation paying income taxes.

It just results in dead Iraqis and global surveillance.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly - <AUTHOR> http://blog.tojicode.com/2013/12/notch-webgl-dart-and-ramping-up-quickly.html <comment><USER2> _Now, I haven 't seen one line of Notch's code. I have no idea if it's well structured or spaghetti. I would make an educated guess and say that there's a lot of the basics in this project that have been ported over from the Minecraft or 0x10c code._

This last point is rather unlikely I think. I spent more than one or two weeks worth of time watching the various screencasts you can find on twitch.tv of Notch coding (I find it highly relaxing).

He usually writes everything from scratch. He doesn't copy & paste from other projects because he's experienced enough to pretty much to just write down the code he wants. He also hardly ever looks up documentation (besides using autocomplete for library methods). Also, he practically doesn't write any code comments in these toy projects.

He's extremely productive in my opinion, and can easily spend hours at a time coding. He does a lot of play testing and small gameplay fixes, even at early stages.

I've learned a whole lot just watching these videos. For instance that we don't have the same taste in music :-) But thank god for twitch.tv.

<comment><USER3> I've also spent time examining Notch's coding habits.

He is a terrible, terrible coder. Minecraft was (and still is) an unoptimized, poorly designed piece of crap when he handed it off to the rest of Mojang. The DCPU-16 he designed had many flaws and his assembler for it threw out assembly convention. He makes very basic mistakes very frequently and his core designs are flawed.

I say this as someone who has spent a considerable amount of my life [1][2][3] figuring out this terrible crap and working around it. Notch is a very bad programmer, and people only revere him because he made Minecraft.

To reply to you all at once: regardless of his ability to create or ship a game, which is not in question, his ability to _write good code_ should not be idolized. His failures have tangible reprecussions that have long plagued the Minecraft hacking community and Mojang itself.

[1] [https://github.com/SirCmpwn/Craft.Net](https://github.com/SirCmpwn/Craft.Net)

[2] [https://github.com/SirCmpwn/Tomato](https://github.com/SirCmpwn/Tomato)

[3] [https://github.com/SirCmpwn/organic](https://github.com/SirCmpwn/organic)

<comment><USER4> _Notch is a very bad programmer_

I despise this sort of single-dimension haughty evaluation of programming "goodness": It is garbage, and is the dismissive grenades that a particular type of maintenance programmer tosses to feel better about themselves as they try to feed the family with sloppy seconds.

I single out maintenance programmers because there is a stark difference between creating something out of nothing, and being the guy who looks at that something and -- with all that is laid in stone in front of you, all of those unknown lands revealed and detours and dead-ends made evident -- can say "Oh clearly you should have A->E->Z: What a dummy!".

All novel works can be improved in countless ways, iteratively. This is a given of software development, and the fear of having to go through this inevitable process has stopped most projects before they've ever begun.

"His failures have tangible reprecussions that have long plagued the Minecraft hacking community and Mojang itself."

There is so much irony in this statement. Do you even realize?

<comment><USER5> Agreed. A programmer maintaining a new project is going to feel frustrated when the application cannot be easily extended in a way that they expect, but the original author should be forgiven for not predicting every possible future permutation of their existing code base. The best design decision might seem obvious from the maintainer's perspective, but given 100 different maintainers, you'll end up with 200 different solutions, half of which will make the original application seem ridiculous when framed in the context of a massive rewrite that takes into account every business decision that time and experience has yielded since the start of the project.

Further, there are times when a good programmer must _deliberately_ exclude forward thinking solutions because a _non-functioning product_ precludes a successful business. Yes, it should still be a secure solution. Yes, a TODO label may be warranted, but a surefire way to get yourself labeled as a bad programmer is to spend weeks working out "future proof" solutions while the competition is shipping an application that can be successfully executed.

<comment><USER6> Though there are some good points here, my experience has been that this "just get it done" above all else principle has sunk just as many projects as it has launched.

Getting it done is a bare necessity of a good programmer, but what separates the mediocre programmer from a good programmer is whether they get it done in a more maintainable fashion.

It is completely ridiculous to say as long as one can get a product launched, they are a good programmer, because you're likely praising a group, half of whom are good programmers, and half of whom are sinking the product more and more over time. This is a common happening I see with praise of engineers from a management perspective, and why so often companies sink without knowing where exactly they went wrong.

You can judge if a programmer is good, not by tearing apart and poking at the mistakes they made in a new project, but if they proceeded to code using strong abstractions and decoupled code. The easiest programmers to fire are the ones who don't ship, and the programmers that tend to be the costliest to a business are the ones who ship crap code.

<comment><USER5> I didn't say above all else, but I take your point. Of course, this is a balancing act, and I suspect we're both facing some selection bias, but I have to disagree that creating maintainable code is necessary for being described as a good programmer. At the end of the day, all programs are maintainable, as long as the source can be read and understood by a programmer. There is a huge advantage to having a well designed application structure, but there is no replacement for an application that meets its functional specification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't want to criticise the blub essay too much because there were some valid points in there. But in fairness as soon as I read it I thought of John Carmack. He uses C++. Given that the perspective of the essay is Lisp then if C++ isn't a blub I don't know what is.

 _But John Carmack is really productive._

Also he doesn't use vi or emacs. He uses an IDE! He used it even before it had any bells or whistles at all. (He also uses Windows!)

So is it because he's a genius and he does it in spite of using blub? Or is it because:

"Peter Norvig here. [....] In terms of programming-in-the-large, at Google and elsewhere, I think that language choice is not as important as all the other choices: if you have the right overall architecture, the right team of programmers, the right development process that allows for rapid development with continuous improvement, then many languages will work for you; if you don't have those things you're in trouble regardless of your language choice."

As for Notch. He uses Java and wait for it..

Eclipse!

<comment><USER8> So, why do you think he went with Dart? You're kind of telling us that what he chose didn't matter, but he must have had his reasons for jumping into a new technology.

We probably can't infer much from Notch's use of Dart beyond the fact that the technology is baked enough for real world use. I guess someone could always ask Notch for his opinion on Dart, after he's used it for a few more weeks.

<comment><USER7> The primary reason no doubt is because it enables him to deliver over the web. There are other languages for this but I have no doubt that in Notch's case I have no doubt its because he feels he can be productive in it and that is because it is similar to what he knows. He was asked on reddit why he chose java and he had a really simple answer:

"Because I know it"

Given the massive language debates that are out there I thought this was pretty refreshing and indicative of a successful person whose focus is elsewhere.

Myself I think Dart is a massive improvement over java and I could probably debate it all day. But then again I'm not as successful as Notch, maybe I should ease up on the debating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is less a matter of only writing what's needed, than having written the same thing in lots of different variations, until you know the essence of the problem, and which are the most elegant paths to take.

A beginner in any discipline can't accomplish so much with so little effort. And it's wrong for a beginner to start out trying to do so, IMO; it's too easy to get discouraged if you think from the start that you should be able to do it with so little effort.

Writing your first game loop is a bit clunky, trying to fit it in with whatever framework / language / API is hosting you, and the sequencing / setup of everything. The tenth time, you know exactly what you want from an API, and have a good idea of what bits you need to build to get the effect you need. The hundredth time, you can look at a new API / framework and see the what it enables you to build most efficiently, and you can let that inform the design of what you create. Then, very little effort is needed. But that's only because you've already done the "really complicated system for loading meshes and shaders" or some equivalent in the past.

It's hard to get really efficient without having done things the inefficient way to begin with, if not earlier in the current project, then in previous projects.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't know why the blog poster is impressed. This is Notch's domain, writing code of this ilk. He's probably got over a decade or more dealing with games and graphics, the hard part is dealing with a API that's unfamiliar.

(I have ported familiar code from a Python script to a C# desktop application in similar time, the hard part was dealing with various .NET quirks.)

</comment><comment><USER11> "Just saw a nerd flamewar debating if I'm a bad programmer. I'm self-taught, prefer working along, and program for fun. Don't learn from me."

[https://twitter.com/notch/status/408011329237049344](https://twitter.com/notch/status/408011329237049344)

Gotta feel sorry for him, he didnt ask to be or not to be an idol, must be disconcerting to have a bunch of random strangers talking about how good you are.

</comment><comment><USER12> I agree with his main point, but to be honest, on most of the games I've worked on I've had something playable very fast (1 or 2 weeks)... Its all the details beyond basic gameplay that take all the time and really make delivering a game hard.

<comment><USER13> Agree completely. Basic little 3D engine is easy to do because it's been done so many times before. Any of the complexities are well known and it's not like Notch hasn't made a similar block based 3d engine before. The author talks about not making an engine and just making a game.. but there's no game here yet?

The hard part is always the details and the new stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Now I feel bad for slowing up my current pet project by getting bogged down writing polygon collision detection when axis aligned bounding boxes would have done for prototyping. (I'm not as quick as Notch!)

<comment><USER15> My understanding is that usually you want both because AABB is good for broad- phase because it's so quick then true polygon collision can be done in a narrow phase.

<comment><USER14> Absolutely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Dart syntax is very similar to Java in many respects, but simpler, so is it really any surprise that Notch would try out Dart, given his history with Java?

People like what's familiar. One of the reasons Java took off is because of it's similarity to other ALGOL type languages. C/C++ programmers could learn Java quickly for example.

</comment><comment><USER17> You know, I read Hacker News less and less precisely because the posts are so damn negative. For those debating whether Notch is good or bad, I suggest reading every article from programming in the 21st century.[1]

[1] [http://prog21.dadgum.com/archives.html](http://prog21.dadgum.com/archives.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> >Don't build an engine that you will someday build a game on top of, because you will never get past step one.

I have several still-unfinished Game Maker apps which more or less died because I got so bogged down on the "engine". So yeah.

<comment><USER19> In this case, I see an analogy with the whole "Do it manually with a few customers" advice for startups that pops up from time-to-time. You write the damn code from scratch and see what gameplay is interesting, then you can write tools within that domain.

<comment><USER18> Now that html5 is a thing that would definitely be doable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Ultima Underworld continues to blow my mind. Happy 22nd birthday.

</comment><comment><USER21> ahha, thanks for this! I'm really pleased to see Notch doing what I always thought he did best - messing around with wee projects and coming out with joyous little playthings.

Minecraft just got a little bigger than I imagine he was interested in playing with.

</comment><comment><USER22> Where would a noob to this kind of stuff start? I'd like to draw a rectangle to the screen. :)

<comment><USER23> I found NeHe's tutorials to be easy to follow especially since code that's ready to compile is provided at the end of each lesson: [http://nehe.gamedev.net/](http://nehe.gamedev.net/)

Most of them focus on OpenGL for windows.

I just searched and found this WebGL tutorial which says it's based on NeHe's so it's hopefully good: [http://learningwebgl.com/blog/?p=28](http://learningwebgl.com/blog/?p=28)

Disclaimer: I'm not a game developer and I barely dabble in the 3D world, so take my links with a huge grain of salt :)

<comment><USER24> Stay away from NeHe tutorials, they are badly written and really old. Pretty much everything they cover is deprecated and done in otherwise old fashioned ways.

This is a big problem with OpenGL tutorials in general, a lot of them cover old stuff that shouldn't be used any more.

The entire OpenGL fixed function pipeline is deprecated, replaced by programmable shader pipeline. It's a lot more work to get simple stuff done with shaders but it pays off in the end.

If you're looking to write a game (and not an engine) it may be a good idea to get an engine and not write "raw" OpenGL at all.

<comment><USER25> If all you're looking to do is simple stuff (like get a rectangle on the screen), shaders are not required, correct?

<comment><USER26> They are, unless you use old deprecated versions of OpenGL.

<comment><USER25> So the simplest program using the simplest shader would use a pass-through shader that doesn't modify the inputs?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> All that stuff sounds so cool, but I have no idea of how I would implement it in code. One of these days I'll learn 3D graphics programming.

<comment><USER28> I recommend [http://www.amazon.com/Math-Primer-Graphics-Development- Editi...](http://www.amazon.com/Math-Primer-Graphics-Development- Edition/dp/1568817231/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1386098622&sr=8-1&keywords=3d+math+primer) when you're ready</comment></comment>


What tools are you using to build and visualize knowledge graphs in 2020? - <AUTHOR> I would also be interested in the use cases that justify the usage of KGs in your work.<p>Also, it would be interesting to know if anyone is using KGs for feature engineering in Machine Learning and how that is working out. <comment><USER2> Not using KGs for feature engineering/machine learning, but more for (personal) knowledge management. Using my own open source tool, Contextualise ([https://contextualise.dev/](https://contextualise.dev/) and [https://github.com/brettkromkamp/contextualise](https://github.com/brettkromkamp/contextualise)). Check out the awesome-knowledge-management list for more KG and KM resources: [https://github.com/brettkromkamp/awesome-knowledge- managemen...](https://github.com/brettkromkamp/awesome-knowledge-management)

At a professional level use KGs for educational web services in relation to curricula taxonomies.</comment>


Pitchups.com - A Community for Startups  - <AUTHOR> http://pitchups.com Pitchups.com is a community for startups. It lets you pitch your startup and let the community vote on it. The most popular pitches rise to the top. Think of it as Digg for startup pitches - but much more! Connect with other entrepreneurs and find potential angels, investors and partners! <comment><USER3> It may be a good idea to have a weekly/monthly contest for the best startup pitches, and get some judges to evaluate the ideas/bus plans, and give some sort of award - maybe mentorship, or access to an angel investor or VC or even a seed investment. Something like TC Disrupt but done online.

<comment><USER4> There is plenty of demand for something like this to be done online - <USER2> there are many more entrepreneurs and startup ideas out there than physical events that can be conducted.</comment></comment>


MailChimp Hits 1 Million Users - <AUTHOR> http://home.wistia.com/medias/d06d8d073a

<comment><USER2> This is from 2011. They're over 3M now.</comment>