[video] Sliding Pi – a 2048 game calculates Pi like an ancient mathematician - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFu80--1BFY

<comment><AUTHOR> Some of my references: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi#Polygon_approximation_era](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi#Polygon_approximation_era), [http://ceemrr.com/Geometry2/InscribedPolygons/InscribedPolyg...](http://ceemrr.com/Geometry2/InscribedPolygons/InscribedPolygons6.html)

Free game download: [http://bit.ly/1kFNy2X](http://bit.ly/1kFNy2X)</comment>


Ask HN: How to secure your internet activity (eg.emailing) when traveling? - <AUTHOR> Assuming most public networks can't be trusted.
What do you do to ensure your internet activity (eg. emailing, secure payment, browsing) is secure when traveling?
Getting the region's data SIM is convenient and I presume it can be trusted (as much as you can a local ISP).
I know there are paid VPN services that one could use. Which do you recommend/trust?
But also what are some free general advice/procedures that someone should follow? <comment><USER2> Standard procedure for various large security-related companies when traveling abroad is to provide the employee with a temporary device with only files that are required for the trip. The device can be cleaned/analyzed/destroyed on return.

Although this is more or less the only way, it might not be practical. I'm not security expect and do not have the resources to do the above, but I take various precautions when traveling:

* Make use of a Cellular Data Plan.

* Make use of VPN (Roll your own, or have a look at the VPN Comparison Chart [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11294064](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11294064))

* _Do not keep devices unattended._ Especially not in a hotel room.

* Use 2FA and other standard security practices (firewall, identify phishing, have most recent updates installed).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comparison chart! I know not all VPN services respect a subscribers privacy but its better than risking fraudulent activity.

I understand that any sufficiently well resourced company can provide you with VPN access to their own private network for business activity.

But I'm interested more in the things an individual can or should do on our own without the backing of a corporation.

Steps I've taken are:

* Ensure two-factor authentication (2FA) is enabled

* Setup a separate email that I forward my personal mail to, and only log into that while I'm away

* Only access the Internet through a prepaid Cellular Data Plan or at an Apple Store Wifi

* Avoid any bank transactions during the holiday period

If any of those are not satisfied, I don't go online and just take a break from the Internet for awhile</comment></comment>


Saving Science - <AUTHOR> http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/saving-science <comment><USER3> Quote: "First, scientific knowledge advances most rapidly, and is of most value to society, not when its course is determined by the "free play of free intellects" but when it is steered to solve problems."

But the history of science boldly and flatly contradicts this claim. The most productive and society-reshaping products of science arise in pure, not applied, research.

Quote: "Second, when science is not steered to solve such problems, it tends to go off half-cocked in ways that can be highly detrimental to science itself."

Also contradicted by history. As just one example, the success of Bell Labs over the decades resulted, not from a focus on solving particular problems, but a focus on research for the sake of research -- pure science.

The author of the article raises an alarm about a supposed scientific crisis, and eventually reveals what he thinks is the source of the problem -- a waste of scientific talent spent on pure research. He needs to read the history of science with an open mind.

Quote: "It was military purchases that kept the new transistor, semiconductor, and integrated-circuit industries afloat in the early and mid-1950s."

That's true, but it's misleading because the development of the transistor at Bell Labs wasn't an applied science project, it resulted from pure research in materials science and physics.

The author isn't reporting on the state of science, he's complaining that it's not what he thinks it should be, in a way that stands at odds with science's history.

<comment><USER4> I think your claims require a bit more backing than mere assertion. Certainly, some of the most important research (now described as "pure") was done with applications immediately in mind.

For example, Newtonian physics always had the goal of calculating artillery trajectories. Nuclear physics had the goals of energy/weapons. Probability theory, operations research, and most of our modern computational infrastructure came directly from people trying to do applied work. Nonlinear wave equations, to discuss a niche example I know well, are primarily motivated by applications in photonics.

I'm very well aware of the many anecdotes of very pure research turning out to be useful later. But there are also a huge number of anecdotes of pure research being directly motivated by providing theoretical justification for/analysis of applied work.

So I don't see any compelling reason to believe your unsupported assertions.

<comment><USER5> Here are a couple of examples:

1\. Quantum mechanics was never motivated with the thought of semiconductors (therefore computing technology). If you were motivated by building a computer, you would never have discovered quantum mechanics.

2\. Probability theory was "invented" to understand/solve gambling problems. Nobody anticipated how widely it would be used.

When paradigm shifts occur, it takes a long time for the effects to percolate, before we can even get a feel for the space of possible applications. However, if resources (including smart people's time) are not spent laying the foundations, one could never have taken aim at the applications! If one is always chasing applications, who spends time and money on the preliminary legwork?

At any point, if resources are directed through some small set of people who decide and enforce the directions to be pursued, then the outcomes will be more representative of their biases than reality. Those few people effectively act as a bottleneck for human ingenuity.

<comment><USER4> First of all, quantum mechanics _was_ motivated by the thought of semiconductors. One of the primary use cases of it was explaining the photoelectric effect [1]. Secondly, other primary motivations for QM were explaining and predicting chemical reactions, radiation sources, and nuclear energy.

Secondly, probability and statistics - as you note - were invented to understand/solve gambling problems. Virtually every early advance was then made by people attempting to _use_ it. These include Gauss predicting the orbit of Ceres, Graunt and Halley (yes, he also spotted Halley's comet) doing insurance, Galton and Pearson studying evolution and developing eugenics, and Gosset using statistics to brew better beer.

Probability and statistics are perhaps the worst possible example of pure research that - purely by chance - happens to be useful later.

[1] Interestingly, the classical belief that the photoelectric effect proves the quantization of light is wrong. The Schrodinger equation + continuous electromagnetic fields actually exhibit the photoelectric effect.

<comment><USER5> Claiming that quantum mechanics (QM) was motivated by semiconductors is bordering on discussing in bad faith.

A glance at [1] will show that people were thinking about issues leading up to QM for several decades. Planck's equation relating energy to frequency of light (in several ways the first "quantum" idea that conceived what we today call Planck's constant) was motivated by understanding the "ultraviolet catastrophe" [2] (which was a purely "theoretical" endeavour as some would call it today). Planck's work preceeded Einstein's explanation of the photoelectric effect by several years. Even when the photoelectric effect was observed, it was first noticed in zinc (IIRC); it was only in the 1930s that QM was applied to understand the functioning of semiconductors.

 _You are confusing all the things we use QM for today with all the reasons for which it was first conceived._ Moany of those reasons of course spurred development in QM _after it was conceived_ \-- but none of those motivations would have conceived QM.

With regards to your comment on the development of probability:

There was always a reason/purpose something was conceived. So claiming that it was "motivated by applications" is tautological. _The relevant question to ask is whether the applications today are different from the original motivations._ If they are, then frankly, it doesn't matter what the original motivations were... the idea would have been difficult to conceive starting with the eventual application in mind. Eg: Without an understanding of probability, linear algebra and differential equations, there would have been no quantum mechanics. Somebody observing the photoelectric effect could not have developed those tools for their "application".

I notice your other comment on the thread (OP) talks in analogy with physical training. IMHO, such an analogy is misguided for endeavours which cannot be reasonably well specified so as to be manageable (in that it can be managed, with the goal in mind). Basic research is often not amenable to that because it has tons of unknown unknowns [3].

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

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

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

<comment><USER4> The photoelectric effect was first discovered in silver chloride solution. I don't know that much about the energy bands of silver chloride, so I won't comment about whether that was a semiconductor. (I also know very little about liquids, basically all the physics I did happened in semiconductors.)

The first solid state demonstration was in selenium, which is a semiconductor. This is what I was thinking of when I said that the photoelectric effect was semiconductor physics.

[http://www.pveducation.org/pvcdrom/manufacturing/first- photo...](http://www.pveducation.org/pvcdrom/manufacturing/first-photovoltaic- devices)

 _The relevant question to ask is whether the applications today are different from the original motivations. If they are, then frankly, it doesn 't matter what the original motivations were... the idea would have been difficult to conceive starting with the eventual application in mind._

You are defining "pure" in a far more expansive way than the article does. Your definition is actually so broad that it doesn't contradict the article at all.

The article claims that science, with the goal of building cool military applications (or presumably life tables or brewing beer) will work better than curiosity driven applications. Then it claims the fruits of those labors will be useful elsewhere. Now you seem to be agreeing with this, or at least not disagreeing.

Note that the article isn't saying "don't figure out fundamental physics". It's saying "go build a giant wall of ice to keep the mexicans out and a better understanding of pure thermodynamics will be one output of that project."

Also note that I'm not arguing _for_ the premise of the article, necessarily. I'm simply arguing that it can't be casually dismissed without even an argument. My analogy is meant to be suggestive, not to prove the point.

<comment><USER3> > The photoelectric effect was first discovered in silver chloride solution. I > don't know that much about the energy bands of silver chloride, so I won't > comment about whether that was a semiconductor.

Had the first example of the photoelectric effect originated in a semiconductor, that cannot be used to argue that the research was motivated by the goal of practical application. By that reasoning, the fact that particle physics is about atoms, and that atoms can be used to make weapons, could be used to construct an absurd argument that all research that involves atoms has the ultimate goal of designing weapons.

> The article claims that science, with the goal of building cool military > applications (or presumably life tables or brewing beer) will work better > than curiosity driven applications.

The phrase "curiosity driven applications" assumes what it should be proving. Not all curiosity into nature has application in mind, indeed that's not now pure research is defined.

> You are defining "pure" in a far more expansive way than the article does.

Pure research is research meant to discover properties of nature, without any concern for practical application. That's hardly worth discussing as though there's any controversy about the definition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article calls this a lie:

"Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown."

'On a broad front' I think that's probably correct. If you have specific goals you want to achieve, sure you should probably direct research at that goal to have the best chance of achieving it. But if you are more interested in exploring the wild frontiers of science, less directed efforts are the way to go. Of course in reality we want to do both, but the article offers no such grounded perspective.

Anyway, who is being lied to and to what goal? Is anyone really fool enough to think that all of US science spending has been purely provided to scientists free of all strings? Has there really been an actual coordinated effort to persuade anyone that this is true?

I read Bush's statement as an aspiration, not really a statement of incontrovertible fact. Can aspirations be lies? Is there some terrible conspiracy afoot? This pudding is being very heavily over-egged.

The latter part of the article is a cogent and reasonable criticism of some of the problems in modern science. There's a lot of house cleaning that needs to be done. But that cause is not well served by dour, grandiosely pronounced, clickbaity conspiracy mongering.

<comment><USER7> I would call this article quite full of speculation. Why did it have to be so long without a proper introduction or abstract?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The best way to get a human into good physical shape is to prepare them for a fight. I've never been in better shape than when I was boxing - I was strong, I was fast, my cardio was great. In theory, nowadays I should be in better shape. Rather than focusing my time on bag work, drills, footwork, etc, I could be focusing on fitness. Yet in reality I'm nowhere near my fighting peak. I can do a lot of pullups, but I doubt I could crank out more than 20 burpees right now.

The reason for this is that I've lost my focus: if my cardio sucks, the result is no longer _getting punched in the face_.

It's an interesting hypothesis, and one that should not be dismissed out of hand, that societies behave in the same way. Think about our modern malaise - we have no grand projects, particularly in the public sector. All we do is funnel money in the general direction of something we like - <USER2> optimism, in Peter Thiel's language.

Consider California high speed rail, supported by both the president and governor of CA. 8 years later lots of money has been spent but no track has been laid [1]. Would 8 years of delay on a vital project be acceptable to a nation preparing for war? I suspect not.

[1] There is no technological barrier here. The Qinhuangdao–Shenyang high speed rail - 250 miles long - was built in 4 years.

<comment><USER8> > Think about our modern malaise - we have no grand projects, particularly in > the public sector.

Interestingly I've heard that in economic return-on-investment terms grand projects are almost always failures.

> [1] There is no technological barrier here. The Qinhuangdao–Shenyang high > speed rail - 250 miles long - was built in 4 years.

The barriers are other than technological, sure - I don't know about California, but the things delaying the next high-speed rail line in my own country are court cases, appeals, and political disputes over matters like: some houses need to be demolished to build the stations; the line might disturb the ecology of some wetlands, the line will make a naturally beautiful area less so. Along with some analysis-paralysis issues (is this the best use of public funds? The model for the original analysis was wrong! Will the line still be in the right place by the time it's built?)

I suspect China, or a hypothetical America-at-war (or even America-at-cold- war), would not worry about the first category, and would take higher risks on the second. We've become a lot more risk-averse as a society, sure. I'm not convinced that this isn't simply a rational response to a safer world, where most citizens, on the whole, enjoy a pretty good life. Risking a few deaths and some blighted regions for the sake of a bit more growth makes more sense the poorer you are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Didn't even see a mention of what science really is. I bet you many "scientists" don't know (pun intended) and couldn't tell you what science is.

Knowing an experiment or observation is not repeatable _is_ knowledge that _can be_ useful. What are the causes of non-repeatability? That's even more useful to know.

The observation and experimentation processes of science may be reflexive and would be worth investigating.

The money spent on "science" has created ecosystems where the novel, accidental discovery might be more likely.

The claim that "science" is self-correcting must be supported by evidence.

Finally, the media reporting of science does injustice to scientists by making claims not put forth in publications so frequently, that you are wise to disregard any media reporting of the science, and must go to the paper itself.</comment>


Ask HN: The book you always wanted to read but never had time or motivation for? - <AUTHOR> What is the book you always wanted to read but never had time or motivation for?
Three answers are allowed, one is to look smart (eg: "The Count of Monte Cristo"), one is for the title you are a little ashamed of (eg: "The Neuromancer"), one is for a tech book (eg: "Lions' Commentary on Unix").
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! <comment><USER2> To look smart (I think): _Gödel, Escher, Bach_ or anything by Ayn Rand

<comment><USER3> I don't mean to offend you, but for a large segment of the U.S. population reading Ayn Rand does not make you look smart.

<comment><USER2> No offense taken ... I have no dog in the fight

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _one is for the title you are a little ashamed of_

FWIW, I'm interpreting this as "ashamed to admit you haven't read this title yet" as opposed to "ashamed to admit you want to read this title".

To Look Smart: Wolfram's _A New Kind of Science_

Ashamed Of: _Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs_ (SICP)

Tech: Knuth's _The Art of Computer Programming_

<comment><USER5> Don't be so ashamed - it's a good book but even Sussman and Abelson teach their courses out of other books now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Moonwalking with Einstein([http://www.amazon.ca/Moonwalking-Einstein-Science- Rememberin...](http://www.amazon.ca/Moonwalking-Einstein-Science-Remembering- Everything/dp/0143120530)) Thinking, Fast and Slow ([http://www.amazon.ca/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel- Kahneman/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.ca/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel- Kahneman/dp/0385676514/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b))

<comment><USER7> fast and slow is worth it. really. i am a picky reader - often stop reading books half way through - but i couldn't put that one down. very good book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> to look smart _Gravity 's Rainbow_

ashamed of: the _Dark Tower_ series

tech: no interest in reading one from cover to cover, but I'm open to being convinced otherwise

edit: not sure which way _I_ interpret "ashamed", take it how you will!

</comment><comment><USER9> In search of lost time, by Marcel Proust.

I've had it on my shelf for a while.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> to look smart: _The Count of Monte Cristo_ , A. Dumas

ashamed of: _The Neuromancer_ , W. Gibson

Tech: _Lions ' Commentary on Unix_, J. Lions

</comment><comment><USER10> that book by Marx, just to know what all the fuzz is about.

</comment><comment><USER11> Err.... all of them?

</comment><comment><USER12> To look smart: The Tao of Physics

Ashamed of the title: Yoga, Inc

Tech book: CSS and HTML Web Design (because I've been faking it all along)</comment>


DNA Fountain enables a robust and efficient storage architecture - <AUTHOR> http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6328/950 <comment><AUTHOR> DNA is an attractive medium to store digital information. Here we report a storage strategy, called DNA Fountain, that is highly robust and approaches the information capacity per nucleotide. Using our approach, we stored a full computer operating system, movie, and other files with a total of 2.14 × 10 __6 bytes in DNA oligonucleotides and perfectly retrieved the information from a sequencing coverage equivalent to a single tile of Illumina sequencing. We also tested a process that can allow 2.18 × 10 __15 retrievals using the original DNA sample and were able to perfectly decode the data. Finally, we explored the limit of our architecture in terms of bytes per molecule and obtained a perfect retrieval from a density of 215 petabytes per gram of DNA, orders of magnitude higher than previous reports.

<comment><USER2> Plus it has an advantage of having a half-life of ~521 years unlike tape storage

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, DNA is extremely long-living!</comment></comment></comment>


Heroku vs EngineYard Cloud vs Joyent - <AUTHOR> http://blog.eliotsykes.com/2009/10/30/heroku-vs-engineyard-cloud-vs-joyent/ <comment><USER2> These two services behave so differently, it's hard to do a real cost breakdown. It depends on your app. Here are some issues with comparisons between EY and Heroku (I'm leaving Joyent out because I have no experience with them):

1\. There's no reason to believe that 6 mongrels on an EY small EC2 instance == 6 thins on whatever EC2 size Heroku is using. They need to be benchmarked.

2\. DB Performance needs to be benchmarked. EY uses MySQL, Heroku uses Postgres or Amazon RDS (MySQL). I've heard that their postgres db is substantially faster than RDS.

3\. Heroku gives you varnish, and it doesn't cost you any dynos. If you can use cache control headers, varnish is your friend. On EY you'll likely use Rack::Cache, which is fine, but it hits a mongrel. Heroku also does gzip and SSL before it hits your server, also saving you cycles.

4\. App server redundancy with EY is expensive since you need a whole other small EC2 instance, with Heroku all your dynos are spread out.

5\. If you want instant database failover (using MySQL replication), this is a extremely easy on EY, with Heroku it takes more work, you have to launch your own RDS instances. Of course, a small RDS instance is only $80/mo, beating EY and Heroku's DB offerings on price. RDS will have replication soon, probably at a lower price than EY. Of course, neither EY and Heroku haven't to my knowledge announced plans to drop their prices in November when amazon drops their EC2 prices by 15%. This would make both more competitive vs RDS.

6\. EY likely has a better economy of scale, a 5ECU EY instance ($197 vs $125 for a 1ECU small) is probably more cost effective for CPU heavy requests than Heroku Dynos.

7\. EY support ain't free. Keep in mind that EY support and monitoring are only there if you pay major extra $ on top of your infrastructure. It can easily nearly double your costs depending on your plan.

The cost of either one really will vary depending on which features you use heavily.

</comment><comment><USER3> Everyone who has ever worked with me in sales or marketing is going to giggle to hear me say this, but it's really bad form to make your pitch on your competitor's negatives. Every point that salesperson had to make could have been made purely on positive terms, like:

* "I think you'll find our support is hard to beat, because of our advanced support portal you can see [here], and because we offer 24x7 phone support."

* "We're convinced that we currently offer the best pricing in the industry for your expected usage; [explain here]. If you're getting a better price for that usage from someone else, we'll beat it."

* "We have a different architecture than other cloud providers, because we provide OS-level isolation from other customers. No other customer app failing in our cloud will impact yours, because [etc etc]"

And on and on. The direct jabs at Heroku here just make me think this guy is skeevy.

<comment><USER4> Yeah but the guy said explicitly that he was comparing the two providers. It's like me walking into a Ford dealership and saying that I'm trying to decide between a Taurus and a Chevy Malibu.

Direct comparisons would be reasonable and helpful although you'd be a fool not to vet them afterwards. If a competitor is missing a feature (24x7 support in this case), I'd say that's absolutely fair game.

<comment><USER3> Even if you want to be very direct about your competitive differences, you can do it without ever stating an overt negative. Just say, "ask them if they can XXX", or "ask them if they really YYY". Then say "we can, and here's why that's awesome:".

One very simple reason why the direct comparison is a bad idea is right there in the blog post: Heroku falsified one of the Engine Yard guy's claims, and blew his credibility up. There's _always_ a risk that can happen to you when you badmouth a competitor.

Be subtle about competitor flaws, and very very overt about your benefits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was hoping for an actual comparison instead of a bunch of dirty sales laundry.

</comment><comment><USER6> For a straight web site, I'm sure any of these are fine if not "pricey". What do you folks use for web service hosting? Sure, it can be just a web host like any other. But Heroku (last time I checked) does not support any form of long- polling and/or streaming for instance.

I can setup a VPS with nginx proxying to tornado/node.js/etc that does streaming without a problem. However, there's the issue of scaling it out that's pain. You can use Linode's API or something similar but eek, what a mess.

Thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER7> Been using EngineYard for quite a while now and I'm extremely happy with them. In fact, I had a problem with our production slice last night after a deploy–I hopped into IRC and they fixed it right away.

I have only used Heroku's free plan. I have run into a few small snags that made it unusable for some specific apps (example: couldn't upload high-res images reliably). I really like their management app and technology. I plan to use them for a smaller project soon.

Regarding this quote in the original post: _"but to be honest he's scared me off with those hundreds of dollars quotes like that's nothing for a small guy startup like me to pay for hosting."_

If you're a small, low-budget, bootstrapping startup then maybe you're comparing the wrong services. I think with Heroku and EnginYard both, you're going to pay a premium over simply getting a nice slicehost slice or SoftLayer server and setting it up yourself.

</comment><comment><USER8> back in the day joyent/textdrive was working on some rails specific deployment strategies and just ended up with their "accelerator" AKA VPS AKA Cloud

<comment><USER9> Yeah, what ever happened to railsapphosting.com?</comment></comment>


Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeed.com/pranavdixit/big-tech-apps-for-the-next-billion-underperform <comment><USER2> We have a lot of Indian users use our PWA ([https://usebx.com/app](https://usebx.com/app)), so we tried to optimise for low end phones. Generally, we found that animations still run reasonably smoothly. The trick was to be really careful not to carry out too much layout thrashing, and use GPU accelerated CSS animations wherever possible. On some of the cheapest devices, we got our animation running as smooth as a Galaxy Note or iPhone. Just goes to show that if you don't over-bloat your app, even low end phones can offer a very good experience.

<comment><USER3> I've been surprised by how performant you can get with CSS transitions and a will-change property. But good grief is it _difficult_.

On one hand I understand why a transition on `left` isn't hardware accelerated but a `translate3d` is, but on the other it seems crazy that we expect people to think and know this kind of stuff when they just want to do something very simple.

<comment><USER4> That's was my intention when I proposed will-changed. I was trying to get the Firefox OS home screen slide transitions to be performant without hard coding it in the Gecko layout engine.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for proposing it! I was astonished by the difference when I used it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I did an experiment similar to this a few years back, but I lasted about six months. After touchscreen on my iPhone 6 Plus died prematurely two days after the warranty expired, and neither Apple nor Verizon would help, I decided to simply forgo owning a smartphone for a while. I used one on WiFi only, and went back to an LCD flip phone from 2002. This worked great, except people kept complaining that they couldn't text me. I try to get sms set up, but they said my phone was too old to work with their current network.

Then I moved somewhere new and wanted to do some dating. It was obvious I was going to need a real phone. I bought a Kyocera Hydro for $40. It has similar specs to the device in the review - 1 GB ram, 1 GB clock speed, 2 MP camera: [https://www.gsmchoice.com/en/catalogue/kyocera/hydroreach/Ky...](https://www.gsmchoice.com/en/catalogue/kyocera/hydroreach/Kyocera- Hydro-Reach.html)

My first impression was that it was amazing to get a device like this for $40, if you put it in a perspective from 5 or 15 years ago. Out of the box, though, the system couldn't keep up with typing. Simply entering text was a strain on the processor. In general though, it seemed roughly as capable as an iPod Touch G4, though with inferior system software, but less capable than a Samsung Galaxy S3. I would complain about the buggy firmware and apps but it seems no worse than Motorola or Samsung, who are each poor in the regard compared to Apple. The main drawback was the camera. Battery life on it is still better than my current iPhone. Reception is poor.

To make a long story short, after using the phone for six months, I realized that I should've just bought an iPhone 4s for $50. I would have had at the least a good camera and OS updates.

<comment><USER6> It's not a hardware problem. Typing worked just fine on Windows 95 withd 8 MB of RAM and 50MHz processor.

<comment><USER5> If you installed Windows 7 on that machine it would probably be slow, though. I think this one was running Android 4 when new. Probably it would have been better with a version made a few years earlier. I looked into rooting it to install a more lightweight OS, but this was my first experience with that and it doesn't seem to be a popular phone to hack.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I remember buying a burner phone in India once and it hurt my ears when I received calls. It turned out the phone only had one loudness setting which was at a level able to pierce through the din of Mumbai. Ear bleedingly loud.

<comment><USER8> Well, except when I'm indoors, I wouldn't mind that. The few times I've had to call 911 by the side of the road to report accidents[1], the phones I had just couldn't produce sound loudly enough to be heard over passing traffic. I know there was an initiative to protect people's hearing a few years ago by limiting volume - but sometimes you really need it.

[1] Other people's - not mine!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is probably an extreme example to use Bharat 2(which most considers a failed project) and using light apps on top of that. Choosing a budget phone does not mean choosing the cheapest one. Honestly i don't know anyone who uses the phone they mentioned, more phones from Honor or Xiaomi or Moto etc are more common. Its hard for me to have exact data on this, so this is just based on my experience.

<comment><USER10> It was a best selling phone in India last year. People are using it, just not people in your social circle.

<comment><USER11> I too have never seen anybody using it in at least North India. In fact, I never ever heard anyone even talking about it. Unlike many people here, I am actually very close to rural life in India and I couldn't spot this phone. South India may be?

I don't know how it was the best selling phone in India.

<comment><USER12> I live in Kerala (South India) and I haven't seen this phone with anyone. Most of them uses budget phones from Samsung which costs around 5k-8k INR.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think his expectations are just out of balance. The phone he describes sounds a lot like the phone I gave my kids. I just want them to have a _phone_ that they can use in case of emergencies. That's basically what my baby boomer parents need as well. So he's right, phones at that price point are limited, but that doesn't mean they don't fulfill the needs of portions of the population - just different demographics than his own personal needs.

<comment><USER14> If you _really_ need just calls, dumbphones are still a thing, and I see plenty for sale here in provincial China (/me waves from Xining). The article's point is that cheap smartphones aren't working well for their intended users because the vast majority of apps aren't designed for their limitations.

<comment><USER15> Well, this should be easy- open the Git-Repository from five years ago, compile the old version of the app and release.

The irony is - you cant do that, because maybe, just maybee all your current users would drop the HOT NEW SHINY, bloat-add-ware in the store, like a hot rock, if they could go back to something basic- basically have the whats-app experience, before the feature bloat came.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'd be interested to know how these $60 phones perform compared to a 9 year old Motorola Droid. Obviously, the level of content 9 years ago was at least an order of magnitude less than today, but how much of these devices slowness is content vs delivery technology? Is it because web apps are dynamic instead of static? Is it a matter of framework bloat? What is really the root cause of the terrible performance?

<comment><USER17> Operating system bloat and app bloat.

A motorola droid was super fast, I had it for years.

If you made a brand new motorola droid today with the same exact hardware and software it would be too.

Here's a chart showing apk bloat for popular apps over time: [https://sensortower.com/blog/ios-app-size- growth](https://sensortower.com/blog/ios-app-size-growth)

It's for iOS but the same logic follows for android

<comment><USER18> Is ProGuard or similar widely used these days? Is it good enough?

There was a parallel trend of some really awesome apps clocking less than 4MB, which I attribute to good tooling. I wonder if Gmail, Facebook, et al have stripping & such turned off, or if they just have huge asset stores?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> iPhone User with a $900 phone switches to a $60 phone and frustrated that it doesn't perform as well a $900 phone while trying to use it like a Premium phone?

I am surprised :).

<comment><USER20> I went through that process. After I stopped buy good phones subsidized by the phone company & started paying full retail phones upfront, I became less interested in having a top of the line phone. I just don't wanna fork out $900 for any phone. I bought two versions of a sub-$100 phone, they both sucked and/or were defective in some way. I bought a $240, and it was OK, but I was constantly fishing for an excuse to get rid of it. I finally came to the conclusion that I had to spend about at least $400 for a phone I'd be happy with (I wanted new + 32GB internal storage + not-crappy camera + removable battery). That strategy has worked well for me so far!

<comment><USER21> I disagree, it can be done below $400. The first two generations of the Moto G where really awesome for the price (< $200). They had vanilla Android, frequent updates, reasonably good screens and were fast. I used one for a while full time while my Moto X was being repaired. And I briefly considered switching to the G full time because it had some nice features (could be bought with dual SIM and had a bumper available that could replace the back). Unfortunately, quickly after Lenovo bought Motorola, they diversified the product line and the quick updates stopped.

Currently, Nokia (they are not really Nokia, but have ex-Nokia staff and are a Finnish company) makes really great Android phones around $200-$300. They are in the Android One program and do 2 years of feature updates and monthly security updates. So far, it seems that they are keeping up this promise. Phones like the Nokia 6.1 are fast, have a nice screen, etc. Obviously, it is not a $700 phone, but speed/quality/update-wise they are very similar to the old Nexus line.

<comment><USER22> I recently bought a Nokia 3 for testing stuff on. It's $179 outright in Australia (so US$150ish) and I've been pretty impressed.

It's slow, but usable. Pure Android, and ok camera, screen and build quality.

(My daily phone is a Pixel, and I have had iPhones in the past to compare)

<comment><USER21> They released the 3.1 in May and it seems that they bumped up the specs quite a bit (4 to 8 core, 2 to 3GB RAM, 32GB storage).

[https://www.phonearena.com/phones/compare/Nokia-3.1,Nokia-3/...](https://www.phonearena.com/phones/compare/Nokia-3.1,Nokia-3/phones/10902,10433)

Last week I bought a Nokia 6.1 and it is pretty fast. I have been an iPhone user since 2009 (with an Android excursion 2013-2015). But my beloved 64GB iPhone SE had water damage after a bike ride through the rain last week. And I didn't want to buy a new iPhone just ~2 months before the keynote. I'll see after the keynote whether I'll buy a/the new iPhone or whether the Nokia is good enough.

At any rate, I am very impressed what they are doing. I hope they stay on this course. I think there is a place for phones with pure Android and regular updates, but that is cheaper than the Pixel line. Basically the void that Nexus left.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This reminds me of when Apple said they would refurbish older phone models and sell them in India and people got irate that they only sell them used stuff. So, okay, no iPhone for them at all, I guess.

They're basically stuck using older, cheaper technology. That's fine, but you can't really access the older software that was developed for that level of hardware anymore (hence the 'lite' apps mentioned in the article). It's an interesting disconnect between hardware and software in the market.

</comment><comment><USER24> The article talks a lot about storage. Is an SD card not possible? I have a somewhat average Huawei phone that's a couple of years old (sensible charging, battery still good though not great) and a 32GB SD card carries all I need in terms of photo after photo, and app data from less used apps.

<comment><USER25> SD cards on Androids are kind of weird. It's not always consistent where things will be stored. Unless things have changed, many apps can't be installed to SD (and if you force it, you'll find that they are subtly broken). When you're building the phone to hit a low price point, you might not have the budget for a slot anyway; and unfortunately, you're likely to not put much more storage than is needed to boot the phone; let alone handle the play store updates that will be ready when it's unboxed.

It would really help if Google made translations suck less. They are stored uncompressed in the apk, even though human language text is easily compressed.

<comment><USER26> Back in the early Android days, this wasn't the case, you could easily push most apps onto MicroSD. Yet, versions of Android up until adoptable storage was added (which essentially makes your mSD non-removable) have continued to make it more and more difficult to use your MicroSD for storing apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> So its just best selling phone under $75 not the best selling mobile which i would take would be Samsung or Xiaomi.

</comment><comment><USER28> Had to buy a $79.99 Blu C5 at target last minute few weeks ago when my phone died night before I had to catch a flight. Everything is really crappy and really slow, but so far perfectly usable.

Still been using it last few weeks since I can't decide which phone to get. If it had a slightly better speaker I'd prob keep it. Guess my needs aren't that demanding in hindsight.

<comment><USER29> I used $50 alcatel phone for the last four years. It was actually pretty nice for the first three years, it wasn't even slow for many purposes (though cruising the web was annoying). That it's screen was 1/3 normal size helped - sped things up and made the phone much tougher.

The phone was killed in the last year by the gradual process of applications upgrading themselves and exceeding memory. And then the touch screen started dying.

The cheapish thing I have does more but is not more aesthetically pleasing.

See: [https://medium.com/matter/shitphone-a-love- story-a44e6643480...](https://medium.com/matter/shitphone-a-love- story-a44e66434807)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I've been using a Nokia 216 for a month while my smartphone gets repaired. It has 4G and Bluetooth, but not WiFi (why?). It has a lousy camera, but the LED torch is good. It has threaded texts (this is not common, apparently) and the battery lasts forever even using data. There is no GPS nor, tragically, Snake.

You get Opera Mini installed which is... an experience. There is no cache (and probably hardly any RAM either), so if you close the browser your entire session gets deleted. History somewhat works. Every now and then you get an ad injected - the ad never seems to change. My phone is trying to make me buy a German Honor A10. I live in the UK.

Javascript, of course, is not supported. If you want to interact with an element it refreshes the entire page and re-renders it to reflect the update.

It makes it painfully obvious which websites are _really_ optimised for mobile, which ones just have a setting for small screens, and which don't bother at all. Simple sites work well - HN comments is good, most news websites (e.g. BBC) work, Wikipedia is fine. People are astounded when I can fact-check in the pub. Browsing Google images is also surprisingly good. Pages with custom fonts often don't load at all. Forms are hit and miss.

Data usage is really light. I have a 100MB bundle and I barely put a dent in it.

It's, on the whole, usable. I can look up things, check the weather and procrastinate.

What is really missing is maps. Google Maps does not work _at all_. The interface doesn't work - if you get a list of possible destinations, often you can't click on the one you actually want. There don't seem to be any usable ultra-low bandwidth navigation websites. Bing doesn't even try, and not much luck with Bing either.

If I had access to slack, 2-factor authentication (without using texts) and semi-decent mapping, I'd be tempted not to go back to a smartphone.

<comment><USER31> About 4 years ago, before my current employment made owning a smartphone a necessity, I was a dumb phone user. I was able to easily give up Reddit, HN, other various things but the single most painful missing thing to give up was maps.

My approach at the time was to route on my laptop and print directions. It worked most of the time but still was rather painful.

It ended up being a lot cheaper though. When I was a poor college kid I was able to get on a prepaid plan with no data, unlimited text and like 200 minutes of calling a month (way more than almost anyone in this day and age uses) for about $15 a month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The chief complaint seems to be the lack of internal storage, but the phone has an SD slot that supports cards up to 32GB while his shiny iPhone 8 has exactly 0 GB expandable storage.

<comment><USER33> Except that's not how it works in the Android world. You have internal storage that needs to be freed up to hold apps. When that memory runs out, that's it. The SD card isn't for holding apps.

We used to root Android for this reason. We needed to free up silly apps no one uses and we had to have the ability to aggressively clear out the system.

<comment><USER34> Android has supported apps on SD cards for ages. First with Apps2SD then since 6.0 Adoptable Storage which just treats internal+SD as one big storage pool. A lot of higher end phones have disabled the UI for Adoptable Storage due to performance concerns though it is still possible to set up with ADB commands. This type of phone however is the exact sort of thing it's meant for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The title is misleading and essentially a clickbait. Later in the article they mentioned:

> At $60, the Bharat 2 is one of the cheapest smartphones in India with 4G LTE > and, according to Counterpoint, it was the country's best-selling smartphone > in the sub-$75 price band last year.

</comment><comment><USER36> The author just can't seem to understand the concept that these phones are an upgrade for most Indian users. He mentions it multiple times as if he complained about it to literally everyone he interviewed.

</comment><comment><USER37> >Vikas Jain, Micromax's cofounder, was not concerned when I brought this up to him. "Our target customers are Indians who are buying their first smartphone, or people who are upgrading to their first smartphone from a feature phone," he told me in a phone interview. "These people aren't really bothered about how fast the processor is, or how clear and rich the display is. Their needs are a lot more...basic, and as long as they get decent battery life, a decent camera, and a basic internet surfing experience, they are satisfied."

A market ripe for disruption.

<comment><USER38> How so? Seems like the features/specs provided line up pretty well with the $60 price point. Are there examples of basic smartphones in this price range with significantly better features? (Legitimately don't know)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I work in mobile performance and have built out an automated testing workflow for our CI system to try and prevent big breaking changes to these types of phones.

The issue with testing these phones is the device introduces lots of variance due to the low hardware standards. We typically test for relative changes in key metrics and want to move to testing different types of phones for usability. This is generally hard because the noise makes the test inconclusive.

<comment><USER40> How do you this testing? Any public service?

<comment><USER39> We have a lab environment with multiple phones plugged into a single controller. The controller runs a set of Jenkins agents which advertises the different devices as targets for Jenkins jobs.

Plus, lots of tweaking and perf related fixes to the phone. If you're looking for an off-the-shelf solution, check out Headspin or the Google Cloud offerings.

<comment><USER40> Thanks for the feedback. I'll look into headspin. I'm not into mobile performance or testing so not sure how I would automate and log the performance on different devices. Honestly I'm not sure what tools I would use on the device to run the tests.

<comment><USER39> We are trying to build something similar to CT-scan; except it's a 1-man team so it's been a longer journey:

[https://code.fb.com/developer-tools/mobile-performance- tooli...](https://code.fb.com/developer-tools/mobile-performance-tooling- infrastructure-at-facebook/)

We run functional UI tests with a performance tracer wired up- we already had them setup by feature teams so it was easy to get started. Instead of a Zookeeper scheduler, it's just Jenkins.

Right now we've been able to catch 2-3% relative regressions in things like startup, opening a Google Maps view etc which is pretty good. It was easy to setup and then hard to optimize the variance down so we could get a strong signal.

We're hiring if any of this is interesting, it's Golang/San Francisco/Full- Time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> ...and here my age shows.

I remember a time when I used a physical landline phone as my only phone. I didn't care if I missed a call, because the people that I wanted to talk to either would see me at school the next day or would show up at my house if it was important. Texting was nonexistent.

Or, to put it another way - eh, life goes on if you can't do a thing.

<comment><USER42> The problem is that times have changed. Back then the scenario you are describing was everyone. Right now, if you were to go 'back' to that life, you will be an outcast. People won't understand why you don't respond to their messages. If you explain them, people have to make an exception in communication just for you. That gets annoying, and you will be skipped over easier.

<comment><USER41> No, the scenario back then was a group of maybe 60 people at most.

The scenario now is also a group of maybe 60 people. Those 60 people are not so high strung as to require a response immediately.

My biggest problem with "downgrading" to a landline now would be the loss of Google Maps, to be perfectly honest. I would lose none of the richness of connection that I have now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Sounds like a terrible choice of phone, and I haven't seen this model in the actual top 10 list.

I'm currently testing a Redmi 5 (should retail for ~100, maybe less) and it is impressive. Eight cores, great screen, fingerprint sensor, 3300mah battery, all in a very nice package - only let down so far is the camera.

</comment><comment><USER44> Sounds like the assumptions of newer versions of Android and the ecosystem may mean feature phones like the Jiophone (running the FirefoxOS successor) can be competitive on the basis of the hardware and software actually being in step with each other.

</comment><comment><USER45> When I made an app I went and bought the cheapest Android I could find to check the thing ran ok as I use an iPhone normally. It was quite interesting - I made it display a bit less stuff and the UI less fiddly as the screen response was bad. I think devs should in general try catering for the worst devices and network connections. One reason WhatsApp won, especially in India, was it worked as a java applet on old phones when the competition couldn't be bothered with that.

I'm not convinced by the current trend of everything requiring a ton of javascript frameworks to display some text info and similar. It causes issues along those lines.

</comment><comment><USER46> from the comments, don't kill the messenger

>Can I use this article as a case study for Journo students on 'How NOT to approach a topic'? You took a wonderful subject and turned it into a gloating, patrnonizing pile of crap. Bravo. The takeaways from this article essentially are 'Cheaper products perform less efficiently than more expensive ones' and 'India is full of poor people'. Yep, right, We did not know this earlier. Thanks for your investigative journalism.

<comment><USER45> That comment seem unfair, there's a lot of other stuff in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I was surprised the choice was not Xiaomi, the experience would be vastly different for slightly more money

if writer would not set Pierce limit it Redmi note 4 should be best selling phoned in India

<comment><USER48> [https://www.mi.com/in/redmi4/](https://www.mi.com/in/redmi4/) rocks

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I'm writing this on a low end Android I bought 2 years ago for $25 bucks. ZTE force n9100, 1 GB ram, 1.5 GHz android 4.1.2 It works great for browsing the web and YouTube, havent tried anything else. It's just as responsive as any phone if not more responsive. The problem the author has is with the software, the hardware is exceptional in any phone, although 512 megs of ram may limit it somewhat.

Has anyone ever done anything productive with a cellphone? I doubt it.

<comment><USER50> The problem with the software eating up space is partially that Android itself seems to assume a ton of storage space as soon as you go beyond Android 4. I had an HTC Desire that I had to get rid of simply because the Play Store kept upgrading itself and eating up all remaining storage

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> It's misleading to call it one of the bestselling phones in India. This article is the first time I even heard about this phone.

It's just a bit below the price of the cheapest xiaomi, which is miles better, and can arguably be used as a less shiny i-phone replacement

</comment><comment><USER52> A common problem with low end devices is specs that make no sense. Why does this device have a quad core processor? I bet this phone would perform much better if they used a slower processor but doubled the memory. It's crazy that Android is so bloated that 1 gig of storage isn't enough.

</comment><comment><USER53> Great article I'm glad to see at least one tech giant is (attempting) to cater towards low-end smart phones:

[https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/27/instagram- lite/](https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/27/instagram-lite/)

<comment><USER54> Google has been doing similar things as well with their "Go" series of apps. Relaunching web app wrappers as lightweight apps is nothing new.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> > According to data from app analytics firm App Annie, Indians spend 36% of > their screentime on communication (like WhatsApp), 20% on video players > (like YouTube), and 16% on social networking (Facebook).

I wonder how much of that is self fulfilling due to the low powered devices?

<comment><USER56> Most, I mean upwards of 60-70% always search for charging point the first thing they arrive anywhere (be it airport, Hotel or even office). Always the devices are on charge. Always.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> This is the tech equivalent of slum tourism. News flash: poor people deal with crap that rich people don't have to.

<comment><USER58> I hear that, but there's something instructive here as well for members of the HN community who write software.

Namely, it's that sometimes performance and optimization matter. Given the size of the Indian / developing world market, I wonder if there's an opportunity to provide a good experience (apps or OS) on more meager hardware.

I certainly don't remember the first gen iPhone being painful or slow. Why can't we make an experience today that runs on low end, but still vastly more powerful hardware than the original iPhone?

<comment><USER59> I think there's just a problem with software nowadays. I bought a 2005 PowerBook G4 for nostalgia's sake, and ended up finding out that even if I push the CPU of the poor thing to the max by compiling GCC and downloading stuff, it still manages to have smoother animations than my maxed out quad- core i7-powered Dell XPS 15: [https://twitter.com/SilverEzhik/status/1017622599696896001](https://twitter.com/SilverEzhik/status/1017622599696896001)

<comment><USER58> Try installing OpenBSD (or even Xubuntu) with XFCE on that i7 Dell. It'll fly. Resource sipping, featureful software exists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Buzzfeed, quartz, dailyO are all clickbait opinion articles.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/3hf1hn/hey_india_wha...](https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/3hf1hn/hey_india_what_are_the_bad_newspapers_and_online/)

</comment><comment><USER60> Biased article.

The phone is really really basic and designed for light apps and light browsing and is being compared to iPhone 8.

</comment><comment><USER61> The problem here is mostly the piece of s __* Android OS. 1gb of storage is enough for a complete OS(100mb) and user files. 256mb ram and 500mhz single core is enough to drive a good OS without very much latency. And we only need a few functionalities (communicate and record) ... The 1000000 apps are a symptom we are confused about how computers work best. In time, we will have to figure this out, or we will have deserved to lose this tech.

<comment><USER62> Or in general, blame software bloat and the developers who push this sordid movement of inefficiency upon everyone else.

A 1.3GHz quad-core with 512MB of RAM _should_ be plenty powerful for what people use smartphones for; it wasn't too long ago when the typical _desktop PC_ was around that specification (albeit only a single core) --- and yet, people used them for watching videos, VoIP/IM/video chat, and otherwise most of the things that smartphones would usually be used for today. At least, I could remember doing those things comfortably on a 733MHz PIII with 256MB of RAM.

 _Scrolling through my Twitter timeline was a stuttering, jerky mess, despite Twitter 's claims to "load quickly on slower connections."_

I absolutely do not fathom how we got to the point where basic functionality like displaying some text and images seems to take far more processing power than they did years ago, and yet no one notices and tries to put a stop to it.

IMHO something is very wrong when apps that do seemingly trivial things are multiple megabytes; surely one does not need _millions_ of bytes of code to open a browser window to a website or implement IM functionality, for example. When software came on floppies, size was measured in kilobytes and a 1MB app was _huge_ and accordingly did quite a lot.

<comment><USER63> > people used them for watching videos, VoIP/IM/video chat,

I used a 260 MHz Win98SE for VOIP and video chat a long time ago (when Win98SE was current).

No one cares about efficiency any more.</comment></comment></comment>


The 2005 email that spawned Picnik, Google's latest buy - <AUTHOR> http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/03/looking_back_the_email_that_spawned_picnik_googles_latest_buy.html

<comment><USER2> My favorite quote, given the recent debates over Flash vs Canvas:

 _We're at the intersection of demand (mass use of online photos) and capability (Flash 8 supports the first level of functionality we need). Flash 8.5/9 will take us to the next level. If Canvas becomes widespread and is hardware accelerated we can move to that. If WPF becomes widespread we can move to that and boost our functionality/performance even further._

That was 5 years ago. Not trying to start a flamewar, but I just want to point out the enabling capability that Flash brought (and still provides 5 years later).

<comment><USER3> It's important to note that the product was not important. It could have been Flash or HTML5 or Fooware. What the founders saw was an intersection between demand and capability, and built a business to exploit that availability gap.

<comment><USER2> I'd argue with this assertion. I think what you meant to say was that the _technology_ choice wasn't important. The product was obviously important, since without the product there is no company, nothing for anyone to acquire etc.

But I agree in an extremely hypothetical way that the technology choice is unimportant, assuming you can make the same competitive product with a number of technologies. In this case though, especially back in 2005, you simply can't argue that they could have made that product with anything else (apart from desktop software, which is a totally different product space). They were clearly aware of their technology choices, were keeping tracking of the latest and greatest, and chose the only one that was technically feasible for the product they wanted to create.

<comment><USER4> I don't think illumin8 is trying to argue that it could have been done with anything else at that exact point in time, just that they identified an opportunity and the technology that could make that happen. That the technology was flash, is in this instance mere coincidence.

That said, I agree that flash has been an enabler for many advances on the web. Unfortunately, the flash plugins just seem to be bogged down more and more, and don't seem to evolve very effectively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _6\. add features and customers forever and rake in the dough_

Even though they eventually sold to Google, the initial plan including _raking in the dough_. I think that's an excellent lesson here: Hope for a massive buyout, but plan to make money.

</comment><comment><USER6> Would love to hear pg's thoughts on how well the contents of this email would do as a YC application

</comment><comment><USER7> I would love to see posts like this from other companies, since I'm very interested in how people decide on what to build for their startups.

<comment><USER8> Do a "Ask HN: Where did your startup come from". I bet there'd be some cool answers.

<comment><USER7> It is here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1164338>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Future Founder # 1: Yo dude, I've this totally cool idea.

Future Founder # 2: How about we name it CutePuppy.

Future Founder # 1: Check if CutePuppy.com is available

I can bet this conversation theme has started 80% of new web-two-point-oh startups.

</comment><comment><USER10> Thanks for the really great link! Loved the way the gave the clear and concise approach beginning with "The Market"

Most important part that is often glossed over by entrepreneurs is "GETTING THERE"

</comment><comment><USER11> Thank you!</comment>


Being homeless a struggle, even with a $100k job offer - <AUTHOR> http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/being-homeless-a-struggle-even-with-a-100000-job-offer/ <comment><USER2> I was homeless for about a year and a half. The first 6 months were spent sleeping on the streets, and when possible, in a shelter - but realistically, in the area where I was, most shelters were not really a safe place to be, and the few that were filled up early. The remaining time, I crashed at a drug dealers house and helped sell in return.

I didn't have much more than the belongings that fit in a mid-sized duffle bag and for a while I mostly survived by cleaning bathrooms at coffee shops before opening hours where the employees didn't really want to do that part of their job - and in return I would get some coffee and a bite to eat. Any money I did get, I saved up.

Once I had access to the internet again, and at least a warm place to sleep at night that I considered safe, I started making contacts on IRC. Eventually I had enough money to relocate across country via Greyhound, a couch to crash on when I arrived and prospects for a new beginning. I quickly jumped from $25k to $40k to $60k etc and am currently at $160k with a whole new life and an amazing career ahead of me.

It's possible to get out of the situation if what got you there isn't addiction or mental illness - the system does little to help, and without being resourceful it's easy to get stuck in that position for a long time. But it can be done. Granted, I never had the ex-con/drug dealer status haunting me in background checks, but I have been upfront in interviews before and still got the job. Greatest accomplishment in life? Escaping homelessness.

<comment><USER3> Fully escaped?

I've spoken openly of my 30 months sleeping rough on the streets of the UK. I may have "escaped" homelessness, but the mental scars accumulated whilst on the street do still haunt me. I feel it, the sense of worthlessness, the self- doubt. There's a feeling that I shouldn't be alive let alone here in this workplace or surrounded by good people, a feeling that I don't quite belong.

One can put a roof over one's head, get a job, that leads to a career, obtain an income that is above-average... but can one truly escape something as traumatic as being homeless for any sustained period of time (covering 1 Winter at least)?

I'm less sure on that. I live in the hope that I'm wrong.

And of course, Christmas comes around and people return to family and those who don't are the waifs and strays, an annual reminder that we're not the same.

<comment><USER4> May I ask: What would have helped? And what would help now?

Homeless people and people who are vulnerably housed in the UK have pretty lousy treatment from "services", a lot of which is provided by faith and voluntary groups.

There are huge amounts of stigma, and a lot of misunderstanding of alcoholism and drug use and mental illness.

<comment><USER3> Small, safe spaces.

That is... I went onto the streets to escape poverty, violence and sexual abuse.

For me a hostel was not a safe space, so I didn't even successfully make it onto the first rung of support. It was hostels that distributed information on where to get food and such, so I missed that too.

So there needs to be a better support system for those sleeping rough, and that needs to recognise the flaws in the offerings today and also find better ways to distribute information.

Then, I've made the argument before that we should have a better way to migrate someone off of the street. It's not enough to give a council flat, someone I knew at that time eventually committed suicide because he couldn't cope, fell apart, and suffered from the isolation.

I think instead of that, there should be spaces smaller than a studio apartment that are transition spaces. They should be private, but perhaps clustered so that there is a support network there. People should be given help on how to do things, simple things like how to shop and eat better, how to take care of a home and manage the utilities and bills, how to basically live normally again and construct those routines. How to not shrink into that space and be alone.

I did meet a lot of people with mental illnesses, I don't believe anyone can wave a magic wand and get them off the streets. But we can have the structure in place to help them so that when they are ready, it's possible.

The vast majority of the people on the streets in the UK aren't there because of drugs and alcohol, that's just a visible symptom of a small minority. Most I spoke to had normal lives, good lives, but a trauma occurred and they ended up on the street. There seemed to be a lot of divorced or widowed males. A lot of the young who were physically and/or sexually abused.

Anyhow, a link [http://crackandcider.com/](http://crackandcider.com/) . These people are good, it's no magic wand, but they will take monetary donations and turn it into basic things to help keep people warm and alive even if they are rough-sleeping. I like that they're challenging those misconceptions too.

<comment><USER5> One thing I'm curious about, if you're willing to share, is what makes hostels and shelters unsafe. There are several people on here who mention hostels or shelters not being safe for them, and I've never quite understood what would cause that, given that the entire point of a shelter is to offer a safe space, isn't it? What are the common failings there? What makes the safety of a shelter vary between different people?

<comment><USER3> What does a hostel offer?

A roof? Is that all a homeless person needs?

For me what I needed, because I came from a place that of violence and abuse, was to feel safety of person and possession.

In many ways, that sense of security trumped everything.

And if you take a teenager that has gone through that and chosen the street over a roof at home... then changing the roof and being surrounded by strangers, some of whom suffer from mental illness and can be violent themselves... a hostel doesn't deliver on safety.

I only stayed in a few, they were how I imagine US summer camps to be. Rooms containing a number of bunk beds, anything from 4 to 8 people in a room.

The ones I experienced separated on gender as you would expect, but didn't separate on age, or other needs.

When I landed on the street I was frightened, crushingly shy, a victim all the way through. A hostel was a brutal experience, horrifying to me in those early weeks on the street in ways that sleeping under bushes, on industrial estates and on building sites just wasn't.

I had a different set of problems outside, namely the weather, shelter and warmth. But what I had with some planning was a sense of security, a sense that my possessions and myself were safe. That the very worst that could happen would just be to be moved on.

Those were things I felt were in my control. I felt safer on the street.

I should note that I didn't spend every night of 2.5 years sleeping rough. I was young, and learned fairly quickly to seek out Universities, find the student union bar, arrive late afternoon and read a book, and then wait for people to arrive so that I could chat to people. From there the opportunities opened up, and there was a good chance that if I overcome shyness, didn't scare them with the state of me, and everything was cool, that for one night there was going to be a bed, a shower, and some toast. I became quite good at this, but never stayed in a city more than a couple of nights before hitching elsewhere so that I never overstayed a welcome and doing this meant I could have a few nights a week on a sofa of someone my age who had a kind heart.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In his case, it sounds like the problem isn't homelessness itself, but:

1\. A crappy background check system that reports him as an ex-con/drug dealer when he's been exonerated.

2\. Companies using those systems and judging him without giving him a chance to speak up.

<comment><USER7> Even the president is in favor of punishing people who have been suspected of crimes; it seems to be a popular position that people are not really innocent until proven guilty.[1][2] I find this trend deeply troubling, but it does seem at least somewhat popular.

#2 is at least partly due to the fact the if the companies allowed him an opportunity to refute the claim, they would be incurring various legal liabilities. The rules meant to protect job candidates often result in them being passed over at the first stage where it is realized they are 'complex' cases.

[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh- conspiracy/wp/201...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh- conspiracy/wp/2015/12/04/can-americans-be-denied-second-amendment-rights- because-the-attorney-general-suspects-theyre-terrorists/)

[2] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh- conspiracy/wp/201...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh- conspiracy/wp/2015/12/06/what-could-possibly-be-the-argument-for-allowing-a- terrorist-suspect-to-buy-a-semiautomatic-weapon/)

<comment><USER6> > #2 is at least partly due to the fact the if the companies allowed him an > opportunity to refute the claim, they would be incurring various legal > liabilities.

Interesting! I'd thought it was simply done in the name of efficiency.

<comment><USER8> You're too old. You have a criminal background. You're too overeducated. We think you'll sue. You're too young.

It seemed that companies are loathed to take risk on employee. At the same time, lot of environments contained toxic working conditions, so it's not clear if their choice of employees matter much.

But people must find a job to keep themselves afloat or depend on someone having a job. It didn't matter if you're bad at social grace or if you have mental illness or if you're a felon, old or young.

Without food, shelter, and peace of mind, I think people would be hard pressed to be economically productive.

<comment><USER9> At the same time, there are a lot of employees suing companies "just because", so the feeling has some justification.

<comment><USER8> And where do those employees find the money to sue the corporation?

Don't forget that it doesn't prevent the creation of toxic working environments.

<comment><USER10> > And where do those employees find the money to sue the corporation?

Often from lawyers who work on contingency and then take the bulk of the damages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is part of the larger tech hiring culture of "it's better to miss hiring someone good than to hire someone who might be bad." The guy in the story is hit especially hard by this, but HR's paradigm of fear/incompetence/inability to manage people after they're hired is a big piece of it.

It's not ever easy for someone classified as an ex-con to get a job, but tech discriminates more than most other professions.

<comment><USER12> Well, HR / recruiters are a bit worse in most (tech?) professions; they seem really lazy when vetting people and just go for the stereotype great employee while discarding everyone else. So the only way back would be to go for a very small company in a smaller town. In the EU he would be hired for sure; I would hire him. I never cared about previous experiences/age/gender/race only about current skills and effort and we did very well by it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This just backs up why I think Finland's recent move[1] to give every citizen a basic salary is the way forward.

You'd then give everyone that basic level of security and enable them to progress in life. Yes there are potential flaws with the Finnish scheme (some people on benefits may ultimately lose out, and millionaires getting the same amount as poor people) - but crucially it would probably stop most, if not all, of cases like this, where someone can't escape the pull of homelessness even with opportunity there.

1 - [http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/finland-plans-to-give- ev...](http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/finland-plans-to-give-every- citizen-a-basic-income-of-800-euros-a-month/ar-AAg3Bn1?ocid=ansmsnnews11)

<comment><USER14> Germany has something called "Grundsicherung", which is even below unemployment benefits, but can be gotten by anyone, even without having a place of residence. That means if your homelessness is not based on mental issues or being too proud to accept help, you have at least a possibility to get out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Take someone who has already demonstrated the know how to make money selling illicit drugs and, as punishment, ban them from legitimate employment for life... That must be super effective! /s

</comment><comment><USER16> Why don't wrongfully convicted people Sue for damages and use the lawsuit to get there records purged? I sure there is a reason why people don't in general I'm just not clear what exactly this reason is. Anyone in the know care to elucidate me?

<comment><USER17> Suing the government is not all that easy:

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

<comment><USER18> It really isn't. A close associate of mine had a government official back out of a contract he signed (in the government's name) in a way that was so legally clear that it would have resulted in a summary judgement had it been anyone else. His lawyer advised him not to bother unless he could afford to pay the legal fees for a decade long court battle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Why is he failing background checks if he's never been non-wrongfully convicted? Genuinely curious to hear from anyone with experience on the employer side of this.

<comment><USER20> There are two kinds of background checks. The official kind done by a dedicated team with access and knowledge to retrieve city, state and federal data. And the HR kind, where someone without an investigative background and education spends ten minutes doing web searches and online "stalking" to see if the candidate has any untoward elements in their past.

The first kind costs hundreds dollars per candidate. The second can be done for about twenty bucks worth of time. You can guess which approach most companies use.

It's easier on most candidates, too, because a real background check requires them to fill out paperwork. An ad hoc one they may never know about...unless they fail.

<comment><USER21> > _There are two kinds of background checks._

IBM. Wells Fargo. Frontier Airlines. T-Mobile. Experian. Daimler Chrysler.

These are some of the companies listed in the article. They are some of the biggest in the world. They don't seem to me to be the type of companies that take the latter approach to recruitment, possibly opening themselves up to discrimination legal issues.

<comment><USER22> They probably do both. The official background check may come back clean. But, as soon as the HR guy or hiring manager put his name through Google, they see "So and so convicted of dealing crack."

<comment><USER23> Surely one of the first things he does when contacting a company is to warn them that a web search will find these things, but that he has been exonerated, and to provide documentation as to such?

I just find it incredibly sad that the people conducting these background checks at such large companies are so utterly incompetent.

<comment><USER22> I'm not sure I agree that this is a sign of incompetence. Instead, it's likely a case of extreme risk aversion.

Hiring somebody is risky and expensive. The cost for getting it wrong is quite high. At best, it costs the team money in lost productivity. At worst, the new hire actually is a criminal (or whatever).

Given two otherwise equal applicants, it's only prudent to hire the one that doesn't have nasty Google results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> He could try working as a freelancer, on websites like Elance/Upwork or something and make some money. Then he could use that money move out of the homeless shelter and then look for a decent job.

<comment><USER25> The problem here is not a shelter but a previous criminal records.

+1 for freelancing idea, it might actually work if there are security jobs. But I think security in it's nature is something that needs assurance that person is capable of auditing the system.

<comment><USER26> You're right, though if he's very capable at security stuff, there's probably also other types of freelancing work that he'd be capable of doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is there anything we can do for him? I mean this is just nuts.

<comment><USER20> Now that he's in the NYT he will probably be OK. The question is what to do about other people in similar situations.

I once received an application from someone quite famous. But he was famous because of a criminal case against him which was ongoing. We let this scare us off, because as a small company we didn't want the exposure if we did hire him. I'm not sure it was a very moral decision, but does your startup have time to deal with that?

<comment><USER28> > Now that he's in the NYT

Pedant: the article is in the Seattle Times :-)

> he will probably be OK.

I sure hope so. I always have mixed feelings when I read articles like this. On one hand, things _should_ usually end up going well for the person (assuming they're legitimate) because of the exposure. But, on the other, it's sad to hear of them being in the situation in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I spent two years trying to get a homeless person off the street, and made a movie about it:

[http://graceofgodmovie.com/](http://graceofgodmovie.com/)

</comment><comment><USER30> Are there charities set up that could help with something like this? I mean it would literally take less than $5k to get this guy set up. A couple suits of decent clothes, a security deposit and first months rent for an apartment, a bus ticket to wherever his job is.

That is a bargain for removing a homeless person from the system. Local governments and shelters should be jumping at the chance to do it.

<comment><USER31> It's not just that. It sounds like he gets the offer, but it's contingent on his background check clearing.

If that's all he needs though, where's the Kickstarter?

<comment><USER30> Maybe I was confused. It sounded like some of them were possible but he had no way of getting to the city where the job was. Or maybe he was just saying that even if one _did_ come through he couldn't follow up on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One thing I'm curious about is how he actually ended up homeless. Before the conviction, it seems like he was doing very well (BMW, townhouse).

Why did he not have sufficient savings to survive after he got out of prison?

(Not trying to blame him for anything, trying to plan for my own life. I strive to maintain sufficient savings so that I would never be homeless even if I never worked again.)

<comment><USER32> I suspect any savings he did have would have gone to his legal defense. It's an all or nothing thing, you wouldn't hold back if you were wrongly accused and had everything to lose (as demonstrated).

<comment><USER33> In the comments, if that is actually him posting under his name, he says "I was in Debt and had JUST started that particular contract ,,an attorney wanted 10.000 up front and I did not have it !! ."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It seems like the conviction is what's preventing him from taking up the job offers, not being homeless.

</comment><comment><USER35> Why don't they do the background check before the interviews so they don't waste eachother's time and money just to later have a background check fail. Does a background check costs more than an interview and paying for the flights?

<comment><USER36> Not a for a single candidate, if you however need to do it for all candidates before they are evaluated it will be much costlier :). Doing it after the interview for few candidates is much cheaper.

Also it may take weeks to do the full check, you will loose the candidate if you wait for so long to do the assessment .

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> What is this article actually about?

That he's getting $100k offers pending background checks and failing them?

Bad title.

</comment><comment><USER38> It's a bit weird though. Why couldn't he just rent a house/borrow money to pay for a temporary residence, then pay off using his paycheck? If his case was indeed already listed as exonerated, then he should be able to at least take some loans. But indeed, whetehr he was truly guilty or not, the stigma put on people via even just one conviction is just horrible. This seems such an ancient and brutal practice in today's world.

</comment><comment><USER39> I wonder if he could start his own consulting company?

<comment><USER40> It comes with a lot of the same problems as getting hired by a company as an employee. Meeting with clients when you can't travel easily is a challenge. Living in a homeless shelter puts you on the schedule of the shelter (there are in and out times that are strictly enforced at most of them, if you aren't in by the curfew, you don't sleep in a bed that night), which conflicts with the erratic schedule of an IT contractor. You need a phone that is reliable, and the ability to take calls and emails at any time, which being homeless does not really allow; my friends who are homeless often live by day in coffee shops and libraries and by night in shelters if they're lucky enough to get a bed.

Also, though I don't like it, the reality is that black folks in IT are also facing subtle discrimination on a daily basis. Getting hired as a contractor often has none of the same protections that large companies have in place for people of color being hired as employees (government contractors are an exception in that the government has guidelines in place to help insure minorities are well-represented, but selling to the government is a whole other set of skills that he may not have, and may not be able to obtain given his circumstances). Among people of color (and women) that I've discussed it with, they tend to prefer applying for jobs and working jobs in major companies because the HR processes are designed to be less discriminatory. Small firms, even when they intend to not discriminate often make "culture fit" decisions that exclude women and minorities. He's also older. Smaller IT firms are infamous for hiring young and overlooking older candidates.

I live in an RV (I did it for four years, traveling full-time, and now I'm back to it after a couple years of stability), and I'm being reminded of all of the ways it makes a "normal life" difficult. And, I'm not dealing with the kind of stuff he is: I have a vehicle and money to travel, I have a phone and reliable Internet, I have a private home where I can have phone/skype conversations with co-workers, etc.

Getting out of homelessness is really tough, is what I'm trying to say, and being homeless makes a lot of things that are obvious solutions to problems for you and I much tougher when you don't have the stability and savings and such to fall back on that you or I have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Artificial selection at its finest.

</comment><comment><USER42> I believe the only clear way for him is to leave the US and land some international job at some place good as Australia or Sing. Yes, the US will loose a good cyber cop. But as you can see here, this is entirely the US systematic problem. Simmons does not deserve to serve lifetime living in the US, struggling for foodstamps.

<comment><USER43> How is that supposed to work? He can't even afford to leave Seattle.

<comment><USER42> Companies pay relocation to a suitable candidate.

<comment><USER44> They reimburse, you need the money upfront.

<comment><USER45> Not necessarily. I would have thought the company paying directly was preferable, since then they can see invoices, and query costs beforehand.

My employer paid to transport my belongings, all I did was get a few quotes. It was useful for them to be involved, since they knew about necessary insurance etc, but an international move was new to me.

They also offered to transfer my relocation bonus to me as soon as the contract was signed, but I didn't need the cash so I waited until I'd opened a local bank account in the appropriate currency.

<comment><USER44> You're right, it varies. I'd posit that most of the time however, you get reimbursed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Seems like this story is more about the struggle being black.

</comment><comment><USER47> "I am very pleased to offer you the full-time position of Senior Analyst, Security Compliance," - so why doesn't he take that job? Or are they offering him the job and then by the time he goes to take it they've googled him and changed their minds?

<comment><USER48> Very likely the offer is contingent upon the successful completion of a background check. A thorough background check (criminal, education, credit) can cost a few hundred dollars, so firms won't proceed until an offer has been accepted.

Even though he was exonerated, his prison stay and other convictions may show up. He can explain, but a firm can rescind an offer for whatever reason they want (outside of protected statuses, which does not include criminal background). For a security position firms may want perfectly clean backgrounds.

<comment><USER47> Ahh, I was wondering why they would leave it that late, but avoiding extra costs makes sense.</comment></comment></comment>