The venture capital model is broken, and this damning report explains why - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekwire.com/2012/venture-capital-model-broken-damning-report-explains/ <comment><USER4> Ouch:

 _Longer fund lives are an expensive trend for LPs, who often are asked to pay additional management fees for a fund that extends beyond ten years. Many funds have several companies left in the fund at the ten-year mark, and demand additional fees, frequently based on the value of the portfolio (e.g., 1.5 percent of the cost basis of the remaining portfolio). The alternative available to LPs is to receive a FedEx package of private company share certificates. Which of the two evils is lesser?_

Context: VCs market funds to LP with a lifetime of 10 years, but usually can't liquidate all their holdings in that time frame; they apparently then go on to charge management fees during "overtime".

<comment><USER5> Given that investors were already paying ~2% management fees during the life of the fund, paying a few points a year while the VCs try to liquidate the remaining assets doesn't seem like that big a deal. The remaining assets are probably less than 10% of the original fund size in terms of their cost basis, so you're talking about an ongoing fee that's less than 10% of what they were already paying.

The alternative would be to fire-sale the assets when the fund closes, which would probably cost the investors a lot more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The report that they link is well-worth reading in order to understand the VC ecosystem.

tl;dr of the linked report:

* Somebody who relies on VCs to invest their money has finally noticed that VCs fail to beat the market over 10 years.

* They think the fault lies at the investor-VC interface: The way VCs are compensated is broken, and the way VCs report the performance of the portfolio is opaque.

* They make recommendations, which will never be adopted because it would expose and publicize the true VC returns.

<comment><USER7> Regarding your third point, if I was a VC that was beating the market - <USER2> there actually are many - I'd be happy to share my info and put pressure on the weaker VC's to expose themselves.

<comment><USER6> > _and there actually are many_

But not with regularity, which is why they don't do it.

Even Sequoia, which seems to have a golden halo around here, had the partners pony up funds in order to keep some funds positive.

<comment><USER8> > Even Sequoia, which seems to have a golden halo around here, had the > partners pony up funds in order to keep some funds positive.

Can you clarify what you mean here? Adding capital to a fund doesn't impact the return of the fund. And separately, I think you're factually wrong. (aside, I'm an entrepreneur funded by sequoia)

<comment><USER6> > _Adding capital to a fund doesn't impact the return of the fund._

You know that, I know that, but the folks who do the investment want to see the dollars returned be greater than the dollars invested. Otherwise, they also look like they are mismanaging money.

 _And separately, I think you're factually wrong._

Why?

 _(aside, I'm an entrepreneur funded by sequoia)_

You think they'd advertise such things to you?

Edit: Apparently they do --

 _Leone noted that Sequoia has never had a fund that has lost money. There was one time when things were looking like they may go that way in 2002, so the Sequoia partners got out their checkbooks so that no one could say that they lost money investing with Sequoia Capital._

<http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/12/doug-leone/>

Yes, that's right: That's Leone saying the partners needed to bail out the fund, because their investments were negative. I give him points for honestly admitting that they blew it bad enough to kick back money. Of course, subtract points for the way in which he stated it, requiring carefully parsed words _Sequoia has never had a fund that has lost money_.

<comment><USER9> If I were an investor and saw that type of behavior, I would put my money with them. That's a great move. I'd reinvest if the guy said 'we messed up, we're compensating you for it.' Of course if there were any pattern or regularity to the failures I might not continue to invest. But if it happens once and that's the response? I am impressed.

<comment><USER6> > _But if it happens once_

Thank god, we're finally getting past the "Good VCs never lose money" mantra around here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Surely most users of this site already knew only the top VC funds make money. The Kauffman Foundation certainly should have. But that doesn't mean the VC _model_ is broken, just that there are a lot of lame firms using this model as well as the good ones.

<comment><USER4> You'd be better off replying to a post of the actual Kauffman report than the summary on "Geekwire.com". From the beginning of the report:

 _Recommendation 1: Abolish VC Mandates: The allocations to VC that investment committees set and approve are a primary reason LPs keep investing in VC despite its persistent underperformance since the late 1990s. Returns data is very clear: it doesn't make sense to invest in anything but a tiny group of ten or twenty top-performing VC funds. Fund of funds, which layer fees on top of underperformance, are rarely an effective solution. In the absence of access to top VC funds, institutional investors may need to accept that investing in small cap public equities is better for long-term investment returns than investing in second- or third-tier VC funds._

Kauffman isn't disagreeing with you, but is observing that LPs are often required to allocate capital into VC as an asset class, and can thus be required to plow money into huge and underperforming funds because it's too difficult to get enough money into the smaller funds that do outperform the market.

You can read just a couple pages into this report and see that they're on the same page you are in this regard, right?

<comment><USER10> Obviously they're "on the same page" now. But they must not have understood the sharp dropoff in VC performance when they invested in mediocre funds, or they would not have done it.

<comment><USER11> That's not necessarily true. The Kauffman Foundation is a non-profit whose purpose is to support entrepreneurship. Investing in VC may accomplish that goal, even if the investment loses money. Heck, it may have been worth it from a research point of view, just to gather the data that went into this report.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> >> In essence, the report suggest that VCs get paid "to build funds, not build companies."

Sometimes it seems like the whole financial sector is just one long series of perverse incentives strung together. But I guess it doesn't make the news when it works the way it is supposed to.

</comment><comment><USER13> Note this which appears on the last page:

"Several peers listened to our list of topics andresponded by cautioning us that "this is a relationship business," implying a view that we are better off accepting the status quo and being in misaligned, under performing VC relationships than pursing negotiations for better terms."

"this is a relationship business" is a frequent phenomenon in sales and even in lawyer client relationships. Lawyers become friends of their clients and this prevents the clients from easily doing something that isn't in the best interest of the lawyer. Large ticket salesmen frequently wine and dine clients (including sports tickets and if you believe some accounts prostitutes). Specialty doctors entertain primary care physicians (well at least in the old days they did) in order to maintain a flow of patients. The very clear intent of all of that is to protect a legacy system and prevent you from entering into a relationship with another entity that may actually be better for you. This happens even in cases where the person being sold is spending their own money. But when people are spending someone elses money all bets are off.

</comment><comment><USER8> LPs need a two-tiered investing model. It's true, outside of the very few top performers, everyone else is a loser. Unfortunately, once in a while, a loser, or more likely, a new fund hits a home run. They should have a portion allocated to investing in new funds with less capital at risk.

The 2 and 20 is also only a problem for bigger funds. For smaller funds ($40mm for instance), it's not really an issue. Assuming two partners, that's $250k annually for each, leaving 300k for office and misc expenses. Not getting "VC rich" with those kinds of dollars. It's when a 2 and 20 fund raises a 500mm or 1b fund that the 2 and 20 causes the base salary to be excessive.

</comment><comment><USER14> What do you expect when half the VCs say they invest using "their gut"? as if "feeling" a company is going to be successful is a valid metric. In any case if you fail more than once it's obvious your gut isn't very precise and you should use other methods.

Anyway, that the system is broken is hardly something new, have you all forgotten "The canary is dead" slides from TheFunded? and it was 4 years ago!

What I'm asking is: does it matters? When those slides were released it was all doom and gloom, wantrepreneurs were going to disappear, nobody was going to be able to raise funding, etc...

And nothing happened, which is not me saying it doesn't matters, just that it seems no-one cares.

</comment><comment><USER15> The VC market is one where the buyers of VC funds (LPs such as Kaufmann) have a lot less information than the sellers (the VCs themselves) - a market with a high degree of information asymmetry. In "a market where sellers have more information than buyers about product quality can contract into an adverse selection of low-quality products."

[http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2...](http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2001/press.html)

<comment><USER16> LPs commit money to new funds before the first investment is ever made. What type of information does the seller (VC) have that the buyer (LP) does not?

<comment><USER17> One of the challenges is that the buyer (LP) is usually managing billions of dollars (e.g. a pension fund or large endowment), and venture is only a tiny fraction (a couple of percent) of his total asset base. It's difficult for those LPs to have expertise in an asset class that is such a small portion of the portfolio. The obvious objective criteria is past performance but understanding the potential of a team requires a deeper understanding of what makes firms successful.

<comment><USER6> > _The obvious objective criteria is past performance_

Considering that this criteria has been debunked for prices of public companies, I'd be amazed if it were true for private companies.

I'm gonna take a flying guess that the correlation studies have not been done like they have for public, due to the opaqueness of private pricing.

<comment><USER17> The studies have been done, and there is a much stronger correlation between past performance and future performance in private equity than in the public markets. In the public markets for active fund managers, there is almost no correlation. For vc funds, there is a decent correlation. My hypothesis is that the reason for the difference is information inefficiency. In the public markets, everyone is oerating with the same information, so it's hard to create a sustained advantage. In the private markets, one fund may have access to information (seeing companies no one else sees, knowing customer or acquirers, etc). Success often begets success because funds with successes get positive press which leads more entrepreneurs to go to them.

<comment><USER6> > _The studies have been done, and there is a much stronger correlation > between past performance and future performance in private equity than in > the public markets._

Very interesting. Link?

BTW: Were the prices self-reported?

<comment><USER17> I can't find links to the papers themselves, but the research was published by Lerner and Stahlman at HBS. They looked at firms that had top quartile venture funds and then looked to see what percentage of them remained in the top quartile in the subsequent fund. For public market managers, the measure was the same but on a year over year basis rather than fund over fund.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> You could swap out VC funds with hedge funds and the article would pretty much be the same.

<comment><USER5> Not really. There's a couple things hedge funds have to deal with that VCs don't - generally, it's easier to track the market value of their portfolios, so they have to show performance on a quarterly or annual basis. Also, the lockups for investors are much shorter (~2 years) so you can get out of an underperforming fund, whereas with a VC you're generally locked in from the start to the end of the fund. (Secondary markets do exist, but at a large discount.)

<comment><USER19> I think kyt's point is that 2%+20% causes the same mis-alignent of incentives for hedge funds.

<comment><USER5> Maybe, but even the compensation structures behind that 2/20 are wildly different between the two groups. Hedge funds have two things I've never heard of in a VC fund: benchmarks against market returns, and high-water marks. So while the headline of how they are compensated seems similar, the reality of how they get compensated isn't. Also, what a hedge fund does (assuming it's investing in traded securities) is generally far more scalable than what a VC fund does - doubling the size of a hedge fund may just mean doubling the average trade, whereas for a VC it means you have to either double the number of deals per partner or chase deals in a much later stage where round sizes are larger.

<comment><USER19> "assuming it's investing in traded securities"

Which is only a percentage of funds under management. The hedge fund industry invests in wildly diverse sectors, securities etc. VC'S can be treated as just another hedge fund sector.

If you can't get basic facts right (e.g.: lockups are not ~2 year - <USER3> by mdda), it is difficult to pay any attention to your opinions.

The other major problems arising out of "black box" investing also applies to hedge funds.

<comment><USER19> If you want to continue the thread, back i up with data. E.g. Deutsche Bank's Alternative Investment Survey: [http://www.db.com/medien/en/downloads/2008_Alternative_Inves...](http://www.db.com/medien/en/downloads/2008_Alternative_Investment_Survey.pdf)

That shows the diversity of strategies (although not funds managed per investment category). "The SEC started regulating funds with less than a two year lockup" I.e. a pecularity to the US.

<comment><USER5> Effectively, SEC regulations like Dodd-Frank impact large funds worldwide, because you're subject to them if you have more than a small number of US investors. (I think it's 15.)

That survey isn't particularly good data. For one thing, it conflates Fund of Funds with other hedge funds, which is pretty questionable given that they're really a separate class with different fee and performance expectations.

<comment><USER19> > That survey isn't particularly good data. For one thing, it conflates Fund > of Funds with other hedge funds, which is pretty questionable given that > they're really a separate class with different fee and performance > expectations.

DeutscheBank is a bunch of kids and that particular report is questionable??? I hope _you_ don't work in funds management.

> Effectively, SEC regulations like Dodd-Frank impact large funds worldwide, > because you're subject to them if you have more than a small number of US > investors. (I think it's 15.)

See <http://www.google.com/?q=master+feeder>. Hedge funds that want to accept money from US and EU investors are structured to _avoid_ the US regulations for the EU investors (for many more reasons than lock-up periods - e.g. _look_ at the graphs of lockup periods broken down by investor country???!).

It is almost the defining feature of hedge funds that every fund is different. A hedge fund is _defined_ by the class of investor it aims at (institutional and/or qualified investors) - everything else is variable - hedge funds are diverse in almost all other dimensions (although some things are common e.g. 2 and 20).

Returning back to the original point:

"You could swap out VC funds with hedge funds and the article would pretty much be the same."

Very true. The variation within the hedge fund industry is more than the variation between a VC fund and any average hedge fund. IMHO 90% of the article applies to hedge fund investors. The issues of the 2% management fee, the human factors of the fund managers, and the issues to do with transparency (black box) are all relevant to many hedge funds.

The only reason I am answering you is because I hate seeing the standard misconceptions about hedge funds being promulgated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think the binary nature of the VC model is a big part of the problem. I don't know what the alternative's going to look like (crowd-funding?) but right now we have a two-caste system. There are "the funded" and the cold and hungry. The inside and the outside. Losers and winners selected before a single one of either side has had an opportunity to accomplish much of anything. There are a lot of things that could be said about this model, but I think it's pretty clear that it's _not_ good for technology. As we see, most of this bubble is in "social media" VC darlings with mediocre leadership and MBA culture... and still little investment is going into Real Technology startups founded by actual engineers.

A VC cash infusion puts someone from one category into the other immediately. Someone goes from being (in terms of VC-istan social status) a beggar to a baronet in an afternoon. It's really an all-or-nothing game being played. Making it a million times worse is that VCs usually talk to each other about the deals they're making, which means that one VC's opinion influences the multitude. If there were more independence among VC decisions, we'd see an order of magnitude more good startups getting funded.

I think VCs tend to get distracted by their kingmaking powers as well. It's no longer about delivering the best returns for their client. It's about using that magic wand to be "cool" and minting the _right_ baronets, the ones who will use the press access and social status they get from being Funded to make that VC (individually) seem more stylish. Like Tyrion Lannister, they just (::sniff::) want to be loved.

<comment><USER21> If this is what you or anyone else reading this worries about when they go to sleep at night I strongly suggest you start a business that is bootstrappable instead of the next social network.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's easy to bash projects that fail. Wall Street is stuck in this place where they keep investing in the same boring business they have been for decades. They set unreal expectations, that cause firms to fudge numbers, leading to bail outs. Wall Street is short sighted and doesn't look at the big picture. Hell, if I was part of the largest (corporate) welfare class as well, I would bash failed ventures as well.

Fortunately, I am not tied to group think, so I can be as creative as I would like to be. VC's are great. They take chances, and are willing to invest in things that are more than likely to fail than be successful. Discovery is the ultimate reward, and I am more than happy to lose money so long as it leads to a discovery that helps society as a whole.

VC's allow for experimentation, and even if the experiment fails, lessons are always learned. It's amazing how narrow minded business people are. Personally, I feel that knowledge gained is priceless and far outweighs short term profits. Thank you VC's for taking chances and for willing to think outside the box.

TL;DR: Knowledge is the ultimate return on investment.

<comment><USER15> Sorry but this argument is some combination of naive, inane and/or b.s. VCs are financial investors and their investors (the LPs like Kaufmann) who give them money are expecting a return. Discovery, social good, changing the world and other euphemisms don't cut it for them as that is not what they are sold. They are sold a story of high risk, high reward, and per these #s, that was not what was generated.

TL;DR: Until pension funds and endowments are happy to be compensated in rainbows and hugs, returns are the only thing that matter.

<comment><USER19> Ironically enough it looks like you are just as wrong as GP.

"The Kauffman Foundation was created to encourage entrepreneurship"

[http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/05/07/how- venture...](http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/05/07/how-venture- capital-is-broken/)</comment></comment></comment>


My Apple ][ Tribute - <AUTHOR> http://ceklog.kindel.com/2017/04/17/my-apple-tribute/ <comment><USER2> Nice. How many of us started on these machines?

You should get your disks imaged.

:D</comment>


JavaScript fetch, retry upon failure - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/ycmjason/javascript-fetch-retry-upon-failure-2kj3 <comment><USER2> I much prefer and recommend using axios over fetch, and it has a retry plugin you can use globally or only for custom clients.

[https://medium.com/@shahata/why-i-wont-be-using-fetch-api- in...](https://medium.com/@shahata/why-i-wont-be-using-fetch-api-in-my- apps-6900e6c6fe78)

[https://github.com/softonic/axios-retry](https://github.com/softonic/axios- retry)</comment>


OnLive - Cloud Computing meets video games - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/06/Thoughts-on-OnLive

<comment><USER2> > Normally, I'm happy to download at around 150k/sec!

Is he serious? Is this the actual broadband speeds in most of the US?</comment>


Ada Lovelace Day - <AUTHOR> http://findingada.com/ <comment><USER2> Lovelace's Leap: <http://blog.jgc.org/2011/09/lovelaces-leap.html>

<comment><USER3> I was just about to ask if this was one of your projects.

<comment><USER2> Ada Lovelace Day?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Also interesting for Ada Lovelace Day is Sydney Padua's free iPad app: [http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/lovelace- babbage/id459405731?...](http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/lovelace- babbage/id459405731?mt=8)

</comment><comment><USER4> today on adafruit i'm helping limor fried (first female engineer on the cover of WIRED) with 24 hours of posts with cool women doing great stuff in the world of making, engineering, science and more. she also has 10% off everything in the store to encourage giving the gift of electronics to spark imagination - <http://www.adafruit.com/blog/category/random/ald/>

enjoy...

</comment><comment><USER5> Hmm, they've changed the date. It has "always" 24 of March.

Drama provided: [http://blog.findingada.com/blog/2011/03/03/ada-lovelace- day-...](http://blog.findingada.com/blog/2011/03/03/ada-lovelace- day-7-october-2011/#comment-32374)

</comment><comment><USER6> I applaud the day, but I wish the website made it more obvious who Ada Lovelace is. I have a vague idea because I'm in the same industry, but I doubt the audience that this day is truly intended for -- the many girls and women out there who don't see the sciences and engineering as a female career -- know off the top of their head. Even going into the About page, her bio is very small.

I want to tweet/share this link but am afraid most people will click on it and go "What the?". So I'll just send the wikipedia entry on her instead.

<comment><USER6> Also, this line should be fixed in the bio page (which takes two clicks from the homepage to find):

[http://findingada.com/about-finding-ada/who-was-ada- lovelace...](http://findingada.com/about-finding-ada/who-was-ada-lovelace/) >>The Analytical Engine remained a vision, until Lovelace's notes became one of the critical documents to inspire Alan Turning's work on the first modern computers in the 1940s.</comment></comment>


Online Job for Freelancers - <AUTHOR> What is the best freelancing site online and the rate you would be hired is higher? Other than upwork. <comment><USER2> [https://weworkremotely.com/categories/remote-programming- job...](https://weworkremotely.com/categories/remote-programming-jobs) may have some remote freelance that fit your criteria

</comment><comment><USER3> Not Toptal</comment>


Keep your job for five years, get $50,000 - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/08/smallbusiness/bonus/ <comment><USER2> "SIB is Schneider's third company. Now 30 years old, he started his first business, a retail mobile phone company, when he was 18... [In] November of 2008... SIB was born."

The average period of ownership for his prior two companies was under 4.5 years, given that he took a break in between ("to learn to kiteboard, traveling to the Dominican Republic, Panama, Israel and Mexico"). One was sold, no word on the other.

He's asking employees to stick with a job longer than he EVER has.

And he's asking them to have faith that, if he sells again, the new owner will respect this bonus policy.

I'd have zero faith in this. But then, unemployment being what it is, I probably wouldn't quit, either.

<comment><USER3> I don't see that being a problem if there's a signed contract. It would be like any other liability if the company is sold.

<comment><USER4> Nope, a contract wouldn't help if he did an asset sale, gave himself a dividend, and then shut down shop.

They should get the funds placed in escrow.

<comment><USER5> When the startup I worked for was acquired, I got a retention bonus dangled in front of me as an incentive to stick around; one of the terms of the contract is that if I am laid off or if the company has a change of control, then the entire bonus gets paid off immediately.

Of course, I am confident that no matter what happens, the acquiring company will have the cash lying around to pay off my bonus. A small consulting firm... not so much. Regardless of the contract terms, the firm can always declare bankruptcy, in which case the employees expecting their $50K payout can stand in line with all the other creditors.

Yeah, escrow sounds like a good idea for a case like this. (Would escrow be enough to shield the money in case of bankruptcy? My Google-fu is not helping.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yikes. What could possibly go wrong?

Employees will see this as a deferred bonus. Applying to myself, let's say I make it to 4 years and am fired "with cause", maybe I had one too many sick days, before the fifth year. Maybe at 11 years and 10 months. That is going to be irritating.

But the other thing is that employees will factor it into their perception of compensation. At the end of 5 years after the payout, unless there is something new put in place, or a $10k raise, it's going to seem like a wage cut at that point. That issue needs to be considered, anticipated, and addressed.

Another problem is it likely knocks you into a new tax bracket that year, and possible kills off some subsidy you were getting with the new health care system so now you have to pay the full premiums, and various other similar issues, so all together it could end up being a bit less than one would get with it spread out over 5 years.

Rather than a $250,000 one time bonus at 25 years, which may or may not be possible since it's unlikely this is going to be set up in a trust account, it would be better to see a tax deferred, legally guaranteed pension plan set up and funded. In 25 years $250,000 is going to be a lot less than it is now, in a retirement investment account it has the opportunity to grow.

But, on the other hand, perhaps many people don't think in terms of retirement or taxes these days and are impressed by what seem to be large numbers and lottery payouts. If that's the case, then perhaps this is a more effective incentive than retirement benefits.

<comment><USER7> My interpretation of the article was not that they would get a one time bonus of $250,000, but that they would get $50,000 every five years for a total of $250k after 25 years.

I agree with your other points, though.

<comment><USER6> Hm, that's a good point and would be a better system than what I was interpreting it to be since there wouldn't be the gut feeling of a wage loss after 5 years.

BTW, I should clarify I'm not intrinsically opposed at all to anything in the article, I'm just pondering about the design of the system and its potential advantages and drawbacks compared to other possible incentive systems.

Ultimately such human incentive plans are unpredictable in advance of being first done and thus the proof is in the pudding, it will be an interesting experiment to see carried through and see what the results are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's interesting how it talks about how employees aren't loyal to companies, I think a lot of this is because most companies don't show much loyalty to their employees. Although it seems more likely in start ups.

When companies show loyalty to their staff and not lay them off at the first sign of trouble, really think about compensation (so that employees don't have to consider changing jobs as the only way to get a pay rise) then they may see more loyalty from their employees.

<comment><USER9> Loyalty is for people, not abstract entities. Notions of being loyal to a company are a management invention designed to control employees, nothing more.

<comment><USER10> Couldn't disagree more, and I would have thought HN would be one of the few places not to see that view. With startups the founders and early employees often (not always) see their company/product(s) very fondly, the natural response to having created something yourself if you care about it.

And it doesn't have to be a startup, it can be any job that you become attached to. I assume it's a mix of pride in what you have achieved and the parenting instinct.

Your suggestion is insulting to many, many people who really do care about what they are working on.

<comment><USER11> It's great that you're caring about the things that you do, but what's a corporation's primary goal? _increase shareholder equity_

 __Especially __, I would think, in companies that received millions of dollars of investment from outside sources (VCs). (In exchange for amounts of control by those same investors)

Pride of creation is one thing, but I would caution you against using this as a blinder: the corporation is not (and can not legally be) loyal to you. [Edit: unless you provide more shareholder equity then the next person... and then only until the person who increases shareholder equity more than you comes along]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Slightly unrelated:

CNN needs to work on their "in article" link placement (don't really know what it's called). I took a screenshot in case it's different for other users.

<http://i40.tinypic.com/nxt81.jpg>

I re-read that section twice trying to make sense of it...

<comment><USER13> I saw the same thing and was also confused. It looks like a section heading, so I went through trying to find the explanation of who was sleeping with whom in this company...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Apple used to have a sabbatical; at five years, you got six paid weeks off.

Well, it's not 50K, on the other hand it was surprising how many people hung on until five years, took their six weeks off (often including vacation), then quit.

It seemed to get rid of dead wood. I'm still not sure why.

<comment><USER15> _It seemed to get rid of dead wood. I'm still not sure why._

My guess would be that, those people who were no longer growing at Apple, after six consecutive weeks off, filling their mind with things other than working at Apple, realized they had stagnated and figured out something else to do. It's much easier to have perspective on a situation after spending a significant period of time away from it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sounds a lot like stock options, but without the stock, and a much steeper "cliff" than the classic vesting schedule.

I wonder how many people will stay 5 years, collect the (one-time) payout, then leave shortly thereafter?

<comment><USER17> That's kind of the point, to get them to stay for 5 years. It's an extra $10,000 per year in pay that is only payable if they stay 5 years. Most people leave for better pay, this mitigates that and will not always have to be paid.

If they stay til 5 years and then leave after getting the cheque that's an extra couple of years. It's also a major negotiating point on salary raises. (eg. An employee of 4 years is more worried about the 50K than rocking the boat for an extra 10K raise).

This offer like most perks is cleverly constructed to make an employee who is about to leave stay and think he is getting one over on the company by leaving the day after he gets his $50,000. (Which most employees won't actually do because they aren't sharks)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Many of my coworkers have been with the company for 5 years or more. In many cases the reason for this is that they do not have many employment options because they are borderline incompetent.

</comment><comment><USER19> Get it in writing and make sure it can't be taken away. Google had a leave policy after 5 years of tenure that they yanked during the great shrinking of 2008-9. You could go off for something like 9 months and your options would continue to vest. I think maybe even your health insurance stayed active, too. Then you could come back and keep on going.

Apparently they had a problem with people taking leave and then never coming back. Instead of fixing the actual problem (people not wanting to return -- wonder why...), they took away the benefit.

This was pretty crappy for those of us who were pretty close to it, or who had earned it and hadn't scheduled it yet.

</comment><comment><USER20> probably won't work.

there is no real trust in employment...to a lot of people they'd just see it as an added incentive for the boss to fire you at the end of 4th year.

<comment><USER21> I absolutely would expect it. There's no way I'd believe they'd see that sum of money and think, "Yup, it's worth it."

Companies that DO pay me what I'm worth do so at the time, not a year later. And certainly not 5 years later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm not really a fan of these game theory-style targets, they just bring out the worst in people. Being an employee at a business for a long time should be the result of an excellent environment, not from being bribed with a long term financial milestone.

<comment><USER23> I didn't see this in the comments above, but the whole time I'm thinking to myself: 50k at the 40% bonus tax rate == 30k. That's still nice, but that's significantly less than if they just paid you that over the course of 5 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's just another form of stock options except cash always sounds better if the stock is going nowhere or your company doesn't have any stock to give. It's also an approximate 10% yearly bonus held for 5 years. I would rather have the bonus up front instead of the carrot on the string deal.

</comment><comment><USER25> That's not very different from stock with a vesting point, right? Except the amount you gain is predetermined.

</comment><comment><USER26> I read this as: "you get an automatic $10k/yr pay cut at 5 years".

</comment><comment><USER27> I guess it makes sense if you have been there for, say, three years that you then stay an extra two years (you didn't already plan on) before seeking a job elsewhere. Considering that any other job would have to give you 25000 more, staying is properly the best offer.

But really outside of that situation it wouldn't seem as an attractive offer. It is not difficult to imagine some other company offering you 10k more especially if you are hitting the first big milestone of 3-5 year professional experience (even if that measure is, at best, bullshit).

<comment><USER28> 10K extra a year would financially be more expensive to invest than 50K five years later.

<comment><USER29> ? The future value of money is discounted by inflation and the opportunity cost of failing to invest.

According to this inflation calculator for US, you would lose about $1000 just from inflation if you deferred your bonus for the five years from 2005 to 2010.

"What cost $10000 in 2005 would cost $11067.95 in 2010."

<http://www.westegg.com/inflation/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Will keep all the useless staff

What do you do to keep the good ones that could get a job that pays $11K/year more and so in 5 years they would have $55K ?

<comment><USER31> There is something to be said about a lumpsum payment of $50k that is psychologically more attractive to people than the same about of money amortized over a period of 60 months. Extra 11k a year comes down to an extra $900 a month, which for a lot of people is not as psychologically impactful as getting a $50k payment. Smart strategy by the company.

<comment><USER32> Unfortunately, getting the $50K as a lump sum could have negative tax implications. If it pushes you into a higher tax bracket, you could end up paying more tax than if you got a little bit each year. Plus, you'll have the disappointment of seeing much less than $50K after all the taxes (income taxes, social security, etc.) are withheld.

Also, by having to wait five years for the money, you're giving up any possible investment gains and income that you could have made if you'd had the money earlier.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure how easy this would be legally, but they might be able to set it up to drop most of the $50k into the employee's 401k.

The employer + employee contribution limits are currently $49k/year, so even if the employee is contributing their $16.5k max, you could mitigate a hell of a lot of the taxes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This sounds like a ghetto interpretation of a pension.

</comment><comment><USER34> I wonder what the value of 50,000 dollars five years from now is in terms of today's dollars considering inflation ,another five rounds of QE and a probable economic crisis.

Perhaps my odds are better if I just bought $2000 worth of silver and did absolutely nothing else.</comment>


Apple Watch can detect arrhythmia with 97% accuracy, study says - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/11/apples-watch-can-detect-an-abnormal-heart-rhythm-with-97-accuracy-ucsf-study-says/ <comment><USER2> With due respect to the Cardiogram developers (hi guys) as a doctor I really can't see a huge amount of value in this - my patients who present to emergency departments with paroxysmal AF are all anticoagulanted or on rate control and there has only been one instance in the last 3 years and many thousand patients when someone has presented to emergency and we have had to run through the full spectrum of echo -> anticoagulante -> cardiovert.

To the founders: what do you see as being he end game here? Are you just looking for validation (of the concept in itself, not the app- I use it on my watch)? Is the US market so different that this is particularly useful and cost effective for detection? Do you see this as eventually displaying early warning in the instance of an early warning?

Thanks and I don't mean to denegrate your efforts, but I do see lots of Consumer Med tech as solving a problem that really isn't creating value (i.e. Proliferation of devices,wearables and algorithms that proclaim the ability to help with X but are really marginally helpful at best) and I'm wondering if I'm missing something about the actual medical benefit, or whether what I feel like is true- that they aren't after being a medical device at all but instead are chasing the consumer dollars by making medical claims

<comment><AUTHOR> Circulation published a nice review this week on the rationale for atrial fibrillation screening: circ.ahajournals.org/content/135/19/1851.full?ijkey=StzSPk8eljGaP2G&keytype=ref

The main reason is that 10% of strokes are associated with undiagnosed atrial fibrillation. The patients who present to the emergency room are a pretty biased sample--for one, they're experiencing symptoms. To prevent strokes, we need to have a way to catch AF in asymptomatic people.

Part of the challenge here is that episodes of atrial fibrillation can be infrequent--in CRYSTAL-AF, for example, it took 84 days from randomization to first episode--and existing monitoring devices like Holters or Zio patches are only worn 24 hours to 2 weeks. The great thing about Apple Watch and other consumer wearables is that they're worn for months or years. That means if we can prove the algorithm is accurate, we can get higher time-coverage than a traditional medical device, catch more AF early, and prevent those 10% of strokes described in the Circulation article.

<comment><USER3> Hmm, this makes me think personal insurance will at some point in the not too distant future give hefty premium hikes to those who refuse to wear a 24-7 monitoring device; as vehicle insurance in the UK is doing with monitoring devices (cameras/accelerometer-type devices).

<comment><USER4> Pretty sure Obamacare wouldn't allow that, but they could start subsidizing devices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> (Cardiogram Co-Founder here)

Let me know if any of you have questions on the study, app, or deep learning algorithm. My colleague Avesh wrote a post with a little more technical detail here: [https://blog.cardiogr.am/applying-artificial-intelligence- in...](https://blog.cardiogr.am/applying-artificial-intelligence-in-medicine- our-early-results-78bfe7605d32)

<comment><USER5> This is really exciting! Quick question for you.

Have you experimented at all with using the Apple Watch to measure blood pressure?

I have done some reading that suggests the optical sensor could measure blood pressure with some accuracy, but that Apple is hesitant to release it as a feature due to regulatory and accuracy concerns. It's my #1 wished for feature.

<comment><USER6> Measuring blood pressure (non-invasively) requires applying pressure to the artery and determining at what point that pressure obstructs blood flow. That would be a) challenging to do with a watch, and b) really annoying to the user.

<comment><USER7> Not entirely true, there is a clever method that works without (pulse transit time measurement). You measure the electrical signal of the heartbeat, and the acoustic signal, and take advantage of the fact that the acoustic signal propagates slower in blood than the electrical signal propagates through nerves. This difference is directly related to blood pressure! I don't know if you can get away with one measurement on the wrist + some clever calibration, or if you need two points (e.g. one close to the heart). If you take two measurements, you can apparently also calculate the aortal pressure, which is different from the pressure in your arm, and hard to obtain non-invasively. (I'm not an expert so I'm sorry if I got something slightly wrong :-) .)

There was a startup that worked on using this, but they failed (due to financial but also regulatory reasons), and then remotely bricked all their sold devices...

I really wish someone would develop this further. Even if it is not as accurate as a normal measurement, the implications would be huge. There are so many people running around with hypertension who have no idea. I also don't see a risk in false positives in this case, since in principle everybody is recommended to have their blood pressure checked - false positives who go to the doctor are then just like people who read an article and go to the doctor, and are weeded out there. False negatives might be a problem - but if you don't advertise it as a blood pressure measurement tool, but just implement it as an additional warning in a smart watch, you'd reduce the false sense of security people would get if it didn't work properly.

<comment><USER8> Newer Chinese "Fitbits" promise that. But they only use an optical system and it doesn't work for me even after entering a baseline.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Accuracy is a useless metric for something like this. If you have binary data filled with 97% zeros (ie most of the time it is not arrhythmia) you can use the sophisticated machine learning technique of:

      if(TRUE) return(0)

This will give you 97% accuracy.

EDIT:

I just read the headline earlier. Now after checking:

> _" The study involved 6,158 participants recruited through the Cardiogram > app on Apple Watch. Most of the participants in the UCSF Health eHeart study > had normal EKG readings. However, 200 of them had been diagnosed with > paroxysmal atrial fibrillation (an abnormal heartbeat). Engineers then > trained a deep neural network to identify these abnormal heart rhythms from > Apple Watch heart rate data."_

So 1 - 200/6158 = 0.9675219. My method performs just as well as theirs if we round to the nearest percent. This is ridiculous.

<comment><USER10> From the commments on the article itself:

 _Cardiogram engineer here. 97% accuracy refers to a c-statistic (area under the ROC curve) of 0.9740. An example operating point would be 98% sensitivity with 90% specificity.

These important details are often lost in the news. You can some more details on our findings in our blog post: _

[https://blog.cardiogr.am/applying-artificial-intelligence- in...](https://blog.cardiogr.am/applying-artificial-intelligence-in-medicine- our-early-results-78bfe7605d32)

<comment><USER11> Just wondering, with such an unbalanced dataset (5,958 negatives, 200 positives), wouldn't have been fairer to use average precision (area under the precision-recall curve) instead of ROC-AUC?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> We need to see the full, published study and its methods (particularly around recruitment and exclusion criteria) before we can judge it properly. Until then, the presented statistics about accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity potentially bear no relation to real world usage, if the cohort and data quality were tightly controlled, as you'd expect for an initial study involving the makers of the algorithm. A few other thoughts:

1\. Even at 98% sensitivity and 90% specificity [0], which I don't think would hold up with real world usage in casual, healthy users, if AFib has a prevalence of roughly 2-3% [1] then by a quick back of the envelope calculation a positive test result is still 5× more likely to be a false positive than a true positive. With those odds, I don't think many cardiologists are going to answer the phone. You'd still need an EKG to diagnose AFib.

2\. There is huge variance among people's real world use of wearable sensors, and also among the quality of the sensors. (Imagine people that wear the watch looser, sweat more, have different skin, move it around a lot, etc.) You'd likely need to do an open, third-party validation study of the accuracy of the sensors in the Apple Watch before you can expect doctors to use the data. My understanding is that the Apple Watch sensors are actually pretty good compared to other wearable sensors, but I don't know of any rigorous study of that compares them to an EKG.

3\. Obviously, this is only for AFib. AFib is a sweet corner case in terms of extrapolating from heart rate to arrhythmia, because it's a rapid & irregular rhythm that probably contains some subpatterns in beats that are hard for humans to appreciate. As others—including Cardiogram themselves [2]—have pointed out previously, many serious arrhythmias are not possible to detect with only an optical heart rate sensor.

[0]: [https://blog.cardiogr.am/applying-artificial-intelligence- in...](https://blog.cardiogr.am/applying-artificial-intelligence-in-medicine- our-early-results-78bfe7605d32)

[1]: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24966695](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24966695)

[2]: [https://blog.cardiogr.am/what-do-normal-and-abnormal- heart-r...](https://blog.cardiogr.am/what-do-normal-and-abnormal-heart- rhythms-look-like-on-apple-watch-7b33b4a8ecfa#fabf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Full journal publication is coming--as you likely know, the system doesn't always move as fast as we'd like.

> quick back of the envelope calculation a positive test result is still 5× > more likely to be a false positive than a true positive.

For what it's worth, about 10% of people who come in to the cardiology clinic experiencing symptoms are diagnosed with an abnormal heart rhythm. So even a 20% positive predictive value would be an improvement over the status quo.

As mentioned below, you can use other risk factors (like CHA2DS2-Vasc, or even simply age) to raise the pre-test probability, and thereby control the false positive rate.

As a meta-point, I do think we let the perfect be the enemy of the good in medicine, and that potentially scares people away who could otherwise make positive contributions. For example, many of the most common screening methods in use today are simple, linear models with c-statistics below 0.8. You can build a far-from-perfect system, and still improve dramatically over how people receive healthcare today.

My overall message to machine learning practitioners sitting on the sidelines would be: please join our field. The status quo in medicine is much more primitive than we have been led to believe, and your skills can very literally save lives.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for replying! I'll certainly be looking forward to the publication.

>about 10% of people who come in to the cardiology clinic experiencing symptoms are diagnosed with an abnormal heart rhythm

OK, but I'd be more careful about staying apples to apples in your comparisons; your app is about asymptomatic AFib. So how many of those people going to the cardiology clinic had undiagnosed AFib; for how many of those would a new diagnosis of AFib have changed the plan of care; etc. Kind of like robbiep was saying, I would be interested in actual added value from the larger perspective.

Totally appreciate your point about perfect being the enemy of the good. The danger is that these semi-medical wearables currently straddle a strange zone between medical and consumer use. The inevitable marketing strategy is to co- opt the positive reputation of medical products while acknowledging none of the pitfalls of consumer products. Most of the screening methods you bring up are used by a doctor on symptomatic patients with a suggestive history, and only as a partial component of clinical judgement. The way Cardiogram seems to make the most money, on the other hand, is to sell the product to asymptomatic, casual users. (Furthermore, CHA2DS2-Vasc costs 30 seconds of talking or reading a medical record, not $700 in Apple products.) So you're inevitably running up against some doubts among physicians [0].

And finally, I agree that more machine learning practitioners should join medical research. I hope the field works to set more reasonable expectations, however, as in: ML will solve very specific subtasks in clinical reasoning (as in the diabetic retinopathy study [1]). Instead, the headlines usually ratchet that up to "AI will replace radiology/cardiology/$specialty in X years." That tends to hurt the people currently in the trenches, since their contribution in bringing about practical, incremental change is diminished. The top answer of this Quora thread [2] has a good discussion of the many dimensions of the problem.

[0]: [https://twitter.com/Abraham_Jacob/status/860119573915287552](https://twitter.com/Abraham_Jacob/status/860119573915287552)

[1]: [http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2588763](http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2588763)

[2]: [https://www.quora.com/Why-is-machine-learning-not-more- widel...](https://www.quora.com/Why-is-machine-learning-not-more-widely-used- for-medical-diagnosis)

<comment><USER13> The diabetic retinopathy study (and the somewhat recent stanford dermatology study) were the first ML studies I had read about that blew me away in terms of their sensitivities and specificities, as compared to real doctors. Your comment on specific subtasks is perfect, and I try and use these examples when discussing ML with fellow medical students.

However, like you said, the medical field is very slow, and has quite a lot of inertia to maintain the status quo. Unless insurance companies refuse to compensate practitioners that don't use these tools, I fear that few, if any, in the healthcare field will opt to use such techniques.

And finally: How should someone with both a medical and computer science background get into ML?

<comment><USER12> I found the Statistical Learning self paced course on Stanford's site to be a great formal intro to ML algorithms implemented in R, and it is taught by the inimitable Hastie and Tibshirani: [http://statlearning.class.stanford.edu](http://statlearning.class.stanford.edu)

This post on ML in medicine is a pretty good overview of everything that has been going on recently and the nuances often lost in the current hype: [https://lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com/2016/11/27/do- compute...](https://lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com/2016/11/27/do-computers- already-outperform-doctors/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For those who's going to mention Bayes' Theorem regarding medical tests, here's a link to save you a Google search

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem#Drug_testing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem#Drug_testing)

</comment><comment><USER15> If I am reading this correctly, there were 6,158 patents with ~200 true positives, so approximately 3% of the population. 98.04% sensitivity (recall) and 90.2% specificity (%true negatives) leads to...

~4 false positives for each true positive.

That isn't bad, all things considered, but still a long way to go.

</comment><comment><USER16> They aren't clear what they mean by "97% accuracy". Does that mean 97% of people with arrhythmia are correctly diagnosed, or 97% of people are correctly diagnosed or not-diagnosed? If it's the latter, it's not very helpful at all. The number of people in the general population with arrhythmia is significantly less than 3%, so if this Apple Watch test says you have arrhythmia it is far more likely to be a false positive than a true positive.

<comment><USER17> No, accuracy doesn't tell us anything about usefulness. If the test is cheap and it brings in people for a better test and thus saves lives it is useful. The only real danger is if people decide that since the watch says there is nothing wrong so they can ignore other symptoms.

It is something like chest pain: most of the time chest pain is not a symptom of a heart attack, but it is best indicator we have so you go to the emergency room when you have chest pain. Doctors there can evaluate your situation.

<comment><USER18> On a related note, I had a very rare stroke last week, only symptom: headache for 3 days. The doctor sent me for a CT scan without any idea of what to look for. The only clue: it was not a migraine because I missed any neurological anomaly.

On the other hand, stroke prevalence is rare, 1.3% for men, and generally don't look like mine, and my kind is 2% of all strokes, it would have been completely weird to suspect it with such a low probability and such a non- specific evidence.

Long story short, I almost got sent home with an aspirin while I had an extensive cerebral veinous thrombosis.

<comment><USER19> Having spent a couple of days in a stroke ward over Christmas, the low prevalence of strokes should _never_ be used as a reason not to test where possible.

I suspect a lot of people don't understand how serious and crippling - mentally and physically - a bad stroke can be.

If you're lucky a bad stroke kills you. If you're not lucky you lose a good part of your brain and motor function.

In practice this means you can be left unable to move some or all of your limbs, unable to talk, unable to hear, unable to understand what's happening around you, and perhaps unable to see.

It's _no exaggeration_ to say that it can turn life into a nightmare.

Anything that makes this less common and less likely is a good thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've arrhythmia and I can see it on my Garmin watch by looking at the data, as well as .. my phone.

It doesn't help much though, because I don't know if its good or bad (well, actually I know but not because of the watch data). Doctors are still needed for this, and generally that includes a bunch of controlled tests and people listening to your heart while also gathering data (similarly to the watch albeit with a more precise apparatus)

I guess it can help to tell people they might wanna see a doctor if they haven't though.

</comment><comment><USER21> Probably want to update the title, which still refers to the more general 'arrhythmia'. It sounds like Cardiogram's work is mostly focused on afib?

<comment><AUTHOR> First validation study is on atrial fibrillation, although we've had users who have discovered other arrhythmias through the app. Here's on example of a person who discovered supraventricular tachycardia: [https://blog.cardiogr.am/my-apple-watch-saved-my- life-a61256...](https://blog.cardiogr.am/my-apple-watch-saved-my- life-a6125663b2bb)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm seeing more and more people wearing Apple watches and more similar PR stories like this.

I saw one story that talked about a guy whose car flipped and he was unable to reach his phone but thanks to his watch he was able to call for help.

</comment><comment><USER23> Despite all the caveats around this work, early detection is one of the reasons HR trackers are a great investment. You can't manage what you can't monitor

</comment><comment><USER24> the one question I have is - how much better is the DNN vs. just simple rhythm analysis, i.e. periodicity, etc.

</comment><comment><USER25> Always great to have percentages reported for a sample size <100.

<comment><USER26> ? I don't get that logic... And neither do half of my friends. The other 50% actually don't get it, either. But I did only ask <100 people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Am I the only one who thinks that 97% accuracy (1/30 chance of an error) is very bad in medical diagnosis?

At least I'd expect something like 99.9% accuracy (1/1000 chance of an error) when someone gives me my own heart diagnosis.

<comment><AUTHOR> You'll find most most medical algorithms pretty disappointing. :)

For example, the algorithm in implantable cardioverter defibrillators generates unnecessary shocks in 1 in 6 patients. Its accuracy is getting worse over time: [http://www.reuters.com/article/us-untimely-jolts- idUSTRE70O7...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-untimely-jolts- idUSTRE70O7IP20110125)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is really great news but I wish it was actually available. The Apple Watch right now is largely useless.

It captures all of these health metrics but then does absolutely nothing with it. It really is desperate for some actual killer health use cases.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! You can use the Cardiogram app today to understand your heart rate data: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cardiogram/id1000017994?ls=1...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cardiogram/id1000017994?ls=1&mt=8)

We'll be incorporating these results into the app itself over time.

But as with anything in medicine... it's ready, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim... fire! :)</comment></comment>


Apple Sold 2 Million iPads In 59 Days - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/31/apple-sold-2-million-ipads-in-59-days/

<comment><USER2> Full Disclosure: I bought an iPad 2 days ago.

Interesting perspective: 2 million iPads in 60 days is roughly 33K/day. Google is activating 3x as many Android phones per day (and presumably growing).

An Android phone != an iPad but it makes you wonder what sales numbers will look like when we start seeing Dell tablets running Android (along with the other 5 big PC manufacturers)

As usual Apple has a huge head start, and like with the iPhone will have a 2nd generation iPad device out by the time we see any credible Android competition.

<comment><USER3> 1 Company selling 1 model is very different then 20 companies selling 40 different models with 5 different versions of OS.(and 20 different skins)

<comment><USER4> Right. There are two discussions to have here.

Company Success: Apple is clearly successful with those sales #s.

OS Success: It remains to be seen if the ugly/fragmented OS being sold by 20 different companies will kick the ass of the prettier/walled-garden OS sold by one company like it did with Computer OS's. If it does, it'd be sad to see it happen to Apple a second time.

I'd personally prefer to see Apple license the heck out of their OS's with stringent hardware requirements.

<comment><USER5> I'd be happy if they just made it legal to license it for use in an emulator. That would cover 99% of the use cases I have for running either of their os's (iPhone OS, OS X) on non-apple hardware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good for Apple. It's great to see a company make big jumps in the consumer market. There are too many "me too" companies that won't take a chance and invent the next big thing. Can someone talk Steve Jobs into building a consumer robot? Someone needs to kickstart this market.

<comment><USER7> I'd love to see how Apple would reinvent the car.

<comment><USER8> I can't find it now, but amidst the 3.3.1 kerfuffle someone blogged about what the iCar would be like. Here's what I remember from it:

If Apple made cars:

      * You'd only be able to drive them on Apple-certified roads
      * The cupholder would only accept a proprietary Apple cup
      * There would only be one pedal
      * You could have any color you want - provided it's brushed aluminium

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> No matter what you think about the device (and by extension Apple), these are impressive numbers.

</comment><comment><USER10> It seems a month ago there were 4000 iPad apps made and now there are 5000?

iPad is not the same gold-rush for app developers as the iPhone was, that's for sure.

<comment><USER11> I think this is because the ipad has a larger screen and thus you need to have more features (and longer dev cycle) on it or it will look empty. There is also the expectation of higher quality apps. Fart and other junk apps probably don't work very well because of this and thus the total app number is much lower.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, absolutely. Fart apps make sense on the iPhone - it's something you _always_ have with you and you can whip it out when you're with your friends and do some cute little gimmick that's deleted 2 minutes later after the $0.99 of value has been drained from it. iPad uses are for the most part much closer to a 'traditional computing' model.

<comment><USER13> Fart apps for the iPhone: Big red button in the center of the screen that says "fart." Cost: $0.99.

Fart apps for the iPad: An array of buttons labeled things like "squeeker" and "poot" and "low rumble" and "Shock and and Awe." Plus controls for volume, stereo center, and a time line editor for layering multi-channel, multi-event sequences. Cost: $4.99.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The TV Program Technow showed yesterday a school here in the Silicon Valley where each student got a iPad. They are now going to roll this program out to every student of this school beginning this upcoming school year. I am surprised how fast some schools are jumping on the technology and would not be surprised to see the iPad sales numbers to climb up even faster.

<comment><USER15> The enterprise remote tools will work well for schools (e.g. remote disable). It might be very tempting to start a company to build a library of single topic lessons (audio, video, text, and maybe some simulation) on a variety of subjects. License it to schools for a yearly fee.

Plus, you have the added bonus of no camera so you won't get sued for that :)

<comment><USER5> Actually the educational technology sector is well established, most of the large textbook companies already have programs for flowing their content into multiple application formats, and have well established sales teams that understand the market. Not to say that there aren't opportunities in that space, but you are going to have to provide unique value if you want to be competitive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> That's all about to change once Google gets their low-cost tablet out. You can already get an APad, but it's not very big. Another problem is that Android apps only have a small form factor and aren't designed yet for the larger screens.

</comment><comment><USER17> Although my family members have the iPad bug, my major concern is what sort of impact these sales (plus next iPhone) are going to have on flash memory supplies/prices (short-term).</comment>


R programming for those coming from other languages - <AUTHOR> http://www.johndcook.com/R_language_for_programmers.html? <comment><USER2> Heavy R user here. When I was starting out, this: <http://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/Short-refcard.pdf> was a savior and goes well with this piece.

As others have mentioned, getting into the useful data structures and libraries is the next step here, because those are what makes R great. The book "R in a Nutshell" is a nice desktop reference, and the CRAN Task Views for your domain are a pretty helpful jumping off point: <http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/>

The R mailing list and Stack Overflow communities are also a tremendous resources.

<comment><USER3> While I agree on the R mailing list and StackOverflow (subscribe for r on the RSS feed) i would respectfully suggest that you ignore R in a Nutshell. While it does have some interesting worked examples and some good explanation, the book is essentially a commented version of the R introductory manuals.

The refcard is wonderful though. Personally, I found R bloggers really useful, just reading through all the articles is a nice way to learn the packages and tricks of the language (some of the code on the R help mailing list is also extremely useful here).

In terms of short, concise, wonderful books Data Manipulation with R is a favourite. Its only 150 pages, but it describes how to move your data from one form to another in the best and easiest ways. The SQL stuff and the regular expressions might already be known to the people here, but some of the material on dates, times and general reshaping of data was extremely useful (to me at least). R is not strong in this area, IMO and its nice to see some guidance in this area, as R packages often have funky data shape requirements.

<comment><USER4> _While it does have some interesting worked examples_

This sounds good!

 _and some good explanation,_

Also sounds good.

 _the book is essentially a commented version of the R introductory manuals._

The question that comes to mind: exactly how good are the comments?

<comment><USER3> They are reasonably good. Its definitely not a bad book, but its not one I would recommend as almost all of the information it gives is in the manuals. If you have programming experience, you're better off reading the manuals. I didn't when I started learning R, but even then I felt somewhat cheated by the reams and reams of man pages included with a text which I had paid for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While this looks like a good basic article for programmers learning R I recommend moving onto The R Inferno: <http://www.burns- stat.com/pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf> The R Inferno touches on do's and don't within R programming. The burns-stat.com website is also a good reference for R tutorials as well.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for that link. That's chock full of good tips for working in R, and definitely addressed at least a couple things I spent a while debugging.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > It is sometimes possible to use = for assignment, though I don't understand > when this is and is not allowed.

Little bit of interesting history on this was just a google away: [http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2008/12/use-equals-or- ar...](http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2008/12/use-equals-or-arrow-for- assignment.html)

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure that post is 100% correct. Reading it gave me a bad feeling that it missed something I'd read in the past. See here for example ...

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1741820/assignment- operat...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1741820/assignment-operators-in- r-and)

The = operator is only a "top level" construct, while <\- can be used anywhere. Now exactly what those limitations are may be a bit subtle (the OP's point), so I also just use <-.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> R is so ugly. Octave / Matlab is supposed to have inconsistent syntax and behavior but at least wrt matrices it seems much cleaner. So, is there a language (like R or Matlab) that's beautiful and well thought out? Mathematica?

</comment><comment><USER10> There's a new book that seems to be about best practices for writing software in R. It's called 'The Art of R Programming'. I got a review copy but I haven't read it much yet, but the premise is that the book actually focuses on R programming techniques as opposed to introducing statistics using R.

</comment><comment><USER11> Useless article: he didn't even bother to explain data frames, one of the most used data structures in R.</comment>


Practical Tips on Writing a Book from 23 Authors  - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.plos.org/neurotribes/2011/06/02/practical-tips-on-writing-a-book-from-22-brilliant-authors/ <comment><USER2> I've been planning to write a book for some time now too. I wish the author had gotten into more of the process of how to get a contract and actually get published. Nevertheless I think anyone in the process of writing a book could get some gems from this article.

<comment><AUTHOR> Start here: <http://agencygatekeeper.blogspot.com/> and here: <http://queryshark.blogspot.com> . You'll have about a day's reading.</comment></comment>


Documenting the Macintosh: About 'Inside Macintosh' - <AUTHOR> http://www.storiesofapple.net/interview-with-caroline-rose.html <comment><USER2> This short interview was published in 2011. Why not use the correct title: "Documenting the Macintosh – An Interview with Caroline Rose"? I suspect more than a few HN readers know of her.</comment>


Restoring for..in peak performance - <AUTHOR> http://benediktmeurer.de/2017/09/07/restoring-for-in-peak-performance/ <comment><USER2> Maybe the title should append "in V8" so it's clear this is for the JS Engine

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm surprised that for...in is still relevant for modern versions of JS but it's really nice.

</comment><comment><USER4> The cycle continues. The sun goes up. The birds migrate. And the engineers continue depth-first optimizing arbitrary low-hanging fruit instead of the real performance bottlenecks.

<comment><USER5> > And the engineers continue depth-first optimizing arbitrary low-hanging > fruit instead of the real performance bottlenecks.

Can you explain what the "real performance bottlenecks" are in this case?</comment></comment>


WASM Builds of the Z3 SMT Solver - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cpitclaudel/z3.wasm <comment><USER2> There is a SAT solver (mine, actually :) ) that's also complied to WASM, and online:

[https://msoos.github.io/cryptominisat_web/](https://msoos.github.io/cryptominisat_web/)

<comment><USER3> Well done! I'm taking a course on SAT solvers [1], but it uses some lisp format and lets you input from a richer language (e.g. distinct, if-then-else, plus integers rather than just booleans), so I had to look up the conjunctive normal format in your app. The readme for this repo [2] sent me here [3]. Pretty simple format.

I love how fast your app is!

[1] [https://www.coursera.org/learn/automated-reasoning- sat/](https://www.coursera.org/learn/automated-reasoning-sat/)

[2] [https://github.com/msoos/cryptominisat](https://github.com/msoos/cryptominisat)

[3] [http://www.satcompetition.org/2009/format- benchmarks2009.htm...](http://www.satcompetition.org/2009/format- benchmarks2009.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I used Emscripten to make a browser-based STP query tool: [http://stp.github.io/live/](http://stp.github.io/live/) However our API is limited and this has led it to be not so useful and only show valid vs. invalid.

</comment><comment><USER5> 2018 (!)

<comment><USER6> Yah, so last year</comment></comment>


Boundless Informant: the NSA's secret tool to track global surveillance data - <AUTHOR> http://guardiannews.com/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-boundless-informant-global-datamining

<comment><USER2> Glad to see that the government finally understands that IP address does not equal identity. Now can we get copyright law updated to match?</comment>


Co-Founding a Startup - <AUTHOR> http://benbloch.posterous.com/co-founding-a-startup

<comment><USER2> I have been building something similar as a side project. <http://impromptudo.com>. (also an even less polished mobile version at <http://m.impromptudo.com>, but it should auto detect your mobile browser)

At one point you could post your own stuff, but was removed after some feedback and I just didn't have the critical mass to avoid users posting something to do, and not hear from anyone else and then deem my app useless.

Edit: Ha, just noticed I replied in the comments when the original post went up that I had something brewing for his startup idea.

<comment><USER3> Are you still actively working on this?

<comment><USER2> Define active. It's a side project. I'd say now I put in about 4 hours/week. I know it needs to be more, but life is busy.

But it generally flies itself. I'm pulling in events from several services, at about 400/day over the 12 "most active" cities in the US.

Right now my priorities are:

* Add more cities

* Improve data quality

* Improve mobile version (maybe android app)

* Add more filtering

* run google adwords campaign

And much more. Plenty of work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Would this pull event data from existing social networks like Facebook, foursquare etc?

<comment><USER5> Currently from foursquare. But we have some ideas we want to play with in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think this is a problem that's going to be solved more correctly via things like group messaging rather than a direct solution, but it's certainly an interesting problem to tackle.

<comment><USER7> Group messaging currently solves the problem, but as we become more complex and technology aware, other solutions will bloom to meet our growing necessities, imo.

<comment><USER6> Group messaging is certainly not an ideal solution to it, but I think it's probably better than any focused solution. It's one of those problems that any solution that is focused on solving that problem is useless far too often to ever take hold. The best solution to this is something that makes it easier to communicate with people -- not something that makes it easier to 'plan instant events'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Congrats and good luck.

</comment><comment><USER9> Godspeed!

</comment><comment><USER10> These guys are solid.</comment>