Ask HN: Have you made a profit mining Bitcoin? - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I'm interested in hearing people's experience mining bitcoin, especially if you've made a profit.
How much do you have to spend on hardware to keep up with network difficulty these days?
I'm currently considering a Group Buy of 38 330 MH/s USB ASIC Miners, and am concerned about rising network difficulty potentially preventing my recouping what I spend on the hardware: Miners, & Hubs.
I don't have thousands of dollars to spend on TH Miners which would seem to be able to outrun difficulty in the short term.
What are HN'ers experiences mining Bitcoins?
Thanks,
-C <comment><USER2> The best advice I ever received was over 2 years ago whilst on holiday in Canada. A dude there said that he'd spent $6000 CAD on mining equipment (GPUs) and had made a cool $15000 - but he said that he would have made more if he'd of just bought the coins.

Rewind to just over a year ago and I place a (pre)order for 5 ASIC miners (from Butterfly labs) for a total of $3250. When the things arrived, a year later, I was lucky that they were still profitable at the time (mid August) as the price of BTC had risen but decided to sell them on eBay for ~$3000 each because not only were they ridiculously loud and I had no where to put them but the difficulty was ~60 million and increasing (and it's now 148).

I was lucky enough to pay off my credit card and still have some left over with the money I made from selling the miners. Although I made a decent profit, I would have made a lot more if I'd of just bought the coins for the same value (as they've increased ten fold in the same period).

Now I've invested around half of my profits back into buying coins and so have finally taken the original advice onboard. This and the current market conditions make even the best mining options from Cointerra seem like a risky investment at this stage.

</comment><comment><USER3> Bought 2 FPGA miner rigs from BFL. One of their first customers to take that risk. Cost about 30 grand. Liquidated 2 of my 6 underperforming retirement funds to pay for it as I was unemployed at the time (yes I am a little crazy and obviously have no dependents).

I now have about 330 grand in BTC. After paying off the original investment (and then some) by selling off 1/3 my holdings when it was $230. I also paid off the upgrade to 3 ASIC mining rigs (4.5TH) which should ship... Imminently actually.

I also have a 6 figure developer job but Bitcoin has made me far more money so far (on paper) this past year.

I'm still bullish on it. Welcome to Internet Gold 2.0.

<comment><USER4> Good for you and your brass nuts, man. However, I think what you risked underscores the reason why small miners will never be profitable - small risk, small reward. Big risk big reward. Those with capital to invest will leverage, those with modest investments should not be expecting huge returns.

<comment><USER3> Thanks. I knew it was a pretty big risk at the time but I spent about 2 weeks obsessed with it and doing my homework. Pored over the source code, forums, docs, concepts etc. (it probably helped that I'm a programmer). By the time I was done with that "homework" it felt less like a risk and more like a sure thing... although BFL at the time was also a big risk.

It took MANY emails with Sonny and Josh over there, back and forth, before I felt comfortable forking over that amount of cash. (They ended up giving me a discount, too.) The tone of the emails and the seriousness and some voice calls helped reassure me a lot that they were serious. I don't think that aspect of it can be discounted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've mined bitcoins, and have made a reasonable profit (~20ish BTC or so?). I mined in the GPU days, and while I currently run a small ASIC miner (BFL Jalapeno), it will likely barely be profitable.

The considerable risks and costs of getting into modern ASIC mining make it pretty unattractive at the moment. Until that changes, I'd advise anyone with a profit motive against investing a lot in BTC mining.

If you're confident that Bitcoin will go much higher, and are willing to wait a long while for it to happen, maybe it still could be worth considering. If you just like the idea of Bitcoin, getting a little ASIC miner for fun is entirely respectable. On the grand scale of things, bitcoin is still just a curiousity, and it doesn't hurt to dabble.

<comment><USER6> With the rise of ASICs, the difficulty level is skyrocketing. I just picked up a Sapphire to play around with, but I'm not sure it'll ever break even.

<comment><USER7> I wonder if Litecoin mining is more profitable with GPUs?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yes. Having access to a few hundred computers that sit in computer labs all day mostly doing nothing, I used to fold proteins or search for Yeti. Now I mine.

But profit is kind of relative. I have made money. It is bankable, but I probably had more time in doing the initial setup than what I would have made if I had taken that same time and spent it doing something related to my primary job.

There is "Profit" there is "Revenue" and there is "a smart spend of my time". This met two of the three.

<comment><USER9> Even if those lab computers have GPUs, at current difficulty, whoever is paying the power bills is almost certainly paying more for the incremental electricity-use than the value of coins you're collecting.

So if you're doing this "now", you're not really making money from 'mining', but from theft. The mining is just obscuring the theft enough to allow it to continue. Perhaps there's some copper wiring or tubing on premises you could also take and resell while they're not looking?

<comment><USER8> As it happens they are in buildings where they are the primary heat source, and we first started protein folding to keep the CPU's over 50% so the room wouldn't freeze in the winter.

Students Remote access the desktops so they have to be always on, and they pop in and out at all hours of the day and night we did the math heating the room with PC's was cheaper than keeping the boiler on for the entire building.

Believe it or not there are people in this world who aren't thieves.

<comment><USER10> That is so cool.

Did you do any research on increased wear of the hardware under load? That could be an additional cost that would start showing up only after a period of time.

<comment><USER11> I work at Intel, and am involved with the "Reliability Verification" team for some of our client products. We design our chips to last 7 years when run well over the specced frequency on "viruses" that are much harder on the hardware than any realistic workload. Server teams have even stricter requirements.

If any hardware is going to see increased failure, I'm guessing it's the hard drives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Add it all up (usb hubs, power bricks included too) and put the numbers into the calculator on the genesis block.

[http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/](http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/)

The 330MH/s miners were profitable if you bought them a few months ago but with the rising difficulty of the network, they don't seem likely to break even.

A more likely profitable venture would be to use the same money and buy into bitcoins. Secure your wallet and sit on it in hopes the price rises.

</comment><comment><USER13> If this was 2010 or 2011 or so, you'd have a really good shot, but not near the end of 2013.

It's certainly theoretically possible to make a bit of extra money, but I think it's probably much too late in the game to make a serious go of Bitcoin mining for the acquisition of wealth unless you somehow have a free source of electricity and/or hardware.

I think the guys who are really going to make some money off of Bitcoin mining going forward are the people who sell the specialized mining rigs.

</comment><comment><USER14> GH/s per watt is everything. I'm pretty sure you're looking at the Sapphire USB miners. These are almost certainly not worth it. If you got 38 of these for free and had free power and started mining tomorrow, you would have perhaps $1500 worth of BTC a year from now.

Assuming you're buying and powering them yourself, you're paying around $1000 and $200 bucks in electricity. It's a fairly risky investment that will likely net you at most $300 on a $1200 outlay.

To summarize your purchase: 132 MH/s/watt for ~$1000

If you want to make a better risky investment, you might look into pre- ordering into one of the newer process ASICs, like Butterfly Labs' Monarch:

[http://www.butterflylabs.com/monarch/](http://www.butterflylabs.com/monarch/)

This purchase: 1.71GH/s/watt for $4680

The problem is you're pretty late in the game, so it's really hard to predict what the difficulty rate will look like in even a few months.

It's possible that your USB miners will be worthless in a few months due to the mass in flux of newer ASICs. It's also possible that so many people will be purchasing newer ASIC miners that ALL mining will become entirely unprofitable.

And all of this assumes the relative stability of the BTC/USD exchange rate. :)

</comment><comment><USER15> I mined in mid 2010 from my CPU. I was not a hardware guy, so I gave up in about 6 months. I have managed to keep every bitcoin key I've ever owned, with the exception of one small mistake that cost me 1 bitcoin. During this mining period, they were worth $0.06 up to $1. It took me those 6 months to have my first epiphany about the value of Bitcoin. But it was just one of several more monumental epiphanies to come over the next 3 years.

I bought in to the BFL pre-order during the first few days of the announcement. It took me 12 months to receive the hardware. During that time, Avalon beat BFL to market and destroyed my expected difficulty. Fortunately, the $1800 I spend on the hardware has paid me back over 10x in dollar amount. It will take me about another 6-9 months to break even on the bitcoins I spend due to the massive rise in value since I made the pre-order. Fortunately, I bought a good number of bitcoins at the same time so I've made out on both investments.

I have purchase a BFL Monarch during the first few days of the announcement, but I do not expect to make the money back in any reasonable amount of time due to the flood of new ASICs and coming changes in difficulty. Fortunately, I do not have power costs.

<comment><USER16> > I do not have power costs.

How do you get your power?

<comment><USER17> I've had leases with landlords where the rent includes all utilities. This amount of electricity is probably not what the landlord had in mind when writing up the lease, but could explain the lack of power costs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Since ASICs are now "out there", the overall difficulty might not jump as quickly as when they were newer. But in general you'll be losing money (especially if you pay when you pre-order[1]), or _possibly_ running pretty thin margins, unless you're way ahead of the curve (then you can make a lot. but that's unlikely to happen.).

It's a gamble, and it's a gamble Bitcoin is _designed_ to prevent being too profitable. To be frank, I wouldn't suggest it.

To answer the title, I made about a quarter of a coin back when GPU miners were relatively new, on Slush's pool. And about 0.1 coin with my CPU prior to that. Otherwise nope :)

[1]: assuming the relatively-stable constant increase in bitcoin price keeps going, you'll very likely make way more just by buying the bitcoins then. _that_ growth has survived every boom and bust thus far, completely unscathed, so it seems pretty likely to continue.

</comment><comment><USER19> I have about 4.5 BTC that I mined in mid-to-late 2011, using an nVidia GPU whenever my PC happened to be on and idle. At the time, I was just about breaking even compared to the extra cost of power; since then, the exchange rate has increased enough that if I were to sell, it would end up having been nicely profitable.

Unfortunately, the time when you could pull that off without a large up-front investment seems to be long past. Personally, there's no way I'd consider sinking a large amount of money into mining hardware at this point. If you believe BTC has a promising future, it's much safer to just buy coins. (EDIT: but of course, given the volatility, that only makes sense as a long-term plan.)

</comment><comment><USER20> I read about Bitcoin in June 2011 and built a miner using two ATI 5830s shortly after. It ran at ~550 megahashes and cost a total of $450.00 to build using newegg.

I live in an area with free power in Tokyo and let the machine run for ~2 years. During some of this time Bitcoin was hovering around $2.00. I was mining as a hobby since it cost no money and I believed in Bitcoin's potential.

In the second half of 2012 the price started jumping and I netted a very very nice return. I would not mine now as any real investment. I would like to believe Bitcoin's adoption will increase and the price will continue rising, but short term I think it's still quite the gamble.

</comment><comment><USER21> Mining? No. I have lost a small amount. Had a little fun. You might make a mint, but it is the wild west. You need to be able to spend a fair amount of time fussing with the things. My USB ASIC Miners would overheat and reset a lot until I put some heat sinks on.

>and am concerned about rising network difficulty potentially preventing my recoup...

Yup. You are wise to be concerned. If you want a nice boring low-risk investment, umm some ICA mutual fund maybe? But that's no fun.

Speculating, I'm a little bit ahead, and I have a lot more fun doing that.

</comment><comment><USER22> "How much do you have to spend on hardware to keep up with network difficulty these days?"

Financing will be your problem. Anyone else can buy that hardware and your profit (if any) is baked into the cake when you set the cost of renting that money and/or however you want to account for opportunity costs.

Or another way to put it is it's highly unlikely your financing cost (cost of the money traded to get the miners) is precisely zero, and when you factor it in, things get sketchier.

</comment><comment><USER23> I received 2 of the AVALON ASIC Batch 2 orders in July. They cost about 55 BTC (~$1500USD) each in February and now I have mined about 94 BTC ($13000) on each (running at about 83GH/s).

The daily mine total has decreased about 10fold, each making about 0.25BTC per day with the latest diff increase.

The cost per day in electricity is $1.50-2 so with current exchange rates and diff increases they should be 'profitable' until Feb-Mar next year (not even a full year).

</comment><comment><USER24> I took a page from the "selling pickaxes" manufacturers themselves. I purchased a Jalapeno in Aug 2012, then upgraded right before they doubled prices of the miners. Then I auctioned the preorder for 30BTC . Retail for the device was $1500 even though I paid $700. Sadly the coins were worth $6K while being held in escrow, and only worth $3K by the time I converted to fiat.

</comment><comment><USER25> I got in on it back when bitcoins were around $1 each. I sold 10btc at the first $30 bubble, and made enough to buy a new video card, and I still have somewhere between 60 and 70 btc left. Haven't touched it or payed attention to it much after that, besides checking the price every once in a while.

</comment><comment><USER26> I guess the "picks and shovels" rule holds for this gold rush too.

</comment><comment><USER27> Back in 2011, I mined enough BTC on my $1000 mining rig to eventually make a 5x profit, but there's no way I'd be able to make a profit today at the current difficulty/prices.

</comment><comment><USER28> From what I understand the USB type hardware isn't profitable.

You could see much better financial gains buying coins and hoping for the best or investing is something else.

</comment><comment><USER29> It seems like, due to the deflationary nature of bitcoin, it would be more cost effective to just buy bitcoin outright now, instead of buying mining hardware.

</comment><comment><USER30> > I'm currently considering a Group Buy of 38 330 MH/s USB ASIC Miners

You will lose money. Don't do it. You will be better off just buying coins.

</comment><comment><USER31> Nope. Made a tonne selling mining devices though. Paid my rent for a few months.

</comment><comment><USER32> [http://blockchain.info/charts/miners-operating-profit- margin](http://blockchain.info/charts/miners-operating-profit-margin)

<comment><USER33> That chart is for GPUs; it doesn't apply to ASICs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> No</comment>


Japanese ink supplier Seiko Advance produces colors for Apple's iPhones - <AUTHOR> https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Apple-ink-supplier-in-Japan-makes-mark-with-iPhone-11-Pro-colors <comment><USER2> Despite the apparent similarity in English, and that they both now use the kanakana セイコー in their official names, it appears that this Seiko (正興, "revive justice") has nothing to do with the far larger Seiko (精工, "qualify craft") group of watches, Epson printers etc fame.

[http://www.seikoadvance.co.jp/company/profile.php](http://www.seikoadvance.co.jp/company/profile.php)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seiko#History_and_development](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seiko#History_and_development)

<comment><USER3> On a related note, the Mitsubishi Group is a huge conglomerate that makes everything from cars to fighter jets to nuclear plants. Mitsubishi pens also dominate the stationery market, and I just assumed that it was part of the group. But it turns out the pen maker is actually unrelated to the conglomerate[0].

To add to the confusion, both the pen maker and the conglomerate have identical English names, Japanese kanjis, and even share the same three-red- diamonds logo.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uni- ball](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uni-ball)

<comment><USER4> At some point, the company was renamed from Masaki to Mitsubishi, and the logo similarity can't be an accident. They may not be officially related, but there's almost certainly an interesting history between the two companies.

<comment><USER5> It's likely a similar story to Mitsui, where it's actually just a huge family and people use their name to increase trust.

EDIT: turns out both companies came to this logo independently. The pen company got to it first, and the Mitsubishi Group and the pen company decided to allow mutual usage due to non-competing business areas.

[https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%B9%E3%83%AA%E3%83%BC%E3...](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%B9%E3%83%AA%E3%83%BC%E3%83%80%E3%82%A4%E3%83%A4)

^ here's some more info for Japanese speakers. Basically both companies derived their logo from various family crests and it's a pretty common shape so it ended up like this

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> An interesting topic for Tim Cook to tweet about. Perhaps he's trying to emphasize their use of non-Chinese companies in their manufacturing process?

<comment><USER7> Sometimes a "public reference" is part of an enterprise's contractual negotiation. They can then use this (Tim Cook's visit + quote) to garner future sales.

<comment><USER6> Tim Cook is a very private person, and he puts a lot of work into maintaining his public persona. Every word that he says publicly is vetted and checked to make sure that it aligns with his and Apple's position on whatever the relevant topics might be. I doubt that a small supplier in Japan would make them reconsider that policy.

<comment><USER8> Uhhhhh... no.

Having worked with Apple in Japan directly (not just engineering related work, but having worked with former Apple Japan execs), I can tell you that the relationships they hold with companies over there are valued internally. It's part of the culture, for better or for worse.

I can't state for certain whether it matters in the context of Cook's Tweet, but it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest either. Don't be so quick to cast it aside. ;P

<comment><USER6> Of course they are, I'm not saying they're not. But that doesn't mean Tim Cook doesn't have a reason behind his tweets. (Note that I'm not saying this is a bad thing; it's just that if they have anything to do with Apple they always align with something that the company would like to comment on, be it education or the environment or immigration policy.)

<comment><USER9> I see no reason a tweet like that couldn't be a mutually beneficial one. Seiko gets the shout-out and in exchange apple gets a better deal and also telegraphs a little tidbit that shows thought and quality that go into Apple products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I love mittlestand companies like this. Global, highly specialized, and all about product quality and customer service.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the TIL word!

<comment><USER12> And of course it's a german word. These companies are the strength of the german industry !

<comment><USER13> And the driving force of capitalism, megacorps only represent about 1% of companies and ~20% of employment (minimum wage jobs are also a very small percentage of all jobs despite the constant attention it gets).

SMB are the real business world and where the majority of upward mobility is. Sadly most critiques of markets are hyper focused on the mega corps and policy gets made which only considers the big bad guys, which squeezes out the smaller firms as side effects of otherwise well intentioned policy.

The rate of people starting new businesses has been declining lately and it's concerning. Megacorps dominating absolutely everything is a big part of dystopian fiction for a good reason.

<comment><USER14> I agree, but part of the reason is that such small businesses consistently fail to differentiate their policy objectives from the ones of megacorps. If I give a tax breaks to companies, megacorps will benefit disproportionately more than SMBs, but SMBs oppose thresholds and caps because they "discourage growth" and "increase red tape". What is a legislator going to do?

SMBs in many ways act as "temporarily embarrassed megacorps" and hence reap what they sow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Link to the tweet from Tim Cook:

[https://twitter.com/tim_cook/status/1204212048139182080](https://twitter.com/tim_cook/status/1204212048139182080)

</comment><comment><USER16> As a consumer-products company, color is something Apple has long been obsessed about. The highlight of Steve Jobs' intro of the multi-color iMac G3 in 1999 was his comment about their colors: "Don't you just wanna lick 'em?" (IIRC). See also, from 6 years ago: [https://www.cultofmac.com/243579/how- apples-design-team-choo...](https://www.cultofmac.com/243579/how-apples- design-team-chooses-colors/)

<comment><USER17> Sometimes it baffles me, the amount of sound and fury regarding the rose gold iPhone etc. For me it's a utilitarian device but I know it's not that for everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Although the article itself refers to the substance as ink, it's usually called coating(s).

<comment><USER19> Could it be called an ink coating? My understanding is that the distinction between ink and pigment is that ink is a solution while pigment is a suspension, can there be both kinds of coatings? or is it a meaningless distinction to draw in this context?

Sorry to barrage you with these questions if you don't know, but you brought up a pretty fine point so you seem knowledgeable about this :)

<comment><USER18> I'm no expert but in industry (and it may differ from company to company) coatings is mostly paints and inks are separate. Inks usually permeate (and add coloration to) a medium while coatings/paints bind and coat (to) a medium.

<comment><USER20> Anodized aluminum forms a porous surface that is dyed with ink to colour it, if I recall correctly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is that olive drab, like the military uses?

<comment><USER22> It's actually a really nice greyish-green colour. Not as drab as you'd think thanks to the way light diffuses through the glass

With the dark green case, it has a VERY strong Newton MessagePad vibe which I love (having been a very happy Newton user during its twilight years.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> So I guess bike-shedding has now become mainstream, seeing that the CEO of the second-largest company on the planet has mentioned the color of one of his company's products as a thing to be amazed about.

<comment><USER17> Bike-shedding is effort wasted on things that are irrelevant, like if an electronics startup paid this much attention to color. In Apple's position as a fashion company as much as a tech company, and at Apple's scale, they can and do invest hundreds of people's time in making sure that the paint jobs are as good as they can get them.

<comment><USER23> I was still looking at Apple as mainly a tech company, the "style" thing I reguarded as a distraction. We'll see if they're be able to keep their current valuation by ignoring their tech roots. And yes, I am bitter because just the other day an iPhone of our family experienced the infamous "white screen of death" for not having sufficient storage space left (it happened on a restart), the phone is one-year old. I hadn't seen such low quality in a mass- produced OS since the days of Windows Me and Windows 2000.

<comment><USER24> > Windows 2000

I urge you to reconsider.

<comment><USER23> That was the last OS I used for which the acceptable troubleshooting solution was to "format the disk". 20 years later and I came to the same point with this iPhone 7, thought that we had left that behind us. And I can't even do it myself, I have to wait for the local Apple service store to open, which it won't until January 6th (the phone broke down on December 27th). But hurray! for the new color, I guess.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Guide to SVG Animations (SMIL) - jarek-foksa http://css-tricks.com/guide-svg-animations-smil/

<comment><AUTHOR> I wish SMIL is supported in browsers these days. There are some javascript hacks to emulate it and there was also some SMIL players but it never went mainstream.

It's particularly interesting to digital signage systems.

</comment><comment><USER2> Wow, that was a super thorough article.

</comment><comment><USER3> The title ought to change to specify that this is an SMIL guide.

It's too bad that Internet Explorer doesn't support SMIL [0]. This unfortunately eliminates SMIL from consideration for many projects.

[0] [http://caniuse.com/#feat=svg-smil](http://caniuse.com/#feat=svg-smil)

<comment> jarek-foksa SVG 1.1 spec shares some definitions with SMIL spec, but if I recall correctly SVG working group is planning to get rid of any mention of SMIL in SVG 2 and instead rely on the terms and concepts outlined in the Web Animation spec [1] (the API will remain the same though).

I would change the title to "A Guide to Declarative Animation in SVG".

[1] [http://w3c.github.io/web-animations/](http://w3c.github.io/web- animations/)</comment></comment>


How Tesla-Toyota Project Led to Culture Clash by Opposites - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-07/how-tesla-toyota-project-led-to-culture-clash-by-opposites-cars.html <comment><USER2> This article makes it seem as if the Toyota president came out to Elon Musks California home, and after a ride in the Roadster, suddenly saw the light and decided to start producing electric cars.

And just how did he decide to execute his grand electrified vision? By backporting electric propulsion onto an existing SUV platform. Yeah, this is exactly the moment where this particular piece of journalistic spin comes crashing down.

The RAV4 EV was sold only in California precisely because it was a compliance car. Toyota simply decided it was cheaper to leverage their existing investment into Tesla to produce an EV on the cheap that could get them the required environmental credits so they could continue to sell their actual vehicles without having to buy the credits at a (at the time) large cost from other manufacturers. It was a simple localized business decision, not some grand strategy.

Of course Musk doesn't just ridicule fuel cells, he affectionately calls them "fool cells". As someone who builds his businesses by reasoning from first principles, he justifiably doesn't understand the idea of swapping a 20% efficient (if you're very lucky) combustion engine with a 10% efficient, experimental fuel cell when you could instead use a dead simple, clean and 80%+ efficient electric motor.

<comment><USER3> > As someone who builds his businesses by reasoning from first principles, he > justifiably doesn't understand the idea of swapping a 20% efficient (if > you're very lucky) combustion engine with a 10% efficient, experimental fuel > cell when you could instead use a dead simple, clean and 80%+ efficient > electric motor.

You're comparing apples and oranges. That electricity isn't generated via a particularly efficient mechanism after all.

<comment><USER4> Combustion engines (and cells) are for the most part less efficient than our least efficient power generation plants combined with the grid.

<comment><USER3> That may be so, but that doesn't mean that the string of numbers he rattled off should be compared to each other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It doesn't sound so much like a culture clash to me. Sounds more like a difference in the direction each company wants to take (EV vs hydrogen).

Just because they didn't share code (since they were both doing it, it makes it a common mindset for both and not a difference in culture) and one thought the brakes should be less jerky isn't some massive difference in culture. Any complex engineering project will have many difference in opinion you can nitpick. But I saw nothing in the article that shows these differences were what led to the breakup.

</comment><comment><USER6> > Toyota engineers also rejected Tesla's proposed designs for an enclosure > that would protect the bottom of the RAV4 EV's battery pack... Tesla > ultimately added a titanium plate to ... better protect its battery.

That might explain why Tesla was so willing add said plate to the Model S.

</comment><comment><USER7> At least both sides learned something. Better to love and loss than to never love at all.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think a more interesting culture clash is the one between Toyota and GM. There was an episode of _This American Life_ dedicated to the story[1], and it was eye opening (to someone not versed in the ways of car production). Interestingly, the plant that Toyota sold to Tesla (mentioned in the article) is the Nummi plant, around which the GM/Toyota partnership was centered.

[1] [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/403/n...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/403/nummi)

</comment><comment><USER9> I know this is very meta, but the page is so cluttered... I would link to the Readability version but it redirects back to the article (previous complaints "you're stealing our visitors" caused that). So instead I can recommend this: [https://readability.com/bookmarklets](https://readability.com/bookmarklets)

</comment><comment><USER10> "Back in May 2010, as the emerging alliance took shape, Palo Alto, California- based Tesla's chairman, who's also CEO, called the partnership "historic" and said Toyota was a company he long admired."

This sentence, hurts, my brain.</comment>


Adoptly, the Tinder for child adoption, is indistinguishable from parody - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/19/14319654/adoptly-tinder-for-child-adoption-app-kickstarter-parody-startup <comment><USER2> The article seems confused about the concept of satire. Satire is not something you debunk, that would be fraud.

That said, I hold with satire. I'm going to be laughing about this stuff all day.</comment>


A great way to divide startup equity - <AUTHOR> http://startupplays.com/blog/how-ill-fund-my-next-startup-a-fair-equity-split-for-founders/

<comment><USER2> Kind of annoying ad that doesn't really tell you anything. I think they'd be better off writing out the basics, then saying buy the video for more/examples/explanations/etc.. Not tell you nothing up front, but waste your time, like the current page.</comment>


Implementing a Gaussian Naive Bayes Classifier in Python - <AUTHOR> https://www.antoniomallia.it/lets-implement-a-gaussian-naive-bayes-classifier-in-python.html <comment><USER2> It seems odd that the key feature of Naive Bayes (conditional independence of individual features given the class) is only mentioned in passing (and never explicitly that they are conditionally independent).

This feature is then used when transforming probabilities to log-probabilities in one go without any mention which would make it particularly confusing for beginners.

I would recommend decomposing p(x|C) before applying the log transform for clarity.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing out! This is a blog post for people that know already a bit about the theory and are interested in a possible implementation. But I see your point and will add it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What does it mean to use the probability density function of the gaussian distribution as a "probability"?

the probability of any x value in a continuous range is infinitely small. Is it really using the probability of a value "as extreme or more" as x?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you have a bag of [1.0 3.1 5.2 7.8 7.8 7.9 8.1 8.2 9.9 10.1] what is the probability of picking 8.0? It is definitely higher then 1.1, isn't it? I hope this clarifies the pdf usage.

<comment><USER4> You have an interval of real numbers [0, 1]. What's the probability of picking 0.3639401?

<comment><USER5> If we're using a uniform random number generator in [0, 1] with 32-bit IEEE754 numbers, the closest to 0.3639401 is

        2^-2 * (1 + 3823195*2^-23) = 0.3639400899410247802734375

The numbers directly before and after it are:

        2^-2 * (1 + 3823194*2^-23) = 0.363940060138702392578125
        2^-2 * (1 + 3823196*2^-23) = 0.36394011974334716796875

Giving a range of size 2.980232238769531250 * 10^-8 in which all numbers compare equal to 0.3639401 in IEEE754 32-bit floating point. And since we're looking at a domain of [0, 1], that's also immediately our probability.

(I'm fully aware this isn't what you were asking, but I found it fun either way)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Might be worthwhile to add conditional risk to it, to generalize it to the minimum risk classifier. That way you'd also distinguish it from, say the scikit-learn implementation.

</comment><comment><USER7> Great topic!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you dude!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What's so special about this post? There are tons of ML tutorials online! Why was it upvoted to front page?

<comment><AUTHOR> I honestly couldn't find many implementations of Naive Bayes out there. The famous ones are over engineered to use it as a learning too. I think people appreciate the fact that an article like this for its step-by-step approach.

<comment><USER9> I went looking for something just like this a few weeks back. The examples I found were all either wildly over-mathematical or terribly unclear. This seems to strike a good balance. Thanks for the writeup!</comment></comment></comment>


Economist Mohamed El-Erian warns about the risk of 'zombie markets' - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/16/economist-mohamed-el-erian-warns-about-the-risk-of-zombie-markets.html <comment><USER2> Unprecedented levels of stimulus around the whole world. If that isn't the precursor for some airpockets/bubbles of mispricing to emerge.. I don't know what is.

I was reading Sapiens by Yuval Harari today and he had an explanation of easy credit that i liked. You are basically betting that enough innovation and progress happens to underpin the money you've "borrowed" from the future - when that doesn't happen...the bubble bursts. I wonder what sort of progress would smooth over the extraordinary credit injection we've seen in 2020.

<comment><USER3> Giving money directly to businesses (especially hedge funds and banks) is a mistake which will have terrible consequences. If we need stimulus to stave off a debt deflation spirals we should give money directly to people. It could be structured as a modern debt jubilee, as suggested by Steve Keen, or as UBI, as suggested by many including Andrew Yang.

<comment><USER4> The argument for giving money directly to businesses is that it makes the recovery easier. Many argue that we needed to give _more_ money directly to businesses, that it was wrong to let unemployment get so high when we could just pay businesses to keep people on.

<comment><USER5> Giving money to businesses to keep people employed is a non-starter in the US as there is no political will to ensure those businesses don't just furlough employees anyway and pocket the bonus - will for both writing effective regulations and post-hoc enforcement against businesses that skirt them.

It also directly creates zombie companies if applied to industries that can't possibly bounce back, like travel etc.

IMO the appropriate business-saving economic response would have been to statutorily suspend all rent/mortgage/loan payments denominated in USD. That's the bulk of most small businesses' fixed burn rate. Needing to service the debt black hole is our primary source of inflexibility.

Of course given that we're still "debating" whether the pandemic is even real or not, figuring out what is appropriate is purely academic. Enjoy your token $1200 while the looters loot billions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "We're not there yet, but we're starting to get close."

I'd say we're clearly already there yet. How can stock markets possibly be rallying with half the world economy closed? Of course it's due to government zombie money. There's already a disconnect between real value creation and valuation (even more than usual).

<comment><USER4> The extent of the closures was always overstated in popular accounts - you say "half", and people often talk as though it was even more, but the highest concrete estimate I've seen is 30%. And in most places the closures have ended.

<comment><USER6> No doubt, but even so, the markets are barely even down. How so?

<comment><USER4> I think "barely even down" is a good reflection of the likely impact to the companies that comprise market indexes. In almost all places economic activity has mostly resumed; fears that nobody would be willing to do anything until the virus was gone have largely been disconfirmed. There will certainly continue to be human and economic costs of the coronavirus, but the costs seem unlikely to affect the financial situations of most companies.

<comment><USER6> Sorry I don't agree.

Not only have whole sectors such as travel, entertainment, retail been directly affected (ie closed), it seems they will continue to be affected by the changes (investments/costs) they need to make to comply with the post- covid world.

The markets have remained levitated by govt. stimulus - the Cantillon effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> All the money coming from the fed must be paid back, I believe. It seems like this will be difficult to repay. Usually with a loan a business would invest in capital or something similar and there is no value lost. Then there is the hope of return so they can pay off the loan. In this case, what return will people get on the money that comes in for the crisis? I think in this case it is covering lost value. That swill be tough to repay. Or is the fed anticipating losing money? Will this allow the losses to be put on the feds balance sheet rather than some other lender?

<comment><USER8> No it doesn't. The fed is the only source of dollars in existence, and it only ever loans out dollars. Therefore, if every dollar were to be paid back, how many dollars exist ?

Zero.

Since that is clearly not what people want, you're right about it never happening.

In a modern fiat money system paying back central bank loans changes the money supply. You might be confused because the US did at one point pay back all the government debt (which isn't the Fed's money, that's a separate thing), however looking a bit more closely you might notice that that did not take place in a fiat money system, but in the gold standard (for one thing the Fed didn't even exist when that happened).

Analysing yet a bit further you will quickly find out that, if you had the choice, you want to live during a time where the government debt increases, and the number economists vehemently deny is a wild guess on page 5 of every economy book out there (but really, it is a wild guess), is 2% per year, or at this point 330 billion per year.

The real US number is about 3.8% per year, and calculating it for many years might make you notice that it seems to follow big mac inflation. That's not a coincidence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You know you're in serious zombie market territory when bankrupt companies are raising $1b on equity markets: [https://www.marketwatch.com/story/hertz-seeks- bankruptcy-cou...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/hertz-seeks-bankruptcy- court-approval-to-offer-1-billion-in-stock-but-experts-expect-equity-to-be- wiped-out-2020-06-12)

<comment><USER10> It's no worse than startups that went public during the dot com era. At least these bankrupt companies have some operating history and physical assets.

<comment><USER9> Dot-com paper companies that had no assets and no revenue also had no debts.

Here, we're talking about the vastly different proposition of raising equity in a company where debts outstrip assets.

<comment><USER10> I understand. If you don't like it, buy puts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's not going to stop a financial crisis since the system refuses to help regular people past this July in August you can easily anticipate serious problems for the banks that could easily overwhelm the entire system. Trump doesn't get that basically 80% of jobs are gone you cut off unemployment and 80% of loans go into default by August.

<comment><USER10> They'll just extend the unemployment benefits. Like I said before, it's an election year. If politicians know one thing, it's how to keep their jobs.</comment></comment>


Google Trends: django, ruby on rails, "rails is a ghetto" - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/trends?q=django%2C+ruby+on+rails%2C+%22rails+is+a+ghetto%22&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 <comment><USER2> [http://www.google.com/trends?q=django+python%2C+ruby+on+rail...](http://www.google.com/trends?q=django+python%2C+ruby+on+rails&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0)

sigh

</comment><comment><USER3> Django is not a "type" of jazz you moron. It's the name of Django Reinhardt, who was a great jazz guitarist.

</comment><comment><USER4> Django is a type of jazz (just in case you didn't know) - of course it has SE traffic going way back.</comment>


Rate my startup idea - <AUTHOR> Hi guys,
I am working on an idea that could be called "Airbnb for food"
Problem: -There's not enough variety for food. -Food is expensive.
Solution: -Connecting Chef/Cooks with Food lovers. -As a food lover you have a virtual menu on your phone that can grow and shrink based on your filters -As a cook/chef you can startup a restaurant essentially out of your own home. -Two clicks and you can order food, not from a restaurant, but from a cook directly. -Cheaper and healthier with a lot more variety. -Will need a good review system to make sure lower quality cooks get weeded out.
I have never heard about a startup that is doing something similar. Do you any? And, do you think that this idea could work? <comment><USER2> _" As a cook/chef you can startup a restaurant essentially out of your own home."_

If you're going to sell food that you made at home, your home kitchen is going to have to comply with all sorts of health and safety laws that govern commercial food preparation, e.g., periodic health department and fire department inspections. You might also run afoul of zoning regulations that prohibit running that kind of business from a residential area. And if you rent your home, it probably violates the terms of your lease.

 _" There's not enough variety for food."_

Where I live (NYC), there's an infinite variety of food. Most other large cities that I've visited also have lots of different types of food available. Where do you live?

 _" Food is expensive."_

Food made by a chef in small quantities will be expensive because it won't have the economies of scale of a large restaurant (e.g., the chef would have to buy the raw materials in small quantities, probably at retail prices instead of wholesale prices).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, this is good feedback

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't think either of your problems are actual problems. There's plenty of variety of food, and at a reasonable price.

I also think the economics for what you're suggesting don't pan out--have you talked to anybody that actually does one-off dinners as chefs? The planning and costs and time investment are nontrivial.

</comment><comment><USER4> Have you checked out:

Foodie Shares MealSurfer Josephine

I think there are a couple others as well.

<comment><USER5> Dear Jeff would you consider give me feedback on my thread too ?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11851027](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11851027)

Please and thank you</comment></comment>


AP changes writing style to capitalize 'b' in Black - <AUTHOR> https://www.oregonlive.com/nation/2020/06/ap-changes-writing-style-to-capitalize-b-in-black.html <comment><USER2> I work in academic publishing, and we've been discussing this as well. Somewhat more complicated is capitalizing White, since up to now most of the folks who insist on doing that have, shall we say, a very _narrow_ idea of who is white.</comment>


Apple Moves Production to Sharp for TV Debut - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-11-25/apple-moves-production-to-sharp-for-tv-debut-jefferies-says.html

<comment><AUTHOR> It's interesting how Apple try to have more control and more knowledge of the fabrication process at each step. It could be seen as a "relocalisation" strategy.</comment>


Psychological effects of coding style (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.devever.net/~hl/codingstylepsych <comment><USER3> I occasionally write for myself and for a casual audience, and I will sometimes write with proper caps... and other times write with no caps at all. (Hackernews and this particular timing/subject makes this comment more suitable to proper caps, for instance)

I think CamelCase captures a kind of properness that underscore_style does not. If you look at just texts, older people use proper caps, but younger people don't. Of course this is not out of laziness — but because caps and no caps leave different psychological imprints.

'Hey!' and 'hey' are totally different and convey very different meanings. (-> medium is the message)

Particularly meme-y, edgy, distant, and cool content likes no caps (e.g. Billie Eilish song titles).

As to programming, I like nocaps because it makes things less formal. It makes things more bound to change, because code should read more live than fixed. It's more sandbox and less tablet.

This is why to me Haskell, in all its greatness, feels too rigid. Too many caps (among other things). There has to be a psychologically lighter version of 'Maybe Int = Just Int | Nothing'. Feels too much like rules written, less exploratory.

Also caps in general are more psychologically distant (and effortful) than the underscore approach, because it uses lots of chord+keys (caps) instead of single keys. Swapping dash and underscore (and dvorak and smart hotkey handling) also achieve similar effects. Small costs add up, especially when lots of tiny decisions are involved.

Psychology of representation is a subtle art that is often overlooked. You need time to do it, and most people don't have the time nor the leisure. Much like yak-shaving.

<comment><USER4> My style could be summarised as: Very_Very_Important, SomewhatImportant, mostly_important, notveryimportant.

I personally hate the "camelcase everywhere" style, and for that matter, verbose names. Opponents tend to claim that it makes the code easier to read, but I've found that after more than a few minutes of staring at code like that, the ThingsScreamingAtYouEverywhere just get tiresome and start to obscure the actual structure, as well as making it difficult to distinguish between two very long identifiers that differ only slightly in their tail.

This may also be because the majority of the time I've (been forced to) work with that style, it's been "enterprisey" code that's full of AbstractPatternDecoratorProxySingletonFactoryFactory noise.

<comment><USER5> Imagine if it was abstractpatterndecoratorproxysingletonfactoryfactory.

<comment><USER6> Now lets throw in Hungarian Notation!

oAbstractpatterndecoratorproxysingletonfactoryfactory

<comment><USER7> C++ constructor:

OAbstractpatterndecoratorproxysingletonfactoryfactory::OAbstractpatterndecoratorproxysingletonfactoryfactory(){}

<comment><USER5> C style: abspdpsfacfac

(even has pdp in it, truly C)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One of the things I really enjoy about developing in Python is that - <USER2> - various code style smells seem fairly apparent when reading the source.

Over time in a well-maintained project there's a tendency for these to clean themselves up, and a feeling that the codebase is in good shape emerges.

Variables become clearly and simply-named, the code starts to read more like a hybrid between a human language and a programming language, and the formatting and syntax become - generally - more straightforward and less 'clever'.

Ideally the patterns and algorithms also gravitate towards readable and efficient patterns (using generators, dunder methods, collection types, and so on where appropriate) until the code feels pleasant to understand and modify.

What's your favourite language for intuitively assessing code quality, and what are the indicators and criteria that you think you use?

<comment><USER9> There's something about JavaScript and the length of files, grouping of related lines, and usage of functions that can make it immediately obvious that the quality is either atrocious or decent.

I suppose that that extends in part to any C-style language, but the relative looseness of JavaScript really makes it stand out to me, for some reason.

<comment><USER10> I don't understand why js psychologically force me to write smaller files.

Whenever I write in any other language, I feel totally fine with 1000+ LOC in single file but when it's js, the zeitgeist force me to put them into bunch of folders exporting from an index.ts

I can't put my fingers on it.

<comment><USER11> I feel queasy when I see a 1000-line file in any language, but JS in particular is just... yikes. I guess it's because the language has a reputation for being inconsistent (whether that's deserved is another thing entirely), so the less you have to reason about, the better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Post title raises an expectation that is hardly met. So what are the psychological effects? Oh I don't know, here's some random thoughts about C++ code style.

<comment><USER13> Worse: its psychological claims are entirely made up and only serve to artificially support his chosen style. It's the worse kind of argument: using made up science that is thus impossible to counter.

<comment><USER14> I find this comment and the one above way too harsh. The author of the article does not make any strong claim at "science"; it is written as a deliberately subjective series of musings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've come to appreciate snake case (or hyphenated words in languages like Clojure) because it adds a little extra space in the syntax, and this break is easier to read I think. Long camelCased phrases are often really dense.

<comment><USER16> I mix both: mainly using camelCase, but using underscores sometimes instead of conjunctions to make things more readable (as you say), especially to make some important meta information stand out (as in "doSomething_locked()" for a method, to indicate that it must be called within some contextual lock).

If using mainly underscores, I don't see what other separator I could use as a higher level separation. Maybe two underscores, but that could too easily be seen as a typo.

<comment><USER17> Underscores to separate words, and dashes to separate clauses. E.g., 'do_something-locked()'. I personally don't use this style in code, but it's my go-to file naming convention to avoid whitespace. E.g., 'my_awesome_report-20200428.pdf'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Just one nitpick that annoyed me. thisIsCamelCase. ThisIsPascalCase.

</comment><comment><USER19> I know it is a bit of an aside, but how on earth did we overload the term camelCase (or CamelCase) when we have PascalCase available?

</comment><comment><USER20> > This sort of information can also be conveyed by a documentation comment on > the function or a pseudo-keyword:

> #define NATIVE_THREAD_ONLY

> NATIVE_THREAD_ONLY int foo();

> The Win32 API tends to like using these (IN, OUT, INOUT, etc.), but I'm not > too fond of them.

The use in Windows is not purely informational or for documentation. They have static analysis tools (prefast and prefix) that actually parse them and issue warnings for incorrect usage in code.

</comment><comment><USER21> I've been using Upper Camel Case recently, been causing me problems with having to name my classes and instances differently.

eg previously I would do:

        MyClass myClass

</comment><comment><USER22> Germans capitalize their nouns in normal language. I wonder what effect that has on their code.

<comment><USER23> Actually, for me it's the other way round. Sometimes I write german words like "BratwurstBratGerät" (UpperCamelCase)

<comment><USER24> Can you explain this phrase to a non German speaker? I think "bratwurst brat gerät" very roughly translates to "bratwurst roasting device" which makes me think of kabab-case instead of UpperCamelCase. German phrases are usually pretty intuitive but I don't understand this one at all.

<comment><USER25> Germans write those compound words with "German casing", like this: "Bratwurstbratgerät" [1]. It is just a roaster for bratwursts. In other languages like english sometimes compound words are kebab cased, like yes. [2]

Btw, for kebabs you probably want a Dönnergrill :)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_(linguistics)#Germani...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_\(linguistics\)#Germanic_languages)

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Also wondering what the psychological effects of IDE, programming language, and SDLC are.

<comment><USER26> I work with C#, Xamarin, and Visual Studio.

80% of the time build errors are transient and go away with another F5. Sometimes a build works but is reported as a failure because of a tooling error. 'Clean'ing the build doesn't actually do what cleaning should do, so you also have to manually delete intermediate folders to get builds working again. Heaven forbid you name folders appropriately and put your project anywhere other than C:\, because your tools will break with mysterious errors that turn out to be MAX_PATH related. Sometimes when debugging Xamarin iOS apps, Xamarin will deploy old, cached binaries without any indication that something went wrong - really, really great for debugging and issue verification (/s). It won't be fixed because Microsoft is "prioritizing issues with a broad customer impact".

I can personally confirm the psychological and physiological effects of at least this particular coding environment: stress, learned helplessness (why the fuck is the answer always just, hit F5 again?), shame and embarrassment (when I tell the team a bug wasn't fixed, only to learn that visual studio was gaslighting me and deploying cached binaries to the device after a full clean of the project), and high blood pressure from the aforementioned issues.

<comment><USER5> I work with C#, Visual Studio. 1 level of folder nesting was more than enough for me so far. I see a deeply nested folder hierarchy as a code smell, I once had to walk one such hierarchy to convert files into utf8, and it was a massive pain.

<comment><USER26> The issue is with forms and the like, the tooling creates a lot of intermediate files based on the names of classes and whatnot. If you're following the 'best practice' naming patterns, and have your code in a user folder, it's likely you'll run out of characters. I don't use more than 2 folder levels ever, but I have a product with wordy names.

<comment><USER5> src/MyProductDeluxe9999LimitedUnleashed/Branch/MyProductForms/AboutForm.Designer.cs - 83 characters, about 1/3 of path length limit.

<comment><USER26> C:\Users\user\Documents\Visual Studio 2019\Projects\myrepo\src\MyProductDeluxe9999LimitedUnleashed\Branch\MyProductForms\myapp.Android\obj\Debug\90\android\bin\classes\mono\android\support\design\widget\BottomNavigationView_OnNavigationItemReselectedListenerImplementor.class - 276 characters

Only 227 if you're careful about where you put it, but that's kind of the point - you have to be careful about where you put/build your Xamarin projects from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Stopped reading at "CamelCase" instead of "[Title|Pascal]Case"

</comment><comment><USER28> Opening curly brace must open a new line!!!!!

</comment><comment><USER29> go fmt

End of argument ;-)

<comment><USER30> Doesn't affect capitalization or underscores.

<comment><USER31> No, but go vet and many IDEs will nag you into submission if you use all caps. Or name your func convertJson when it should be convertJSON.</comment></comment></comment>


Windows 10 Uses Your Bandwidth to Distribute Updates, Disable It Here - <AUTHOR> http://lifehacker.com/windows-10-uses-your-bandwidth-to-distribute-updates-d-1721091469

<comment><USER2> Why don't we have affordable symmetric internet connections yet?

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't disable, Windows needs seeders!</comment>


Federal Court: First Amendment Protects Sharing Food with Homeless People - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicksibilla/2018/08/27/federal-court-first-amendment-protects-sharing-food-with-homeless-people/#3af6de9a4884 <comment><USER2> What is "public space" has become a bit of a thing for me, because a lot of modern development in the city is predicated on getting freehold purchasers to agree to public use, in return for a "let" on things like height limits.

The thing is, there is usually a small plaque somewhere which says "you can use it, but its our rules" and it legitimates move-on orders, forbidden signs, anti-photography and the like.

Public ain't always public.</comment>


New Drug Shows Promise to Cure Nearly Any Viral Infection - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110826134012.htm

<comment><USER2> Earlier discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2882777></comment>


What We Do, More Than Money, Format & Philosophy - <AUTHOR> http://ycombinator.com/about.html

<comment><AUTHOR> _"... Why are we so flexible? Not (just) because we're nice people. We realize that, as it gets cheaper to start a company, the balance of power is shifting from investors to hackers. ..."_

_"... All venture investors supply some combination of money and help. In our case the money is by far the smaller component. ..."_

_"... One of the least publicized things we do, for obvious reasons, is mediate disputes between founders. No startup thinks they're going to need that, but most do at some point. ..."_

_".... We realize that independence is one of the reasons people want to start startups in the first place. And frankly, it's also one of the reasons startups succeed. Investors who try to control the companies they fund often end up destroying them. ..."_

A nice read & certainly offering some insights I have not previously read.

<comment><USER2> I generally believe that most people with money are generally not stupid. Why, if that is the case, I hear so often that VCs more likely to destroy companies they fund by imposing their control (via puppet CEO for example)?

Just asking...

<comment><AUTHOR> _"... I generally believe that most people with money are generally not stupid. Why, if that is the case, I hear so often that VCs more likely to destroy companies they fund ..."_

Human frailty.

After you make a certain amount of money the real aphrodisiac or prime motivator becomes power and control. So (mindless) control is the problem. It has less to do with stupidity, how smart you are as to how well your pre- frontal cortex has been trained to deal with _absolute power_. There is a lot to be learn't from the ego-less leader. Jim Collins has written about this character trait that propels (or hinders) companies ~ <http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/51/goodtogreat.html></comment></comment></comment>


Where to find stock images? - <AUTHOR>

Do you guys know of any good source of stock images that can be used on blogs/web sites?  (free or inexpensive is better)<p>I searched recently on Google, but the free ones I found had very low quality. I would like to get recommendations before paying for such a service. <comment><USER2> I use istockphoto.com. It's not free but at $1 per image who cares. The images are all tagged so the search works really well.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you're not making a profit, all photos on flickr are CC licensed.

</comment><comment><USER4> Corbis.</comment>


Lyft is building a self-driving car, opens Palo Alto office - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@lvincent/introducing-level-5-and-our-self-driving-team-705ef8989f03 <comment><USER2> Am I the only one that feels Lyft needs to significantly improve their app?

Uber has a lot of issues & I'd like to use them less, but their app is just _better_. The pins show up in the right place, the maps seem more accurate and the ux in general is more streamlined & easier to follow.

I know Lyft/Uber are having the driver wars, but it seems like the apps should be at parity (at least) and Uber is bar far better to the point that I actually like Lyft more, but use them less because the app is that much worse.

Is it just me?

<comment><USER3> the uber app is often broken for me and drivers complain about it freezing/crashing constantly.

lyft has worked every time I've used it.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. In my case at least, Lyft works really well but the Uber app has issues.

Phone calls in Uber to drivers have also never gone through, and their support is always unhelpful, so I've been a loyal Lyft user just because their app has worked more reliably.</comment></comment></comment>


On Mastery - <AUTHOR> http://gapingvoid.com/2012/05/31/on-mastery/ <comment><USER2> I completely disagree with many points in this article.

There are a great many people out there who are very good at building stuff but utterly fail at "being successful". And conversely, there are people out there who suck at doing the stuff they're supposed to do but are very good at being successful. The two are orthogonal.

If you focus entirely on "your craft", whatever it may be, and ignore the skills that will enable you to deliver the resulting mastery to actual people (in particular sales and marketing, which most "I just want to be really good at X" people seem to think is beneath them), then you won't be successful. You'll just be one of those people who spends their life wondering why they were always penniless and couldn't get the things they wanted or have the impact they deserved to have even though they were really good.

The world is full of smart, competent people who don't know how to build their success, don't know how to market and sell themselves. Don't be one of those. Be a master - sure - but also learn how to translate that mastery into real success.

Re: mastery being more satisfying than success - that's only true if you're not broke. An empty belly, or the inability to afford even the most basic things you really want, makes mastery a hell of a lot less satisfying.

<comment><USER3> I understand what you are saying in the context of the audience for this forum; coders and those running software start ups, and I think you have a point. Those who see refining their coding craft as their central interest _do_ need to link up with market facing people to become successful.

However, I think the gentleman running the sushi bar in the original article has no big money worries if he is charging $600 a head for 10 seats with half hour turnaround!

<comment><USER2> _However, I think the gentleman running the sushi bar in the original article has no big money worries if he is charging $600 a head for 10 seats with half hour turnaround!_

And do you think that is a product of "lucky" celeb status (if there really is such a thing) or deliberate sales/marketing (performed either by himself or others, perhaps even without his direct approval) over the last 60 years?

<comment><USER3> I agree with you that the gentleman who runs the sushi bar _must_ have had an eye to his reputation; perhaps capitalising on an early press article or some kind of favourable review. Small traders have an eye to their marketing as well as the craft, they are 'canny' in my experience. I suspect that zoned out coders may be less well equipped in this area.

One of my favourite examples of a very canny maker is Sakuma San...

<http://www10.big.or.jp/~dh/sakuma/index.html>

Mr Sakuma has spent much his spare time building thermionic valve amplifiers ('tube' in US) of a minimal and historically informed kind.

Valve technology is simple, with low component counts, and can sound excellent, but tends to be 'tuned' to a specific kind of music/programme material.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can't remember who said it but there's a saying "There are no great things to be done, just small things with great love." It seems that nothing great can emerge unless you do what you love to do. And when you do what you love to do, nothing is great: you just do what you love and keep wondering why all these people think it's great and think you're successful.

What's success anyway? It's not money; probably all successful people didn't do it for the money and consequently they also kept doing it after they got money. Is success about not having to worry about mundane things? In that case anyone can be successful, just stop worrying. Is success about doing what you love? In many cases doing what you love invites success but that alone doesn't necessarily equal success.

I think success is close to arriving at a point in life where you stop "needing" things merely to complement who you are.

By this rule when you become the advertisers' nightmare you've succeeded because you don't "need" anything you don't need. Anything you think you "need" will give a warm feeling of security that always vanishes too soon, and there's always more. Success is not having to chase shadows to always get something better: success is to accept yourself as who you are so that you can be in silence from all the worlds noises and listen to yourself on how to play your life and out into the world.

If you agree with that then mastery is a device to reach success.

</comment><comment><USER5> Yes. Mastery is satisfying in itself. In a way that money (and facilitated experiences) can never be. Notice how extremely wealthy people often keep working? I tried retirement. It sucks.

for PedantNews: mastery remains valuable only if that skill remains in demand (e.g. slide-rule proficiency); at $600 a head, how is he not rich?; the capitalization (and themes) echo _Think and Grow Rich_ (Napoleon Hill); I love sashimi, but, being raw fish, how can it can be improved beyond the quality of the fish (displaying my ignorance)? BTW: the film looks great. <http://www.magpictures.com/jirodreamsofsushi/>

I rephrase it: create value - according to what _you_ feel is valuable. This differs from YC's entrepreneurial "make something people want", which emphasizes other's values. It is closer to creating intrinsic beauty/transcendence. And, IMHO, that is what this guy Jiro is doing: creating something great. Not _being_ great. He and his mastery are in service to what he values.

<comment><USER6> On the run so I can't reply to the rest, but the film is very good. I don't fully agree with the author's take, but it's one of the better films to watch if you're struggling to hold on to some passion...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "9. A tiny little sushi bar in some random subway station. Yet people wait in line, people book a stool at his sushi bar as much as a year in advance, a prices starting around $600 a head. People have been known to fly all the way from America or Europe, just to experience a 30-minute meal. In a subway station!"

Can authenticity be scaled up?

This particular establishment isn't really a humble 10 seat Tokyo sushi bar in my (perhaps odd) way of thinking, it is a very good _simulation_ of one but wrenched from the ecology of such street food places.

So by acknowledging the mastery, we have changed the practice.

<comment><USER7> _So by acknowledging the mastery, we have changed the practice._

by acknowledging the mastery, we have changed the experience for the end user, but not the practice of creating the sushi. People may reserve a stool a year in advance, but for him it's the same - people come to eat, he makes sushi.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The real question is how do we define "success"? Is success making a lot of money? How much is enough to qualify as "successful"?

We tend to narrowly define success based solely on extrinsic values like money and status, rather than intrinsic values like mastery, purpose, and happiness.

I think the author is saying that focusing on mastery is more likely to lead to "success" in the form of happiness and a greater sense of purpose, regardless of whether or not it also leads to material wealth. Personally, I agree with this more holistic view of success.

<comment><USER9> Each individual has define success and wealth for themselves. Money is a default because it is easy to measure, this does not mean it is the right metric to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "The tailors have a similar shtick as Jiro."

It's interesting to me that the author unintentionally insults the very people he intends to put on a pedestal. I guess this is a nitpick, but a shtick is a gimmick. Jiro, the sushi chef, and Saville Row tailors are certainly not using gimmicks to drum up business.

</comment><comment><USER10> Mastery simply means moving forward continuously. There is no way to achieve it, for the path has no end.

<comment><USER11> Overall I agree and like this sentiment as a way to organize your own approach to a craft.

However, I do think that for most disciplines there is a significant apprenticeship/journeyman period of a a least a couple years before you develop the basic muscle memory you need to truly explore the craft and not just imitate tutorials.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Mastery" is like a buzz-word, but it's had its power in our culture for a long time. Buzz-words are useless unless a meaning is assigned to them.

To me, mastery means mastery of the basics.

A master chef is a master at slicing, chopping, mixing ingredients correctly, and applying heat to food in a variety of ways (frying, baking, grilling, etc). A master carpenter is a master of measuring, sawing, hammering, and fastening wood together.

My professor for introductory accounting tells his classes that advanced accounting textbooks have the same chapters as the beginning books, just with more advanced subject matter. Mastery of accounting would then be just mastering those basics.

<comment><USER13> I disagree completely. Mastery necessarily implies a mastery of the basics, but it is _so_ much more.

A master chef knows how flavors, textures, and colors interact to build a food experience much greater than the sum of its parts.

A master carpenter knows how the wood she is working with will behave as it is worked with and finished, so the joints and reinforcements are completely hidden within the aesthetics of the piece itself.

(I can't speak to accounting, but I would imagine there is a similar difference.)

The point being that, once the basics are mastered, there is a completely new level of complexity (and therefore creativity) that can be managed. The true masters are the ones who are one level above everybody else who is "merely" great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Based on this article, mastery sounds like a total grind - these are classic 'success trap' descriptions that anyone with an entrepreneurial twinkle in their eye might recoil from. Doesn't transforming your mastery into something that works _for_ you sound massively better? To each their own... (kind of agree with swombat, but I'd think 'master' corresponds to at least a boutique level of success)

Re: "to me, mastery means mastery of the basics" - People aren't called masters of something because they master the basics. To me, mastery means mastery of the finest nuances, which are not basic at all.

<comment><USER15> Entrepreneurship is itself a craft that can be mastered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> OT but his Jiro story reminded me of the movie Tampopo, a hilarious Japanese movie from the 80s about a woman and her struggling noodle shop.

<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092048/>

</comment><comment><USER16> Numbering paragraphs in what is essentially a prose article is like thumbing your nose at the concept of mastery.

<comment><USER17> I believe those numbers matched up to the his Ignite slides. 20 slides at 15 seconds a piece. He wasn't thumbing his nose at anything.</comment></comment>


Beware the Planners - <AUTHOR> http://www.danpink.com/archives/2009/06/quote-of-the-day-beware-the-planners#comments

<comment><USER2> From Pasteur: Fortune favors the prepared mind.

Be anal about planning - no, probably excessive. Plan for alternatives? Critical. Absolutely critical. Those who play with money who thought the bubble might burst did way, way better than those who got blindsided.</comment>


Firefox 31 for developers - <AUTHOR> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Releases/31

<comment><USER2> Firefox dev tools are becoming better and better. I disabled Firebug a few weeks ago, I don't miss it.

<comment><USER3> A part of me is annoyed that Firefox has spent so long trying to build a set of dev tools when Firebug was already an established tool for them.

I agree that the dev tools are a lot better, and I've recently removed Firebug as well, but I've spent many months annoyed at Firefox dev tools appearing when I've wanted to inspect an element using Firebug. Firebug has been a resource hog for a long time now, but I feel that I stuck with it for longer than I should have because the Firefox dev tools were an annoyance.

Is there a specific reason why Mozilla didn't just ask the creator of Firebug if they could merge his work into the Firefox source, and build on the creators already good work.

<comment><USER2> _We thought long and hard about including Firebug wholesale and considered several approaches to integrating it. An early prototype of the Inspector even included a significant portion of Firebug. Ultimately, integration proved to be too challenging and would have required rewrites that would have been equivalent to starting over._

Source: [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/10/firefox-developer-tools- an...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/10/firefox-developer-tools-and-firebug/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Something I don't get about the Firefox developer tools is why they make the console logging unavailable if I've defined console as a window level variable, overwritten for the purposes of extending its behavior.

This only happens for the Firefox tools. Firebug, Safari and Chrome web inspector don't care. We do this so we can enable and disable console statements for debugging purposes. We monkey patched console, and because of that I can't use Firefox developer tools at all. It's a shame.

<comment><USER5> Works for me:

        > c = console
        Console {  }
        > window.console = {}
        Object {  }
        > c.log("hello")
        undefined
        "hello"

If you could provide specific steps-to-reproduce and/or a test case, then dropping those in a bug is the best way to get the behavior fixed: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox&c...](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox&component=Developer%20Tools%3A%20Console)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Awesome, I've been waiting for "copy as curl"! The dev tools are improving steadily.

Using the xmonad window manager the color selector window gets sent to the background. Perhaps this could automatically work if the color selector window provided Extended Window Manager Hints?

If not, does anyone know the name of the window the color selctor opens so I can make the color dropper work by forcing it to float?

<comment><USER7> The eyedropper is using a panel with a call to openPopupAtScreen to open it ([http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla- central/source/browser/devtoo...](http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla- central/source/browser/devtools/eyedropper/eyedropper.js#195)).

I'm not sure exactly in what ways this is failing, but please file a bug under "Developer Tools: Inspector" if you have STR and we can try to narrow it down: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox).

<comment><USER6> [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1042863](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1042863)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What is happening with asm.js?

<comment><USER9> It's still awesome. And it's benefiting from the speed improvements in the rest of Firefox even when a release is done without specific asm.js enhancements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> still miles behind chrome devtools..</comment>