An apology to readers of Test-Driven iOS Development - <AUTHOR> http://blog.securemacprogramming.com/2012/09/an-apology-to-readers-of-test-driven-ios-development/ <comment><USER2> "The second problem, and the one that in my opinion I've let down my readers the most by not catching, is that the table is completely false."

There is a big difference between "unsupported by hard data" and "completely false", especially when the author later admits to not being willing to pay to see the first paper cited in support.

It also seems, (from this post: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/9sv/diseased_disciplines_the_strange...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/9sv/diseased_disciplines_the_strange_case_of_the/)) that in fact the first line is supported by data, if only in aggregate. The author of that blog posts makes much of the phrase "this study didn't accurately record" while glossing over the next part of the sentence that states "so we will use average rates summarized from several other studies." It is common practice to aggregate data, and provided it is done properly, the aggregation can reduce error, not increase it.

The claim that "a bug introduced in Requirements, costs more to fix the later it is discovered" is claimed to be supported by data. Well done for demanding to see that data. But epic fail for creating controversy by claiming that the opposite is true.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Amusing exchange over at Reddit:

Redditor 1: "I bet not a single f$%k was given about that table among the readers of the book :)"

Redditor 2: "That table, or something like it, features strongly in every software engineering textbook that I've ever seen. The numbers differ, but the increasing order of magnitude differences are roughly the same. It's the essential justification for nearly everything in software engineering. "A single f$%k" doesn't begin to describe the importance of that table."

And yes, "the essential justification for nearly everything in software engineering" is broadly correct. Anytime you see an argument that "it's important to get the requirements right" for instance, it's based on studies that purport to show these numbers.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, with the semantic cavet that "software engineering" is used in the sense of "software development management process nattering" and not (always) the actual engineering of working software.

The basic falseness of that chart is pretty well known among the hacker set. Or maybe it's a failure of interpretation among the natterers: the "high cost" of mistakes in the past is made mostly of work already spent. The _immediate_ cost of correcting a past mistake is often (of course not always!) vastly lower than people think. And the farther you are from the actual code involved (i.e. if your role is "architect"), the higher your overestimate of that value is going to be.

So this is a feedback loop: the "high level" people at the start of the process have a built-in bias against iterative solutions (which they perceive as "expensive") and thus a built-in predilection to overdesign as they try to get everything right the first time.

<comment><USER4> I'm glad someone else sees the difference between the engineering of working software and the "process nattering" that seems to make up official "software engineering" as far as I can tell.

You do miss a couple of steps in the feedback loop:

1\. " _The 'high level' people at the start of the process have a built-in bias against iterative solutions._ "

2\. " _A built-in predilection to overdesign as they try to get everything right the first time._ "

3\. The wild-ass guesses that make up the overdesign prove to be completely wrong.

4\. The project fails miserably or succeeds, miserably.

5\. The "high level" people perceive software as "very expensive", reinforcing their biases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know Graham. And he's both a great guy and a serious developer. I've also read his book and though I've not yet finished it, I've seen this table, as it's in the beginning.

Having read this blog post, I now respect him even more. Both for the intellectual honesty and for his efforts to try and reconcile the data in the table, with all its consequences.

I wish more people (including me) were this dedicated and willing to admit mistakes.

Maybe that's what makes him a specialist in software security, of all things.

</comment><comment><USER6> > I therefore no longer consider Table 1-1 in Test-Driven iOS Development to > be representative of defect fixing in software engineering

Surely this makes it _more_ representative, in a literal sense -- if he'd checked his data at the start, he wouldn't have to go back to check it + issue an apology + reprint the books now :P

<comment><USER7> The general idea ("bugs found later tend to cost more to correct") is uncontroversial.

It's also accepted that this is a very difficult thing to study. There are so many subjective factors involved that's it's really hard to quantify the data or the results. But it seems to me that if Software Engineering as a wants to make progress methodically, it needs to throw out the old unsubstantiated assumptions in order to make room for new conclusions with a solid basis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The time and cost to fix bugs can have a huge variance which is sometimes dependent on the nature and field of the software being written. There are bugs that take seconds to fix and others that take months.

I have personally experienced hunting down a bug for six months nearly full time (10 to 12 hours per day) until it was finally found. This was a real-time hardware system and the code was that of an FPGA. The culprit was a coefficient in one of many polyphase finite impulse response filters. The calculations used to generate this coefficient were done in a huge Excel spreadsheet. At one point, in the hundreds of equations in the spreadsheet, the author had used the ROUND() function when the ROUNDUP() function should have been used. This was enough cause a buffer issue in the FIFO feeding the polyphase filter. These are tricky problems to track down when you are literally looking for events that take somewhere in the order of single-digit nanoseconds to occur.

On the other hand, there are those bugs where you know exactly what is going on and where in the code it is happening the instant you see the behavior. We've all experienced that during the course of software development.

Fixing bugs for a dating website has vastly different requirements than, say, fixing bugs in a flight control system.

One argument is for more up-front planning in order to avoid some bugs. At one point this can quickly become counterproductive. Sometimes it's better to just start writing code and fix issues as they come up.

Now, if we are talking about fixing bugs after the fact, that's a different matter. One example here might be if you inherit the code to a complex website or an engine control system and, without any familiarity with the code, are required to fix bugs. This can easily take cubic time as it requires to learn the code-base (and sometimes the subject matter) while also trying to hunt down bugs.

This is why I tend to take such tables or studies with great skepticism. I haven't really paid much attention to these studies, but I remember looking at one or two of them and thinking that they tended to focus on narrow cases such as fixing bugs in-house, with a stable programmer team and great familiarity with the code base.

<comment><USER9> Skepticism is deserved. It's a very fine balance, and bearing in mind not much software exist that is entirely bug-free.

What is the cost of a bug that is never discovered? Is it negative? What is the cost of fixing a bug that would never have caused a problem (at each stage of development)?

It's way more complex than bugs == bad

<comment><USER10> Agreed. Indeed, your argument naturally follows from a "bug fixes are features" type mindset.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Previously on LessWrong: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/9sv/diseased_disciplines_the_strange...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/9sv/diseased_disciplines_the_strange_case_of_the/)

<comment><USER12> Note that the author of that post is Laurent Bossavit, the author of the "Leprechauns" book that was referenced in the OP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Call me cynical but I am getting very skeptical against a lot of well established "truths" in Software Engineering: the cone of uncertainty, the orders of magnitude difference in programmers productivity, the efficiency of TDD, ...

Most of these well established claims simply don't have enough empirical data to sustain them. They're all bloggers' hand waving and empty claims.

<comment><USER14> _the orders of magnitude difference in programmers productivity_

I am skeptical of this too. It makes more sense to have huge swings in _ability_ , not _productivity_. Ie a poor programmer won't take 10x as long to code a given feature, he will just hit a ceiling of ability and not be able to do it at all.

<comment><USER8> >Ie a poor programmer won't take 10x as long to code a given feature, he will just a ceiling of ability and not be able to do it at all.

10x longer is not a poor programmer, that's an incompetent programmer. If someone needs ten days to code something that can be done in one day something is very seriously wrong.

<comment><USER15> > 10x longer is not a poor programmer, that's an incompetent programmer. If > someone needs ten days to code something that can be done in one day > something is very seriously wrong.

That's just not true, it's all relative. Linus Torvalds supposedly coded git to the point where it was self-hosted in 1 day. Even a very good programmer could take more than 10 days to do that, an average (but not incompetent) programmer could take months.

<comment><USER16> Linus has guessed it took him about two weeks to get git to the point it was self-hosted.

<http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/msg24132.html>

It's still impressive, though.

Edit: Should have read further. It looks like Linus got git self-hosting in two days.

<https://lkml.org/lkml/2005/4/8/9>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hopefully this will end in a discussion in which the actual data underlying the table can be had and matched up.

Anecdotally, it seems to make sense that it is more expensive to find and fix a defect later in the process. If a dev finds a defect while implementing a feature, only his costs are involved. However, if a defect is found later in the our process, at least 2 qa analysts are involved: one to find the defect and another to confirm it. After that a project manager schedules out time and assigns the defect out to a developer, possibly not the one that introduced the defect gets the assignment to fix it. The developer fixes the defect, a build is made by the build person. The original tester retests the defect and marks the fix as being verified.

That seems complex, but there are possibly even more steps than that. Unit tests may need to be written, customer test cases may need to be updated.

I don't know if the costs end up being exponentially greater, but they would seem to be greater.

At any rate, it would be good to have someone independently validate that data.

<comment><USER18> It's not written in stone that you need 2 QA analysts, a project manager, a developer, and a build master to fix a bug. That only proves that bureaucracy is expensive, not that fixing bugs "late" in the process is expensive!

I'm not sure what exactly the second QA person adds to the process. As a developer, I need to be able to reproduce a bug myself in order to have any chance of fixing it, so there's your confirmation step right there.

Project manager? No, just have your QA person file the ticket as a bug (with the correct priority) and have your developers pull tickets off your bug tracker themselves. At worst, a slight email/verbal nudge from the usual boss should do.

Build person? No, have a continuous, automated build system. The job of the build person should be to maintain that system, not to run individual builds.

Now you're down to one QA person to file the ticket, one developer to fix the bug, and the same QA person again to close the ticket. Add in a few minutes of another developer's time to code review the first developer (you don't even do _that_ despite having all that process?) and it's still cheaper.

Unit tests? Developers write their own unit tests. Have a failing unit test that reproduces the root cause of the bug _before_ you fix the bug--that's a best practice anyway. For testing above and beyond that, it's not unreasonable to have SDETs maintain that stuff, though you already have the root cause of the bug captured in a unit test so your main concern should be whether any existing tests actually rely upon the broken behavior.

<comment><USER7> _It's not written in stone that you need 2 QA analysts, a project manager, a developer, and a build master to fix a bug._

Well - that depends. For plenty of large software engineering projects (think aerospace) it's a given that you'll have that organization many times over.

On the other hand, a web startup may produce a high-quality shipping product with just two or three devops. The number of "lines of code" may even end up being similar between the two deliverables.

The code that gets burned into an ASIC requires a completely different set of development considerations than a non-critical "make deploy_production" web service.

But how do you quantify all these confounding factors?

<comment><USER18> The hope is that adding all those people adds value somewhere, it doesn't just add cost.

<comment><USER7> Right - the aerospace people aren't stupid - far from it. They simply have vastly different goals and constraints, and thus a different organization and a different development process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Lots of props to the blog author for going through the hoops that I suppose we should all be going through. I've always placed the CC books up there in the pantheon of great software engineering books. This is a chink in the armor and I hope Mr McConnell takes the time to provide a response although I'm not holding my breath. Another object lesson in not accepting things at face value.

</comment><comment><USER20> Based on my own subjective experience I've found the numbers regarding testing to be suspicious simply because "bugs" are so varied that any specific number would be subjective.

I'd always assumed that these numbers referred to an architectural type of bug where, once made, more code is built upon the bug and so a cascading effect occurs. The more code that relies on the bug, the worse it is to fix because you have to fix all of it's dependent code. In some cases you may need to repair data, or entirely refactor sections of an application.

But there's other bugs that are more "typo" level bugs where obviously the time to fix is exactly the same no matter what phase of development.

I had just always assumed those numbers were a worse-case average to encourage developers to better plan their architecture. In part because the context of code complete is more about planning and estimation.

Though there may not be support for the exact figures, I think the point of them is to not let things pile up and to try to put thought into your design especially at the architectural levels.

<comment><USER21> This seems to have been my experience and interpretation as well. A bug is not a mistake in coding, but a mistake in selecting core architecture, 3rd party libraries, etc.

Making a mistake picking the wrong storage engine can cause major problems if you find it can't scale to your load after 12 months of development. That's a ton of code to change if you're switching from MySQL to Redis (for a crazy example).

Make a mistake in copy or layout, and that's usually much easier to change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It seems he wasn't able to see some of the sources. One cost money to see, one is out of print and not available...

It may be true and noble that since he isn't able to verify the data himself, he shouldn't have used it. But if you can't see the sources, you also can't state that the data is incorrect. One of those books he couldn't find might contain the data that directly corroborates this.

I suspect the cost of fixing defects has more to do with your internal process, and less to do with how much work it takes to find and fix the actual defect. I have a client I work for now for which I need about 10 days lead time to get code from development to production. So it might take 1 hour to fix a bug that is discovered, and 8 hours to do the paperwork and go through the formal process of moving code through testing, staging and finally to production.

</comment><comment><USER23> I wonder if he tried asking McConnell just how he compiled the table. It does seem a bit odd to construct such a simple table from eight different sources.

<comment><USER4> ...none of which seem to have the actual data to support the table.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I seem to remember first seeing a table like the one the author describes in "The Mythical Man Month" but my copy is currently at home. The data underlying that book was gathered from projects at IBM in the '60s and '70s and I don't really doubt that the underlying data was fairly represented.

The bigger question is whether improvements in processes and tools have obsoleted this data. TDD and automated regression testing would be one place where inter-phase defects could become less costly. On the other hand, projects that have uncorrected architectural errors can be completely functional and yet their maintenance costs never decrease.

If someone has a copy handy, please validate my memory otherwise I'll check when I get home this evening.

<comment><USER25> I've just gone through it page-by-page, and didn't see a table like that. Using the 20th Anniversary Edition, I also looked through the summarized list of claims in each chapter, and the 20-year retrospective, and did not see the table or a section that might have been a textual version of the same data.

Perhaps the closest bit I found was in the chapter "Plan One to Throw Away": "The total cost of maintaining a widely used program is typically 40 percent or more of the cost of developing it" (p 121). Similarly, another section quotes Capers Jones, "Focus on _quality_ , and productivity will follow" (p 217, emphasis original).

That, I think, is about as close as MMM gets to these claims.

<comment><USER24> I couldn't find it either but in addition to "Code Complete" this data is also shown in a chart in "The Software Project Survival Guide", also by Steve McConnell (p29).

The attribution is "Researchers have found" but Boehm and Papaccio are listed in the references.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wish more authors would check their references like that. Not that I am interested in iOS-development, but still.

</comment><comment><USER27> It's great to see such intellectual honesty. It looks like the real perpetrator, however, is McConnell.

<comment><USER28> "The fact that no studies have produced findings that contradict the 10x claim provides even more confidence in the 10x claim. When I consider the number of studies that have been done, in aggregate I find the research to be not only suggestive, but conclusive—which is rare in software engineering research." Steve McConnell [http://forums.construx.com/blogs/stevemcc/archive/2011/01/09...](http://forums.construx.com/blogs/stevemcc/archive/2011/01/09/origins- of-10x-how-valid-is-the-underlying-research.aspx) <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4117417>

<comment><USER29> Yikes, that doesn't strike me as very intellectually sound.

"The fact that no studies have produced findings that contradict the existence of a teapot orbiting Jupiter..."

<comment><USER30> I think if you read the article you'll find that that's unfair. His argument is that there are many studies that support it _and_ none that contradict it, and that such consistency is unusual in the literature. That may be wrong but it's not trivially stupid as you make it sound.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Much respect for the frankness and forthrightness with which he addressed this. I've always taken the exponential increase in the cost of bug fixes with time for granted. I won't do so in the future. We need more empirical studies of software development!

</comment><comment><USER32> Anecdotally, I have certainly found that although the cost in time may not vary as much as this table would indicate, the cost in stress ramps up even faster. Fixing a bug in production is usually a highly stressful endeavor for all involved. I would love to see a similar table phrased in terms of stress comparing different development methodologies currently in vogue (test and throw it over the wall, CI, automated pushes vs. manual pushes, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER33> A google scholar search for the title of the paper behind the paywall reveals numerous copies freely available through university websites.

</comment><comment><USER34> So yeah, long story short from what I gather is: I couldn't find the referenced sources to the table I am referencing so it must be false!

What a leap of logic, seriously...

<comment><USER31> He didn't say it was false. He did say it was unsupported.

<comment><USER30> "The second problem, and the one that in my opinion I've let down my readers the most by not catching, is that _the table is completely false_."

<comment><USER31> "it" meaning the conclusion about the exponential increase in the cost of fixing bugs over time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Would people who've read the book recommend it? It sounds interesting to read because I'm not experienced with TDD, and iOS tends to shy away from it.</comment>


Brazilian Presidential Hopeful Dies in Plane Crash - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-13/brazil-real-ibovespa-fall-on-concern-candidate-in-plane-crash.html

<comment><USER2> Eduardo Campos was just the third in the polls, but was seen as an alternative - the first two positions in polls are occupied by the party in power and the former party in power, in that order.

The commotion caused by this accident may help his substitute, as his candidate for vice-president was a very popular character in Brazilian politics who didn't run for president mostly because of bureaucracy in the foundation of her new party.

</comment><comment><USER3> Could a Brazilian chime in? Who's going 2nd in the polls? Do you expect Campos supporters to move to Rousseff or to <other person>? Do you suspect foul play? What are the main differences between each candidate's platform? Did the World Cup results play out as predicted (ie. Rousseff losing support due to loss)?

Thanks!

<comment><USER4> Campos dropped from the coalition that elected Rousseff 1 year ago. He was stronger on the northern regions where former president Lula successfully conducted a "Venezuelization" process (trading government social subsidies for votes).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very unfortunate, he was previous state governor with a 76% approval rate and a depolarizing force in this year's presidential elections.

</comment><comment><USER6> I had to retread that title twice. I read it as:

       Brazilian Presidential Hopefully Dies in Plane Crash

Which naturally seemed rather horrible.</comment>


How to Mixed Reality - <AUTHOR> http://northwaygames.com/how-to-mixed-reality/ <comment><USER2> How to accidentally a word.</comment>


On Startup Capital Efficiency - <AUTHOR> https://stevecheney.com/on-startup-capital-efficiency/ <comment><USER2> Capital efficiency is a great point of view. The take that every dollar from a customer is worth 5 is a really good conversation to have with a CEO.

It bucks the trend that showing revenue (and then, showing profit) are liquidation events, not just investment opportunities. So it's not saying much that if you show revenue, you get a chance to liquidate or raise an up round. People have known that forever.

The more valuable perspective here is that many startups deliver products that are copies of stuff that already exists. That's just what VCs fund. So capital efficiency is your special sauce.

It would be nice to have a conversation about where capital efficiencies lie _generally_ in technology. My feeling is that it is still in some sort of user-generated content. This is totally opposite of the trend to fund AI companies, which seek to replace the human being. Seems so much more capital- efficient to get the human being into doing expensive labor for free.

This leads to the most interesting counterpoint to the POV advanced here: capital efficiency is super important, but it's also super boring. Maybe there are investors who want to line up outside your door to do your thing capital efficiently. But the people working for you, especially at the beginning, _do not care._

People want to be thought leaders, not penny pinchers.

<comment><USER3> OP here. Thanks for reading. Good comments.

As far as winning out vs competitors, efficiency can be key. There is no question there.

One of the things about frontier tech (autonomous, AR, sensor networks, ML) is that many people are funded and do it too early. So they need to somehow last.

Most startups spend the money within two years or less. It's programmed into the psychy. A Sequoia would never admit this but they want you to spend your money fast and move on to the next thing if you aren't growing fast enough. Buying one more year can be crucial.

<comment><USER4> I need to build my v2 and am avoiding accepting angel funding from an investor who wants 30% for $250k. Sales are not stopping at this point. I am using stripe for all sales. Do you have a suggestion for me to get a loan? I need $150k to build v2 AND keep the lights on for say 12-14 months. Thanks.

<comment><USER5> Check with SVB or Lighter Capital?

<comment><USER4> I spoke to these guys: [https://stripe.com/works- with/fundingcircle](https://stripe.com/works-with/fundingcircle)

But they want tax returns and credit score. Thank you and i will look into Lighter Capita. SVB is silicon valley bank?

<comment><USER5> Yes.

Tax returns and a credit score for your business? Or are they asking for a personal guarantee?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In early-stage SaaS, a rule of thumb I've often heard is that it's great if you're maintaining a 1:1 ratio of cash burned to ARR generated.

So if you net burn $6M cash from Day 1 to now, and get to =>$6M ARR, you're doing great. Presumably that ARR has an LTV(lifetime value) that's some multiple of ARR.

But in early-stage, that "net burn of cash" figure includes both client acquisition costs, COGS, and initial R&D costs. So it's a pretty messy metric IMO beyond a back-of-the-napkin kind of thing.

Almost immediately you'd expect to focus on the king of the "classic" SaaS metrics - CAC:LTV, where LTV takes into account gross margin, and making sure you're above the 3x line.

Investing big $ in R&D for product expansion/improvement etc is almost a different question - it's its own ROI calculation.

Final point - in SaaS, the pay-back on the initial CAC cash outlay is also super important. If it's tight (good), you are "re-cycling" the initial CAC spend on add'l clients, and each is creating a stream of future cash flows.

In a perfect world, you're taking $100 of investor money, deploying it into CAC to produce x # new clients, which represents ARR streams, and who pay back the $100 CAC almost immediately. Then you re-deploy the $100 to get the next x # of new clients, etc.

This is the magic of compounding in SaaS.

\--

All this to say - capital efficiency should be understood in context (in my examples above, capital efficiency in go to market has it's own rules and dynamics, whereas other uses of capital may be different).

</comment><comment><USER7> > _Many people say growth is the only important metric, and that's actually > wrong. The reason is simple—only 5% or fewer of startups are growing so fast > that efficiency doesn't really matter._

I'm confused. Isn't the _whole point_ of VC to try and find that 5%? And to be comfortable writing off the remaining 95% as acceptable loss? Isn't that why VCs encourage startups to irresponsibly increase their burn?

I mean, it makes sense if the author wants to offer startups some weight in the battle against that pressure - after all, the VC has 30 other investments and the founders have all their eggs in one basket. But that's not the perspective of this article - it's very much written from an investment perspective. If I talk to my investors about capital efficiency, they tell me they think we should pour more money into everything to try and grow faster, runway be damned.

<comment><USER8> I think your perspective reading it is different from mine - I read it more as being somewhat from the founder'a perspective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> On the cost side, it's difficult for me to understand how most startups can pay SV rates for talent and be considered efficient. The problem space usually is just not difficult from a technical aspect, you don't need top talent. Maybe unpopular here due to the bias of SV talent in HN but from a capital efficiency standpoint startups need to be designed in SV/US and developed elsewhere.

<comment><USER10> The SV salaries are why you're seeing platform B2C companies lead the pack and build full engineering teams in the Bay Area. For many B2B, especially in non- platform markets, building hybrid teams (or building completely outside of SV) with Founders in the Bay and scaled operations often outside the US.

As an example for NFLX with $2.2M revenue per employee ($15.8B rev / 7,100 FTE) if they could save $150,000 per employee it's only $1B to the bottom- line. By hiring "the best" and keeping operations as simple as possible paying more per employee may actually be financially better for them too.

<comment><USER9> Idk, that "only $1b" is an annual bump to the bottom line. Net income only crossed into the B's for the first time in 2018. Was significantly less in prior years. The question is how much growth would it take to add another B and how long would it take. At this point, is the market even that big?

Also, Netflix is a great example of a product that could be engineered anywhere with US based design/management (if you're of the opinion that innovative ideas start here). Especially since they're on AWS for infra.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> it was hard to find a point here. it seems to boil down to "hey, don't forget about capital efficiency!", which is not so helpful.

the importance of captial efficiency is already highly scrutinized because startup success is most sensitive to growth rate (of profit, aka income minus expenses). the challenge is that many early stage startups can't be measured on profit, so proxy metrics (like user growth) are used to forecast future profit and growth instead.

even revenue-oriented startups try to be measured on proxy metrics because investors so easily misconstrue early capital efficiency metrics as characteristic of future performance (this happened to my startup, on very early unit economics).

</comment><comment><USER12> You wonder if somebody is being disingenuous when they tell you that an investor who is famed for investing in Uber uses capital efficiency as part of their decisionmaking process.

<comment><USER13> You should read the interview. It's candid and interesting and addresses your comment: [http://fortune.com/2019/01/17/mitchell-green-lead-edge- capit...](http://fortune.com/2019/01/17/mitchell-green-lead-edge-capital/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why is every dollar from a customer worth $5 from an investor, as opposed to $2 or $10. I understand the idea behind revenue dollars being more valuable than investment dollars, but I question how the ratio is constant across startups rather than heavily dependent on other factors like industry, stage, round, etc.

</comment><comment><USER15> Does capital efficiency really matter as much though in "winner take all" markets that seem to be more and more the norm in tech these days? The reason it feels like so many VCs are pushing for growth at all costs is that in many sectors now being 2nd is an order of magnitude worse that being 1st (and being 3rd is almost equivalent to being non-existant). Look at social networks: Facebook's market cap is around half a _trillion_ dollars. Linked in was acquired for $26.2 billion, very similar to Twitter's current valuation, Snap is ~$16 billion.

And all of those companies had multi-billion dollar valuations before they barely had any customer revenue at all.

</comment><comment><USER16> Many investors care more about growth than capital efficiency. The investors in the last round of your startup typically have a 1x liquidation preference as well as protection against down rounds. For a company that's generating revenue this provides with protection in case things go wrong. They also have a portfolio. End result is that many investors are more risk tolerant than founders and will push for growth at all cost.

To be clear, here at Stream we have super supportive investors. But I've seen friends of mine struggling with their investors and the constant push for growth at all cost.

<comment><USER3> Totally agree. Investors are the worst at pushing this. And they do it with a lot of psychological tactics. We've been really fortunate to have great lead investors who are available to us and support us too. I think it's very rare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> >for every dollar you take from an investor assume you need to turn it into 10

I don't think that's the right way to look at it. It's more accurate to say that for every dollar you take you need to generate $0.50 to $1 in ARR. Or for something like a social network acquire one customer per $10-15 you take. VCs are looking for an IPO or acquisition and that's how they're priced

</comment><comment><USER18> It'd be interesting to analyze the tech IPO pipeline with this perspective...</comment>


Are Angels Making Money? More Important, Should You Care? - <AUTHOR> http://www.techvibes.com/blog/are-angels-making-money-more-important-should-you-care-2012-10-04

<comment><USER2> Heck, yes, we should care! If they're not making money investing in tech startups (assuming HN readers), I think it's pretty obvious they'll look to invest elsewhere. In effect, Angels are our customers, too; and if a customer is not perceiving value (i.e., ROI) they will look elsewhere.</comment>


Get Any Quote as Image - <AUTHOR> http://saying.co/albert-einstein/a-person-who-never-made-a-mistake-never-tried-anything-new#comments

<comment><AUTHOR> An example for twitter [https://twitter.com/Saying_co/status/397888453431398400](https://twitter.com/Saying_co/status/397888453431398400)</comment>


SeatGeek Marketplace - <AUTHOR> http://chairnerd.seatgeek.com/seatgeek-marketplace/ <comment><USER2> I just tried to sell my resume on SeatGeek, and it was rejected as not being related to an event. So seems to be working well :)

<comment><USER3> I tried to sell my recliner, but I couldn't find a way to upload it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think this is really good use case. Is it limited to the sports ticket only? How its going to figure out if the tickets are non transferrable? Does it work with the venue/vendor to confirm the transaction?

<comment><USER3> Well, if they follow St*bhub's model, they would probably just refund any claim of problem by the buyer and take that out of the seller... even if the seller did nothing wrong and the buyer is trying to defraud. e.g. claimed denial-at-door (even if because of misuse by the buyer) , claimed somebody else in the seats, etc. They refund without requiring proof of problem partially because they know you can dispute with your credit card issuer anyway, and that's a difficult case for them to prevail on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is really smart. I feel like it further establishes SeatGeek as the inarguably best destination to buy tickets: peer-to-peer at lowest fees in the industry, combined with the best prices on the web.

If you consider a marketplace to be (demand side) : (supply side), they already have a backstop in the supply side through price-comparison, and can now differentiate their service from other companies with a solid user- uploaded set of tickets.

<comment><USER6> These sites are really at odds with teams who have chosen the leasing vs. ownership of tickets, where leasees can only transfer and sell their tickets on the officially-sponsored marketplace.

I'm a season ticket holder for such a team, but can't go to all the games, so I list quite a few each year, and I really hate that demand for tickets gets unequally spread through the official market and these other markets.

Is there a legal reason why a seat aggregator like SeatGeek doesn't list these official site tickets? Is it just because they don't get a kickback from them? Some other reason?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As much as I want to love this, I'm wary — how's SeatGeek protecting against fraudulent tickets? How is my purchase protected? Does (can?) SeatGeek validate the ticket themselves?

TicketMaster, the monopoly that they are, can do this with their resale marketplace (of course, the ticket needs to come from them in the first place), but since SeatGeek aggregates, I don't think they have this superpower.

<comment><USER3> Only the official marketplace can validate the barcodes. For example, Ticketexchange for most pro sports other than baseball and StubHub for most major league baseball teams.

An individual can do an ad hoc validation of a given ticket by trying to create a listing on the official marketplace. You will be able to create a listing _only_ if the ticket is valid _and_ unencumbered (by an existing resale listing).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "The SeatGeek app now allows you to send tickets to anyone else, right from your phone. Your friend will be able to get into the game with the app – no printing, no meeting..."

Um, _maybe_.

The venue has no obligation to accept phone scans, and a growing number of venues is refusing to allow people to just scan a PDF off their phones rather than have a printed instrument because it is a growing vector for fraud.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're working with venues and have venue access control policies within our data model for every event. A substantial majority of venues support mobile entry. For a minority of events, you do indeed need to print tickets – in these cases we clearly indicate to the user that printing is necessary.

<comment><USER3> "We're working with venues and have venue access control policies within our data model for every event."

Care to name a few with which you have any agreement?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been an avid user of SeatGeek ticket search since the beta, snd I despise selling my unused tickets on StubHub. Knowing how well the rest of their offering is put together, I'm pretty excited to try out the selling side. Curious how the fees compare, which didn't seem to be mentioned.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

re:fees, we're charging no fees for user-to-user sales. For tickets listed publicly, we're charging 12% + 3% for credit card (market rate in our industry is 20-30%). That's preliminary – we may move it up or down.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why do coding bootcamps teach Ruby on Rails and JavaScript? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> JavaScript is a must know if you want to do web work. It's as necessary as HTML. It's the only language browsers actually natively run.

Ruby on Rails is sort of the basis for most any other modern MVC web framework. That is to say it inspired nearly every other web MVC framework, in most other languages. If you can use Rails you'll be able to use most anything else. Prior to Rails most web apps had proprietary frameworks powering them or no framework and were just an bunch of "pages" (endpoints) loosely strung together.

Rails also, for better or worse, has one of the easiest to use ORMs-- ActiveRecord. This helps new folks worry less about the intricacies of learning SQL (or whatever your persistence layer is) and more so about what writing a web service is really about.

Ruby as a language is also very expressive, is truly object oriented, and has all the right building blocks (that's kind of a pun actually), plus a very large amount of documentation and examples. It also is very good for meta programming which is what enables a lot of the rails magic (and fun).

At the end of the day learning more languages like PHP, Python, Java after Ruby is fairly trivial. I always tell noobs to learn whatever is useful for them, and stop worrying about what language.

I started with Ruby 10 years ago and now can write Java, PHP, Python, Scala, Elixir, Objective-C, and Swift; though I am by no means an expert in all of them. At some point you'll realize you've learned concepts and they're what is important. Not syntax.

P.s. don't let my username fool you ;) I'm just unfortunately hipster.

Edit: added some thoughts on why your first language isn't so relevant and a bit of clarity.

Edit 2: fixed absent minded use of rails where I should've written ruby.

<comment><USER3> From a substitutes perspectives...

If you look at the absolute numbers, Ruby jobs are fewer, while (its primary competitor) Python jobs are higher (Python over Ruby by 2:1 according to both GlassDoor and Indeed). About the same ratio also seems to apply for job postings.

So why so many Ruby bootcamps? Maybe it's a relative thing, but I don't have estimates of the number of Ruby bootcamps versus Python bootcamps. But assuming there are more, I can hypothesize:

Python is increasingly being taught by universities. Thus there is a natural pipeline of Python users entering the workforce. Plus, with Python's "one obvious way to do it" philosophy and incredible online documentation, there's a lot less to learn to master it.

Thus, there would perhaps be more demand for Ruby bootcamps, even if the relative job market is smaller.

<comment><USER4> How many of those Python jobs are web dev vs data science / analytics / whatever? Ruby is mostly RoR, but Python is pretty broadly applied these days.

<comment><USER5> This.

There might be more Python jobs, but a lot probably require knowledge that most people can't get in bootcamps.

A simple indeed search of Django vs Flask vs Rails shows there are much more demand for Ruby web developers, which is what bootcamps train for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Programming concepts come more easily the more gradually they are revealed. Nobody has any concept of what a stack overflow is or why it's important on day 1. Ruby is approachable and fairly forgiving and (at least in MY opinion) VERY readable.

Full disclosure: I went to engineering school for 2 degree and then later attended (and currently work for) a code school.

I can say that I can see a marked difference in students that go through Ruby as a first programming language vs JS. Ruby-first students are more ready to deal with new ways of doing things and they are, in general, less likely to have serious learning issues. JS-first students tend to have more consistent problems grasping things like scope and return values. It IS possible it's bent as such due to our curriculum, but all I can tell you is what I've seen in our students.

<comment><USER7> Because if you can understand Ruby, you can understand anything.

<comment><USER8> You won't understand why some languages aren't as elegant to write as ruby.

<comment><USER9> This is really a issue as ruby dev. Its hard to motivate yourself picking up anything that is not as cute. Glad more and more cute/elegant languages are coming out every day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Code camps were a product of the mid-to-late '00s, and the premise and format has largely remained the same.

In the late 2000s, the popularity of Ruby exploded when Rails gained mindshare. Rails, along with its healthy share of innovations [1] and productivity gains [2], was a good fit for code camps because it took little effort to crank out a basic CRUD app. Such fast feedback is very impactful on people who are just starting out programming.

Despite other frameworks borrowing from RoR in the years to come, Ruby's culture is largely compatible with the notion of 'programmer awesomeness' \-- where a motivated coder is given a powerful toolset and is allowed to do great things, even if they're a bit quirky -- and is lighter on idiomatic dogma than some other languages that are popular for greenfield development today. While those idioms and mores are an asset to the languages that have them, they may stifle independent exploration and make people more afraid to make mistakes, which are quite detrimental to new learners.

Meanwhile, since the late 2000s, Javascript has become practically mandatory, largely buoyed by the HTML5/Web Platform effort and browsers finally getting their act together, but also by Node opening up an entirely new frontier for JS in a very desirable application domain. This, coupled with the JS community's tolerance and encouragement for exploration and independent re- discovery, also makes it a good fit.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12758085#12761705](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12758085#12761705) [2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13196431#13197538](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13196431#13197538)

</comment><comment><USER11> Quite simply, it's great market fit.

JavaScript has extremely low barrier to entry. Everyone has a browser, so you can get someone to get started without download any software. That's huge.

Rails has the benefit of providing a framework that can get someone building functional CRUD apps in a tremendously short period of time.

Between those two, you've hit a nice sweet spot where someone can be fully functional as a developer in a short period of time (talent/quality/patience aside).

<comment><USER12> I agree about "easy to get started." When I came up with the idea for [http://TexasCoders.com](http://TexasCoders.com) I absolutely didn't want people to think about Javascript or any particular language, because I mostly care about teaching the fundamental concepts. I'm not advertising it as a Javascript class.

Maybe the appeal of Ruby is that it's "new" but not so new that it's a waste of time to learn. Also, my impression is that some effort was made to make Ruby's syntax "pretty" in a holistic sense, which might save a teacher some time. Personally, I was turned off by RoR very early on because it was a pain to install on Site5 (the first and only web host to offer it) and then had no compelling reason to try it again after that. Also the concept of "Rails" bothers me, because I think software should be unique and "off the rails" like art. But that's just my opinion :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Look at the goals of a bootcamp in the first place - to get you just enough knowledge to have the minimum skill needed to be useful to a team. They are not trying to make you a computer scientist... they are trying to teach you as little as possible, while still knowing enough to get work done, which means knowing how to work with a toolkit that does most of the work for you. And RoR does that. It also is popular enough that once you know it, you can probably find a team using it that needs help.

And why JS? Because that is what runs in the browsers.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'd guess Javascript is quite popular[0] because it's literally on every modern computer and has incredible reach[1]. It's also a bit of a kitchen-sink language so students can grow into a style and paradigm that suits them. Plus there's nothing to install to get started... just open a browser.

[0] [http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/javascript/](http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe- index/javascript/) [1] [https://tessel.io/](https://tessel.io/) [https://www.sitepoint.com/creating-webgl-game- unity-5-javasc...](https://www.sitepoint.com/creating-webgl-game- unity-5-javascript/) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sETJs2_jwo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sETJs2_jwo)

</comment><comment><USER15> I think it hardly matters which language you learn first. I went to a Ruby bootcamp but Ruby is #4 or 5 on the list of languages I've used most since then. I didn't use it at all in my first job after the bootcamp.

Those programs are three months out of your life and then you're back to learning on the job and in your free time like everyone else.

I think a dynamic OO language like Ruby or Python is a great place to start but it doesn't really matter. Any mainstream language would be fine.

</comment><comment><USER16> You ask this as if _all_ coding bootcamps teach these things, which I highly doubt to be the case. In fact, I'm aware of several "bootcamps" for both Java and Python. Hell, there's even one out there for COBOL: [http://www.wintrac.com/courses/mfcobc.asp](http://www.wintrac.com/courses/mfcobc.asp)

As someone who ended up learning Ruby (and Rails) for a previous job, I can attest that it's a great language from a learning/teaching perspective. Huge ecosystem, the syntax is actually readable, you don't have to fiddle with compilers, and so on. As mentioned in other comments, Rails is also the archetypal MVC framework, for better or worse; while I don't personally care for it, it gets the job done and is in relatively common use; in terms of getting students from zero to hireable quickly, Rails knowledge is pretty useful.

Meanwhile, Javascript is one of those necessities for web development, for better or worse, so a web-centric bootcamp will understandably put some emphasis on learning it.

</comment><comment><USER17> A lot of it might just be timing. Dev Bootcamp (the original bootcamp?) started up when Rails was the cool kid on the block, and it was a break out success. They proved there was a market, and the busy model was easy to clone. A bunch of Rails bootcamp copycats popped almost immediately.

</comment><comment><USER18> My guess is that they are the flavor of the month (knowing only Rails+JS is widely employable), and have a low enough barrier to entry that you can realistically teach someone enough to be useful in the timescale of a bootcamp. Add a little HTML/CSS and you can do front end as well.

I think the auto-magicness of Rails helps, since it gives you so much even if you are relatively inexperienced. Then you have a jumping off point, to start learning on the job, earning money and you can ostensibly choose your own adventure from there.

edit: I'm not sure what's objectionable about this comment. I'm new here and trying to be helpful, so if I've gone against some rule, I'd like to know so I can learn from it.

<comment><USER19> Rails is not that employable anymore. Sure, you can find gigs for it in tech hotspots, but that's true for any language. For people living in the Real World outside of the tech bubbles, Rails jobs have mostly died out and been replaced with Node jobs.

<comment><USER20> Not here in the UK. Agreed, most Rails jobs are in London but outside the capital PHP:Node is about 7:1 on Indeed.co.uk by job title and that's excluding WordPress, Drupal, Magento and Joomla.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, PHP, .NET, and Java are always going to be king outside of the tech hubs. I'm saying that the niche that used to be occupied by Rails jobs is being/has been replaced by the niche now occupied by Node.js jobs.

Rails does not have the widespread appeal it used to -- it's not the hip new kid on the block like it was in 2005. At my employer, the people who handle Rails act like it's radioactive and are itching to replace it with more "modern" things.

<comment><USER20> Node:Rails is about 1.5 in London and 2.2 in the rest of the UK so, yes, Node seems to be more popular than Rails outside the capital. The complicating factor, however, may be the hiring culture in the Rails community. Because Ruby and Rails are so strong on community it may be that a lot more Rails vacancies are advertised informally. That's certainly been my experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Essentially because they're easy to grok. Take js for example. No interfaces, basic OO system, no access modifiers or static typing, no multithreading, no pointers Etc...

A lot of concepts can be handwaved when you're using a language that doesn't support them. Js is easy to learn and widely useful.

</comment><comment><USER22> They are ubiquitous and compliment each other in full stack entry level developer roles.

</comment><comment><USER23> IMO Ruby does a pretty good job hosting a bunch of different programming paradigms and techniques in a consistent way. Whether or not that's ultimately a good thing in a language, I don't know, but I can believe it has benefits in an educational context. Add to that the popularity of the language in general, and it seems like a decent choice for a "boot camp" style education.

If there's a real argument to be made for the pedagogical merits of Javascript, I'd love to hear it. There does seem to be a sizable job market for relatively inexperienced Javascript developers, though.

</comment><comment><USER24> If they are teaching Ruby and Javascript, then that must be a web development specific bootcamp. Javascript is a must for web, Ruby is a solid backend choice with very high readability.

</comment><comment><USER25> I think the question that I'd really love answered is why do all of the bootcamps focus on web development. Why don't some focus on systems development, operating systems, trading systems, and other things that won't be covered that I'd consider "important programming" stuff.

<comment><USER26> The purpose of a bootcamp is to take an inexperienced or new developer and get them job ready. This is possible with web dev, as theres a large market for it and its sufficiently "shallow" enough to be usefully productive in a few months.

The subjects you mentioned have much smaller, specialized job markets and take longer to learn.

<comment><USER25> I don't think the job markets are smaller nor does it take longer to take someone and teach them how to be a deveoper on low-level systems. These fields are more about knowladge and tricks to learn to make your software efficent and an understanding of existing systems. This is very easily codifiable in a code-camp like course.

You can take students and build real products (embeded systems like example medical gear and such) and teach them all of the same programming-specific information they already learn.

Now granted this wont happen any time soon. I don't think it's impossible I just think the kind of people who go to code boot camps aren't the kind of people who are interested in low level systems development. Maybe that's just a stereotype but as long as it persists people probably won't attempt to build things like schools like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Both frontend and backend, definitely if you are to be in charge of a project that involve security and quality coding on both side that most developers must be proficient and competent to deliver with "Web application" framework.

</comment><comment><USER28> Because they are the (one of the) easiest ways to get things done. Did you have a specific question? This seems to be one of those questions that will bring out the trolls and people will start talking about elixir, rust etc.

</comment><comment><USER29> If I did it again, I'd do a longer bootcamp that was Devops focused.

</comment><comment><USER30> JavaScript is everywhere and they need it for the browser. Ruby is the most consistent and concise mainstream OO language IMHO. Ruby on Rails is still the easiest web framework to program with.

</comment><comment><USER31> My first programming class employed Pascal. It hasn't held me back. Let them learn Ruby... one day they'll tell it to their grandchildren and everyone will have a laugh.

</comment><comment><USER32> A few points I don't think anyone has mentioned yet:

\- Ruby has less of a learning curve in contrast to a lot of other languages, though the margin is definitely narrowing with ECMAScript

</comment><comment><USER33> Most actual work is in "php". But, it isn't 'hip' anymore. So, they teach ruby. Ruby is more difficult and less clear. Rails itself is a land of 'gotchas' (I have 10 years exp in both). After learning ruby/rails it will be difficult to find work and understand basic database constructs.

/end rattling my cane

[https://www.google.com/search?q=php+vs+rails+stats&ie=utf-8&...](https://www.google.com/search?q=php+vs+rails+stats&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#q=web+language+usage+statistics)

<comment><USER34> According to first link in those search results, ColdFusion is as popular as Ruby. I think you have to factor in the number of PHP "applications" where there's little to no development needed. There's a tremendous number of websites thrown up on $5 hosting with Wordpress and a $20 theme.

> After learning ruby/rails it will be difficult to find work and understand > basic database constructs.

Doesn't have to be that way, but I'd posit that developers should learn to build an application using pure SQL before they learn an ORM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Web is the most accessible medium. If you can view it in your browser, so can anyone else. There is no complex configuration or build process (though it seems the JS community is dead set on changing that). What You See Is What You Get. It's an immediately useful and intelligible medium and you mostly stay away from the really scary things. Teaching simple web dev first makes sense.

Rails is probably chosen mostly out of the false tradition that Ruby is a good beginner's language or the also-false tradition Rails is a good framework.

</comment><comment><USER35> For one Ruby just has easy syntax

<comment><USER36> easy, not simple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Ask ten people to write a hello world in js, and they all will do it, and do it the exactly same way - this is great for a production language. On that point, JS is as good as C/Cxx

The downside - ask 10 people for an example of proper use of advanced oop in js, and out of these 10 you will get 5 passible anwers all of which will be drastically different - horrid thing for production

<comment><USER7> How many ways do people write Hello World in C, Java, Ruby, Python?

<comment><USER38> for letter in 'hello world?': print(letter, end='')

<comment><USER7> Hm, yes, I think I have seen that once on HN.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Code South Labs, Mississippi's first coding school - <AUTHOR>

I am a co founder of Code South Labs and a native Mississippian who has been a developer for 12 years. Today we launched Code South Labs (http://codesouthlabs.com) not only to hopefully make it a viable business, but aslo to give opportunity to the people of one of the most impoverished states in the United States by offering them the opportunity to learn how to code. I know how much this knowledge has done for me, my career and my family, and hope to help as many people as possible out through teaching and helping others learn through our program(s). I would appreciate any feedback about the curriculum and the site. The site is live but we will be making tweaks to the curriculum and copy over the next few weeks as we finalize our courses for 2015. <comment><USER2> clickable - [http://codesouthlabs.com](http://codesouthlabs.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks.</comment></comment>


Americans are saving at an unusually high level after Trump's tax cuts - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/saving-rate-trump-tax-cuts-b856974d-5a4c-4758-a0b6-1dceb552e0b4.html <comment><USER2> Note that the savings rate was over 10 percent before the 1980s. Also note that it is 'savings' in a balance-sheet sense; it includes debt repayments. This is not unusually high. 4 or 5 percent is unusually low.

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT)</comment>


Turning the iPhone Into Child's Play with new Kickstarter project Ubooly - <AUTHOR> http://betakit.com/2012/02/24/turning-the-iphone-into-childs-play-with-ubooly

<comment><USER2> Looks very cool. I love the concept of a toy that has access to all the power and knowledge of the cloud, plus gets smarter over time.

<comment><USER3> Awesome! I just bought five (and I don't even have kids).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My 3 year old loves her Ubooooooooly and can't wait to play again.

</comment><comment><USER5> my kids love it, 4 and 6 yr old boys saying "do it again Dad" now i need a second one...

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm gonna need two...

</comment><comment><USER7> Awesome!</comment>


Her photo was the honeypot local law enforcement couldn't resist - <AUTHOR> http://www.citypages.com/content/printVersion/2411141/

<comment><USER2> Submitter: if you are going to submit print links, how about at least posting a comment giving the non-print link?

Print links have several problems:

1\. They often use a small font and wide layout that makes them unreadable on mobile devices, and they are often hard to read even on desktops. (They are designed for printing, not reading on a screen).

2\. They often (as in this case) bring up a print dialog that needs to be dismissed.

3\. They generally provide no way to go to the non-print version. Sometimes it's possible to guess from the URL what the non-print URL is, but it is not obvious in this case. Contrast this to the non-print page, which usually has a link to the print page, so those who prefer the print page can easily get it from the normal page.

<comment><AUTHOR> My apologies..., when I first opened the link, for some reason the Print dialog didn't come up (in Chrome). After I read the story and submitted it and then came back...lo and behold that print dialog came up.

Here you go: [http://www.citypages.com/2012-02-22/news/is-anne-marie- rasmu...](http://www.citypages.com/2012-02-22/news/is-anne-marie-rasmusson- too-hot-to-have-a-driver-s-license/)

(and you're right, this story was ESPECIALLY hard to find. Even on CityPages own carousel the link is broken...I had to search for the subject's name, which only took me to a slideshow, which luckily had that backlink)

If a moderator could change the link to: [http://www.citypages.com/2012-02-22/news/is-anne-marie- rasmu...](http://www.citypages.com/2012-02-22/news/is-anne-marie-rasmusson- too-hot-to-have-a-driver-s-license/)

The mobile users would be much obliged...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> In some branches of the civil service in the UK (I do not know exactly which ones but HMRC is one of them), we've had a system to deal with this for about 20 years now.

All accesses of personal data have some random chance (I think it's 5%) of being audited. If your request gets picked, a dialog pops up saying that your access is being audited and you must file a form immediately, explaining why you needed to access that record.

For celebrities and for anyone whose records have a history of abuse, the probability goes to 100%.

If you do not submit the form, or your explanation is not satisfactory, you get invited to a disciplinary interview.

That's cheaper than auditing all accesses, but is enough to discourage unnecessary "browsing" of data.

<comment><USER4> I'm surprised that when accessing data, officers don't have to enter a reason, e.g., "investigating case #3894".

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am surprised to see a bikini photo in an (internet!) article about a woman who's been trying to get away from creepy stalkers who know a little too much about her. You'd hope that the paper got informed consent before publishing, but...

(She's not as easy to find as one might fear, but Google does suggest "Anne Marie Rasmussen picture" when entering her name.)

<comment><USER6> Apparently the picture was from a body-sculpting contest. If you enter a contest, you're probably expecting some publicity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The salient part of this story for me: here's a "facebook" that's already got legal and regulatory protections, and _intended to be used by those sworn to protect us._

And it's being abused.

I'm shocked, shocked.

Now take the same system, and put it in private hands.

There are people who'll have access to that system: programmers, systems admins, DBAs, contractors, vendors, business partners, advertisers, marketers, .....

Yes, a fair number of organizations will put some level of control over the data. Pre-employment screens, background checks, security policies, independent audits, ....

And some won't.

And controls or not, the data will out.

How much of an intelligent, consenting adult's life should really go online?

How much of a teen's life?

How much of an infant's life?

A recent HN story on clearing Google browser history prompted the inevitable "I can't imagine what could possibly go wrong" (non-ironic) post.

A well-known contemporary tech company was vitally engaged in civil rights and personal data tracking which lead to the deaths of some 6 million people. World War Two, Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, IBM: <http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/> [http://archives.cnn.com/2001/LAW/03/columns/fl.sebok.IBM.hol...](http://archives.cnn.com/2001/LAW/03/columns/fl.sebok.IBM.holocaust.03.15/)

Social networking's upsides are pretty cool. I'm not down with the negatives though.

</comment><comment><USER8> The author points a finger at police for leering over an attractive woman's photos -- then needlessly posts bikini photos.

The photos add no substantive content to the story; they're just there for gawking at.

The ostensible point of this article is that the law enforcement database should be more tightly controlled. But there's a more basic point that is missed: if you're going to wag a finger at a bunch of photo-gawkers, you shouldn't simultaneously encourage (and profit from) such gawking.

<comment><USER9> The problem isn't leering over her photos---I believe she's a body sculptor so is used to that particular attention.

The problem is that police officers are illegally accessing her private information to know more about her purely out of a puerile interest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have strong opinions about the politics of this (i.e. giving people power without accountability always causes problems, whether it's on this scale or the Department of Homeland Security scale), but since we're on Hacker News, I think it'd be more interesting to consider what this says about auditing, data access, and privacy. I noticed some comments already about auditing systems.

Can this story tell us anything interesting about audit trails we'd like to see in other applications - or that we should maybe implement in our own work?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Have to say, the cynical part in me is kind of surprised that the police (in Minnesota) have an audit system that tracks each lookup. They could easily have justified a system in which license lookups don't track the officer.

(obviously they don't run automated audits, though)

<comment><USER11> The programmers and administrators of that system also have CYA incentives.

I recently built a fairly complicated reservation/scheduling/accounting system. Because of office politics, I elected to design and implement an auditing feature even though it wasn't a requested (or even desired) feature.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess that makes sense...when an incident like this comes up, it's impossible for anyone at any part in the chain (from the chief to whoever hired the contractor) to justify: "We just didn't think we needed to track _every_ time someone wanted to look up private info"

Given that such a computer system probably has a lot of redundancy (or machines spinning) to make sure that cops, at any time, can call up info and do everything else through that network...logging 10-100K logins would be pretty trivial.

Given that you weren't asked to do the auditing feature in the first place, did you also build any kind of suspicious-behavior detection?

<comment><USER11> I did consider building some kind of fraud detection system since there was some suspicion of... treachery. But I didn't know enough about the domain to believe that I could implement something that would work reliably.

In fact, my doubts about my domain knowledge is one of the main things that motivated me to build the auditing feature. If something went wrong I wanted to make sure that I could only be blamed for legitimate mistakes on my part.

I'm sure the same thing happens with larger systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> she looks old.

</comment><comment><USER13> Breaking news: Men look at pretty woman's photo!</comment>


Show HN: My first HTML5 game - <AUTHOR> http://cel.im/game

<comment><USER2> I hold a PhD in Experimental Psychology. Your way of scamming people and tricking them into time wasting BS, while smuggling the whole thing as low level research is to be ethically condemned, and index of deplorable scientific morality. Simply disgusting.</comment>


Ask HN: Where should I locate my startup to find the best EE talent? - <AUTHOR> Hi all,
I'm in the process of forming a company which will develop a new kind of medical imaging device. We have a good idea of our market and have a pre-clinical sales channel in mind, but we need very good people with backgrounds in EE (particularly analogue electronics) to take the development forward. I'm based in London but suspect there is a lack of talent here, particularly in the field of analogue electronics: I'm currently based in one of the top EE university departments in the country. The best post-grads want to do post-docs or switch industry entirely, while the undergrads do not have the level of skills I need (unless they are a truly exceptional student).
Assuming I am free to locate my company anywhere that has the right skill base, where would you suggest? <comment><USER2> Huntsville, Alabama.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure if you're joking but they do seem to have a lot of STEM industry based around NASA and defence contracts.

<comment><USER2> Not joking. Huntsville's engineering culture is usually dated to Von Braun. It actually goes back to the TVA before the war. Engineering and technical culture is a principle part of its identity. Not ancillary to industries like banking or agriculture or mining. It's benchmarks are at the Saturn V and Hubble level.

Huntsville is chock full of experienced engineers and technical staff. Its engineering cadre is able to work with regard to regulations and specifications. There's a lot of NASA and military contracting because NASA and the military have major _technical_ facilities in Huntsville. Marshall Space Flight Center and Redstone Arsenal respectively.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Space_Flight_Center](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Space_Flight_Center)</comment></comment></comment>


Tell HN: Alphalab's Winter/Spring 2011 app deadline is Monday - <AUTHOR>

Alphalab (http://alphalab.org) is a Pittsburgh based startup incubator.  The deadline for the Winter/Spring 2011 session applications is this Monday, November 1st.  Sessions are 5 months long with a Demo Day at the end where companies showcase what they've accomplished and present in front of investors.  More information (including funding info) can be found here: http://alphalab.org/about.aspx
For full disclosure, I am an Alphalab alum.  The experience was great and the relationships I've built and things I've learned are invaluable.  These incubators provide the means for companies to do things right and really jumpstart their businesses.  I encourage anyone at all interested to at least apply.
One thing I'm sure will be brought up in the comments is the fact that you need to maintain a significant presence in Pennsylvania for 5 years as part of the Alphalab terms.  Honestly, I relocated to Pittsburgh for Alphalab and it was one of the best decisions I've ever made.  The startup community here is thriving and everyone is willing to help.  There's also great talent right around the corner with CMU, University of Pittsburgh, and Duquesne University all within 1 mile of each other.  The community might not be as big as SF or NY but I think the smaller size makes it more intimate.
You can apply now at: http://alphalab.org/survey_overview.aspx <comment><USER2> What does alphalab offer over any of the other seed programs/incubators to justify being locked into Pittsburgh for 5 years? I split my time between pittsburgh and the bay area, and while it's a nice town it definitely feels like you're giving up a lot by staying there for 5 years, at least if you're a web startup. The only web development interest group or meetup I could find since moving there was some php group, whereas in the bay I can go to at least one a week.

<comment><USER3> It should probably be said that you're not "locked" into Pittsburgh for 5 years. Plenty of the companies that have taken this investment (AlphaLab & the parent org IW) have relocated in other areas of the country: ModCloth, Clearspring, etc.

However, of the AlphaLab companies nearly all have stayed in Pittsburgh. One was acquired and had to move to Texas.

There's actually quite a few tech groups (as +30) in Pittsburgh. I did this Google embed because people kept asking: <http://PghTechEvents.com>

There's also HackPittsburgh.com for the Maker crowd.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm applying this year. Working on the final touches as we speak. Looking forward to it!

</comment><comment><USER3> Yea, in Pittsburgh it's a very tight knit community, and everyone wants you to succeed. It's also super cheap to live here - while still being close to NYC/DC/Chicago/Toronto.

</comment><comment><USER5> Clickable: <http://alphalab.org/survey_overview.aspx>

</comment><comment><USER6> Here's another reason Alphalab is a great incubator.

[http://realestate.yahoo.com/promo/best-cities-to-move-to- in-...](http://realestate.yahoo.com/promo/best-cities-to-move-to-in- america.html)</comment>


Montana Requires Warrants for Cell Phone Tracking - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2013/06/21/montana-requires-warrants-for-cell-phone-tracking/

<comment><USER2> The fact that we need to have new laws to make it required to get a warrant for some new way to find out about you and track you and invade your privacy is the real problem. The rights not written, etc.

<comment><USER3> The real issue is that the laws are too specific. We keep either needing high courts to rule that the original intention was to prevent X from happening, or to get the legislature to pass a new laws specifically stating that X shouldn't happen.

There needs to be a broad, stated right that law enforcement needs warrants to intercept communications. All exceptions must be passed as laws, and therefore must have justifications. It also helps when fighting said laws that you can point to the rights we have that are being taken away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Am I the only one who finds it amazing that this is front page news these days?

What's next, news that a state requires a trial before sentencing?

</comment><comment><USER5> Clicking in the article from google results bypasses the paywall. [http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd...](http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&ved=0CDMQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.wsj.com%2Flaw%2F2013%2F06%2F21%2Fmontana- requires-warrants-for-cell-phone- tracking%2F&ei=23XFUZymO43m8wTw8YGQDg&usg=AFQjCNE0lpEIOJWCWpGHT6DSaAUsbNlVDg)

</comment><comment><USER6> It doesn't apply to federal law enforcement or other federal employees acting in Montana, afaik.</comment>


Y Combinator Pushes The Envelope - <AUTHOR> http://www.tomstechblog.com/post/YCombinator-Pushes-The-Envelope.aspx

<comment><USER2> The idea that each person has a unique set of traits that will only allow "deep compatibility" with another person who has another unique set of traits is a theory that seems to be only believed by people who don't have a lot of experience with relationships (no offense!).

Maybe the details of the implementation could change my mind, but in the end this would probably be useful for little other than a marketing gimmick.

Is now really the best time for the online dating world? The best times seemed to be shortly after the big sites we have now had just came into existence. Now there social stigma of actually using them as such has become overpowering. Bars though, don't really have this problem.

<comment><USER3> The success rate of a eHarmony.com would seem to disagree with you. In fact I'd argue that the field of mathematics in general disagrees with you. Time and time we find that mathematics can determine things that we never dreamed it could. Things like "game theory" prove that the deeper we delve into statistical analysis the more we are able to determine what someone will and won't do. I'm not saying its ever going to be 100% accurate but if we can determine that x guy and y girl live happily ever after 85% of the time if they share z traits that still gives us the ability to match people far more successfully than we do now.

<comment><USER2> The success of their marketing or of actually getting people hooked up? If they were so successful then they'd lose all of their customers because they would no longer need the site...

> I'm not saying its ever going to be 100% accurate but if we can determine > that x guy and y girl live happily ever after 85% of the time if they share > z traits that still gives us the ability to match people far more > successfully than we do now.

Go ahead and even begin to try to find data to back up that big assumption. No metric with such high correlation exists. This is my point.

<comment><USER3> Well, I guess my question to you would be: What would prove it to you?

The position you seem to have taken right now is that you believe no metric exists and no matter who says there is one you won't believe it.

eHarmony has shown several reporters verifiable numbers proving 90 member every day. I've never heard anyone dispute that claim. The only dispute is what percentage of their members that actually represents. But lets say its a pathetically small percentage, 20% or so.

The fact that they've achieved even limited success seems to indicate that the idea has merit and that refinement of that idea could yield better results.

That's a theory backed up by mathematics. In the end relationships are just two people choosing to join together and stick with each other which means a discipline such as game theory which has been shown to effectively predict the future actions of people could be a prototype for predicting relationship success. Because staying in a relationship with someone is just a behavior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Every once in awhile I'll feel very similar, like, "whoa, how cool is it that we have all these potential ways of making technology work for us?"

It really is. It isn't cheesy. It's inspiring and exciting.

</comment><comment><USER5> Melodramatic post. "Technology is cool."

<comment><USER3> Hey Ben,

I wrote the post in question and I actually registered with Hacker News for the first time just to reply to you.

As far as your comment goes, I apologize in advance for being harsh, but get over yourself.

Being aloof might be cool in high school but if your over the age of 18 you're old enough to realize that the world is too harsh to turn down any opportunity to be in awe of it. The reason I chose to share my observation is because it made me feel good about the world we live in and I thought it might make others feel the same way. Quite frankly, I wish more people would do the same and I wish you wouldn't discourage them from doing so.

So yes, "Technology is cool" and we could all use as many reminders of that as we can get our hands on.

<comment><AUTHOR> _"... I wrote the post in question and I actually registered with Hacker News for the first time just to reply to you. As far as your comment goes, I apologize in advance for being harsh, but get over yourself. ..._ "

HN is attracting its share of _"1 quip snipers"_ , trolls that criticise but not really bother to expand why & generally make a nuisance of themselves ~ <http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html> but we're not all like this.

 _"... But if you look outside of that self imposed box you see there's so very much left to do in technology ... Now I've found that dating someone gives me a tremendous opportunity in bars because rather than be a part of the dating rat race I actually get to observe it as an outsider which is really enlightening ..."_

This was the standout part of the post that struck a chord with me. It's the reason I posted it. A hard problem at the moment I see at various levels is the _"human"_ matching problem. I often wonder the reasons why this problem is tackled so badly in software? Is it because the same thing that makes nerds good at computing also degrade their ability to undertand _"human matching"_?

It's not just dating where solutions to this problem can be applied. It could also be applied to anywhere you have a requirement for recruiting individuals to interact with other people. Part of the reason why the problem domain is not well understood by nerds could also be covered by the _"homo-logicus"_ , _"homo-sapiens"_ divide Alan Cooper describes in "Inmates are running the Asylum". Funny enough this idea also partially explains Trolls. Nerds posting insults like jocks giving wedgies.

The big problem with the matching humans from what I can gather talking to people who try pure software solutions, is the lack of ground-truth. What appears on a site just doesn't match real life. Nothing beats the opportunity to evaluate a human in real-life. Any augmentation to help filter this process may have pay-off in a lot of other areas.

<comment><USER3> Well first, thanks for posting this. Always nice to know someone enjoyed a post. On what you said...

The big problem with the matching humans from what I can gather talking to people who try pure software solutions, is the lack of ground-truth. What appears on a site just doesn't match real life. Nothing beats the opportunity to evaluate a human in real-life. Any augmentation to help filter this process may have pay-off in a lot of other areas.

I think you're right that people lie but I think statistics can, to a certain extent, help with that. To give an example, let's take a guy who loves Gilbert and Sullivan musicals but is ashamed of it so he says he hates theater productions. But then in response to other questions he reveals more truthful answers.

Eventually, a statistical measurement will determine that Women who love musicals match best with guys who claim not to as long as they fit those other traits. So the computer never manages to decode the lie but it still, through the magic of statistics, manages to make the match just the same.

I'm sure we're years and years away from actually getting to the point of having an effective system like this but just the fact that we seem to have the power to do it is pretty amazing.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Understanding Singapore's Different Types of Street Suffixes - <AUTHOR> https://remembersingapore.org/2018/08/15/singapore-street-suffixes/ <comment><USER2> _For example, at Bedok's Eastwood Estate, there are Eastwood Road, Eastwood Drive, Eastwood Green, Eastwood Place, Eastwood Terrace, Eastwood Walk and Eastwood Way.

Likewise, for Springleaf Garden Estate, along Upper Thomson Road, it has a total of 11 local access roads, namely Springleaf Road, Springleaf Avenue, Springleaf Crescent, Springleaf Drive, Springleaf Garden, Springleaf Height, Springleaf Lane, Springleaf Link, Springleaf Rise, Springleaf Walk and Springleaf View._

This scheme has the potential for some confusion.</comment>


Polyphasic Sleep: Facts and Myths - <AUTHOR> http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm <comment><USER2> Thanks, there's some good technical knowledge here, and also some FUD.

I dug into the subject of polyphasic sleep and read a couple very personal accounts of people who made it work for them for extended periods (several months or more). I never tried it myself, but I don't believe they were any less "creative" or functional during this time, or that they were doing long- term damage. So until better evidence comes along, I believe that maintaining schedules like Uberman is possible for the right person in the right place and time, and not trivially a bad idea. For all I know there are good reasons for most people not to bother with it -- like some gene you need to have to succeed -- but we don't know yet.

As drx points out, the author strays into arguments like "abnormal means unhealthy". Another bizarre argument is "it's not optimal because you're less creative etc". Putting aside my own anecdotal evidence that sleep dep makes you _more_ "creative", look -- if Uberman is actually sustainable and gives you X more waking hours per day, I'll decide for myself if that's outweighed by hypothetical cognitive deficits! Arguments like "lots of people have tried and failed" are also sloppy.

<comment><USER3> "I dug into the subject of polyphasic sleep and read a couple very personal accounts of people who made it work for them for extended periods (several months or more). I never tried it myself, but I don't believe they were any less "creative" or functional during this time, or that they were doing long- term damage."

Chronic sleep deprivation doesn't cause obvious, self-evident damage at the time, and it's not always obvious to the person who's experiencing it. But it can cause serious, serious problems over time. That is essentially the effect of sleep apnea. The effects are subtle enough that an enthusiastic confirmation-biased person would easily miss them over a period of "several months or more", but they're real and they get worse over time.

<comment><USER4> As I said in another one of my comments, sleep deprivation, in my opinion, isn't actually the key part of polyphasic sleep. You can sleep 6 or 7 hours polyphasically, too, and this will increase your productivity and creativity than sleeping the same amount monophasically.

<comment><USER3> Sleeping _biphasically_ for 7 hours or so works because that's what humans are wired for. Maybe taking two or three naps instead of one is better than taking none at all, but without the sleep dep you might as well just go biphasic. The main selling point of polyphasic _is_ the sleep dep.

<comment><USER5> Indeed... in a short period of time where you must do X, polyphasic makes a hell of a lot of sense. As a long term strategy, I can't believe it's healthy. I'd rather not meddle with the default operation of a complex system I don't really understand, so usually I sleep until I feel like waking up - there are very few leisure activities that I'd rather do than be consistently well rested.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have no opinion either way, since the field seems to be dominated by empirical "evidence" and cranks, but this guy's entire argument rests on this sentence:

"One of the myths of "Uberman sleep schedule" is that it makes it possible to enter REM sleep and skip non-REM sleep stages entirely. That myth is derived from another false claim that implies a non-essential role of deep sleep. I will ignore these claims as standing in total disagreement with laboratory findings and models of sleep. Instead, let us focus on a more plausible claim of the possibility of compressing sleep stages.".

I.e. "I will ignore one of my opponent's arguments and instead focus on another. Since I can rebuff the other argument, my original viewpoint is true". It's a logical fallacy.

He also tends to say "X is unnatural/abnormal" => "X is unhealthy".

I wish someone did serious research into the topic without prejudice.

<comment><USER7> Let me tell you, as a narcoleptic, I get hours and hours of REM sleep and virtually no deep sleep. It is not pleasant. I started using a drug that facilitated more deep sleep. All of this was monitored and my brain waves were recorded. This is anecdotal but the idea that deep sleep is not absolutely essential is ridiculous to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here is a very good reply to the arcitle from Puredoxyk:

[http://www.puredoxyk.com/index.php/2006/11/01/an-attack- on-p...](http://www.puredoxyk.com/index.php/2006/11/01/an-attack-on- polyphasic-sleep/)

Puredoxyk is one of the two (back then) college girls, who lived on the Uberman Sleep Schedule (and gave it its name) back in 2000. She is also author of the original E2 node about Uberman SS. <http://everything2.com/node/892542>

There is great discussion on the Google Polyphasic Group about this [Dr. Wozniak's] article: [http://groups.google.com/group/polyphasic/browse_thread/thre...](http://groups.google.com/group/polyphasic/browse_thread/thread/fd1e3e91d65ba492/d0f308868351a810?hl=en&pli=1)

Here is my quick summary:

1\. There is not enough scientific data to backup either side (for/against polyphasic);

2\. Dr. Wozniak has his own agenda - he advocates so called "free-running sleep";

3\. Some of the "facts" [mentioned in Dr. Wonziak's article] are in contradiction with experiences of people who tried polyphasic sleep, like Puredoxyk ( <http://www.puredoxyk.com> ) or Steve Pavlina ( <http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/> )

<comment><USER3> Pavlina's ex-wife and business partner is a telephone psychic. Pavlina has extensive blog posts in which he takes her occupation seriously. He's a garden variety crank, frankly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> When looking into this, I've found a lot of people blogging about trying to do this. Usually they talk about how great it and then quietly drop it.

<comment><USER10> Sleep is _weird_ like that. I've read a lot of articles about people trying modafinil and similar substances in order to sleep less and be more alert and, again, most who blog about it (or even write articles for popular publications) tail off or give up for extremely vague "It was great but it's not going to work for me" type reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow, I like this site. Some of the author's analysis seem slightly off to me, but there's a heck of lot of anecdotes and data and quotes. A heck of a lot of anecdotes, data, and quotes makes for good reading.

I particularly liked the part about the sleep habits about the various genius creative people. Cntrl+F "da vinci" to start on that section of the article.

Personally, my best sleeping pattern so far has been a 1-4 hour nap and 4-7 hours of sleep at night. I want to see how low I can go while getting at least a few hours of high level performance and able to function the rest of the day. I don't actually need full speed productivity all of the day and I even prefer cleaning and organizing while I'm a little tired, I get into sort of a zen of it. Anyone else have thoughts on how low you can go while functioning?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, it's a bit of a rant, but an interesting one. Wozniak's an interesting person; I hope you've checked out Supermemo and its open-source counterpart, Mnemosyne.

I've been taking a 20-45 minute nap in the afternoon for close to a year now. I think it was Dustin Curtis's article on polyphasic sleep that prompted me, and I went with the "siesta" schedule because it seemed the most sustainable -- a lot of people do live that way, and getting work done in the mid- afternoon is hopeless for me anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ever since high school stop forever, I been sleeping whenever I want, without the use of an alarm clock.

I find that I naturally wake up at 9 PM on a normal day. Sometime, I only sleep 3 or 4 hours a night. However, that is compensated by another 3 or 4 hours of sleep.

But the best thing is that I am no longer sleep tortured by the school system.

<comment><USER13> What do you do for a living?

<comment><USER12> I am a "freelancer" with only one client and with an income that doesn't actually make me a living. I still live with my parents. It's only a month since the end of high school though.

I aspire to become an entrepreneur and an independent person and is trying to work toward that goal.

I do, however, predict an early death if I am forced to work with a rigid schedule, especially if I have to drive a car to work everyday.

<comment><USER13> A "rigid" schedule might be necessary to communicate with your clients.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wasnt there a thing on here a few months ago about a "guy and a girl" who were going to attempt polyphasic and blog as they do it? Would like to find that and see how it went.

<comment><USER15> They were very tired. Then they stopped. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1225122>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The best part is the Comic Relief section. Read that, and you'll know what to expect every time you read a blogger experimenting with polyphasic sleep.

</comment><comment><USER16> The phrase "Facts and Myths" needs to die a messy painful death. It's the fodder of sex education brochures and corporate training camps.

Any topic away from the main stream should avoid the nasty tactic of labeling different opinions "myths". Wait till your stupid idea is endorse by every sheep-like general practitioner in North America - then you can get away with taring your opponents that way.

"Facts and Myths concerning why 'supermemo.com' is a font of mis- information..." See?</comment>