Silk Road shutdown: how can the FBI seize Bitcoins? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/02/bitcoin-silk-road-how-to-seize <comment><USER2> According to blockchain.info [0] and Arstechnica [1], the seized SR bitcoins may be in address 1F1tAaz5x1HUXrCNLbtMDqcw6o5GNn4xqX .

      [0] https://blockchain.info/address/1F1tAaz5x1HUXrCNLbtMDqcw6o5GNn4xqX
      [1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/internet-lobs-insults-at-fbis-silk-road-bitcoin-wallet/

</comment><comment><USER3> _In the US, lawyers have argued that forcing someone to hand over their encryption keys violates the Fifth Amendment right to protection from self- incrimination._

Is the implication supposed to be that seizure of Bitcoins is protected by the Fifth Amendment? That seems far-fetched.

<comment><USER4> Typically the 5th amendment argument applies to handing over passwords that are only in your head, not keys that are written down. The government can force you to turn over data you have.

The case for not turning over passwords for bitcoin wallets is probably stronger than for true crypt volumes.

If they arrest you with an encrypted volume on your laptop, they know its your's. The only question is what it is. In a lot of cases, the government knows what it is, they just need to be able to prove it. Courts call this a forgone conclusion and can compel you do use your decryption password( but not tell it to the cops).[0]

On the other hand, handing over bitcoin keys maybe the only way they can learn which bitcoins are yours. This is,arguably, not a forgone conclusion at all. And again, you are not just giving them access to the data, you are effectively being compelled to testify that it is your data.

[0][http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/0...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/03/encrypted_files_child_pornography_and_the_fifth_amendment_.html)

<comment><USER3> _handing over bitcoin keys maybe the only way they can learn which bitcoins are yours_

Mmm, good point. Although considering bitcoin is a public network, they could have linked a certain address to you already, ala "follow the money"

<comment><USER5> And the inquisitors may have already proven that you are a witch, so what's a little harm in torturing you to confess.

They may have evidence that this is your wallet, but by supplying them with the password, you are testifying that it is your wallet.

"An act is testimonial when the act entails implicit statements of fact, such as admitting that evidence exists, is authentic, or is within a suspect's control."

"By entering the password Boucher would be disclosing the fact that he knows the password and has control over the files on drive Z."

Compelling Ulbricht to unlock the wallet would be compelling him to testify that the wallet is his. You may think this is a silly chain of reasoning, but I'm sure you will forgive me if I will continue to side with existing federal precedent. [http://www.volokh.com/files/Boucher.pdf](http://www.volokh.com/files/Boucher.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Ultimately, Burcher was orderd to decrypt his drive because the government both knew it was his and knew part of what was on it.[0]

In Ulbricht's case there is a compelling argument that the bitcoin's contained in the wallet on his computer(assuming it was on his computer and not the server) are his. The question is what does the government know about those coins. Clearly, if they know Ulbricht's bitcoin id/public key, then they can look up his transactions in the block chain. If they don't, I'm not sure what they could possibly know.

Of course, given Ulbricht's apparently atrocious OPSEC, it seems likely his password is Ludwig von Mises and the FBI won't need his help at all.

[0][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_re_Boucher](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_re_Boucher)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another question: According to reports Silk Road and DPR made $80 million in commissions. Yet the FBI has only told us about seizing $3.6 million in BitCoins.

Where's the rest of the fortune?

<comment><USER7> Well, riddle me this:

Why is the Cayman Islands, with a population of 56,000, the 5th largest financial center in the world?

<comment><USER8> That would be because they've managed to acquire somewhat of a reputation both for not handing over depositor's money to any and every government thug that waves some paper at them _and_ for returning that money to said depositor on request. A tough reputation indeed to maintain on 21st century earth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can't they just gain access to the account and call it a day? No need to transfer the funds elsewhere, really...

<comment><USER10> And then the owner can just have someone else transfer them to a different address. Suddenly they aren't seized any more. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How are they identifying the owners of these hidden services?

Are denial of service attacks the answer? DDOS a site and just ask popular hosting providers if they're experiencing any unusual traffic levels?

Seems like such an attack always precedes a takedown.

<comment><USER12> If they have a near global view of the network, they can do traffic correlation without having to 'ask' hosting providers - and putting a large signal through would certainly help that traffic correlation to occur.

It is possible that DDOS attacks are not actively initiated by the NSA, but that they greatly help them complete their traffic correlation analysis network to an acceptable level of certainty by lighting up the circuits from the rendezvous points to the hidden service.

<comment><USER5> That, or just look through old forum posts to see if the announcement of a bitcoin drug marketplace looking to hire php programmers was signed rossulbricht at gmail dot com.

<comment><USER12> That doesn't explain how they were able to find the server hosting the hidden service by July the 23rd. The complaint relies on a lot of circumstantial evidence to tie the server to the person, and that evidence wouldn't easily have allowed them to find the server (e.g. that someone accessed a VPN that in turn accessed the Silk Road server from an Internet cafe close to where Ross Ulbricht lived).

If there is stronger evidence that they could have followed from the person to the server, they would probably have put that in the complaint as it would be more direct and therefore more incriminating.

Therefore, it seems likely that they didn't find the server by following it from the person. There are several possibilities here:

1\. Perhaps the NSA helped with finding the server by traffic analysis to follow the circuit back to the hidden service IP?

2\. Perhaps the server was rented from / on the advice of an informant and setup only shortly before it was imaged. Reading between the lines, redandwhite was a law enforcement plant on Silk Road (possibly Canadian, given that is what the article claims) that DPR trusted to some extent and possibly took advice about how to get a host for the server. The complaint conceals where the server was found - perhaps for this reason.

3\. Perhaps a foreign government surveillance programme routinely searches virtual servers, and this resulted in the server being found.

<comment><USER13> 1\. could you please try to briefly explain how would such traffic analysis work? People with deeper knowledge of networking always mention traffic analysis without further explanation... but to us curious amateurs this does not really explain anything.

The fact that they had the server image related to specific date - July 23rd - does this say anything about how they obtained the image? Can we infer that they did not locate or hack the real server (because they would continue to have access after that date) and that maybe somehow they got hands on some backup image or something? Can we infer anything else?

<comment><USER12> To understand how a traffic analysis attach works, you first need to understand how hidden services work.

The way Tor hidden services work is that the hidden service builds a route (called a circuit) through the network of Tor nodes through to a node which it calls a 'rendezvous point' (RP). It then repeats this process to establish multiple circuits, one to each RP. The IPs of the RPs are public information, but no node (not even the RP) except the hidden service knows the route the circuit takes to the RP - only how to get to the next hop. End-users build their own circuit with Tor to the RP, so the RP or the hidden service also don't know the identity of the end-user.

An attacker wants to find out the route a circuit takes from an RP to the private node, to find the private node.

Tor does not send masking traffic - it only sends data when someone is actually asking something. So when someone sends data through the RP, the RP receives that data, unwraps one layer of the 'onion' packet and sends the rest along the circuit. The next node does the same. Therefore, this creates a pattern that is observable to someone who is sniffing the networks.

An attacker with access to all the networks between the nodes cannot see the contents of the packets, since it is encrypted, but they can look for the pattern in the traffic to see where the traffic is flowing. If no one was using Tor at all except for one packet being sent along one circuit, it would be trivial to see the path a packet follows, since you would see the RP sending the packet, then a slightly smaller packet going to the next node, and so on to the destination. In practice, lots of people are using Tor, so you need to do statistical analysis and build up confidence over time about a circuit.

If there is an unusual amount of data traveling over the circuit you care about (e.g. due to a DDOS), this again makes it easier - just look for all the most active nodes. If you can send a pulse of exceptionally high traffic, you can watch the time evolution of the pulse through the system and see where it ends up. Even without a high traffic pulse, you can compute probabilities that observed traffic outputs from a node were caused by a given input (based on the timing, size, etc...) and over time, combine a lot of individual points of weak evidence to get strong evidence about a circuit.

The complaint says that the 23rd was when they asked a foreign government to assist them by imaging the server - so they know where it is physically, and who owns the datacentre.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


New Model For Sharing Water - <AUTHOR> http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/water-demand-and-diplomacy-0703.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I was a bit disconcerted when my local hardware supply store thought I was a bit daft wanting to add a cut-off valve to my shower riser (home made for a claw foot tub).

I can't wait to see their responses when I go back to get flow meters to monitor with my Arduino...

Probably my being a geek on his own well has a bit to do with my mindset. Repairing the pump was one of my first home repair jobs upon moving here, so I am frequently listening to the pump, waiting for it to cycle back off again. A stuck, running toilet once ran it dry... Hence the desire for monitoring.</comment>


'All is well'. In Italy, triage and lies for virus patients - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-ethics-speci/special-report-all-is-well-in-italy-triage-and-lies-for-virus-patients-idUSKBN2133KG <comment><USER2> Man, my heart breaks for Italy. (And the entire world.)

This is an unprecedented time, one we will all remember later. Hopefully, it's bringing the world closer together.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ventilators alone won't help you also need trained medical staff to run them.

<comment><USER4> Italy will rush 10,000 student doctors into service, scrapping their final exams, in an effort to help the struggling health service cope with the coronavirus onslaught.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus- italy/...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy/italy- rushes-to-promote-new-doctors-to-relieve-coronavirus-crisis-idUSKBN214245)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Bay has the smartest and most resourceful people in the world. Why can't we utilize this talent to figure out how to build respirators. Sure there is a bunch of high end 3d printers in the area.

<comment><USER6> "Why can't we just 3D print them" is the most "Bay" response to this complex problem.

Snark aside, modern respirators are complex machines. Certain components could maybe be 3D printed. I suspect we'd probably just be moving the bottleneck up the supply chain, however.

<comment><USER7> We (at least, in the US) have a strategic reserve of functioning ventilators. What's going to be worse is lack of trained operators.

We'd hit the ventilator bottleneck even if not for them, but the operator bottleneck will come much sooner.

<comment><USER8> Do you know what is involved in operating one? Would it be possible to write documentation a layman could understand, so the "operator" problem is solved?

If I had the choice between no ventilator and one operated by a non-doctor just reading a manual I'd still take the second one.

<comment><USER6> Excellent question. Operator manuals for e.g. military vehicles (and weapons) are fairly step-by-step, though not necessarily idiot proof. I would how that a lot of us here could figure out the basics on our own, and with a manual be up to speed in a few hours if it really came to that.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Here are the apps that may be suffering from Pokémon Go's popularity - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> what about everquest? My husband is a big gamer. What is everquest?</comment>


Ask HN: Nest for GPS - Should I build it? - <AUTHOR> The problem I want to solve is the following: with a plethora of IOT/GPS devices invading the market, we are spending more and more time routinely doing "check-ins" to see if what we are tracking is OK or in a normal pattern/area (example: a) where is my child? b) is my truck on route?).
I want to create a "Nest" like service for GPS. Where it will mashup AI and geolocation so that it can first learn normal movement patterns, and based on that, provide you with a permanent status, such as: normal, cautious, warning / check location. All wrapped up and offered as an API as a service.
Thoughts? Does this make sense? Is it really an issue? Would you use this?
Thanks!
rocket man <comment><USER2> You might be interested in Numenta's [0] anomaly detection tech for geospatial tracking [1].

[0] [https://numenta.com/applications/](https://numenta.com/applications/)

[1] [https://numenta.com/assets/pdf/whitepapers/Geospatial%20Trac...](https://numenta.com/assets/pdf/whitepapers/Geospatial%20Tracking%20White%20Paper.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting! Thanks :)</comment></comment>


Dumb benchmarks of Sinatra-like libraries on Elixir, Ruby and Node.js - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/999390

<comment><USER2> Question: Does the franky example make use of both of your cores? Express and Sinatra are probably just using a single core out of the box.

<comment><USER3> Yes, Frankie is using both cores. I am passing the flag "production" to all three libraries but not doing any further customization to the underlying VM/engine/webserver.

<comment><USER4> Slap cluster (<http://learnboost.github.com/cluster/>) in front of your node.js express server and re-run the tests with both cores. I'd guess the performance will close to double.

<comment><USER3> I believe I could optimize all three scenarios by configuring the webservers, VMs and so forth. That is not the point here though so I decided to go with out of the box experience.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fear and loathing in Rolex-ville - <AUTHOR> http://www.cringely.com/2014/09/10/fear-loathing-rolex-ville/ <comment><USER2> I disagree. Watches that cost below $1k are seen as "low-end". At the higher levels it's all about prestige. I had a boss that wore a $50k Franck Muller to match his $150k pinky ring. He only cared about showing it off. It's a piece of jewelry to him.

The new "watchlet" is not expensive enough or exclusive enough to warrant any prestige from the truly wealthy. I doubt it will have much impact on Rolex's bottom line.

Now if you said Tag, Burberry, Movado, etc, then I would agree. Those are lower end quality watches with a similar pricing. Bottom line: The apple watch targets younger crowd with excess cash, not the rich like Rolex.

</comment><comment><USER3> People who buy Rolex and other luxury brand watches aren't really the target market.

There is a reason there are no LCD type watches (/smart watches) with luxury watch brand names on them. thats not their target audience.

Hell, most rolex's are automatic (not quartz). Its about the perceived quality of the watchmaker/the insides for most people who buy luxury brands watches. And people buy good quality watches because they last for years and years. A smart watch won't (you could wear a watch from the 80s now, and it would not look out of place. I can't imagine wearing a iWatch in 30 years...)

You could compare it to the watches made by consumer brands like Gucci, Armani etc though i guess.

</comment><comment><USER4> Apple gold watches are so arriviste</comment>


I started a one-man biz that's beating VC-backed startups - <AUTHOR> https://news.distrokid.com/what-ive-been-up-to-for-the-past-4-years-ef06ab9c5cd6#.pbxjucbsm <comment><USER3> @Pud can undeniably build products that are laser focused and useful.

And his minimalist approach to company building is epic and I am a fan.

But it's sort of disingenuous to play David Vs. Goliath here like his line about launching:

"I figured only a small number of smart people would somehow find us among the masses."

He's just like the rest of us - just build a great product and be lean guys!

But oh wait he launched DistroKid on the back of the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of registered musicians already using his other site - Fandalism - founded years before.(1)

EDIT - why I am a fan of pud is in the children to this comment he brings a data-gun to a knife fight and sorts out my impression w some facts.

(1) [https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/06/philip-kaplan- fandalism/](https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/06/philip-kaplan-fandalism/)

<comment><USER4> A similar situation: Jason Grishkoff built and grew his music submission site SubmitHub[1] "on the back of" his popular music blog Indie Shuffle. People said it therefore must have been easy, but that's not actually the case. He spent 4 backbreaking months sending over 1000 personalized emails to sign up the initial collaborators he needed to make the SubmitHub marketplace possible. The moral of the story is to be wary of succumbing to availability bias[2] and underestimating the work that goes on behind the scenes.

The other lesson is, as Pud said in reply to you, always be parlaying. Spending years building up an audience that you can market to might sound like "cheating" to those of us without such an audience... but then again, spending years acquiring programming skills before starting an online business might sound like "cheating" to non-developers. In reality, it's simply a smart idea, no more and no less, to leverage existing advantages like a unique skillset, valuable knowledge, an audiences, personal connections, etc.

Specifically, building an audience is a great precursor to launching an online business. Growth is hard, and starting from zero makes it harder. And anyone can build an audience! I recommend checking out Ben Gelsey's analysis of Product Hunt's rise.[3]

[1] [https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/submithub](https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/submithub)

[2] [http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/availability- bi...](http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/availability-bias.html)

[3] [https://medium.com/@theunixbeard/product-hunt-s- rise-d49249a...](https://medium.com/@theunixbeard/product-hunt-s- rise-d49249a1a2c0#.ddbokz70a)

<comment><USER5> This response only addresses the extreme criticisms about saying they had a blog so it "must have been easy" or "it's cheating".

I don't think it was easy nor cheating. Both of the founders mentioned here are smart, capable, and engineered whatever advantage they had.

Another perspective on self-promotional articles (not an inherently bad thing) like these is they downplay or omit the influence another venture had on building their current one. The SubmitHub article has a specific question about 'what have been your biggest advantages' and it surprised me that "running a high traffic blog in my target industry with a large email list" wasn't mentioned there. That seems like a huge advantage.

This is a sentiment I've seen in many of the comments here and in the HN comments about your SubmitHub writeup.

It's not meant as a personal attack at you, Jason, or Distrokid's founder. You're all doing great things! It's about breaking down what were likely the major factors in success so that information can be applied in one's own ventures.

<comment><USER4> Totally agree with you. I know this is a nitpick, but in Jason's response to "What have been your biggest advantages", he actually does talk about running Indie Shuffle:

 _> As mentioned before, being "part of the problem" provided the best advantage possible. There were a few competitors trying to solve similar problems, but none of them were actually part of the equation. As such, they struggled to convince others to sign up, and didn't have a steady funnel of users to push their way._

Specifically, the knowledge he gained from running Indie Shuffle ("being part of the problem") and the "steady funnel of users" really helped him out.

<comment><USER5> On 2nd glance, you're right. It could have been more clear ("running my music website was a huge advantage because..."), but it was indirectly acknowledged. Thanks for calling it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love articles like this it's inspiring...but it really doesn't offer any new insights other than the fact that

 _Every one man success story on HN was largely possible due to existing audience from another entity that took years to grow_

It's pretty disheartening once you read the article and it boils down to this very requirement: You Need An Audience First.

I'd like more insights and details in _how_ lone entrepreneurs of HN were able to _grow_ their audience.

Because when Step 1 is _have a big enough audience_ the rest of the steps are pretty much a no brainer. It's this step that most of us are struggling with.

I've spent years in seclusion writing a SaaS that ultimately resulted less than the annual wage of a North Korean factory manager and it was rough both physically and mentally but it all boiled down to the fact that VC funded startups were able to do huge PR and buy ads, write blog posts, increase Adwords bid prices etc while I was not.

So yeah, you can succeed with a one-man biz outfit but not without an audience. It makes sense why Linkedin is valuable, why Pinterest, Whatsapp, Oculus, Twitch gets bought out even without revenues.

<comment><USER7> I was able to bootstrap and launch a successful (5 figures MRR) SaaS by myself with no previous audience. Now we are much bigger (in terms of both employees and revenue).

How I did it was very simple. I found where my customers were and I lived and breathed on the industry forums they were on. While developing my beta I had a very strong sense of the problems people were facing, how my product solved those problems, and why my product would be superior to competitors. Plus I was able to establish myself as a reputable person within those circles of people on those forums.

So when my beta was ready I was able to get people to pay for the beta by offering them a lifetime discount and the ability to talk with me throughout the development process so that they had some impact in shaping the product. Just from those beta users I was ramen profitable and I was able to bring on an intern for a couple months to help me speed up some of the development.

By the time I publicly launched I had a core group of evangelists (the beta users), a strong reputation on industry forums, and an amazing product that solved big issues my customers faced and I reached 5 figure MRR within a month of launching.

<comment><USER8> Ah, so the secret to launching without previous audience is to build up an audience prior to launch.

<comment><USER7> A lot of people think along the lines of:

Step 1: Develop product

Step 2: Market product

But both need to be done in tandem with each other. While you are developing your product you should also be working on some way to either build an email list, establish rapport, get on people's radar, or at the very least validate a product fit and a basic marketing strategy.

For instance if you plan on advertising on Adwords you should be running tests to a dummy page (or email opt-in) before your product launches so that you know if that is a remotely viable option before sinking tons of priceless developer hours into a product with no proven way to market it.

Alternatively if you are going to advertise on forums you better spend a lot of time on those forums to make sure you are creating something those people care about and that those forums have enough visitors to move the needle.

Those are two examples - there are a million ways to market a product and all of the promising ideas should be experimented on and validated before your product is even finished.

Far too often solo cofounders are driven by a cool idea and then handwave (or worse look down on) the marketing aspect of it, and then after their product is finished they are left wondering why they spent huge amounts of time creating a product that nobody is signing up for. When I launched there was no uncertainty - I had already talked to tons of people in the industry, had lots of beta testers, and had properly validated the promotional channels I thought fit best with the product.

<comment><USER9> The book 'Traction' does a great job at building upon this great comment and giving good action steps for founders/makers to market their product

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> To be fair, any company making a net profit is doing better than most VC- backed startups.

<comment><USER11> I've gotten so tired of the VC model. It produces nothing. Just company after company of the same rehashed ideas (or worse still, good ideas) that are doomed to failure because they can't eat the world.

I wouldn't work at a VC unless I had literally no other options, and if I ever start a business, I'm doing it the way the author here did: honest work for honest wage. Maybe I won't get any Ferrari's but at least I'll have my dignity.

<comment><USER6> You aren't alone. The current VC model is destructive because of it's wasting capital at perhaps the most riskiest and inefficient way of producing alpha on other people's money-spraying & praying.

I don't know all the ins and outs but I have to echo the sentiment that it is better to make $1 for every $0 spent than $1 for every $2 spent. The latter makes _zero_ economic sense. Any fucking idiot can spend money and make negative ROI. But the market dissonance is being fueled by low interest capital.

We are going to see history repeat again this year and when the water goes out, we'll see who's been swimming naked. They'll be back for the next bubble.

I'm convinced these bubbles are engineered who make money from the ride up and the ride down. Pump & dump on a national level but of course the men who play Gods need not play by the same rules they enforce on lowly mortals.

You will be able to buy a used Ferrari as they depreciate fairly quickly unless they are rare. They aren't built with longevity in mind and the parts do not depreciate in prices (expect to pay a Honda s2000 for clutch and F1 paddle shift pumps).

<comment><USER12> It's not really accurate to say that the VC game makes $0.50 on the dollar. If that was true, they wouldn't be in business. They make money by hitting grand slams--throwing out a BS number here--every 30 times at-bat. That's all they need. What's unfortunate about the VC model is that 29 out of those 30 at-bats is made on the backs of people who genuinely believe that they have a strong chance of being that grand slam. It's those startup founders who end up with the grey hair and circles under their eyes. As long as their are optimistic dreamers, there will be VC patrons.

<comment><USER11> Except it's not 1/30, it's more like 1/300 which still sounds generous to me.

As for founders with grey hair, I admire their passion, but I didn't get to where I am now by lighting both ends of my life candle on fire for a 1/300 chance of being better off. Fuck that noise. I'd rather have a life and be poor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Really resonated with me, also being a micro-startup with a minimalist customer-centric philosophy, albeit in a completely different market.

Steps to reproduce:

1\. Identify a poorly served professional segment where the business processes are not the primary task,

2\. Automate their processes with vision and passion and empathy for the customer,

3\. Make fans for life. Maybe also profit.

Minimum requirements to execute: at least one seed customer; wifi; coffee; time.

Rock on pud.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed.

Rock on inopinatus

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I very much like reading this type of stories where founders candidly talk about their business, how well they are doing, what did it take to get where they are (remove a good chunk of the usual BS, add some numbers). Indie Hackers is a great source ([https://www.indiehackers.com](https://www.indiehackers.com)) for this type of stories.

I have a feeling that this is the dream of a lot of people on HN. Having an easy to run business with a couple of people, without crazy competition, not needing to go sell it to VCs, and making a good amount of money while running it. Not judging, just observing.

</comment><comment><USER15> Met @pud once while he was CEO of Blippy. Very nice guy and great to talk to. I also absolutely love his post: "Why Must You Laugh at My Back End" ([http://pud.com/post/9582597828/why-must-you-laugh-at-my- back...](http://pud.com/post/9582597828/why-must-you-laugh-at-my-back-end)). He's built lots of crazy impressive stuff by himself and DistroKid is no different.

<comment><USER16> Heh, I just wanted to checkout the DBaaS he mentiones, but it seems [http://www.xeround.com/](http://www.xeround.com/) is now a really shitty Alibaba "clone".

Edit: For reference, here's the old website: [http://web.archive.org/web/20071019010255/http://xeround.com...](http://web.archive.org/web/20071019010255/http://xeround.com/)

<comment><USER15> Yep, yep, my favorite part is using Dropbox to deploy code.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've since discovered the joys of git. Dunno what I was thinking with Dropbox. Did the job I spose.

<comment><USER17> Couldn't you still use dropbox to keep eg server config in sync? you can put a git repo inside a dropbox folder anyway :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Please correct me if I'm wrong - isn't this a terrible business decision? It took a small team a year to make a product that is apparently taking the market by storm. Their secret sauce is apparently not some special algorithm, but common-sense automation. If the barrier to entry is actually this low, and they advertise the fact widely enough, they will soon be joined by competitors trying to do the same. They may be ahead of the pack, but they lose their selling point and their advantage faster than they would have done otherwise.

Why give away your hand like this?

<comment><USER19> It's one thing to talk about your plan, it's another thing to actually execute it. We've seen bloated startup after bloated startup, I think running a lean (and I mean lean, 3 employees is nuts to me) ship like this is very hard to do and also must be very tough being the sole programmer.

<comment><USER20> It might be tough being the sole programmer, or it might be bliss.

I've been daydreaming about running a microISV recently - the ability to prioritise everything myself and crack on without justification appeals. Sure, I might be wrong, but that's OK.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> So artist pay $20 per year, and to quote the article "100,000+ artists", he's looking at $2,000,000 gross per year? Three employees. Amazing

<comment><AUTHOR> Plans start at $20 per year. $35 gets you more advanced features (ability to set release dates, customize pricing, and more).

We also have optional paid services, such as cover song licensing ($12/year per cover song), YouTube ContentID ($4.95 per single) and a few others.

<comment><USER22> How does $12 cover the license of a cover song? Aren't those fees much higher/based on number of sales?

<comment><USER23> DistroKid is charging $12/year to handle the covered song fees for you - <USER2> automatically withdraw the required amount from your royalties and send it to the original author.

[0]: [https://distrokid.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/2131024](https://distrokid.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/2131024)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Minor complaint / remark: is there _complete list of all stores and services_ that DistroKid supports (directly, or better even indirectly) somewhere?

All I was able to find were murky statements about 'dozen mayor services' and "150+ others" [0]. That page links "MediaNet Customers" page [0a] that displays 24 logos and links [0b] that displays list of 286 "MediaNet Content Partners". Is that it?

I was particularly interested about Bandcamp and all I've found that DistroKid mentions Bandcamp [1] and Bandcamp mentions DistrokKid [2] but no proof they really talk to each other.

[0] [https://distrokid.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/1276117-...](https://distrokid.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/1276117-what- stores-will-my-music-appear-in-) [0a] [http://www.mndigital.com/about- us/customers.html](http://www.mndigital.com/about-us/customers.html) [0b] [http://www.mndigital.com/about-us/content- partners.html](http://www.mndigital.com/about-us/content-partners.html) [1] [https://distrokid.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/1601235](https://distrokid.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/1601235) [2] [https://bandcamp.com/help/selling](https://bandcamp.com/help/selling)

</comment><comment><USER25> Ah yes! The CFML guy - @pud (that's how I always remember him from that one blog post he wrote)!

This is really cool, and love hearing about stuff like this. I love the idea of running a small team and scaling a product which doesn't have a huge overhead to make something which beats out the current market by just doing a few things better. Hats off to you man. Great stuff!

<comment><AUTHOR> This pub, this very pub we're sitting in. I built it, with my own hands! But do they call me the Pubmaker?

Naa!

See the wall over there, that protects our town? I built it, with my own hands! But do they call me the Wallmaker?

And the bridge, you know, that crosses our river, I built it, with my own hands! But do they call me the Bridgemaker?

But I tell ya, man! YOU F*CK ONE GOAT!

\- the CFML guy

<comment><USER25> This is the reply I was looking for.

You really got me there 'the CFML guy'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I love what you're doing! But have to observe disparity between:

> beating VC-backed startups

and

> DistroKid intentionally has a small team and no investors. We're here to > make the world a better place for musicians — not to make billions from > them. We'd make ludicrously more money if we charged what the other > distributors do.

It sounds like you're coexisting quite nicely with different objectives.

<comment><USER27> > beating VC-backed startups

Just to nitpick, CD Baby isn't really a VC-backed startup either, right? I've been under the impression Derek bootstrapped it to revenue quickly similarly.

<comment><USER17> He sold it and they pivoted since. It's hardly the same company at all anymore (Derek's CD Baby was an online record store. A webshop for CDs).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> @Pud

There are many people who want to know about your tech stack. I think the thinking goes: with one developer, it must be an insanely productive stack.

[http://pud.com/post/9582597828/why-must-you-laugh-at-my- back...](http://pud.com/post/9582597828/why-must-you-laugh-at-my-back-end)

is old, do you still use the same set up?

<comment><USER29> As someone who works in an AWS / CFML shop, I would also like to know this

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> @Pud, would be great to hear your take on what it has been like dealing with the record companies. According to YC:

> Because the alumni network is so large and tightly knit, investors or > companies who try to maltreat a YC-funded startup can usually be made to > stop. [--> footnote] Except for the record labels, which are effectively a > rogue state with nuclear weapons. There is nothing we or anyone else can do > to protect you from them, except warn you not to start startups that touch > label music. [0]

Your service does various tasks such as cover song licensing which are record label-facing. What has that been like?

And, congratulations on getting engaged.

[0]: [http://www.ycombinator.com/atyc/#n3](http://www.ycombinator.com/atyc/#n3)

</comment><comment><USER31> Eh, I go with CDBaby because the math doesn't work out for me as a small artist. I'd rather pay $50 and just have my album up forever. 9% doesn't matter much to me because I'm making peanuts anyway. Maybe if I get bigger I'll consider switching over.

It would be really slick if DistroKid had some kind of conversion process for CDBaby / Tunecore customers.

</comment><comment><USER32> The entire thing is built on the ecosystems created by companies that were all venture backed at one point, though.

<comment><USER33> There is a big difference between having direct competitors that are VC backed versus using infrastructure that is VC backed.

<comment><USER34> I think the parent's point is that he's built his company on a VC-backed foundation. Not saying it's valid (I have no clue about this business or how it's built), but it seems he's trying to say this is a bit like Space-X claiming to be beating NASA at space travel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> PUD has a well deserved reputation among solo entrepreneurs. I think Distro Kid is his fifth startup.

All but one of his companies (the one unsuccessful one) were powered by CFML.

<comment><USER36> CFML is not a "hip" language, so I don't care /s

This a lesson for all of us developers (myself especially!) who end up fussing over what kind of language/framework/server to use before writing a single line of code.

Props to @pud.

<comment><USER37> CFML is and always was an inferior tech. Worse than PHP, together with ASP. But kudos to the Guy that makes itvwork the way he need.

<comment><USER38> In the time you've taken to miss the point, Kaplan's probably launched another business.

<comment><USER37> And now he is launching the third one. As a software developer myself, what is the point you got that I missed? CFML is awesome?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> _I started a one-man biz that 's beating VC-backed startups_

Click-bait title in my opinion. It's not because you don't need VCs to satisfy your customers that VCs are bad. They are good when you need them to satisfy your customers. Now distrokid-competitors' problem is not that they have VCs money, it's that they "hired" bad ones. Now, I grant you, good VCs for startups, those who gonna understand whats good and not for your customers may be rare... But look at google and facebook, they did right by taking VCs' money don't you think.

<comment><USER40> One could very well argue that this success would not have been possible with VC money. They would never have this business model of $20/artist/year because VCs want loads of profits. And they would have >100 employees instead of three, because, well, aggressive scaling.

It might boil down to your definition of success I guess. Having taken VC money might have maximized their profit but at the cost of their top USP (very affordable service). Also they probably would not be loved as much by their customers and not doing as much of a good deed to the artists as they are now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> [https://distrokid.com/](https://distrokid.com/) is a near-perfect landing page for this kind of service. Well done!

Anyone know if there is an equivalent for independent films?

<comment><USER42> Amazon Video Direct is a worthwhile enterprise to explore. It takes effort. Quite a bit of legwork to fill out forms. Also, the content MUST have a subtitle file...but those things considered, it's highly competitive and gets things on Amazon Prime and pays out real $USD.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Fandalism launch in January 2012. Distrokid in mid-2013. Considering it took @Pud near 4 years to reach these numbers with DistroKid, the year and a half of building a user base with Fandalism is not that big a deal.

This basically would be the same as all the freemium companies out there that offer everything they do for free for a while till they build their product enough to start charging for it later.

My favorite line is in the original DistroKid TC article where @Pud says the goal wasn't to make money with this but to get more people to the social network.

</comment><comment><USER44> I've been watching DistroKid since it spawned out of Fandalism. Awesome to see how successful it's become.

Just curious, what % of artists gross over $19.99 a year?

</comment><comment><USER45> This is pretty darn cool and the first I've heard of it. I thought there'd be a cheaper way to do what your competitors have and here you've done it. What your success also confirms is that reducing your workload with bots and cronjobs are one of the keys to succeeding with a small team.

How do you handle support?

How are you able to find infringing music?

<comment><AUTHOR> > How do you handle support?

2 full-time support reps (who are amazing), so we're not really one-man, anymore.

> How are you able to find infringing music?

Obviously I can't get into details (lest the baddies figure out how to get in). But we have about 40 different checks to make sure the artist is who they say they are (or manually verify if the check fails) and other things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I think it's great that you have found great success as a pipeline service.

I also think it may be disingenuous to suggest this can or should work for every type of business. While I happen to agree that services that simply do a pipeline, aggregation, or intermediary service are A) not something I feel VCs should usually spend their money on in great quantities if at all and B) are often the most ripe for disruption, I disagree that finding scaled efficiency for all types of businessses in this manner is possible.

I do however think it's wonderful you are promoting the more traditional idea of a business with this product at least which is the more canonical bootstrapping or self funding/ side job till you make it/ type thing that doesn't need tons of employees to be a good value for those that are a part of that business.

That's just my opinions though I'm glad it's been a success

</comment><comment><USER47> Having quickly looked at the audience for DistroKid, then see what happens with artists by major labels, no wonder the product is sought after by upcoming artists. [0] Bandcamp is another company that uses technology to squeeze out the middle man. [1] The first page is really well designed. You can easily see what the product does, "let artists make music, then distribute it for a fixed cost".

Reference

[0] "52 Ways to Screw an Artist, by Warner Bros. Records" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13648245](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13648245)

[1] "Is Bandcamp the Holy Grail of Online Record Stores?" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12324350](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12324350)

</comment><comment><USER48> This is another example that it's a misconception that you have to have a big team and lots of cash to get to the next level

Stories like this hearken to people like Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram's Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger.

<comment><USER34> Mark Zuckerberg had "lots of cash" compared to most folks (his father, a wealthy dentist, and his father's friends bankrolled Mark's business). He's not the best example to use when it comes to "bootstrapping."

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Interesting related statistics:

"The blockbuster effect has been even more striking on the digital platforms that were supposed to demonstrate the benefits of the long tail. On iTunes or Amazon, the marginal cost of "stocking" another item is essentially zero, so supply has grown. But the rewards of this model have become increasingly skewed towards the hits. Anita Elberse, of the Harvard Business School, working with data from Nielsen, notes that in 2007, 91% of the 3.9m different music tracks sold in America notched up fewer than 100 sales, and 24% only one each. Just 36 best-selling tracks accounted for 7% of all sales. By last year the tail had become yet longer but even thinner: of 8.7m different tracks that sold at least one copy, 96% sold fewer than 100 copies and 40%—3.5m songs—were purchased just once. And that does not include the many songs on offer that have never sold a single copy. Spotify said in 2013 that of its 20m-strong song catalogue at the time, 80% had been played—in other words, the remaining 4m songs had generated no interest at all."

[http://www.economist.com/news/special- report/21716467-techno...](http://www.economist.com/news/special- report/21716467-technology-has-given-billions-people-access-vast-range- entertainment-gady)

</comment><comment><USER50> As a part-time musician, I absolutely love DistroKid.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Hey, does (or can) Distrokid offer an API? I've been dying to find a distributor that would let me programmatically submit/replace releases. It would only be used for my label, no bulk stuff, reasonable per-call fees or adjusting balances on a pre-paid account would be fine. Sale statistics API - even better.

</comment><comment><USER27> > By contrast, our competitors largely have millions in funding ... And > they're owned by venture capitalists and/or private equity firms who are > banking on a large exit.

Disincentives of the startup model at work!

These days it feels like you if your startup doesn't have polarized outcomes you're "doing it wrong".

</comment><comment><USER52> Hey Pud, since you are answering comments here, I have a question: what failures have you had?

</comment><comment><USER53> This is very motivating. I am also running a site in the indie music industry as a one-man biz. ([http://www.synthshare.com](http://www.synthshare.com)) It has been a challenge to build up the community, I'm sure leveraging Fandalism helped you kickstart your growth. Do you have any advice about user acquisition? Recently I've been getting feedback from music production communities which has all been positive and converted to users; however, it sometimes feels like the site isn't growing as fast as it should be considering all the positive feedback I've received.

</comment><comment><USER54> I see the comments where you started running with a sea of clients who trusted you to give them a fair shake. I see so many of the others where the music makers suck hind tit. Looking at your competitors, you have a clear advantage in your lean and efficient structure. In time your method will spread and and drive many others out. The problem I see is labels tied to the big companies may have restrictive agreements that exclude you. Couple this with the wish of many people to feel they are complete when they have bought into spotify/Apple/etc.

In any event, I wish you well, live long and prosper

</comment><comment><USER55> I am surprised that the development time of 1 year was considered a long time by him compared with his 1-2 month initial estimate.

If only projects I / we had been working on for 2 years became so successful!

</comment><comment><USER56> Is this a digital-only endeavor? I don't see any mention of physical product services such as pressing CDs & DVDs, printing covers/liner notes/etc. And what about marketing materials like posters, flyers and so on. There's still a market for that stuff, and it could be another revenue stream. Merch is also pretty big for some artists, you could explore getting t-shirts and hats and stuff printed. (just an idea, i've no idea if it's profitable, or more trouble than it might be worth)

</comment><comment><USER57> This is amazing. How does one person build so many successful startups while everyone else struggles to just do one?

Maybe there was some momentum from his previous successes? If you're already a famous startup founder, then I guess it's easier to get users for your next startups. I've heard that this was the case for Slack, but I don't know how much truth there is in that.

</comment><comment><USER58> Great to see this. Stoked to hear that it is the same guy who started Fandalism. I used to use Fandalism years ago to post my clips but just kind of stopped. I never got any emails or communication from them and just assumed that they faded away. Spurred by this article, I checked, and am amazed that it is still going strong. Must remember to get back to posting on there again.

</comment><comment><USER59> Previous connections aside this is still very inspiring. Scaling this well with only three employees (and resisting the urge to add more people just to be bigger) is an amazing feat. I'd be very interested in more details. How focused were you on being profitable and reinvesting profits vs. taking venture money? My guess is profit was one of the key metrics?

</comment><comment><USER60> 3 employees, wow! Sounds like it would have taken 300 employees twenty years ago. Reads like an advertisement for basic income.

<comment><USER61> I wonder what his contingency plans look like. That's a bus factor of 1 there with just 1 programmer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I'd be interested how you arrived at this particular pricing. $20 per year seems crazy low to me, have you experimented at all with raising the price. Intuitively, I'd think that the next cut-off point is at $49, but that in the range below that the demand is fairly inelastic.

</comment><comment><USER42> ...and please count me in among the users for the past 4 years who have seen the value, enjoyed the service, had a lot of fun playing with metrics, and feel inspired to continue my 100% rights ownership in music pursuit for 2017 and beyond.

Great product. Great support. Great example.

</comment><comment><USER63> Does DistroKid track the usage/consumption details of the songs for artists to look at or analyze? If so, what is the probability that they will expand to also have a recommendation system for indie music based on these aggregated stats?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes we provide lots of stats to artists. No, we're not planning on a recommendation system (plenty of online radio thingy thangies that are already great!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> It's awesome to hear about a swarm of bots replacing millions of dollars worth of labor overhead. Are you worried about the maintenance and QA at all? Is there anything about the problem that lends itself especially to automation?

</comment><comment><USER65> Would have been so much better if it was titled "YC startups"

</comment><comment><USER66> >thought it would take 1–2 months to build DistroKid. It's just plugging into some APIs and moving files around, right? I underestimated. It took a year.

Wow. I would like to understand more about this.

<comment><USER67> Any technical tasks estimation is usually 3x of the intial. So let's just put 3-6 months there.

Then imagine talking to lots of 'stores', contracts, legal stuff and so on.

Just reading about what this is, I think even one year is quick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Great! I would like to tap your brains. But now you have captured/conquered the music world wouldn't it be wise to disrupt movies/films distributions?

</comment><comment><USER66> A very well written and inspiring post. Congratulations and good luck. Do you mind shedding some light on the tech stack you used for distrokid?

</comment><comment><USER69> It's Craigslist for music. Low overhead. This could do to the music industry what Craiglist did to newspaper classified advertising.

<comment><USER70> The music industry still produces/mixes/masters music.

<comment><USER69> No, they don't. That's all outsourced. The music industry "labels" are mostly marketing and funding operations. All the steps of music production are available to anybody.

<comment><USER70> Right, which is part of the industry. Who exactly is paying for all of that expensive studio time? The broke artist?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> What's interesting to me is how he focused on doing small things and building up on them.

</comment><comment><USER72> How did you get the music industry companies to agree for you to directly upload files to them?

</comment><comment><USER73> Good, there are better backers out there who will buy you out whole and let you keep your soul.

</comment><comment><USER74> I probably missed it in the article, but how does Distrokid make money?

<comment><USER75> "artist pay $20 per year" ... "100,000+ artists"

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> FC, oh boy, happy days :)

<comment><USER77> Many, many wasted hours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> You have dozens of bots, written by one dude ?

Really interested to know about your stack and your deployment methodology. Did you build a bit/async infrastructure because of scale issues...Or is it inherently a mental model that is easy to grok easily?

<comment><USER38> May not be up to date, but past info on his stack:

[http://pud.com/post/9582597828/why-must-you-laugh-at-my- back...](http://pud.com/post/9582597828/why-must-you-laugh-at-my-back-end)

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> Is there something like this but for books and poetry books??

<comment><USER80> So there are a few parts to this. Raw distribution you've got stuff like Draft2Digital which can help you distribute to Amazon/B&N/Kobo/etc. Limited value outside B&N requires you to be in the US so they can help you get around that if you are non-US based. But they also give some tools to make things like putting links to the right store in the back of your book for each platform.

However doing any licensing stuff if say you want to pay to put quotes from book snippets/lines from poetry/etc into your book the way distrokid lets you license a cover, nothing that I know of handles that space. I don't know if there's enough of a market for it because it isn't nearly as good a business decision for a writer as doing a cover can be for a musician, so smart writers avoid it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> Great work! I'd like to see more startups like this.

</comment><comment><USER82> I use and love Distrokid - thanks for the product!

</comment><comment><USER83> *one-person ftfy

</comment><comment><USER84> a distrokid API would be pretty useful.

</comment><comment><USER85> Congrats Pud.

</comment><comment><USER86> nice

</comment><comment><USER87> This is fantastic success story! Thank you for sharing. A schoolbook example of disruption howto.

</comment><comment><USER88> Hey, nothing wrong with self-promotion - it can take you places! Look at POTUS.

<comment><USER68> OK.......self-promote your ventures ):</comment></comment>


90% of Y Combinator Startups Have Already Accepted The $150k Start Fund Offer - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/29/90-of-y-combinator-startups-have-already-accepted-the-150k-start-fund-offer/ <comment><USER2> Can anyone explain the terms "no cap" and "no discount" in "$150,000 in convertible debt. With no cap and no discount."?

I understand what a debt is, so how is "no cap and no discount debt" different from a regular debt?

Also why would you as a startup would want to take a debt?

Another question - what's the point of Yuri giving the debt, it seems he's not even asking for equity in return?

<comment><USER3> When offering convertible debt, the investor accepts the valuation at the next round of investments (in this case series A).

The risk for the convertible debt investor is that this valuation will be very high and the series A can take a long time.

To limit this risk convertible debt investors negotiate valuation caps and discounts.

Cap: The convertible debt gets converted at min=[series A valuation, cap]. Discount: The convertible debt gets converted at series A valuation * (1- discount)

(Obviously, when both cap and discount apply, the valuation for conversion becomes min = [series A valuation * (1 - discount), cap].)

<comment><USER4> Can somebody give me an advice. We have a two person startup, that is making about 20k/mo and it's growing. I am the founder. The thing is, I do not currently plan to raise VC money. My goal is to achieve revenue of 200k/mo by 2013. It is very realistic, but the problem is that as the service grows, we spend more and more time on operations, since certain things were not timely automated. We need about 300k , so that we can hire a couple of contractors to automate operations, to accelerate product development. But since I do not plan to raise a VC round, the convertible loan would not work. What is the right mechanism for this investment? I also believe the risk is lower than normal, since we have been making money for a while, and this should be reflected in the terms and in the valuation. Is this the domain of angels to make such an investment?

<comment><USER5> I think what you're looking for is a _loan_.

Not sure if it's possible to get $300k on $20k/month revenue, though.

<comment><USER4> FYI: Last time I stopped at the bank where I opened business checking account 2+ years ago (Wells Fargo), they sat me down and offered a 100K line of credit (the interest rate was unknown unless I applied, but she said it would be around 7-8%). The service is poorly monetized ( disproportionately high hosting fees + new hardware expenses / revenue). Until recently I was putting all these hosting related expenses on a single US Bank credit card (and paying it off monthly). In response, they raised the credit line to 40k at 8% yearly interest. This is less however than the 300k, that I think is needed. Additionally, I would prefer to use this kind bank debt financing only in an emergency, because I suppose that unlike a savvy investor, Wells Fargo and US Bank would be absolutely inflexible if I say need slightly more time, and would drive the company into default by their blanket policy, regardless of the specific circumstances.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The $150k offer reminds me of a rumor about the way in which Subway selected franchise locations back in the 1980's.

Subway wouldn't do extensive market research or study traffic counts. Instead, they would see where there was a McDonalds franchise and then open a franchise in the same catchment area. At least that was the rumor (not to compare YC to McDonalds or Hamburger University).

<comment><USER7> Supposedly the same thing happens with coffee too. Starbucks does the expensive market research, and then other chains build near Starbucks.

<comment><USER6> From what I've seen it's not just other chains that locate stores near Starbucks. Even Starbucks locates stores next to Starbucks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone else see that this offer will drastically change the tone and success rate of YC startups?

Constraints (in the form of funding and time) were a large part of YC. Entrants got a low (but livable) amount of money and 3 months to come up with something great. That something would either sink or swim on demo day.(for more on how constraints help creativity: <http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=1530>) Within those constraints, past YC classes did pretty well, and came up with amazing companies. Those that didn't failed quickly, and could go on to bigger and better things. But YC is now throwing those constraints away.

Because the $150k offer is guaranteed runway, it fundamentally changes the behavioral economics behind startups participating in YC. Products no longer have to be demoable by demo day, and startups won't have to think about profitability/funding, in the short term. This means that we should expect YC startups to dream -and fail- bigger in the future.

<comment><USER9> I was thinking this as well, but for a different reason. I, for one, would never enter the YC program. $15,000 (especially for that much equity) just doesn't work for most people. The only demographic that can really make that work are 20ish year olds coming right out of school. They haven't started real life yet, and have minimal obligations. Anyone else competent/qualified is probably quitting a job and has various bills and debts, and if they made the decision to do a startup, they already have some bootstrap money or a bit of revenue from a side gig, so that $15k isn't going to make or break them. For 150k however, this changes things entirely. YC can now attract a far more diverse pool of aspiring startups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was curious about the potential for returns so I considered a scenario: the successful YC companies take series A investment at an average $10 mm pre- money valuation (which is reasonable for a YC company starting off with $150k), and no series B is ever needed before exit. This gives the original investors a 1.5% stake at the time of exit.

In order to return the $6 mm there needs to be $400 mm of exits.

But I don't think it's reasonable to assume that the successful companies wouldn't take additional funding past series A. More likely, any successful company would also take series B funding. Then we'd need to see ~$500 mm - $800 mm to break even.

My guess is that these investments aren't really intended to be profitable. I would guess that they're instead a gateway into future deals that will be profitable.

<comment><USER11> In your model you may have neglected to consider that they'll have pro-rata rights.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Going off on a tangent, one of the comments on the TC article seemed really odd - even by TC's standards for terrible comments.

      Am I the only one who finds Y combinator predatory? It preys on 20 year old kids who think they're building the next google. Am I crazy?

On the actual subject of the article - if any of the four startups that haven't (yet) signed the paperwork don't end up accepting the offer, I hope they share their reasonings (either now or sometime in the future).

And on a pedantic note: 39/43 rounds to 91% rather than 90%.

<comment><USER13> Some people believe that in every economic transaction, at least one party must be exploited, no matter how wildly beneficial the deal is to both sides. It's actually a natural implication of the idea that wealth is never created, only reallocated. Unfortunate to see that view among TechCrunch readers, who have evidence to the contrary presented to them every day.

<comment><USER12> I wouldn't mind hearing the view that YC is exploiting founders (though I wouldn't agree with it), but the idea of YC exploiting them in such a way that YC would lose money is fairly dumb.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Na i'd take that money any day. First it's good to have Yuri Milner and Ron Conway on your team.

43 startups @ 150k is only 6.45million, which is typical funding for one venture capital company. Except it's diversified into 43 of them, so that if one of them advances to a series C, they can probably get it all back.

I guess the only problem would be if you try to get a Series A from DST, then you might possibly not get an ultra high valuation, but then again, DST seems to be throwing money at startups after their lustful experiences with Zynga/Groupon/Facebook

This just toughens up the next round of YC applications, which is a bummer. But i'm really interested to see how this will work out.

</comment><comment><USER15> 150K x 43 = 6,450,000. I'm guessing that there is a fair chance that at least one of the 43 companies alone will allow them to break even on their investment. They should end up doing extremely well on the deal.

<comment><USER16> Numbers missing: what is the typical valuation at Series A for a company coming out of YC? If it's $2 million then he'll wind up with (on average) 7.5% of each company (similar to what YC itself gets for about eight times less money), so to break even on one exit it'll have to be a $100+ million exit, which would be bigger than any YC exit so far as far as I know.

<comment><USER17> Heroku was acquired for ~$250 million

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> They'd be crazy not to, it basically boosts whatever runway they had by a considerably amount. What's more interesting than those that took it is those who didn't and if in the end there will be any that won't take it at all and what their reasons are. Likely the number will be '0'.

</comment><comment><USER19> Adios Ramen profitability !

</comment><comment><USER20> I have a question. What if the startup getting convertible debt never raises a round of funding and perhaps gets acquired or does an IPO?

<comment><USER21> I would assume the conversion is calculated at the value of the acquisition or IPO (which is really just a type of investment round). [edit: as it says, no discount so forget this part] Typically there's a conversion percentage kicker, so it might be 110% of the value (ie the early investor gets more for the risk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> $150k is approaching being ramen-wealthy, if you invest it and have cheap rent (not Silicon Valley).

</comment><comment> what-to-do Amateurs. Why not wait a week or two, explore options, see who else is going to respond to this?

<comment><USER23> Because there's no downside. You can take the $150k and stick it in a bank account and still be better off.

<comment><USER24> What's the downside to thinking about it for a week or two to see if there are any non-obvious problems?

<comment><USER25> Who says they didn't?

<comment><USER24> The offer was just made to them last night.

Actually, the TC article says many of them signed papers at the offer meeting itself.

I understand the offer sounds fantastic, but surely they'd want some advice first?

Obviously they didn't, but it seems a little rash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Don't they know that money is bad for them?

<comment><USER27> Money may be bad for a few of them at this stage but it will probably provide a leg up for just as many if not more.</comment></comment>


Programmerless programming is just a mirage - <AUTHOR> http://www.crazymcphee.net/x/2009/01/17/programmerless-programming-is-just-a-mirage/ <comment><USER2> Programming isn't about knowing syntax, it's about understanding abstraction. Some people can solve FizzBuzz, some people can't. If you can't abstract then you can't program, regardless of the tools. That's the problem we need to solve, not simplifying the interface.

I've seen secretaries build beautifully elegant systems with Excel Macros and I've seen CS graduates from good schools fail to build even the simplest of programs. I expect most people here have seen similar extremes. A large proportion of CS majors never learn to program. Until we figure out why, and how to change that, 'programmerless programming' is doomed.

<comment><USER3> I hadn't heard of FizzBuzz, but tried it out a moment ago.

How is possible for someone with a rudimentary understanding of programming to be unable to solve this in a couple of minutes?

<comment><USER4> The one I was referring to (and apparently others, though they 'solved' it) didn't know about modulo. Which would certainly make it harder, though it's ridiculously fundamental. They worked for about 20 minutes writing out something to do with a 101-element array and decimal arithmetic to initialize it (without using ceil / floor to compare, thus mimicking a mod function) before they admitted they were stuck.

This applicant was a graduate of some fairly high ranked university, though I don't know which one. They can come from _anywhere_.

<comment><USER5> That's even worse than the CS student (she had a bachelor's degree in CS, and was in the final year of her master's degree program in CS)... she actually attempted to delete an object in C++ by calling its destructor directly.

Needless to say, my company didn't try to keep her when Booz Allen Hamilton recruited her away from us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I agree with the analysis and have come to the same conclusions over the years. Still, there's one huge exception: the spreadsheet. That's the one UI that has been massively successful at letting non-programmers program without knowing they're doing it.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think one of the big mistakes is the assumption that one can get away from symbols and language by using gadgets, windows, or flowcharts. Even if you succeed at some level, you end up with a different language, which still requires programming and abstraction skills, but the language usually ends up being inefficient.

I find that written symbols are very efficient. At least, as long as I have this keyboard in front of me.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's very, very tempting to believe that this is true. However, the example picked - business process management - is such a spectacularly badly tooled, over-promising and under-delivering area that I don't think it's possible to draw conclusions that wide from it.

BPM has the potential to support some really agile business styles, but I just don't see (or hear - maybe I just haven't got my ear close enough to the ground) that it's being applied to the right businesses at the right time. The best time is _right_ at the start, which means that the tools need to be small, simple and agile, not bloated and overweight.

Everyone deals in abstraction to some degree; business owners and managers are no different. We just need to find a way to map their abstractions to ours in a way that's easier for them to understand. I don't know what that would look like, but I also don't expect it to be a dumbing-down. I _do_ know that BPEL and BPMN _aren't_ it.

</comment><comment><USER9> The thing that I find really strange is that development is becoming more about putting the pieces together and writing code to make small changes than it is about really writing much code. Between the many available jars, gems, plugins, etc. out there, many things we need have been written. While I know some semblance of a programmer will be needed to get things done for some years to come. But at some point, instead of craftsmen, we're going to have more "McDonald's" programmers that are following the book, throwing the code into a microwave, and bagging it.

<comment><USER10> I remember people saying that, too.

In 1980.

It really isn't true, and the reasons why it isn't true have been known for a long time, and it will never be true, and it is this: A (good) programmer is _always_ prototyping. Virtually by definition, you are doing something that hasn't been done before. If it had been done before, you would buy it or download it, it would be a component, and then you would move on to the part of the problem that _hasn't_ been done before.

It is not true that programming is moving towards a model where you just grab components off the shelf and wire them together. Or if it was true, it has _happened_ , it is in the past, it isn't "becoming" true. All the components mean is that you no longer have to research the best way to handle images, and you get a lot farther before hitting the unsolved part of your problem... but it's only the unsolved part of the problem that is interesting. There's no money in solving solved problems. (Well, that's not entirely true, but this is a comment reply, not an exhaustive description of all programming niches.) The unsolved problem is always the focus and pretty much by definition there will always be more unsolved problems.

If you aren't writing much code and you really, truly are just wiring bits together, it is time to either learn how to write metacode that wires the bits together for you and start wiring much, much faster, or to desperately cast about for a new skillset because you are easily replaceable (or possibly just _discardable_ ) and you really need to change that as quickly as you can!

<comment><USER9> Developers are using more and more code that has already been written. Sure we still code, but if you were coding in 1980 (like I was), then you know what I mean.

I'm with you and the author that the non-technical customer is not going to be able to move the legos around on the screen until they have their working webapp. I've been a part of projects that promised those types of things, and they were failures for the most part.

But, the trend is to have more and more complicated pieces that the developer puts together. The developer _feels_ as if he/she has really done something significant, but what they did technically was more brainless than what a game programmer wrote in assembly in the early eighties, for sure.

If developers need to know less and less about what is really going on, sure maybe they will still be called developers, but they'll be closer in function to the guy making your big mac. It won't happen overnight, but just because it hasn't happened yet and may not happen during our lifetimes doesn't mean it won't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I expect that in future there will be more automated programming, based upon a vague description of the problem. However, I've seen very little progress made in this domain other than a few applications of genetic programming and the use of Wizards or UML templates.

In the early days of my software career I encountered plenty of situations which had resulted from the use of Wizards to generate database applications by non programmers. The results were always quite disastrous.

</comment><comment><USER12> In my experience(YMMV) with trying to use BPMN to make inroads into automating workflows at a small financial authority, I had to reduce it to an extremely small subset even just to get business stakeholders to look at the models. The only ones who were assigned to actually help me create the models were the most-spareable, least-knowledgeable people in the organization who pretty much only used a subset reduced to ANDs, ORs, and XORs, and after months, still didn't consistently understand the difference between ORs and XORs. The ability (or even the earnest attempt) to use the symbols correctly had absolutely no relation to the enthusiasm any individual showed towards using heavily marketed tools promising automated execution.

So basically, I was assigned the least knowledgeable people to work on models, and I had to spend an order of magnitude more time redoing their work than they spent doing it. In the end we had a big beautiful graph that no one could verify was accurate in any way except me by describing sections in plain English during the 20 minute meetings I could sometimes wrangle out of the people who knew the business side well enough to give me a plain English answer that was interpreted by me and added to the giant unverifiable graph.

Really a horrible experience all around. And at the beginning of the project, I really thought BPMN looked nice. Of course, I looked at it like a programmer:)

<comment><USER13> How did they express their models before the BPMN tools?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> No matter how easy you make programming there will always be an irreducible complexity in creating a tool for a task. What form that task takes and the difficulty involved may change but ultimately there is a kernel of "programmingness" that you won't be able to get rid of. More so, making easy projects trivial and making hard tasks easy merely makes previously impossible tasks possible, so there will always be developers pushing the envelope programming at the maximum level of difficulty that humans are capable of. No different than any other skill in history.</comment>


Ask HN: College startups? - <AUTHOR>

I know that there are a lot of techie college start ups but there doesn't seem to be a community for them anymore. I remember back in the day we had collegemogul.com and now every so often I see an article or two about college kids on TC.. Is that it for coverage on dorm room startups? <comment><USER2> It's funny you mention this. I'm a fledgling programmer, early into my college career. For one of my first projects ever, I'm beginning to write a web application for college students to share and collaborate on ideas, hopefully helping people creating startups.

Just this past weekend, I taught myself enough Ruby (on Rails) to get the basic application down. My next steps involve designing a nice UI and to add more connection features.

I don't really have enough done to post anything here yet, but if there's something you'd really like to see in a web app like this, your advice is most welcome.

</comment><comment><USER3> Current student in NYC, building a bootstrapped SaaS application.

Would love to see more stuff coming from students on HN, rather then reading for x time about funding, viral social mashup pseudo startups and top 10 lists... of things to do and not to do...

</comment><comment><USER4> I always felt that HN was a community for the dorm room startup but I may be mistaken about the average age of trolls on this site. I am personally in college and would like to know if my assumption was wrong about the average HN'er.

</comment><comment><USER5> Velocity residence at the University of Waterloo is basically for the purpose of dorm room startups.

<http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca>

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome. I've actually never heard of this despite being a Toronto resident (or ex-resident)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sounds good everyone.. We should get a separate section or mailing list going. I'm based in Boston if anyone wants to help set up a meetup around there or NYC next next weekend Feb 25th-28th

</comment><comment><USER6> College student here, working on a startup. I've actually gone part-time on classes to work on my project full-time.

</comment><comment><USER7> College sophomore here working on a SaaS web app. I always wonder where the other people my age are.</comment>


I don't call myself an "entrepreneur" - <AUTHOR> http://bruun.co/2012/11/19/i-dont-call-myself-an-entrepreneur

<comment><USER2> When I tell people what I do, they ask me if I do it because I couldn't get a real job.

Also, I can't help but think Zuckerberg's sister's reality show is a kind of meta/ironic commentary against the hipness of being an entrepreneur.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ironically, that question stops when you get funding, it seems ;)</comment></comment>


A Source of Over-Abstraction – Or DRY Isn't Free - <AUTHOR> https://drew.thecsillags.com/DRY-Isnt-Free/

<comment><USER2> Taking DRY too far can wind up "compressing" your code (think LZW or some such). That's not going to improve readability...</comment>


It's Not You, It's Them: Why Programming Languages Are Hard To Teach - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/53062800

<comment><USER2> nice tip about reading stuff backwards. From my personal experience, the stranger the bug might seem, the simpler the solution is, or the stupid-er the mistake is. That is, it's usually some typo you just can't see however many times you look at it. A recent one was something with a variable like _colllection_...</comment>


The Art of Touch by Microsoft - <AUTHOR> http://tideart.com/?id=4ec018f6

<comment><USER2> Direct link to the website: <https://www.artoftouch.com/en-us/#/learn/about>

</comment><comment><USER3> Why couldn't this have linked directly to the Microsoft site? tideart.com didn't offer any particularly interesting or insightful explanation or analysis.

<comment><AUTHOR> The article has more explanations about the tech than Microsoft's site has.

<comment><USER3> _"interesting or insightful"_?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The site is mainly promoting Microsoft's new magic-mouse-ish touch mouse range. It doesn't even work properly with touch; a pinch to zoom operation in chrome simply zooms the page content, it doesn't scroll you through the content like the mouse wheel does.

The drawing tools are very cool though, considering how simple they are to use.

</comment><comment><USER5> I just hooked up WebTouch support in Chrome on Windows. Unfortunately, I don't have a touch screen on-hand, but I'd be very curious to know if it works in Chrome canary with the --enable-touch-events switch.

</comment><comment><USER6> Can't access this using my iPad. Microsoft's site claims that mobile Safari does not play well with HTML5 and offers to let me download IE9. If I continue anyway, I get a broken site. Saddening.

<comment><AUTHOR> Honestly though a lot of the Google Chrome experiments didn't work on my iPad either.</comment></comment>


My Startup: A place for potential founders to meet - <AUTHOR>

This isn't so much a new business as a new side project of mine.  I've noticed a lot of people here and on other blogs and news sites saying how much they would like a place to find business partners.  So in my spare time I put together http://www.FounderLink.com to fill this space.  I've tried not to make just another social networking site and I am trying to keep the features as few and focused as possible while still being useful for the core functionality(Meeting potential business partners).<p>Any feedback or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. <comment><USER2> there's already a couple out there:

<http://cofoundr.com>

<http://partnerup.com>

like yours, they have various strengths; but a consistent weakness is that there's no inherrent reason for anyone to come back unlike say yc news or meetup.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the links.

I agree that there is very little reason for people to keep going back once they have found a business partner which is why I'm keeping this firmly in the side project area.

I think the biggest issue is that unlike other partner matching sites(dating sites) you're not likely to get many people looking for casual short term business partnerships. :)

Thanks again for the comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> My suggestion: \- Fix your site in Firefox \- Don't ask me to login / signup right away without giving me more info.

Here's your intro page for me btw: <http://www.simplebucket.com/p/mdeymdg.jpg>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip. Which OS are you using if you don't mind me asking? I do all my development in Firefox(latest stable release) in Leopard.

I agree with the login part and I am working on a demo/walkthrough for new users as part of an overall redesign of the landing page which is pretty blegh at the moment. But I'm not a very good designer, so if you know one perhaps recommend them to the site. :)

<comment><USER3> I'm using Windows XP and Firefox 3 Beta 5 at the moment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, I'll get Firefox updated on my desktop and see if I can fix the display issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://Programmermeetdesigner.com> is quite popular as well for people trying to find someone to collaborate on a project/startup

</comment><comment><USER5> Has this anything to do with: <http://www.founderslink.com/> (with the 's' in there)?

</comment><comment><USER6> The css for #tabnav li could use a cursor: pointer. And the min-width: 970px for #content makes the site scroll horizontally for me, while it has an awful lot of whitespace. You could easily remove some whitespace to prevent the horizontal scrolling.

</comment><comment><USER7> I was going to do a similar site like this last summer but decided not to. I'm looking to ditch the domain CoFoundMe.com for cheap if you're interested.

</comment><comment><USER8> Man I am so tired of "Sign Up!" buttons... Pass.

<comment><AUTHOR> Any recommendations on how to get around requiring users to sign up?

You can put in your OpenID url and receive full access that way but how else can I authenticate users without requiring them to sign up?

</comment></comment><comment> craig-faber Thanks. I'll use it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great I hope it's useful for you, let me know if you find any issues or have any suggestions.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where can I get the white lable solution for a web to print website? - <AUTHOR>

I am looking for white lable solution for a web to print website (like milkbooks.com and shutterfly.com)specially for the photobooks.  I found this http://www.imaxel.com/ from google but didnt get many good results. <comment><USER2> I helped out on a nice photobook editor that is here:

[http://pook.io/auth/login#designStage=demo](http://pook.io/auth/login#designStage=demo)

Its particular advantage was that web-to-print was very accurate and reliable, so you could depend on getting a book that looked like what you saw on the screen.

The owner eventually decided not to bring it to market, but he might be interested in hearing from you. You can read more about the project here:

[https://github.com/atotic/pb_server](https://github.com/atotic/pb_server)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks man!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just some clarifications:

\- by "whitelist" you mean "white label", right? \- What features are you exactly looking for?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes white label. Few Features like multiple user, autofill, export the photobook to pdf for printing, custom template and interface etc</comment></comment>


Facebook security analyst is fired for using private data to stalk women - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/05/facebook-fires-security-analyst-accused-of-using-access-to-stalk-women/ <comment><USER2> Facebook:

> _we have strict policy controls and technical restrictions so employees only > access the data they need to do their jobs—for example to fix bugs, manage > customer support issues or respond to valid legal requests. We don 't just > rely on policies; we also verify. Access to sensitive data is logged, and we > have automated systems designed to detect and prevent abuse._

The journalist, Dan Goodin, seems to take it at face value:

> _Like many companies that handle large amounts of sensitive personal data, > Facebook permits employees to access user records only when there is a > legitimate business reason, such as investigating reports of abuse or > troubleshooting performance problems. Only employees in certain roles have > the ability to access those records, and even then, before authorized > employees can open a record, they receive an on-screen reminder that the > access isn 't permitted for personal reasons. All record access is logged, > too, to make it easy for abuse to be detected._

But the truth is that Facebook does not have effective controls, or they would have prevented this particular abuse, and when that failed, they would have detected it. In this case, they found out via Twitter and Motherboard. To make these claims and to accept them unquestioned completely begs the question: The controls failed; why? Can we trust them?</comment>


What Is a Computational Essay? (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2017/11/what-is-a-computational-essay/ <comment><USER2> See also literate programming, in which the source code is contained inside some kind of prose and the entire file is a valid program: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming)

It seems that the computational essay is a step higher than ordinary literate programming, as the code is executable in the format being used to present the document.

Reading this submission reminded me of this interactive article on coeffects, which fits the description of a computational essay: [http://tomasp.net/coeffects/](http://tomasp.net/coeffects/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I love reading Wolfram essays and wish I could afford Mathematica.

This article is from 2017 and Jupyter [0] is from 2014. I wish the article had spent more time explaining its relationship to jupyter/python/R/etc notebooks. Even though Mathematica has lots of cool proprietary functionality, I think the main benefit of computational essays (what I call a notebook that's designed for narrative) is not Mathematica but the sort of fact and computation based story.

I like reading articles that include the data and computation behind them. It makes it less likely that they are full of shit, I think.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Jupyter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Jupyter)

<comment><USER4> Mathematica's notebooks were released with v1.0 in 1988 and are the earliest notebook implementation I'm aware of. Jupyter isn't directly related except that they were a spinoff of a project partially inspired by Mathematica, IPython.

I've been running Wolfram in my Jupyter environment lately, which is a nice setup to do quick analysis without the hell is Mathematica licensing.

<comment><USER3> I thought I read something about how notebooks were based on Mathematica, but couldn't find the article or source.

I think it's fine that wolfram invented it, but it would be more impactful how more common and certainly more approachable techniques could further the computational essay.

<comment><USER5> See this [0] historical retrospective of IPython (the forerunner of Jupyter) in 2012 by its originator Fernando Pérez:

>Let's go back to the beginning: when I started IPython in late 2001, I was a graduate student in physics at CU Boulder, and had used extensively first Maple, then Mathematica, both of which have notebook environments. I also used Pascal (earlier) then C/C++, but those two (plus IDL for numerics) were the interactive environments that I knew well, and my experience with them shaped my views on what a good system for everyday scientific computing should look like. In particular, I was a heavy user of the Mathematica notebooks and liked them a lot.

[0] [http://blog.fperez.org/2012/01/ipython-notebook- historical.h...](http://blog.fperez.org/2012/01/ipython-notebook- historical.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like the overall idea, but Wolfram wants to own everything you do in Mathematica (the "Wolfram Language" largely written by people he hired and then renamed after himself), and he has a litigious history: [http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/](http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/)

As usual, in this blog post he claims credit for things invented by others; in this case, I think the people who deserve the most credit include Alan Kay, Dan Bricklin, Bob Frankston, Fernando Perez, Bret Victor, Mike Bostock, Nicky Case, and Amit Patel.

Kay has been touting the benefits of computational simulations as a medium of expression since the 1970s.

Bricklin and Frankston were the ones who made it an everyday reality in the form of the spreadsheet, also in the 1970s.

Fernando Perez wrote IPython, now known as Jupyter, which is the most practical tool for sharing such a mix of expository text with executable code; [http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/Advent%20...](http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/Advent%20of%20Code.ipynb) is an example notebook. To give credit where credit is due, though, IPython definitely did not originate the "notebook" concept, and in fact didn't even support it at first; Wolfram might be right that Mathematica in 1988 is the origin of the UI paradigm. Jupyter is where it's at, though — you can use Sympy for symbolic computations, Numpy and Scipy for numerical computation (including stuff big enough you have to farm it out to a cluster), TensorFlow for artificial neural networks, and LaTeX for equations in your expository text, thanks to the amazing MathJax. You can use non-Python languages in Jupyter, either in particular cells — some of my notebooks have %%bash cells for things that are most easily done in bash — or for the whole notebook, R being a particularly appealing language for this. (SageMath also supports a notebook interface, I think, but I haven't tried it.)

Bret Victor's work in the 2000s has explored a lot of different ways to create and share such simulations; his talk "Inventing on Principle" is a mind- opening collection of demos on the subject.

Mike Bostock wrote d3, one of the best tools for building such "explorable explanations", and put together [https://bl.ocks.org/](https://bl.ocks.org/) as a way of sharing them.

Nicky Case came up with the term "explorable explanations" and has written a lot of the best examples of the genre; [https://explorabl.es/](https://explorabl.es/) is their site for this.

Amit Patel has also written a number of really excellent explorable explanations (using the term "interactive illustrations"), largely about writing games, at [https://redblobgames.com/](https://redblobgames.com/).

A really enormous problem with the whole field is reproducibility, dependencies, and archival; if you do an SVD in Numpy, for example, you're invoking the SVD code in LAPACK, so the results you get depend on the particular Fortran compiler you compiled Numpy with. Someone attempting to reproduce your results in 2030, 2050, or 2119 is likely to get different results. This is fine for presenting finished results, but it is a huge problem for extending them further. Kay, again, has done some of the key work in this area with his paper with Nguyen on archival virtual machines (a much better followup to Lorie's flawed UVC work; the bootstrappable crowd (mescc, stage0, and the like) are making major progress on making the bottom layer of the stack reproducible; and Nix and Guix are solving the problem of reproducible software configurations.

<comment><USER7> I'd add that Mike Bostock teamed up with Tom MacWright and Jeremy Ashkenas to create Observable (observablehq.com), which is kind of like Jupyter notebooks, except as SaaS, in JavaScript, and both editable and executable in the browser.

Observable documents are a bit less convenient to author than Jupyter notebooks because you have to write in the browser, but they're much more convenient to share around, and it's easier to make highly interactive notebooks and "explorable explanations" with them.

<comment><USER6> I've been meaning to try Observable! However, I have the impression that, in its current form, it exacerbates the archival problem enormously, because the explorability of your explanation is conditional on the continued viability of the Observable web site. I can reproduce and generalize the mathematical proof in Plato's _Meno_ today, 2500 years later; I probably won't be able to reproduce and generalize the computation in your Observable notebooks in 2029, 10 years later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15769054](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15769054)</comment>


Colorado Entrepreneurs Try to Bring Depression Out of the Shadows - <AUTHOR> http://www.cpr.org/news/story/colorado-entrepreneurs-try-to-bring-depression-out-of-the-shadows <comment><USER2> (audio)</comment>


What's Dropbox Worth? Let's Take a Look - <AUTHOR> https://mattermark.com/whats-dropbox-worth/ <comment><USER2> Just commented about their move to their own hardware for storage no more than a few minutes ago.

This article doesn't mention anything about the investment they made in their own infrastructure. Is this on purpose? Moving 500PB isn't a small chunk of change. At the very least, the drives alone ran for $15MM assuming $125/4TB drives). Sure, chump change in terms of billions, but the article fails to mention anything about infra and hardware.</comment>


Rodent Mind Meld: Scientists Wire Two Rats' Brains Together - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/02/rodent-mind-meld/

<comment><USER2> The BBC article on the same thing: <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science- environment-21604005></comment>


Shatter Secrets: Using Secret Sharing to Cross Borders with Encrypted Devices - <AUTHOR> https://uwaterloo.ca/news/news/app-will-protect-confidential-data-when-crossing-borders-0 <comment><AUTHOR> The original pdf - [http://www.cypherpunks.ca/%7Eiang/pubs/shattersecrets- spw18....](http://www.cypherpunks.ca/%7Eiang/pubs/shattersecrets-spw18.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER2> Dark Crystal [[https://darkcrystal.pw](https://darkcrystal.pw)] is a great tool for doing this.</comment>