I'm calling this Bubble 2.0, and it's ready to burst - <AUTHOR> http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/05/bubble-20.html <comment><USER2> I have a theory about bubbles: It's relatively easy to spot that you're in one, but it's very hard to pinpoint what sort of bubble it is. I'll explain...

During the lead up the 2008 debt crisis I saw a lot of people talking about how house prices had been going up year on year and questioning whether we were in a property bubble. There was a debate though. Demand for housing was strong (partly due to population growth) and it appeared that globalisation had freed up the capital so banks had plenty of money to lend to people to buy houses. So the rising price of property, it was argued, looked like the natural effect of market forces. In hindsight it's easy to see that there was an oversupply of wholesale debt, but at the time I think people assumed that it was just a more efficient distribution of global capital that was opening things up.

Similarly, in the lead up to 1999 people seemed to know that there was too much money floating around. Everyone seemed to be investing in stocks or property and swapping stories of how much they had made. Yes, tech stocks were rising quickly, but so was everything else, and there seemed to be no shortage of investors coming up with money to fund these tech companies so what's the problem.

I think what happens is that people always look at current circumstances in the context of recent bubbles and try to look for patterns. When they don't quite fit, they argue over whether this really is another instance of a previous bubble. My theory is that the overpriced asset is rarely the same thing as in the last 3 or 4 bubbles.

So, back to the present day. We have lots of high valuations for tech companies. But we also have lots of tech companies actually making a profit, plus operating costs are a lot lower. So we're not about to see a burst in the sense that the funding will dry up and companies will run out of runway. Instagram was like, 12 people(?), if they couldn't have got that $50mil investment I'm sure they could have found a way to keep operating for another year or two.

The challenge is to think about where the bubble might actually be. Could it be in advertising revenue? Are advertisers burning though reserves trying to get attention? Could it be in mineral resources? Are server or bandwidth costs artificially low? Could it be a bubble in intellectual property? Is the exact implementation of Facebook not actually as valuable as the companies valuation suggests. I have no idea, but I don't think this a complete re-run of 1999.

TLDR; I don't think this is "[Tech] Bubble 2.0", this is probably "[Something else] Bubble 1.0".

<comment><USER3> Maybe it's not a bubble per se, maybe it's just overinvestment? The world economy really sucks right now, and people are seeking havens for their cash. The tech industry is one of the few bright spots in the world economy, and there's an evergreen hope of some runaway hit. So it could be possible for there to be overinvestment even in the face of widespread skepticism.

We also have a lot of supercool mobile electronics platforms being made by China now, and the companies and workers over there are just not getting a fair share of the value they are creating. Just look at Apple's balance sheet. Labor costs are rising, but given how things work in China...? So maybe it's the Chinese Oppression Bubble.

<comment><USER4> Too many people are throwing around the "people are just seeking a place to park their cash because the economy sucks" misguided idea.

Startups offer investors exactly the opposite of what a capital preservation strategy seeks: high risk with low possibility of considerable returns.

Even if the world economy were in recession (its not [1]) most asset managers would recommend dozens of other asset classes before recommending investing in a startup for capital preservation, specially when inflation is low as is the case in most of the world at the moment [2].

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_recession> <http://www.economy.com/dismal/map/default.asp>

[2] [http://www.indexmundi.com/world/inflation_rate_(consumer_pri...](http://www.indexmundi.com/world/inflation_rate_\(consumer_prices\).html)

<comment><USER5> Investment in a single startup is very risky, but if you were supplying the capital for a venture capital firm, I would imagine the investment would be much more consistent. I haven't done any real research, but I strongly suspect that a lot of VC firms are making good returns across their portfolios.

<comment><USER4> Yes, portfolio diversification is investing 101 (kinda curious how most of us here, when working on a new startup, will invest close to 100% of our awake time for months with no diversification)

Your post is somewhat related to what I said. The point I was making was that saying that startups are getting funded because there are no better assets for capital preservation are misguided. You are talking about "making good returns across their portfolios", that's not the goal of capital preservation, that's the goal of capital appreciation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So what exactly is supposed to happen when this Bubble bursts that in any way affects anybody here?

The 1999 bubble was only an issue because it happened with publicly traded companies that lots of people were investing in and making unrealistic gains on. You couldn't watch television without seeing ads for online brokers showing how easy it was to get rich quick, and your "My Account" page on said brokerage site was eager to tell you about your 10X margin and encourage you to use it. When it popped, all those stock portfolios went back to where they started (or worse), and hilarity ensued.

This time around, there's none of that. The "Bubble" is simply a handful of private companies getting silly valuations. If that stops happening, there's really no aspect of it that will bankrupt your random average family in the Midwest.

So yeah, sure, call it a bubble if you'd like. But it seems from here to be a harmless one floating off in the distance rather than a 1999-style one that we were all living on top of.

<comment><USER7> hmmm....

Here's an exaggeration to make a point:

 _"The housing bubble didn't really hurt anyone who already owned their home, or those who never owned a home in the first place."_

Yes, a tech/start up bubble burst would not have near as much impact as the housing bubble for the reasons you point out, but when you suggest that it won't hurt "anyone here" (i.e. people who frequent HN), I'm not sure I agree.

Let's say Angel and VC money dries up, and Series A funding also dries up. You then have a bunch of start ups that don't get funded at all, or who burn through their first Angel/VC raise, and then can't get any further funding. They then can't afford to hire or keep talent (hackers, system admins, designers, etc. – i.e. the people here) and there are only so many positions at companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, etc.

So, depending on the percentage of people who depend on work from start up, or early stage companies who are not yet profitable and need to rely on further funding to grow, a "bubble burst" could impact people on HN.

<comment><USER8> > Let's say Angel and VC money dries up, and Series A funding also dries up. > You then have a bunch of start ups that don't get funded at all, or who burn > through their first Angel/VC raise, and then can't get any further funding. > They then can't afford to hire or keep talent (hackers, system admins, > designers, etc. – i.e. the people here) and there are only so many positions > at companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, etc.

This is precisely what the view looks like for those inside the bubble. Outside the bubble, that would be called a return to normalcy. A world in which solid businesses that have a prayer of actually returning investor money are rewarded and those that don't, die on the vine. The reality is that if you can't raise money for your startup and you aren't making enough to pay your employees, your business sucks and it's time to do something other than create slide decks and beg people for money.

<comment><USER7> hmmm...not sure I agree that _"you can't raise money for your startup and you aren't making enough to pay your employees, your business sucks"_.

When funding dries up, even good businesses have a very difficult time raising capital, and it's not uncommon for a "good" business to be unprofitable for a couple of years (or more) as it ramps up. (See Amazon, Twitter, etc.)

<comment><USER8> When has Amazon or Twitter ever had any trouble raising cash?

<comment><USER7> I should have been more clear. What I meant by those example is that the companies were not profitable in their early years, and paying employees may have been difficult without the capital they had raised.

<comment><USER8> Well my point was that if you can't raise money and you aren't making profits, then your business sucks. That was poorly worded, but Amazon and Twitter never had a problem raising capital when they needed it because there was a huge amount of competition to get into them.

The companies that aren't profitable in their early years and simultaneously can't raise cash are screwed and probably shouldn't be funded in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Unfortunately I'm starting to agree with the bubble 2.0.

Last year I didn't believe it that much, but this year I'm starting to see crazy company evaluations, highly inflated that don't generate any revenue at all, so I don't know how can they be worth billions of dollars, but I know math and little about economics.

But if bursts, it's a good thing. It brings perspective, a thing that's missing a lot these days, where every social app or thingy that's the hottie of the week is evaluated on > $400M.

<comment><USER10> So let's be clear about this: these kinds of startups are arbitrary containers for investment dollars. They could be corn, or property, or jelly futures. But as it happens, technology companies are where a lot of people are putting their money right now.

As a result, it's not the startups with the secure bottom line that are getting investment: it's shiny startups that happen to be very popular. Because those are the ones that look great in an investment portfolio, and which could potentially be sold elsewhere. It's not about dividends over time; it's about passing on a shiny valuable to someone else for a cash return.

Given that premise, it seems like two things need to happen for the bubble to burst:

\- The odds of an investment going bad must increase (or the _perceived_ odds) / the perceived value of shiny startups in general must decrease

\- Another arbitrary, shiny container for investment must arise

Thanks to the banking crisis, we know that property and related investments are going to be tainted for a little while. What else out there could threaten the startup market today? How about in five years?

<comment><USER11> From what I understand, bubbles bursting in the past (e.g. Tulips, Dotcom) have been triggered by a specific event rather than a new, more exciting outlet for money.

In the Tulip bubble it was a failed auction in Haarlan, in the DotCom bubble it was the Fed raising interest rates, paired with the judgement in the US vs Microsoft trial.

So, its interesting to hypothesize what the 'trigger' event could be in this case. I doubt it will be the Facebook float, as I think we have a while to run yet.

<comment><USER12> It's hard to predict these things, but if I had to guess a trigger, it would be some kind of major negative news about internet advertising that causes at least a temporary stampede of advertising spend out of the sector (which could in turn trigger an even bigger investor reaction/overreaction).

Not sure what precise form that'd take. Anything from a major click-fraud-type scandal (would have to turn out to be significantly worse than the current assumptions about fraud, though) to a damning report about ROI from one of the more credible white-paper-issuing analysts, or one of the players themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Am I missing something? The example of a "poetry startup" is obviously meant to be an extreme case, but doesn't prove anything about a bubble -- rejected from YC, miles from funding, no product, no customers. If this idea just closed a $500K seed round, it would be a different story. But people have been coming up with silly business plans forever... What makes this one a particularly convincing bellwether of the imminent __pop __of the 2.0 bubble?

</comment><comment><USER14> Bubble 1.0 created an asset class that the public could get irrationally excited about and invest into. Calling this Bubble 2.0 is misleading. The tech bubble in the late 90s could characterized by companies going public with sky- high valuations without revenue. It seems obvious the major difference is that there are still very few companies going public. And the companies that do all have meaningful revenue/profit.

What I think we are seeing now is the Venture Capital bubble. Lots of funds have shitloads of money they MUST put to work. If they don't put money to work most firms can't raise another fund and at some point the LPs can back out of their commitment. For a while now there is a market where the only way to put large amounts of money to work is to make much larger investments at a high valuation, expecting a lower return.

9 and 10 figure valuations are being driven by too many large funds chasing too few good companies. The LPs will get burned, funds will close, but there is going to be no collapse of the venture/seed market.

If you see this Bubble "burst" it will slowly over the next 5-10 years when second tier funds can't raise more money. VC is turning to a winner-take-all game where only the top 3-5 players make sizeable returns, because their brands are the only ones who afford them access to deals.

<comment><USER15> > _"What I think we are seeing now is the Venture Capital bubble. Lots of > funds have shitloads of money they MUST put to work."_

I agree. The fallacy of some who don't believe we're in any sort of bubble often lies in the fact that they believe it will play out like 2000. If you read some of the anti-bubble VC chatter, that's the spiel you'll often hear, "I lived through the first tech bubble, and this ain't it."

But no two bubbles are alike. I don't expect the Nasdaq to blow up, crushing people's savings. But I do expect to hear a large sucking sound as VC money dries up. I do expect that the crazy demand for engineers we are seeing will soften, drastically. I do expect to see far few incubators and poetry startups. All of this amid an ongoing global recession.

There's a lot of money, billions, that is sloshing around the system. When that disappears, the resulting effect is never nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've been thinking a lot about this as we finish up our tenure at a Canadian accelerator and are getting our seed round together.

In MBA school, you learn about stuff like discounted cash flows and how they are ultimately what is used to value a company. (Comparables and multipliers are really just proxies for the notion of what the present value of a company's cash flow is)

Then you get out and start raising a round, you throw valuations around in the air and to most outsiders it seems illogical. I think this comes about because many founders simply aren't financially literate enough to do more than say "If AirBnB is worth X, then we must be worth at least Y"

Some people get excited by these uninformed valuations, others write blog posts and call it a bubble. In my opinion, the truth is somewhere in the middle. This crop of entrepreneurs learned some big lessons from their older brothers. They've learned the importance of revenue and having an unfair advantage. With a few exceptions, my experience leads me to say that most entrepreneurs are trying to build real businesses and are not gaming the funding community. This is very different from the IPO fever of the dot-com bubble. (Not to mention the fact that the size of many seed rounds today would barely cover a month of runway in 1999)

Capital is out there but the funding environment is not loose and there is less cash in the system than there was the last time around. TechCrunch and YC make it look easy, but fundraising is still fucking hard. Anybody who's pounded the pavement or sat through months of due diligence only to miss closing date after closing date will confirm this.

Instead of arguing on what our companies are worth, we should all be focussed on building a strong, diverse and healthy North American tech industry. It's time to get back to work and stop giving a flying fuck about what some investor thinks you're worth. Debating whether or not we are in a bubble are simply unproductive.

<comment><USER17> I upvoted you for being a voice of reason. I also find it interesting how much the startup community in general hates on MBAs, and yet they also know so little about finance. (I don't know much about finance, either, but from just a little bit of self-education I feel like I know more than the average Techcrunch etc blogger.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've been thinking for a while that someone (perhaps even me) should build a better steam engine. It's cool technology, and the current speed record has stood for over a century; surely we have better materials science now (and the recent success of Tornado, a replica A3 Pacific, shows that it's possible for enthusiasts to build a steam engine on a not implausibly huge budget). One for kickstarter?

</comment><comment><USER19> As an outsider who watched a couple of bubbles from the outside (dotcom and housing), it seems that the likelihood of being in one ends up being inversely proportional to the vociferousness with which those on the inside claim it's not a bubble.

i.e. Tell a Pets.com shareholder in 1999 that owning company stock and they'd look at you incredulously and tell you how we're in a new economy. Or tell a homeowner in early 2007 that prices are crazy and it might be a good time to sell, and they'd look at you like you had two heads because, as everyone knows, house prices always go up.

<comment><USER20> This is really interesting. It seems like everyone on HN, arguably the people who are most inside this industry are agreeing it is a bubble.

Usually that only happens after it is in mid/late pop. Is it possible that people are just scared of bubbles as we are reminded every day of the housing bubble? Alternatively is it possible that there is a specific asset class (ad based platforms) which may be in a bubble? Possibly it is a real bubble across startups that will certainly pop? I have no idea, but it is very strange to see so many people talking about a bubble before it is clearer the bubble is bursting.

<comment><USER19> I see a lot of people who are inside the industry as employees agreeing that it is a bubble. But I see a lot of people inside the industry as investors saying it isn't. I'm not sure if that means anything, though.

<comment><USER21> I would take the words of the employees over that of the investors, you tend to be a little more clear eyed and less inclined to gamble when it's your livelihood at stake.

That said, the bubble we're in is mostly a media creation; people want to hear good financial news from somewhere, and if it's based on someone paying for popularity ( Facebook buying Instagram )in the mobile cat-picture-sharing space; it will still get more attention than it's worth.

Meanwhile the real economy is still in a serious demand slump, and has structural issues that prevent it from achieving anything but tepid growth. And while that situation obtains, excess capital will be looking for alpha in the technology sector.

<comment><USER20> Maybe, but I didn't see anyone in the real estate business (employees, not investors) in any vertical or business saying there was a bubble until mid 2007. By that point, valuations had started coming down and financing was being much, much more selective. I stand by my point that it is strange for an industry to call out bubble repeatedly when there isn't any real evidence of a bubble besides a few anecdotal acquisitions at what people believe to be high prices because they use a non-revenue metric.

Again, I don't know if there is a bubble or not, but it seems odd for a group to call a bubble so early unless there is already drying liquidity. I really have no idea. It just doesn't seem as self-evident to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> A startup bubble is the best thing that could possibly happen.

Look at it this way. There are plenty of talented engineers, designers, and entrepreneurs out there trying to build the next big thing. Due to the incredible scale and reach of the internet economy, those who succeed will become fabulously wealthy. But most will fail (or at least not reach that scale) due to various circumstances---a misstep in execution, a superior competitor, our simply bad luck. There are certainly many small successes, but success or failure can seem like an incredibly binary event.

Why should engineers shoulder that risk? That's the raison d'etre of finance and investment. Let those with capital take on the risk, and give the engineers enough security so that a "failure" doesn't put a talented person out of the game. If every startup that demonstrates that it execute on an idea and can clear some threshold of viability gets a reasonable exit, then the investors will still get enough Facebooks to generate a good return, and the startup teams are much less captive to chance and fortune with respect to whether they can pay the bills or not.

<comment><USER23> In a tech bubble, capital does not chase engineering talent; it chases whatever shiny thing resembles the last shiny thing that made headlines. And when the bubble bursts, the entire sector goes hungry for capital, even companies which, in a more sober market, would be recognized as good prospects for growth.

<comment><USER24> AKA the AI Winter...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I thought one of the characteristics of a bubble -- almost a pre-requisite -- was for the money of the general public to be flowing in.

If things like this poetry IPO idea haven't _happened_ and garnered piles of cash from unwitting investors throwing money into a market they don't understand in a herd mentality ... how exactly is it a sign of anything other than a goofy idea?

<comment><USER26> a bubble in the sense of the dotcom bubble doesnt require the involvment of the public at all - it's simply an overvaluation of companies. as mentioned before, bubbles may be limited to very small sectors (eg. social media) and don't need to take down whole economies (like the housing bubble did) once they pop.

<comment><USER25> But it's a _chronic_ or widespread overvaluation of something, right?

I guess I just don't see how professional investors could be snowed on a grand scale. Even if there is a bit of a trend in, say, social media - that doesn't mean an incubator is going to be taken in by a nonsense pitch, does it?

I would think you would need a lot more money from less educated or indirect sources to start passing off unquestionably _weak_ companies, due the heat of the sector. (e.g. people trusting their long term money to money-managers with conflicting short-term incentives who are willing to gamble on known-bad goods on the assumption that they can find a bigger idiot to sell to before the music stops. Which essentially describes the entirety of the IPO and CDO nonsense in the last two bubbles.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> As the old saying goes, history never repeats itself, but it often rhymes.

Asset bubbles occur when people are more interested in acquiring assets rather than effort to acquire the money used to buy the assets. Basically, people start throwing money around just to get that asset.

It usually occurs when money is easily acquired through loans, etc, and as the asset prices increase, the general idea is "I can borrow the money, make some money on the asset, and then pay back the loan".

Usually a lot of delusional math occurs that convince people that the price they are paying is actually "cheap". For example, people who made $50k/yr and bought a $1M house would delude themselves into buying the house by saying "Well, I can take the teaser rate for 2 years, and by then the price should go up by $100k, and then I can sell, and use that money for a downpayment on a house I can afford." Or, similarly during the dotcom bubble, analysts would say "Well, the P/E ratio is currently 1000, but based on the projected earnings 5 years from now, it's actually only 20." To be honest, in the midst of the bubble, this type of thinking works well. We all know what happens once the bubble bursts, though.

So when popular products like Instagram with _zero_ revenues are being sold for $1 billion, there's a lot of the bubble math going on. "There are 30M users and we're paying $1 billion, so we're only paying $30/user." Anyone remember the acquisition of broadcast.com by Yahoo as a strategic acquisition? The same goes for the rumored attempted acquisition of Path for $100M a couple of years ago. Or Color.com paying $300k for their domain name. I think these massive Internet companies like Google and Facebook are taking a product, and applying dotcom math to it, and coming up with sky-high valuations given the size of their audience. Maybe they're right, maybe not. But they are the ones contributing to the idea that revenue-less products are worth hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.

So, when VCs know there are giant vacuum cleaners that are willing to pay ridiculous prices for products, of course they are going to drop all their money and invest in as many startups as possible. They would love to invest $250k in another Instagram and make $78M. And this helps sell investment in their funds as well, which causes more investors to pile in, trying to get a piece of a bunch of Silicon Valley startups.

And this is the situation where companies like Facebook or Google, or VCs are more interested in acquiring assets (ie investments in startups), rather than caring about the actual money itself.

My guess is that the bubble will burst soon after the Facebook IPO. Why? Because at that point, paying $1B for a company with zero revenues will likely be the cause of shareholder lawsuits, and there will be a lot more scrutiny involved in these acquisitions. Since selling to Google or Facebook is the exit strategy for most of these SV startups, if that door closes, then funding will get pulled quickly and violently, and it will be the start of the next dotcom bust 2.0.

People will also be closely watching Facebook's financial performance and seeing if they can justify their valuation of $100B. If they miss estimates, or if their ability to monetize consumers flattens, then it's most likely a catastrophic, extinction-level event for most of the startups in the Valley.

I certainly hope this doesn't occur, but I can't see how it's not likely. EDIT: To be clear, I don't mean that I believe Facebook will miss estimates, I do however believe that we are in a bubble that will burst.

<comment><USER28> > _"Since selling to Google or Facebook is the exit strategy for most of these > SV startups, if that door closes, then funding will get pulled quickly and > violently, and it will be the start of the next dotcom bust 2.0"_

This points to one of the differences between this boom and the last one. Valuations are being driven by companies with lots of cash are buying startups and sophisticated investors funding growth. Last time, the valuations came from dumb money parked in IRA's and 401k's via Wall Street.

In other words, currently valuations are primarily based on the potential sales of a company's products rather than on the potential sale of its stock to mutual funds.

If the current startup ecosystem went bust, most people wouldn't feel it because their retirement accounts and personal savings wouldn't see it directly. In the dot.com bust, many more ordinary people saw the value of their mutual funds decline because so many hot companies were publicly traded.

That's not to say that recent legislation to allow dumb money investment in startups won't ultimately lead to a similar bust. But we're not close to that yet.

<comment><USER29> Mutual funds (since they typically invest in readily marketable securities) may not feel the pain, but pension funds, university endowments, sovereign wealth funds, etc. will take a hit: a non-trivial portion of VC money is derived from such institutional investors (who are limited partners in the fund).

Pension Funds: Retirees (ex: public workers) take a hit.

University Endowments: Future students, faculty, and employees (think of the guy who's repairing the plumbing in the dorms, rather than the chancellor) take a hit.

Sovereign Wealth Funds: The citizens of said country takes a hit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> There's a lot of comparing apples to oranges going on here. It's difficult to compare the current state of the world to Bubble 1.0. There's over 5x more users on the internet now than when the first Bubble hit. In fact, for a lot of those Bubble 1.0 companies, their biggest problem was that they were too far ahead of their time. There's a lot more attention bandwidth now on the internet, which can support higher valuations of more startups. I don't see people moving away from technology in any significant way any time soon.

The other problem I see is that people are looking at an isolated outlier and making predictions based on that. If we remove the one 1 billion dollar deal (which looks like it could actually have been competitive with FB and cost FB way more in time/money to compete down the road), we're not really seeing any examples of Bubble like behavior, other than what we should expect to see with a growing sector.

Some tech companies are focusing on growth over profitability, with the hopes of being acquired. In almost all cases, those aren't billion dollar+ moves. I haven't seen any broadcast.com like deals. The scale of deals/exits is different now than Bubble 1.0.

</comment><comment><USER31> Ultimately, the issue right now is nobody really knows how much users are worth. There's a lot of speculation that if your site has a lot of users (20 million or more), your company is worth a lot of money. Even if you really have no idea how to monetize those users without pissing them off. There's an assumed value there that may not match up with reality.

Facebook's IPO is relevant here. Once more information comes out, we'll have a better idea of how large user bases (like Facebook's) can be monetized and what it takes to extract the value. Things could go either way after that, and it all depends on how the market reacts to this information.

My hope is that the software industry can weather this storm, and that its now diversified enough to deal with investors pulling out of the startups amassing users and shift to focusing on startups selling to SMBs or enterprises. There's bound to be some collateral damage here, but hopefully it'll be minimal.

</comment><comment><USER32> Poetry is the only artform that has more practitioners than appreciators. So no wonder.

</comment><comment><USER33> I've been written a summary about all bubble theories here: [http://blog.trejdify.com/2012/05/summary-do-we-have-new- tech...](http://blog.trejdify.com/2012/05/summary-do-we-have-new-tech-bubble- or.html)

<comment><USER3> Isn't it absurd to suggest that there cannot be a bubble if everyone agrees we are in a bubble?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I think the author makes some weak arguments. I've worked as a consultant on a few zany startups and all I have to say is that this kind of crap happens all the time:

[http://ixjy.com/post/22704727159/will-somebody-please- disrup...](http://ixjy.com/post/22704727159/will-somebody-please-disrupt- poetry-already)

There are so many cocked up ideas out there (many of them built with someone else's money in the hope that somehow, someone, somewhere will give them money).

Some of these ideas actually get funding, which is tragic, and some of them actually make it, which might be worse, but most of them never see the light of day.

</comment><comment><USER35> Here's a thought experiment I found interesting.

Assume Charlie is right: this is a bubble and the pop is imminent. What would the you in 2014 or 2017 wish you had done now to prepare?

What will happen to your primary source of income when bubble2 pops? How much runway do you have to secure another source of income? What expenses would you wish you had cut? What relationships does 2014-you wish you had cultivated to help find new sources of income?

Then, I suggest you make it a priority _now_ to do those things while you have the chance. If this is a bubble, and if it pops, you won't have any more warning than you do now.

</comment><comment><USER36> Lots of interesting points made here. If I could add only a few data points, I would say the following.

I have taught a very successful class on Investor pitching in SF for 6 months. I have had between 10 and 50 students per class, always sold out, even when I raised prices... (<http://fundraisingviparisoma.eventbrite.com/)until> end of March. Then, in April, I had to cancel two classes because I had too few students, and I only have 10 next week in a venue when I never had less than 20. It just tells me that we are at the end of a cycle, when everybody who drunk the "Social Network Movie kool aid" thought they could create a Groupon for India, a language learning start up or an Opentable for Hair Salons. It's a good thing for everybody actually.

Now as for Facebook's valuations, the question is - will Facebook bring as much traffic to applications in the future than Google did to commerce websites. My belief is yes (look at Viddy, SocialCam, Zynga, Pinterest, Draw Something if you need examples). In that case, Facebook, like Google in 2004-2008, will grow into a 100B-$200 valuation (which does not mean that I think it is the best stock purchase to do, the big money on Facebook has been made already by earlier investors). Same for Pinterest. If Pinterest users convert like crazy, then they will be able to demand emerchants to "pay to play" and... they will.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not an expert here, but is the real problem that there is no way to short a startup? You pretty much have to wait until a startup IPOs to bet against it. (Or is there some equivalent of shorting in secondary markets?)

Would it be fair to say that, until the IPO, every player in the system has an incentive to inflate the price?

And in our little world even the press doesn't usually see itself as having a critical role. Quite the contrary as with Arrington & Calcanis and their ilk.

<comment><USER14>
      Would it be fair to say that, until the IPO, every player
      in the system has an incentive to inflate the price?

If you had unlimited money to invest, this would be true. But every player invests out of a fixed size fund. The more money out of your fund you bid, the lower your return.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> the only bubble I see is in social media (instagram and zynga, mentioned a lot already in this thread). it's funny that business models which from my point of view are far more sustainable and also much more beneficial for society get considerably lower valuations (or at least media attention). i mean startups like asana, heroku, fogbugz or duolingo - whose main use case goes beyond sharing/playing with friends.

<comment><USER37> With the exception of duolingo, these are all companies which make products for other businesses, so we should ask: What do their _clients_ make? If their clients get popped in this (hypothetical) bubble, won't they?

<comment><USER26> good point, there's certainly some exposure to let's say rather overvalued companies. eg. if you looke at the featured clients list of asana. nonetheless in their case, I think the possible applications for their service go well beyond IT companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> TBH I don't know

I was certain this charade was going to explode in 2008/9 but it didn't and it even got bigger.

A guy I know mentioned the only thing that's going to pop this bubble is the Fed raising interest rates, which are near zero. That will severely limit the amount of money available for investments like these.

The problem is with a shitty job market and an economy that's doing bad almost everywhere else but tech odds are the government wont do anything that could risk heavily indebted California sinking into the sea because SV imploded.

Back to jobs, the amount of ex-something-else (not coders) turned watrepreneurs is staggering, and that's because they all want to ride the gravy train and "get paid". This is one aspect that's almost exactly like during the 1.0 bubble.

One scenario I think could pop this bubble is a new bubble in another industry siphoning the money from tech VCs to that other industry's investments. But it would've to be a revolution to beat the insane returns of some tech M&As.

But as long as there's people rushing in because they are afraid of missing the next instagram-like opportunity this is going to keep going.............until the "nextagram" explodes in a ball of fire burning everyone involved...

Then again chances are the guys who started this will get out mostly in one piece, since they already made their money. But like when the previous bubble collapsed there are going to be a lot of actually good startups with great ideas caught in the shitstorm, seeing their valuations drop to the price of a used geometro, and no way to get a loan let alone investments.

And the culprits? they'll be back the moment valuations get crazy again, and they'll make more money, again.

</comment><comment><USER39> If it truly is a bubble, it must be the very beginning and people still have their sanity. Otherwise, this chart would look a whole lot better: [http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chfdeh=0&chdet...](http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chfdeh=0&chdet=1336593600000&chddm=25024&cmpto=NASDAQ:GRPN;NASDAQ:ZNGA&cmptdms=0;0&q=grpn,znga&ntsp=0)

</comment><comment><USER40> Interesting article, Mr. Stross. I think it's great to see so many people hungry for the next new thing, out hustling and working hard to try to make it happen.

As awareness of startup culture grows, it is necessarily going to attract some goofiness. That's OK. Not every idea is a good one, and not every good idea is going to work. We need these stories to make the successes stand out so much brighter.

You may be right, but I hope you're not. I see things like Pebble's success on Kickstarter, Amanda Palmer bringing more attention to the idea of crowdsourcing funding for something that is every bit today's poetry, and see the spread of the paradigm shift we all already value (or else we wouldn't be here). I think it's right to be nervous, but I am cautiously optimistic that hacker/maker/startup culture is an attractive alternative to the existing production model.

I always appreciate your thoughts, but nowhere near as much as I would appreciate a new Laundry novel. Thanks for the good times.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was in the web/dotcom 1.0 biz from early 1995 through late 2001.

I am reading the news these days with a strong sense of deja vu for late 1999.

Kickstarter and crowdsourced funding is great news for artists, but I don't see it scaling much bigger than AFP and "Iron Sky" without attracting fraudsters. Again: hacker/maker culture is great, it has brought us great things in the past, and I expect great things to come of it in future, but it's not delivering huge new industries on the scale of a Google or Facebook or Apple. (Making stuff with atoms instead of bits is intrinsically slow, energy and matter intensive, and hard to scale up exponentially.)

But this isn't about artists making a living. If this guy was talking about crowdsourcing to fund his next book of poetry I'd be all in favour. But instead, he's talking about building some kind of bullshit hosting/purchasing storefront with the idea of raking off a percentage of gross from _a market that died of natural causes three quarters of a century ago_.

Thinking you can set yourself up to rake off a chunk of the value in each exchange in a particular field is the sort of wishful thinking that gave us the Feb 2000 bust.

<comment><USER41> I appreciate how your experience in the late 90s has given you a heuristic for picking up on the signals and leading indicators of a bubble, but I question how relevant it is in this case.

The poetry blog post is just one bad idea that a couple guys had in an attempt to gain a small amount of funding from a notable startup indicator. That's not to say that there aren't more small teams with laughable ideas out there, but I think it's important to note that nobody gave them money. I suspect they went home empty handed because the folks who manage VC funds did learn from the mistakes of the 90s, even if a new generation of wantrepeneurs have no clue.

Which brings me to my point. The niche based thinking expressed by the poetry disruptors and many others is an expression of the realization that individual programmers have the ability to work alone to create products and businesses that are capable of supporting them financially in much the same way that a sole proprietorship would in the physical world.

I'm fairly certain that this wasn't possible in the 90s without outside help, but I think that it explains a lot of the misguided enthusiasm from people who want to build lifestyle businesses, but don't realize that venture capital is not the way to go about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> It is temerity to pass this prediction based on extremely small sample data.

Instagram, Colors, Zynga and others like that are still exceptions rather than a rule. Indeed media attention for these social apps/gaming companies tend to be high which might give the illusion that internet industry as a whole is moving towards valuations without any base underneath.

<comment><USER43> There's certainly some bubblish stuff going on, but you're right that it'd be nice to have more data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> This is more Gold Rush 2.0 than Bubble 2.0.

</comment><comment><USER45> I hope in a way this bubble would burst, I'm getting thoroughly sick of all this web2.0 bullshit. Its nothing but social networks and photo/something sharing sites. Nothing really happening and we need smart Engineers and developers getting back into some worthwhile endeavors. I blame Facebook.

<comment><USER46> > some worthwhile endeavors.

Like what?

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Saying that something is going to happen is easy, as in astrology easy. The meat of any prediction is in the timeframe. If you know for sure that the bubble is gonna burst in n months, you should bet against it in the stock/future market.

<comment><USER48> I absolutely agree. I've been hearing predictions about the startup bubble for quite a while now, no doubt the market will fall at some point. Markets are cyclical so you can safely make a prediction once a year and eventually be right. What I want to see are people stating when the bubble will burst and even better, putting money on their predictions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> It's hard to use this poetry startup anecdote as proof of a bubble since the guy wasn't funded.

If YC had accepted the application, I could see it used as evidence that too much money is chasing too few ideas. But they didn't.

</comment><comment><USER50> Discovering a bubble is easy. Knowing when it will burst is not. This is why most people can't bet against bubbles in the market; the market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

</comment><comment><USER51> Agreed, good chunks of the "web development startup scene" seem rather bubbly.

The entire "get a bunch of users and worry about making money later" mindset seems somewhat broken. Let's see what happens if all major browsers come with ad-blockers preinstalled overnight or more importantly if people/governments? start taking privacy more seriously.

What happened to the good old bootstrapping mindset that used to be the go to philosophy in IT. Seems like it got replaced by a cracklike addiction for VC- money-shots.

</comment><comment><USER52> I don't agree that poetry have no consumers. It is an arguable pity that eyes have blinders. Between simple taglines, among headlines. Happily in advertising, Poetry vines.

</comment><comment><USER53> It seems that the main piece of 'evidence' here is a post by someone who wants to "disrupt poetry" (contra the OP, no mention is made of an IPO), admits it's a "longshot", and in fact is abandoning the project to join a different startup. Moreover, it's just one dude with a blog. Charlie Stross realizes that anyone can start a blog, right? To call this a strawman is an insult to strawmen.

</comment><comment><USER54> My favorite of the new justifications is "in 1999, the Internet was niche, but now EVERYONE uses it".

So a relatively large audience then with no revenue meant nothing, but today a much larger audience still with no revenue is somehow different, somehow worth a lot more.

This sounds to me exactly like the (very old) "we'll make up for it with volume" joke, except people aren't using it as a joke! They believe it!

</comment><comment><USER44> I would not say the tech startup market is overvalued if one looks at money invested.

On the other hand, if one considers the amount of time we're all dedicating to development and market research on our as yet unprofitable projects...

</comment><comment><USER55> Everyone keeps talking about the new bubble.. there is a slight difference from the 2000s anyway..hasn't anyone noticed the 2 BILLION PEOPLE online?...

<comment><USER56> And somehow, Twitter, Groupon, Instagram etc., have not yet figured out how to actually _make money_ off of those 2 BILLION PEOPLE. And last time I checked, making money was the whole point of investing.

Edit: Just to clarify the above, making money == making a profit. I think that's pretty well understood in business, guys. If I bought a single share of stock for $100, and sold it for $50, I sure as hell did not "make money" on the deal, even though I gained $50 in revenue from selling the stock.

<comment><USER57> Actually Twitter and Groupon both make a lot of money off those people. Revenue != profit. Groupon is spending a ton of money moving into new markets. Now, I don't love Groupon but saying they don't make money is just wrong.

<comment><USER58> "To make money" means to make a profit, not generate revenue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I go by the taxi driver litmus test. If a taxi driver tells me about (insert bubble) easy investment, then that's my cue to sell.

</comment><comment><USER20> Bubble or not:

 _shoe-shine boys offering stock tips_ \- Happens in all markets, even in really bad ones.

</comment><comment><USER60> You are wasting time with this pointles pontificating.

Head down. Innovate.

</comment><comment><USER61> Everything that might have been invented has been, because I haven't seen enough mind blowing stuff this week. Therefore, we are closing the patent office. Good day.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra The Poetry startup seems to be a very healthy idea. There is a large audience of poets; writing poetry is a very social process; and they use Internet extensively . Right now they are scattered thru a million of small resources and communities in social networks. But what if you can bring them all in one place? There might be a sufficiently large audience to monetize even if we forget about readers at all.

So his bubble sample has meaning and therefore his POV rests unproved.

<comment><USER28> This reaoning is why it's a bubble - the idea that selling services to poets scales in the way that selling poetry to consumers would (in theory).

<comment> guard-of-terra Poets are consumers, consumers are poets. Also, you can target every poet out there, in the past you could not target every consumer or producer.

It does not have to be big for seed funding. Might as well pay dividents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Says the guy who sells books. I suppose that's a few rungs up from shoe-shine boy, innit?

(Don't get me wrong, I love his books. But are we really looking to SF authors for market guidance now? Just because he cites one failed business model?)

<comment><USER63> He's an ex-developer for a payment processor. Might have a little bit of knowledge...

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Im 19 I've Spent $100 on Facebook ads, and when ads are mobile, i'll probably spend more, and if I had a disposable chunk of 100K I will definitely try to promote on Twitter Trending Topics, as the startup culture continues to grow, college students like me will be willing to throw money on Facebook,Twitter, and other sites rather than you know drugs and alcohol ;)</comment>


6 tips for becoming a Developer (audio) - <AUTHOR> http://cynicaldeveloper.com/podcast/13/ <comment><USER2> I spent several minutes, literally, trying to figure out how to play the podcast. There are lots of things to click on around the page that took me in a loop back to the same page.

In Firefox, the audio widget shows up at the very bottom of the page.

The giant blue graphic is nice, but provides zero functionality. For a tech podcast, the absence of utility combined with wasted screen space is unlikely to create a positive impression of the brand.

I have listened to a lot of podcasts...more than nine bits worth of Hanselminutes alone. One of Hanselman's premises is not wasting the listeners time. If I did not have an interest in providing feedback, I would have abandoned the podcast page long before finding the audio widget.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, Thanks for taking the time to leave some feedback, I am always open to taking anything constructive.

Do you have any suggestions about providing a better ui for the listeners, would placing the player at the top of the page help with the problem?</comment></comment>


13 Xcode Tips That Will Help You Conquer Xcode - <AUTHOR> http://www.xmcgraw.com/13-xcode-tips-that-will-help-you-conquer-xcode/

<comment><USER2> On the topic of useful keyboard shortcuts, I like auto indentation of selected lines with control (not command) + i.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm really digging this. Thanks for sharing!</comment></comment>


Improved chess game compression (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://lichess.org/blog/Wqa7GiAAAOIpBLoY/developer-update-275-improved-game-compression <comment><USER3> This reminds me where many years ago I learned about the world record holder for computer optical character recognition (OCR) accuracy.

The computer scientists took as a target an eastern European chess journal which printed move-by-move reports of tournament chess matches. They incorporated a crude chess engine in the recognition step estimating the liklihood of next moves and combining that with the OCR engine liklihood estimate that the printed characters were particular glyphs. Despite very low quality of the printing, the journal had very high quality editing. The source material was self consistent. Completely illegible characters could mostly be filled in as the sensible game moves that were allowed. It took hundreds of hours of human review time to find a single OCR mistake from this process!

<comment><USER4> > It took hundreds of hours of human review time to find a single OCR mistake > from this process!

This stands out to me as improbable. Not in that the error rate could be that low, but in that they actually had humans spend hundreds of hours checking the accuracy of difficult character recognition. How did that happen?

<comment><USER3> I searched out the article: "Reading Chess", 1990, HS Baird and Ken Thompson. (Yes, that Ken Thompson).

[http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/reading_chess/reading_chess.p...](http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/reading_chess/reading_chess.pdf)

It doesn't actually quantify the human proofreading time. I might have recalled incorrectly; I heard about this in the late 1990's as a war story from another OCR researcher.

<comment><USER5> It's an embarassing problem to have a system with "accuracy to high to measure"!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hmm, a lot of effort to make documents small, but then storing it in mongodb?!?!

If size and performance are a focus, just store them in a normal sorted table with compression (e.g. leveldb, or mysql using rocksdb).

This means all these small documents can be compressed with repetition between games and not just within each game.

And probably much much faster and simpler etc.

Basically, the size taken by the database should be at the same kind of level as you get by just having a text file with one line per game, and gzipping the whole thing. I'd expect it to be an order of magnitude smaller than per- document compression.

<comment><USER7> Games are quite small -- under 50 turns, each under 2 bytes in binary, but more if you start with simple text languge before compression. You need to compress each game individually. Would database-wide compression work?

<comment><USER6> You do not need to compress every game individually. Behind the scenes, your mainstream database is storing the data in pages, and these pages - <USER2> many adjacent rows - can be compressed.

The compression level achieved at a page level is much higher than compressing rows individually because there is lots of repetition between rows. It also speeds up io and other good things. It is almost always good, which is why the most modern database storage engines do it and do it by default.

Consider a csv file, and compare it to the same data stored as json objects, one row per line. The uncompressed json file is going to be much bigger, as the columns are repeated in every line. But both files gzip to much the same size, because all those keys are repeated again and again and the two files have basically the same entropy.

On the other hand, compressing each line in the file individually would be a poor choice, giving relatively poor gains.

There were database engines that did row-level compression, but these performed poorly and I know of nobody who used eg innodb compression.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have always loved just how much of computer science you could learn by doing nothing but working on chess your entire life.

<comment><USER9> Usually the earliest computers were made so that they can play chess and "crack" it

<comment><USER10> I thought they all did math for science or the military?

<comment><USER11> ... and pr0n

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The article doesn't say it anywhere but I sure hope all the games are backed up to disk/tape in txt format and that this is just used to keep in-memory DB/memcache size down.

Otherwise an interesting article about injecting domain knowledge to improve beyond what's possible with a normal compression algorithm.

<comment><USER13> Indeed, you can download this backup yourself if you'd like: [https://database.lichess.org/](https://database.lichess.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> the basis of this algorithm is to rank the possible moves from the current position, then use that to choose a Huffman encoding. In essence, they use a very naive single-move-look ahead chess AI to quickly rank moves giving them a crude measure for how 'surprising' a particular move would be at that point in the game.

Interesting question: If you just generated the bit string that corresponded to taking the 'most obvious move' according to their heuristics, what game would that play out? In a way, that would be the 'most obvious chess game', or perhaps the 'least creative chess game'...

In theory a more optimal version would be to use a more sophisticated AI to rank the next moves, and even to choose how aggressively to Huffman code the possible options.

In a sense this would measure the information content of a chess game (at least relative to the 'knowledge' of that AI) . I wonder what the variance in the number of bits needed to encode various games would tell you about the play style of different players, or the nature of the game, or even the relationship betweeen information theory and creativity....

<comment><USER15> The most boring chess game according to Lichess move compression: [https://lichess.org/study/5jQeJXXb](https://lichess.org/study/5jQeJXXb)

<comment><USER16> damn, that's some "obvious" moves right there

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This nicely illustrates the point of the Hutter Prize, that efficient compression comes from understanding the content on a nontrivial level.

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

</comment><comment><USER18> The to slow approach is fun. If you freeze and use a reasonable engine a bit string could represent which moves match the engine move. (lets call it block 1) The missing moves could be 3 bit numbers like 000 for second best engine move, 001 for 3rd, 010 for 4th, 011 for 5th, 100 for 6th best move, 101 for 7th, 110 for 8th and 111 for other moves. (block 2) The other moves are simply put like E4, E24 or NF3G5.(block 3)

<comment><USER19> For optimum compression with this approach, you'd use an engine that generated the most likely moves (perhaps given the time control and the players' ratings, since Lichess stores those anyway), not the strongest moves. That might not look much like a regular chess engine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> As I understand it uses the Huffman-code for all moves including the opening moves. Alternatively statistics could be gathered for all first moves, all second moves, etc..., then different Huffmann-code could be applied for opening moves.

I wouldn't be surprised if the statistics for the first few moves were significantly different to the moves deep into the game.

<comment><USER14> Probably worth just having short Huffman codes specifically to encode particular opening sequences, before referring to per-move coding

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Our database runs on 3 servers (1 primary, 2 secondaries), each with two > 480GB SSDs in a RAID 1 configuration

Algorithmically cool, but quite a lot of work to save <$500/yr in hardware for a handful of 1TB SSDs.

Converting the data to the new format cost more than upgrading disks.

<comment><USER21> In the conclusion they mentioned rate of growth as well.

If rate of growth is disk usage is at or below the rate of growth in mid-tier SSDs, then yes, it's $500/yr. If you are growing faster than that, then an improvement might be saving you $350/yr + $150/yr², and a wall in the future might be pushed out for years.

With your Cloud provider, it might be hard to get more disk, memory, or CPU without paying for more of the other two. Also, many real organizations and vendor agreements are full of the most stupid artificial constraints. Just because someone else can build a 1PB SSD storage array doesn't mean that any of my coworkers will be allowed to build one any time soon. CAPEX austerity measures are among the most frustrating penny-wise pound-foolish policies we have to deal with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Nice. A touchy balance between overengineering and too much overengineering. Maybe you could better compress combinations of moves, like exchanges.

If you also store move times, there's not much of a win to this.

</comment><comment><USER23> The article includes a brief but clear explanation of Huffman coding. I didn't understood how it works until now!</comment>


Facebook removes regional networks, revamps privacy settings - <AUTHOR> http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=190423927130

<comment><USER2> Of course, the _real_ privacy issue with Facebook is the applications: <http://pjf.id.au/blog/?position=590>

</comment><comment><USER3> Not long ago Facebook added the option to browse by city, which was a great improvement. When I travel I always look for friends in whatever city I am in. I don't think that removing regional networks will affect this...at least I hope not!

</comment><comment><USER4> If privacy was the reason for removing regions, why not just remove any privacy stuff associated with regions instead of removing regions all together? Facebook without region info will look awkward. No longer would I be able to visit a city and in a click see friends I should hit up.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Regional networks are hugely popular... so we've decided to remove them".

<comment><USER6> The part you omitted is the meat of the argument

<comment><USER5> But there's no real argument, just a flimsy assertion that this will somehow allow people to better control their privacy.

The inference is that often people are unaware that a network such as "Los Angeles" has millions of users and thus are inadvertently sharing their private data with strangers. Frankly, I call bullshit.

If Facebook was serious about my privacy they would a) Create a single page for security instead of the current maze of pages, b) Change the defaults for new content to just "Friends" and not "Friends of friends", c) Make it far easier to find how to remove yourself from Friends/Fans/Groups than it currently is.

Apart from a), which has been mentioned before but never materialized, you won't see these happening because they go against the interests of Facebook, and Facebook seems quite fearless when it comes to upsetting their users.

<comment><USER7> So long as removing regional networks is only a temporary solution (as they move towards a better privacy implementation), then there's nothing wrong with their approach to a production issue.

It's a bit unfair to expect them to rollout the perfect fix for security. This could have been a simple mistake, where one team pushed out a great new feature that had unintended consequences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "...and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone."

Hopefully they'll keep the more granular privacy settings, e.g., "Allow everyone except these people", e.g., "View your profile as Person X".</comment>


Ask HN: How would you make a million dollars, working part time? - <AUTHOR> Or: How did you make your first million?
I'm expecting my first child, about 2 years earlier than expected, and want to make a fundamental change to how I earn money.
I want to transition from my $160k software engineering job to working 10-15 hours a week, and still maintain a decent quality of life and have enough money to buy a house. A net worth of $1million feels about the right amount to settle at (500k home owned outright, 500k in the bank; enough spare money to risk on projects, and enough buffer to sustain a modest cost of living even if there's economic turmoil).
I've been a developer for ~10 years, senior / leads roles recently, consultant or contractor for most of my career. I started my own business 2 years ago and that unfortunately didn't work out. I plan to start more, and feel like I've got a good mix of design + business + tech implementation skills to back it up. Which leads me to the question: given 6 months, what would you do to establish a income of ~10k a month (post-tax) that only requires 10 hours a week of work. I don't give a damn about becoming a billionaire or disrupting an industry, I want to raise my kids and look after my wife and live comfortably whilst doing so.
I'm currently exploring: (in order of likelihood)
* Productised consulting — I specialise in a couple of areas that I think can be turned into products.
* SaaS businesses aimed at small-medium companies, ~$200-500/month digital products (rather than consumer products).
* A half-dozen crackpot ideas that might spin off and make a few tens of thousands at a time.
I'm sure a few of you have had this same thought, and I'd love to know what you're doing about it. <comment><USER2> Productised consulting — I specialise in a couple of areas that I think can be turned into products

\--usually a "lead in" to some kind of consulting. ie. look how hard this is just hire us to do it.

SaaS businesses aimed at small-medium companies, ~$200-500/month digital products (rather than consumer products).

\-- generally leads with telesales.

A half-dozen crackpot ideas that might spin off and make a few tens of thousands at a time.

\-- not sure

\-- a lot of businesses require a lot of effort upfront about 2 years...

</comment><comment><USER3> Work 2 years as webcam girl, apparently.

[http://www.news.com.au/technology/online/social/aussie- women...](http://www.news.com.au/technology/online/social/aussie-women- earning-up-to-500000-per-year-as-online-sex-workers/news- story/482a6e861510b4653b995cbb681028cb)</comment>


Searx – A privacy-respecting, hackable metasearch engine - <AUTHOR> https://www.searx.me/ <comment><USER2> Interesting project. I looked around a bit, and this is apparently a public installation of the open source project searx: [https://github.com/asciimoo/searx](https://github.com/asciimoo/searx)

It aggregates searches from other search engines. You can specify a specific search engine to search with a !-shortcut, e.g. "!go your search query" to just search Google.

More info: [https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/](https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/)

Onion link for searx.me: [http://ulrn6sryqaifefld.onion/](http://ulrn6sryqaifefld.onion/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I have been using [https://startpage.com](https://startpage.com) which also bills itself as a "Truly private search engine". It uses Google for search results but sends your queries without any associated IP/cookie info. They also don't log your searches.

<comment><USER4> Me too, but I added a button (with TamperMonkey) to switch back to Google. Some searches are not good enough on StartPage, but at least I don't default to Gg any more.

<comment><USER5> I do the same (sort of) with duck duck go. Just add "!g" to the beginning or end of your search and you'll get actual Google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Would the most truly price one be more like yacy [1]?

This has been a keen interest of mine the last few months, and I will be releasing my own open source search engine which basically a collection of linked docker containers (solr, scrapy, Django, workers).

Certainly the hard road ahead will be relevancy and broad crawling.

[1] - [http://yacy.net](http://yacy.net)

<comment><USER7> I assume you've heard of [http://commoncrawl.org/](http://commoncrawl.org/) \- hope this helps!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Anyone know why i'd want to use this over duckduckgo? Is it more private or something? Their about page doesn't seem to offer anything compelling over duckduckgo.

<comment><USER9> Well, DDG is owned by Yahoo... Also, it is not open source completely. So you cannot know if it is really tracking you or not.

<comment><USER10> You can't know if a public installation of an open source project is actually just running the code that you see either. Hosted open source projects have no security benefits over proprietary services.

And duckduckgo is not owned by yahoo. It has partnerships with yahoo, bing and yandex to use their search databases.

<comment><USER9> I agree with you. However, you can run your own instance of searx if you don't trust anyone. In case of DDG you don't have this option.

I am not sure that partnership or ownership really changes anything. But I hope I am wrong about it. :)

<comment><USER11> > I am not sure that partnership or ownership really changes anything.

It changes everything. DDG is a Yahoo customer and, as adrusi wrote, sources search data from them among other providers. Yahoo doesn't control DDG, its privacy measures, data collection, or product direction as they would as a parent company. The relationship is completely different.

I do agree with you about Searx having the optional self-hosting advantage. DDG claim they won't track you, but there's really no way to be certain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ah, brings back memories of Metacrawler ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaCrawler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaCrawler)), which was once, pre-Google, my first choice of search engine.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't see the API limits posted anywhere? Any limits on the number of requests?

And since they're aggregating from other search engines, won't they eventually reach a point where they're running out of API requests?

<comment><USER14> If API keys are required how is this truly private? Either you get your own keys and loose privacy or you use someone else's service which brings you right back to what you get with any other search engine.

<comment><USER13> Fair point. This occurred to me as well after doing my initial post (follow up below).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice, but in the current environment this will turn into another wack-a-mole game since obviously Google &c don't want to be used this way.

Somewhat relatedly, I wonder when the right to digitally remember what the browser has seen (and create one's own database and automation and share synthesized results) will become a thing for individuals.

<comment><USER16> > Nice, but in the current environment this will turn into another wack-a-mole > game since obviously Google &c don't want to be used this way.

I've wondered about this (specifically in the context of DDG and Bing, but more generally). You say " _another_ wack-a-mole game" (emphasis mine), so I guess that it's happened before, but I don't know of any occurrences. Has it happened that search engines have blocked this sort of large-scale aggregator/re-director type access?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are so many metasearch engines now, has anyone considered created a metasearch of the metasearch engines?

We need to go deeper.

<comment><USER17> I used to use Turbo search as the most meta- and all-encompassing search I could get. Hit the major non-meta and meta engines _plus_ a ton of specialized and obscure ones with ability to configure or filter all that. Long time ago. I'm not even sure the one in this link is it as it's long gone.

[http://websearch.about.com/od/generalsearchengines/ss/Early-...](http://websearch.about.com/od/generalsearchengines/ss/Early- Search-Engines-Where-Are-They-Now.htm)

Turns out Wikipedia has a nice list of search engines. Didn't realize there's so many but not surprised given lower barrier-to-entry.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How easy it is to add new search engines? What if I want to add for example internet archive search engine?

<comment><USER11> Looks pretty straightforward - as an example, here's a provider for the Arch Linux Wiki:

[https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/blob/master/searx/engines/...](https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/blob/master/searx/engines/archlinux.py)

There's also a list of possible engines to support on their wiki:

[https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/wiki/possible-search- engin...](https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/wiki/possible-search-engines)

The Internet Archive is on there - I'm sure they'd appreciate a pull request adding it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Since it scrapes Google, how does it manage to not get your server IP blocked?

<comment><USER19> It doesn't. The idea is that you'll run your own personal instance, and traffic will be low enough to not set off anyone's defenses. You'll see this discussed if you look at the issues, and in the code you can see that it supports using proxies and multiple IPs on hosts which have multiple IPs.

<comment><USER4> If you run your own, then it's not private any more. Your server IP will identify your searches, and only your searches.

<comment><USER11> Perhaps one could tunnel it through Tor, rotating identities regularly. There is the issue of dealing with Google's aggressive reCAPTCHA challenges to connections made through Tor, however.

<comment><USER20> Historically, I've found Google search borderline impossible to use via Tor because it'd usually give me an error page after solving the captcha. Occasionally you'll find a window where they're not nulling Tor IPs, but it's rarely worth the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> >> Open result links on new browser tabs

This plugin requires Javascript apparently - surprised they can't use target="_blank"?

<comment><USER22> Ever heard of usability and user experience? Using target="_blank" is strongly discouraged since at least 2005. All links should normally open in the same tab unless you use your browser options to open them in new tabs. You can click on them with the middle button of your mouse or hold CTRL while you click, for example.

<comment><USER21> Sorry I wasn't clear - they have a plugin in the options that allows you to open all the links in a SERP in a new window/tab - but it says under the plugin that it requires javascript which seemed strange to me!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Inaccessible in Chrome 53.0.2785.21 dev-m (64-bit)

Unsupported protocol

The client and server don't support a common SSL protocol version or cipher suite.

[https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=searx.me](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=searx.me)

<comment><USER24> Probably due to the fact that they only have DHE ciphersuites.

from Chrome's dev console:

          www.searx.me/:1 This site requires a DHE-based SSL cipher suite. These are deprecated and will be removed in M52, around July 2016. See https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5752033759985664 for more details.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Some of you guys might be interested in Qwant ([https://www.qwant.com](https://www.qwant.com)) , a european "truly private" search engine.

Disclaimer: I used to work there.

</comment><comment><USER26> Similar to [http://www.metager.net/](http://www.metager.net/)

</comment><comment><USER26> I like it; It'll be my default search engine;

</comment><comment><USER27> Lovely</comment>


The role of a Senior Developer - <AUTHOR> http://mattbriggs.net/blog/2015/06/01/the-role-of-a-senior-developer/ <comment><USER2> This definitely is in the right direction, but leaves out a lot of very important things.

I think of a senior developer as someone who is effective. Roughly that means:

* Planning: Ability to take on large, ill-defined problems, define them, break them up, and execute the pieces. A senior developer can take something big and abstract and run with it. They will come up with a few options, discuss them with the team and implement them.

* Execution: When something is planned a senior dev can execute quickly. They make tradeoffs, and they know why. They know where to be dogmatic and where to be pragmatic. They also can code well obviously.

* Communication: Effective developers are great communicators. They probably overcommunicate, gather feedback on non-trivial things, and thoroughly investigate feedback received. People often will say "give me feedback" but what that means is "tell me why my solution is right." For senior developers it's "poke holes in my solution." This can be very evident in pull requests -- junior devs can easily become attached to their solution, become myopic, and be unable to take feedback.

* Leadership: They are aware they're on a team. They view it as a part of their responsibility to mentor others. This can range from pair programming with junior devs, to taking unglorious tasks of writing docs or tests or whatever else needs to be done.

* And finally, they've been burned a lot. They can foresee where the problems will be before a single line of code is written, because earlier in their career they've been burned by a lot of things. An intermediate dev (or perhaps a junior dev) has been burned by poor spaghetti code, and has swung over to nailing everything with the GoF hammer.

Another thing that I have noticed how much of the above applies to senior designers as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> Something that I think gets missed often from these discussions is the idea of different definitions of 'senior' in different contexts. If you're working at Google on search algorithms, it doesn't matter how good a communicator you are, if you aren't technical enough to understand the work and think about how to improve it, it's not much use.

Conversely, if you're a brilliant architect but aren't great at being very pragmatic and hacking stuff out, you might not add much value to a lot of smaller webshops.

So someone who would qualify as senior in one place, wouldn't be very effective elsewhere.

And as developers, we can try and identify our own interests and skills and find work that fits these.

</comment><comment><USER4> I know you admit that it's a gross oversimplification but this kind of talk still bothers me a lot. It's a lot like when, to use a (honestly shoddy) metaphor, people talk about rankings in a video game like League of Legends. Some times you'll hear talk like "the difference between a bronze and silver player is game sense!" or "objectives control!" or "mechanics!". The truth is it's all of these things and none of them. A silver player is simply _better_ than a bronze player.

I think the same goes here. There's not some magic thing that a senior developer has that a junior developer is missing. They are simply, overall, better.

<comment><USER5> > A silver player is simply better than a bronze player.

> There's not some magic thing that a senior developer has that a junior > developer is missing.

"They're just better" is a way of saying "this is magic and not quantifiable". If you cannot quantify what factors allow one developer to consistently deliver quality software on schedule, then you cannot grow your team in that direction, and are essentially rolling the dice.

<comment><USER6> That would be true if you were _programming_ your team, but what you're really doing is setting the magnificent machine known as the brain on the problem, which does all sorts of things we can't explain.

I'm all for figuring out explicitly how to deliver software better, but pretending that implicit knowledge doesn't exist seems like folly.

<comment><USER5> In a sense, you are programming your team, in all the things you emphasize and spend time talking about at meetings.

Also, there are obvious things that make developers more able to deliver quality software, and there are obvious things that make gamers more able to win games, just as there are with famous athletes. Thinking that there aren't specific predictors of success here is as silly as saying there aren't specific predictors for what makes a good QB.

<comment><USER6> >In a sense, you are programming your team, in all the things you emphasize and spend time talking about at meetings.

I'm saying that the analogy is just an analogy, and doesn't apply strongly enough. What you're doing has strong components of feeding an ML algorithm training data. Yes, people have intentions and can understand processes, but that's as far as it does. We're certainly not writing neuroassembly.

I don't mean to imply that there are no predictors for better performance, but I bet there are fewer than one might think. A lot of the factors interact in discontinuous or nonlinear fashion, making it very hard to just draw correlations and call it a day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I overlooked the first "then/than", but a few sentences later you had another.

(make that 3 so far...browser closed)

<comment><AUTHOR> One of my weaknesses is being terrible at writing :-) I am trying to get passed it. Thanks for the feedback, I think I fixed them all.

<comment><USER8> In that case... "get past it"

I have trouble with that one myself. :-)

[http://www.grammar- monster.com/easily_confused/past_passed.h...](http://www.grammar- monster.com/easily_confused/past_passed.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What are some tactics you can use as a junior/intermediate developer in a company with a lack of senior developers to mitigate the risks you discussed and foster growth?

<comment><USER5> One big one: talk with marketing and sales about marketing and sales things. It helps you look into engineering from the outside, and see the other side of the interface - it shows you the pain of missed deadlines, and the surprising benefit of having that one extra feature. It helps you put real value to the output, and gives you context for measuring the worth of things you're spending time on.

<comment><USER10> Excellent answer. I think the real difference between a junior and a senior is not so much in coding skill; some juniors are really brilliant coders and can fix any problem you throw at them.

But a senior has more experience with the "why" behind the coding. What are the requirements in terms of schedule, user experience, stability, maintainability, performance, development process, QA, etc. A junior can be great at one of these, but a senior has to take responsibility for all of them. So you need to understand the needs of all the stakeholders outside the dev team. (At least the basics; functional details deserve an expert of their own.)

<comment><USER11> I think his point about over and under engineering stuff is spot on. I did both earlier in my career, and I would say that my skill after 12 years is in knowing the correct level of abstraction, and understanding the tradeoffs between various solutions.

(Yet all the interviews I turn up to these days want an hour and a half timed coding challenge to be completed).

<comment><USER10> I totally agree with you (and the article) on experience concerning the right level of abstraction. I don't think there's a quick shortcut to learning that, though.

I think an interview that focuses on coding challenges isn't really looking for a senior. Point them to a junior that's more appropriate to their needs.

In most interviews I do, we do talk about abstractions and maintainability and stuff like that. Although I have recently done one that involved a coding kata, which was kind of interesting because during the kata we also moved through a couple of (small scale) levels of abstraction while discussing them, and particularly the appropriate time to abstract some stuff.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Twitter's t.co is a game changer - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/09/why-twitters-recent-announceme.html <comment><USER2> _"Twitter could turn #coffee into #starbucks."_

Yeah, I'd like to see them try that.

<comment><USER3> They could have done that a long time ago. If they'd wanted to lose their user base overnight. Same goes for any tomfoolery with shorturls. Other than wrecking bit.ly's market share, I don't see t.co changing much.

<comment><USER2> If it wasn't obvious, I was being sarcastic.

Actually I sort of would like to see them try, just for the entertainment of watching a fiasco 10x worse than Facebook Beacon unfold.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure how this is fundamentally different than twitter integrating with something like bit.ly

Alistair expects us to believe that bit.ly was sharing no tracking / analytics information with twitter?

<comment><USER5> You are right. bitly did tracking and analytics. But Twitter can have even more information by forcing all users to use t.co.

The point of the article is that Twitter can force every one to use t.co on its platform and thus provide better analytics, malware detection etc than its competitors.

It is a game changer for Twitter monetization; not so much for users or content creators.

<comment><USER6> >Twitter can have even more information by forcing all users to use t.co.

I suspect they'd end up with a lot less information if they tried this.

<comment><USER7> It seems they're planning a soft-force: all URLs will be converted to t.co in outbound tweets, but the original shortener will still be visible in some presentations, and t.co will still redirect through the original shortener -- so sites providing some unique value to users still work.

I can't see a major user revolt over that approach -- even though in the long run it gives t.co such an advantage that other services may whither away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So I may just be still waking up from sleeping pills, but most of this article seems like a lot of potential things without much actual direction/decisiveness.

Yes, Twitter CAN do a lot of this, CAN track 500 things and sell them to "businesses" (who? why?)

> This is the real value of the company -- not just knowing what people are > talking about, but knowing which things prompt an action, wherever that > happens.

And then what? What do you do with that?

It feels like this is the same as saying "We'll get millions of users, THEN figure out how to make money". Except we're a step forward from that, having a flimsy plan (Sell the "purpose" of visitors to "businesses" who can "use it" to "whatever") with still no idea of how to do it.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm all for a business trying to do... business, but all this talk of monetizing links, engagement, and the "long funnel" is a little irritating. I feel like I'm begin treated like cattle.

It's stuff like this that makes me wonder if it's possible to build a de- shortener service.

</comment><comment><USER10> Alistair is spot on t.co. It will allow Twitter to better track traffic and they'll be able to sell this information to third parties.

<comment><USER11> Who do you sell it to?

<comment><USER12> Businesses with deep enough pockets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Personaly, I refuse to click on any shortened URIs, especially when using a Windows box. I just don't care for them.</comment>


Start the GoDaddy Exodus - <AUTHOR> http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/12/28/on-eve-net-boycott-dump-godaddy-exodus-begins/

<comment><USER2> Though I'm happy that Godaddy was made to buckle by the collective force of the internet, I can't help but ask: what about the other 149 companies on the SOPA list? Has no one thought about this? The only reason the internet went after Godaddy is because it is one of the few companies within the internet's reach. None of the major media player on the list have suffered or will suffer. Why? Because the internet is an utopia and the world out there is way way bigger than the internet can reach. So much for that fantasy, everybody.</comment>


The interactive landing page that is virally promoting itself - <AUTHOR> http://wanderu.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm one of the creators of the the landing page that we launched recently while the product is still in development. The landing page has an interactive twist that gives people an incentive to share about us.

In the time its been up we've seen the majority of visitors coming back to the page several times, interacting with us a long time each visit and sharing about us on Facebook and through personal referral links. In addition we have seen a strong percentage of referrals coming back to sign up.

Along side to traditional email sign up using Launchrock we added an interactive element that gets visitors a reason to share and spread our message for us and increases our traffic. But in addition people are staying on the landing page for significant time, coming back multiple times and telling us that the game is addictive.

We used a modified game tied to a giveaway where a higher score gives a higher chance to win an awesome ski trip for 4. People are entered by filling out an email prompt after they've played a bit. They get to play longer, so they can get to a higher score by sharing on Facebook and by having their friends come play the game once they run out of lives. So far looking great like a snowball picking up steam.

Would love to hear HN's thoughts!</comment>


The History of Text Generation - <AUTHOR> http://mathesonmarcault.com/index.php/2015/12/15/randomly-generated-title-goes-here/ <comment><USER2> Are there any natural text generation libraries that can generate commentary on time series data?

E.g. blood glucose levels remained steady for the first two months then rose sharply in the past week.

<comment><USER3> Well, yes and no.

Yes in the sense that there are libraries that can generate text (e.g. SimpleNLG), but you need to write code that does the analysis and chooses the content to show.

The "modern" way would be to train a seq2seq model. But for that you need training data, and it's harder to control the correctness of the results.

For a start, you can look at the slides from this summer school [https://nlgsummer.github.io](https://nlgsummer.github.io) and read up on the BabyTalk project ([http://www.nlg-wiki.org/systems/BabyTalk](http://www.nlg- wiki.org/systems/BabyTalk)). SimpleNLG is indeed simple to use, but maybe for your task a template-based system (e.g. [https://github.com/TallChris91/PASS](https://github.com/TallChris91/PASS)) is enough.

TLDR: you either need to write code for managing the time series, or need a large enough dataset to train on. Or rely on commercial services such as those offered by Arria

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Warning: if you want to read this text without javascript you have to disable css, otherwise all the content is hidden. So, it has come to that. This is the new web.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the tip! I use uMatrix with aggressive defaults including no Javascript, somehow this trick didn't occur to me.

Although my general rule is that if Javascript is required to read a site's content, it's probably not worth it. With the storied NoScript being released for Chrome ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19650731](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19650731)), I suspect I'll have more and more company as the new web gets more abusive and dangerous.

<comment><USER4> I am so in awe at this site! It is the first actual example I have witnessed of non-monotonic progressive enhancement. You start with a text-only browser and the site is OK; so far so good. Then you keep adding features to the browser and the site progressively disappears and re-appears again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wow, basically grammar-based generation has been a thing for quite a while now.

I'll have to print one of these circles and bring it to my NLG group to show...</comment>


Chinese Melamine and American Vioxx: A Comparison - <AUTHOR> http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/chinese-melamine-and-american-vioxx-a-comparison/

<comment><AUTHOR> tl;dr Merck pharmaceutical products indirectly ~50K elderly people in the U.S., minor coverage by media, few consequences for unscrupulous business practices. Unscrupulous business practices kills 6 infants in China, major coverage by U.S. and Chinese media, responsible parties executed.</comment>


Just launched our web-based spear phishing attack simulator app - <AUTHOR> http://www.threatsim.com <comment><AUTHOR> Little background here: We're a security consulting company. We do a ton of web app security assessments, network vuln/pen testing, etc. A while back one of our clients (large financial) hired us to do a spear phishing simulation. "Show us how people are still able to get in and show us how they are able to get out". So we did it all manually both the phishing as well as going on site to to data exfiltration to see how we could get around their outbound firewall rules, IDS/IPS, DLP, proxies, sniffers, etc. We figured out how to do all of these successfully and were able to "steal" some fake credit card numbers.

We lost a lot of money on that engagement. :) We went waaay over margin. So we started thinking how can we automate this and make it a repeatable process that customers can run on an on-demand and on-going basis. Security is who we are and in our blood. We we started coding...

And here we are.

So there are two sides:

1\. Web based spear phishing engine that sends out "malicious" emails with all kinds of different options (e.g. malicious attachments, links to malicious web sites, 'your pass expired, enter it here!' sites, etc.) We track who clicked on what, who has out of date Acrobat, Flash, Java, etc.

2\. Bottom line is that phishers will ALWAYS get people to click on something. No matter what. And the attacker only needs 1 person to do it. Just 1. So let's assume that we're going to eventually get in. We have an on-demand executable that mimics attacker malware complete with ninja-sneaky network tricks that phones home fake credit card numbers, .rar files, all kinds of cool network trickery.

All of the above is run by the end user and presented in a nice web UI so a security guy/gal can make intelligent decisions on where their security is good and where it sucks.

We're super excited about our new service and we hope everyone else is too. Would love to hear more feedback.

<comment><USER2> Awesome - I'll be contacting you. This is great, for the typical over-worked but security conscious IT guy (me).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It looks like something I would want to use -- but I can't tell whether it's priced in a range I can afford. I mentally equate the lack of a price list with a hard-sell, high-price sales approach.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're targeting the enterprise market so most of our customers have a security budget that this would fit nicely in. Our model is subscription based, allowing customers to run as many tests as they want. If you look at how much a breach costs organizations it isn't hard for us to justify our price. I can tell you that everyone here at ThreatSim has been in IT for well over 10 years and we're no fans of high pressure sales. Most of our business is based on referral and repeat customers. If you want to know more please fill out the contact form on our site.

<comment><USER4> That answer didn't have a single dollar figure in it.

Perhaps you could tell us an average price (or median, which would be lower), or even just an example of a price someone paid.

If I can't tell what this is going to cost me to within a factor of 10, then I probably can't afford it. Based on what I see here, the entry level cost might be as cheap as $100, or as expensive as $50,000.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder how many companies are currently running tests like this in the enterprise. Anyone have an idea of what people currently use?

<comment><USER6> This is a consulting offering at several low-end app sec firms (if you're a high-end appsec firm that does this stuff, sorry, I didn't know). It's one of those attractive "scales across every employee of the company" services consultants love. Happy to see it productized.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're a mid-level appsec firm, how's that? :) The problem is that high, med, and low end attackers are using spear phishing to get a foothold inside many organizations. This is testing that everyone should be doing today. Read any recent mainstream media article about any breach and Cmd-F "phish".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can't wait to see stats from this! Hoping when you license it to companies, you collect anonymous but public stats.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, one of our goals is to collect industry-wide metrics that will help everyone figure out what the best approach to tackling this difficult problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> 1\. I have no idea what this website does, but it sounds like it is web based security checking. 2\. The web site is down. Potential Delicious Irony: Somebody took down ThreatSim with ThreatSim.

<comment><AUTHOR> Irony is that we're under a lot of traffic right now and moving to EC2 as I type this. Site is back up btw :)

<comment><USER8> That sounds like an excellent problem to have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> just want to step in and say that its a nice little logo you got there, what is the font used and where did you get it designed :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! The logo was designed by the talented folks at <http://peeble.in/> Not sure what the font is, however you can drop it into "What The Font" <http://new.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/> and see what they think it is.</comment></comment>


Why Facebook and Google Ads measurements are all wrong - <AUTHOR> https://retina.ai/blog/facebook-google-roas/ <comment><AUTHOR> Let me know what you guys think about how this $500B industry has been measuring ad performance.</comment>


Problems with Django - <AUTHOR>

I've downloaded Python 64 bit and Django 1.4 on Windows 7, but every time I try to execute "django-admin.py startproject mysite" no project gets created? I've uninstalled django and python multiple times and tried over, and no luck.  How is this fixable? <comment><USER2> come on dude go at the mailing list or better search google or try python 32 bit and make sure it is python 2 not 3 and next time give more information. Search on youtube maybe you forgot a step (for example to change the path variable of windows)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry but, google has no help for this, python 2.7, and can I have a link to the mailing list?

<comment><USER3> <http://lmgtfy.com/?q=django+mailing+list>

The top three links give you everything you need to get help.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You'll want to make sure you have set the PYTHONPATH properly.

Windows is especially fussy about this, so read up on how to set that environment variable will probably resolve that issue and many similar ones which will crop up.</comment>