How Wavee Makes Money: The Math Behind The Startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.ajaimk.com/2010/05/01/how-wavee-makes-money-the-math-behind-the-startup/ <comment><USER5> The difficulty with this (and any other sites it resembles - quibids, for example) is that there is absolutely no good reason to believe that there aren't bots behind the scenes driving up the bids.

As an exercise in curiosity one day I watched a few auctions on quibids for about 45 minutes - with a number of them, immediately after a bid was placed by what may have been a "real" user, nearly instantly another user - <USER2> the same one - placed another bid.

After a time watching this, I began counting the number of bids placed (at 60 cents per bid, which is quibids rate), the questionable bidder placed over 300 bids in the span of 45 minutes - each time in immediate response to someone else's bid.

The item in question was a $100 gift card from Target. At 300 bids (60 cents each), that was $180.00 - grossly in excess of the value of the card itself.

Yes, it could be claimed that this was just a very dumb bidder, but the speed and rate at which they were entering bids was nearly unbelievable.

The auction ended at $15.40. At one cent increments, that was 1540 bids - <USER3> 60 cents each. Quibids made 924 + 15.40 - $100 for that card. Sick.

<comment><USER6> There is no reason to think that the bots are from the site itself (though, no reason to think they are not, either). It seems to me that it would be almost trivial to bot this up...but then you have a bot war trying to get the last possible profitable bid -- or at least one that the bot programmer is comfortable with.

<comment><USER7> Yes there is good reason to think that. An outsider would have to pay .75c/bid to run the bot, which is lunacy.

A bot run by wavee would pay nothing

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This type of auction model is really just a brilliant scam. It's 100 people subsidizing the cost of the item for one person. So, one person gets a great deal, 100 people throw their money away, and Wavee brings in profits that may be even greater than selling the item at MSRP.

<comment><USER9> _may be even greater than selling the item at MSRP_

Orders of magnitude greater, look at one of the finished games and do the math.

It's quite an old scam, first described in 1971 according to Wikipedia; <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction>

The first mainstream'ish implementation I know is swoopoo.com (2008). Since then a large number of clones have popped up, likely motivated by the fact that, for some reason, gambling laws in many countries don't seem to cover this scheme.

<comment><USER10> Do gambling laws in the US really not cover dollar auctions? For some reason I always thought such laws would be why every promotional sweepstakes in the States, e.g. McDonald's Monopoly or Coke bottle codes, etc. have a rule in fine print about "No purchase necessary to enter. To enter, send a self addressed envelope to... " etc. so it could be argued the sweepstakes is not pay-to-enter. Even then, such promotionals usually have further notes about not being able to enter in three or four out of the fifty states.

It would seem regulation would be desirable for such auction sites, since the consumer has to place a significant about of trust in the auctioneer not to bid up his own products to make more money, or throw non-profitable auctions to a self-owned account... the end-user currently has no practical recourse if this happens.

Hopefully grellas or another IAAL can throw in some knowledge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> bigdeal.com does this too. TechCrunch sponsored their jump into America and ultimately pulled out. It's super confusing for people and 99% of bidders get screwed.

The reason why bids happen so fast is that they over bid a high amount and not the next increment. And those super bidders usually have 'won' bids in a previous auction thus receiving a discount on the bid value.

</comment><comment><USER6> In essence a sniper auction where only one person who paid to bid actually gets the item. Is this still legal?

<comment><USER12> I'm not entirely sure it's a lot different to ebay bid sniping with multiple contestants, except for the fact that it's all automated and the profit margin is centralised with the auction house itself.

Of course, that doesn't mean that said centralisation is legal.

But I think my only real disagreement with their existence is that they aren't covered by gambling regulations. As a slightly weird form of gambling, presented clearly to the public as such (and regulated as such), I don't believe I'd have any objection to them.

Sadly, borderline misrepresentation of the truth is not illegal and probably couldn't effectively be made so.

 _shrug_ one way or another a fool and his money will be separated - <USER4> important thing is to make sure he enjoys the process. Value for money can come in excitement/fun as well as goods.

(why, yes, I'm feeling cynical today, why did you ask?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Just to confuse you further, they auction off "bid bundles" (e.g., 300 credits, worth $225, just sold for $7.23). So they're even making tons of money from their own virtual things.</comment>


What Would a Real Cyberwar Look Like? - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/new_scientist/2013/09/cyberwar_and_cyberattacks_it_s_really_espionage_subversion_or_sabotage.html <comment><USER2> Wait, cyberwar has to be violent and hurt people to count as an attack?

Logistics is part of war. Cyber attacks can disrupt logistics without ever directly harming anybody. Take Stuxnet.

But I think the metaphor of war is a bad one. You have deniable assets who can spy on one's enemies or commit sabotage. You can even make it look like somebody else. That's not war, that's covert deniable actions and intelligence and counter intelligence.

And the military is going to be very capable of defending against attacks directly against it. It's the infrastructure and civilians who will be at risk. Cyber terrorism may also be a useful metaphor to consider... you can make people feel afraid if you attack the power grid or cut off phone service to a broad area.</comment>


Ask HN: Should I launch or polish my product more? - <AUTHOR>

I'm currently developing an online service. By the end of the month I'll have a very basic product. I want to give the customers a choice between multiple pricing plans. The pricing plans will be based on volumes (traffic) and additional features.
By the end of the month the service will not have all features available that I want to include in the paying plans.
The questions is: Should I first launch with the free plan, or launch everything together? I can already make a difference in volumes but not with features (since these are not developed yet).
If I launch everything together should I ask a lower price and when adding new features changes the plans and pricing? Or should I already ask my price (based on a full service with everything developed) and add the new features later? or just launch the free plan first?
What should I do? <comment><USER2> Release it as fast as you can!

From "What Startups are Really Like" (<http://www.paulgraham.com/really.html>):

 _Lots of founders mentioned how important it was to launch with the simplest possible thing. By this point everyone knows you should release fast and iterate. It's practically a mantra at YC. But even so a lot of people seem to have been burned by not doing it:

Build the absolute smallest thing that can be considered a complete application and ship it._

Why?

 _Product development is a conversation with the user that doesn't really start till you launch. Before you launch, you're like a police artist before he's shown the first version of his sketch to the witness.

It's so important to launch fast that it may be better to think of your initial version not as a product, but as a trick for getting users to start talking to you._

</comment><comment><USER3> Why not have several mini-launches?

Launch the free, get feedback and iterate. You could post the price list but make the higher tiers unavailable at the moment. You could offer a wait list or make it invite only after they have tried a free account.

Then when you launch the higher tiers you have a list to contact. Get their feedback and continue to improve.

I think it gives people confidence that you are actively improving the service if they can see a feature set list that will be in the forthcoming paid version.

If it's not costly, don't restrict people on volume on the free plan just yet.

You then get data on the natural usage levels your service gets.This might help you to refine your volume cut offs in future.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm also a bit scared that when I launch the problems / features aren't developed in time. Since I'm the only one creating this product. Also when launched you should keep an eye on marketing / feedback what takes more time.

I'm planning on using uservoice so that users can add their wishes and complaints and work on the things that get most votes.

Probably I'll start working full-time on the product when I see that there is a lot of interest. But this probably isn't in the beginning.

</comment><comment><USER4> See this: [http://geekomotion.posterous.com/3-months-later- gmvault-17-b...](http://geekomotion.posterous.com/3-months-later- gmvault-17-beta-the-first-rele) (Gmvault 1.7-beta)

</comment><comment><USER5> Two tips:

1) I use this as a rule of thumb; only launch when it feels like it's version 3.0, not version 1.0. This keeps you on your toes and provides a much better product from the beginning. Remember first impressions are everything, and if customers come and see a smal set of features, they most likely won't come back.

2) Never ever change prices. Unless you're making the product cheaper. If I were to sign up for a service that increased its prices, I would just try and find alternatives. As a customer, it feels like I'm being cheated. Instead, label it as an early bird offer. 30% off in the first 3 months kind of thing. Comes off a lot better.

<comment> adam-_- What's the point in launching polished features that nobody wants? Much better to release unpolished/limited features to a set of users and solicit feedback on what they're really after.

Then you can release more polished/complete features and market more widely and solicit more feedback and rinse and repeat to profitability (admittedly I say this as someone that has not done this yet but plans/hopes on it).

<comment><USER5> I honestly wish you good luck.

I've had too many occasions where, when evaluating a service that didn't quite do it for me.

You can't expect customers to register and pay you money for a service when a) it doesn't do everything they need, and b) there is no certainty that it will ever do everything they need.

Grhmpft... software is hard. Let's go shopping!

<comment><USER6> There's a middle path. Release it even when it's not done, but don't go full throttle on marketing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Have you read 37signals _Getting Real_ ?

<http://gettingreal.37signals.com/toc.php>

</comment><comment><USER8> Launch.

Charge money. No, more than that.

Go read everything patio11 has written about pricing. Especially his latest about how to set your tiers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the pointer. I'll definitely check it out. For others, the blog can be found here => <http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late."

\- Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn

</comment><comment><USER10> Maybe you can release it free as beta and later you can charge customers after lauching.

</comment><comment><USER11> Build, measure, learn.</comment>


First open-access data from large collider confirm subatomic particle patterns - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2017-09-open-access-large-collider-subatomic-particle.html <comment><USER2> I can't imagine the amount of work that goes into making the data meaningful to an outsider. Although CERN is so big, maybe they need to have great documentation even for internal use.

<comment><USER3> It's totally irrelevant and shameful that data is held back for such reasons. Put a disclaimer/warning on it if need be.

When scientists play a part in the open access problem it's like having doctors who smoke cigarettes. There are plenty reasons the cancer is happening already without the leaders of a field contributing to it.

"In our field of particle physics, there isn't the tradition of making data public," says Thaler. "To actually get data publicly with no other restrictions—that's unprecedented."

<comment><USER4> The OP was right, though. Just making the data accessible and documented is a _huge_ undertaking. It's truly a laudable effort.

From the other side, I cannot imagine using the data without intimate knowledge of the entire setup. There are very few people that can look meaningfully at such kind of data, which is why publishing the dataset (and all the work it involves) is often neglected.

Not to defend the behavior in any way, but remind yourself: in the current research model, if you can't make a publication with it, it's not worth your time. For a dataset, I've seen people factor-in the effort to make it public VS the potential citations you could get out of it.

disclaimer: I work in research

<comment><USER5> Journals should not accept for publication articles which do not come with data and analysis source code for full replication of the results reported.

<comment><USER2> Why do you believe journals are the correct place to apply pressure?

<comment><USER5> Because in principle peer review is the basis of scientific progress. Without peer review, poor incentives lead to scientific inquiry about as accurate or useful as Buzzfeed.

Of course modern journals are a disgrace to the enlightenment. But the solution is to fix them, or if that can't be done, replace them. Not to stop the system of peer review entirely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Everyone knows it, no matter how gifted you are chances of your discovering something important is same as any random guy discovering something equally important, i.e., mostly random.

You limit access to the data, you limit ability of others to make an important discovery. Status quo won't offer free access to this data because it apparently reduces their importance.

<comment><USER7> I think your comment betrays profound ignorance off what kind of data we are dealing with here, and how discovering things in this data looks like.

Opening the data (along with the tools made for it) up to other specialists is definitely the right thing to do.

And it worked: They had a nice new observable they defined and rather than having to go to LHC people to check the data, they could do it themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ywm. Y o</comment>


Rookie Doctors Will Soon Be Allowed to Work Up to 28 Hours Straight - happy-go-lucky http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/10/519662434/rookie-doctors-will-soon-be-allowed-to-work-up-to-28-hours-straight <comment><AUTHOR> Dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13840429](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13840429)

</comment><comment><USER2> If a truck driver is working 28 hours straight, we consider their decision making capability so impaired that they endanger others and we take away their licence if they dare to do 28 hours without rest.

Doctors apparently don't make mistakes that can hurt people.

<comment><USER3> > Doctors apparently don't make mistakes that can hurt people.

They can, but it turns out that the handoff points can themselves be more problematic than the effects of working for 28 hours. They did lots of published research which showed that, which is why this policy change is even happening.

Also, a 28 hour shift doesn't mean that the doctor is working (or even awake) the entire time - they're on-shift, but there are periods of downtime. It's not necessarily 28 hours of constant activity.

<comment><USER4> I'd say that's a good argument for fixing whatever the flaws are in the handoff process that make it even worse than 28-hour shifts.

<comment><USER3> > I'd say that's a good argument for fixing whatever the flaws are in the > handoff process that make it even worse than 28-hour shifts.

That's a good idea. Do you know what those flaws are, and how to fix them?

I'm not being sarcastic - there's a whole lot of money that's been poured into this over the last few decades, and it's not easy.

While we wait for someone to figure out the answer, in the meantime, it's reasonable for providers to go back to the policy that empirically produced _lower_ rates of medical errors, which we know because that's what was standard practice up until a few years ago, and it already is standard practice for all other residents.

<comment><USER5> I agree with this assessment having only briefly paid attention to this topic while a friend was going through residency. This is not something that is being ignored - I would say the exact opposite is true, it was probably one of the most discussed topics of residents at the time.

But I also think the answer is pretty obvious, if not practical. You need to basically double the number of doctors, and stagger shifts so they have half- shift overlaps and scheduled 8hr (max) shifts to begin with. Then doctors can stay longer through the next shift if needed (and this would be common) to complete the handoffs properly as well as get through critical periods of patient care.

I think that would be far safer than the current model - but also would effectively double your salary costs which is of course a non-starter.

<comment><USER3> > But I also think the answer is pretty obvious, if not practical. You need to > basically double the number of doctors,

As mentioned in the article, one of the problems they found with the shorter shifts is that it was less effective for teaching, meaning that they would need longer training periods overall to achieve the same results with shorter shifts. So that would mean increasing the costs of residency, which is already an unprofitable program to begin with.

So, doubling the number of doctors without compromising on training would mean increasing the per-resident costs significantly _and then_ doubling them. That's... a hard approach to execute.

Also, that's assuming that having twice the number of doctors caring for each patient per unit time does not introduce any other problems, which is an assumption I'd question.

<comment><USER5> I again don't completely disagree, in the event real learning is going on. That's why I feel the "scheduled" shifts should be rather short and double- staffed, with the expectation residents stay as long as it takes to "get the job done".

I would make the argument that the vast majority of scheduled hours for a resident have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with learning and entirely to do with having shift coverage and are primarily economically driven decisions.

You do make good points about less uninterrupted time with patients, and it's a good reminder of how this is a very nuanced difficult problem to solve. Even in my industry where we can more realistically staff shift overlaps, we have handoff issues due to human mistakes. Nothing is going to be perfect, but I think we can do better for patients as well as doctors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Oh great, I come to HN for tech news and see this. As a graduating medical student doing a surgical prelim, I'm certainly not looking forward to 28 hour work days. I think what many don't realize is that day-to-day medicine is super low-tech.

The ACGME is still acting off a model where sign-outs are face-to-face following a checklist (see: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK43722/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK43722/)). This is the best we've come up with, and it frankly takes a lot of time. It's no wonder 16 hours didn't cut it. What we need is a better way to do sign-outs so that residents can know what's going on even during their days off. The very wording "sign-out" is rather a misnomer. Just because you're leaving the hospital for two days doesn't mean you forget about your patients. What we need is something like a Twitter feed so you can get updates on your patients when you're not in the hospital. Then you wouldn't have to have a full-blown sign-out when you return.

<comment><USER7> That Twitter feed sounds like a start up opportunity. Would it be easy to maneuver around hippa?

<comment> FLUX-YOU HIPAA's probably the least of your concerns. Any feed like that would have to integrate with whatever EMR/Surgery information/Scheduling/HL7 Interface solution(s) your hospital uses, none of which are the same or even remotely resemble each other. Your system would become yet-another-password to remember unless hospital IT would be willing to let you join the domain or group, which likely means you'd need to support on-prem installations.

<comment> vertex-four Do most hospitals not have an ADFS instance floating about somewhere?

<comment><USER3> > Do most hospitals not have an ADFS instance floating about somewhere?

Good luck getting all of the signoff and political buy-in required to get set up with that.

You could spend 18 months running around to convince someone to do ten minutes of work to bring you online, and I'm not exaggerating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Who thought this was a good idea, and why?

Aren't our medical professionals the people we least want to be dangerously fatigued?

Hasn't anyone read the literature on how sleep deprivation interferes with learning?

Or how being up for 24 hours straight is equivalent to a blood alcohol level that would disqualify a person from driving?

And we want people in this state while they're responsible for the health of people sick enough to be hospitalized?

What the actual fuck?

<comment><USER9> I am a surgery resident. This "rule" only applied to first year residents, and was started in 2011. There in fact is a study being conducted where one arm of first year residents follows the 16 hour max and another follows the 28 hour max. It seems the results from this trial suggest the 16 hour max is detrimental to learning, hand-off logistics and scheduling.

Regardless, after your first year, no matter what program or specialty, 28 hour calls become the norm. As a second year surgery resident for example, you can plan on taking a 28 hour call two or three times a week. This is just how it is. For two main reasons:

1) There are not enough of us for everyone to get 8 hours of sleep a night. People can debate why or ways we should fix this, whether it's widening scope of practice for nurse practitioners or decreasing our pay so there is more of us, but logistically there are not enough residents to keep everyone well rested.

2) There is physiological relevance to a 24 hour cycle in many diseases. For example, if a patient comes in with a bowel obstruction, the process of observation, lab evaluation, imaging, +\\- surgery takes sometimes 24 hours. 12 is sometimes not enough to appreciate the full evolution of acute disease.

Big topic here. My experience is anecdotal and limited. Why they did a big study to see what was best. Still, it only applies to first years.

<comment><USER10> Solution: allow more people to become doctors.

<comment><USER9> Ok, but what exactly do you propose? funding to support residents comes from the federal government, and this funding is already strained.

Should we lower standards? Lower quality of care? If the answer was easy we would have already implemented something.

<comment><USER11> If you really want simple solutions to more doctors:

Don't promote/require undergrad before med school. As in premed is not an actual degree anyone would ever get. Don't require multi year residency's, if the goal is education then 12+ hours days actively block that goal by inhibiting memory formation.

Shockingly both of those require zero money and would add up to 4+ more years of practice and lower education costs. However, US doctors don't want that as it would lead to lower pay just like every other country.

<comment><USER9> Limiting under grad education - sure, that is reasonable, that is how non-US countries do it. You get fast tracked to medical school after high school. But you still need some amount of undergrad education before medical school.

But no multi-year residencies? You are misinformed. It takes years to learn how to take care of the sick and dying. We don't just punish ourselves with lengthy training programs for fun.

<comment><USER11> It takes years for the sleep deprived to do so. That does not mean it must take years. As you know actual doctors continue to look things up, so you don't need them to memorize every edge case, just know when something could be an edge case.

<comment><USER9> Yea, well. I just don't think we can continue this argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Strange how some countries expect doctors to work ridiculous hours and justify it on the grounds that not doing it would increase the risk of medical errors and yet other countries seem to manage without excessive hours, see this study about Norwegian doctor's working hours [http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/4/10/e005704](http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/4/10/e005704).

I come from the UK but live in Norway and am impressed by the health system here.

</comment><comment><USER13> This should just be generally illegal from a labor law perspective, not even something specific to doctors.

<comment><USER12> You'll have to join the EU to get that, look up the European Working Time Directive.

<comment><USER13> It could be implemented at the state level here (Republicans would never allow a pro-labor law like that to be passed federally). If New York, California, or Massachusetts passed a law like this, it could be a competitive advantage in attracting top talent in fields that treat their laborers terribly (like medicine, apparently).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Medical errors are the 3rd leading cause of death. Didn't that wake them up to make it less error prone, not more?

<comment><USER3> > Medical errors are the 3rd leading cause of death. Didn't that wake them up > to make it less error prone, not more?

It did. And they did the research, and they found that frequent handoffs introduce more errors than longer shifts do. So, they're taking action to address that.

<comment><USER14> That would make sense I guess but in a "lesser evil" type way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> FLUX-YOU >the cap would occasionally prevent doctors from seeing a treatment or surgery through from beginning to end

I would be pretty annoyed at that, but I also probably wouldn't report it just to see it through. Seems weird they'd suddenly get honest about it.

</comment><comment><USER15> "Allowed" is a nice way to put it.</comment>


Altruistic Autonomy: Beating Congestion on Shared Roads - <AUTHOR> http://ai.stanford.edu/blog/altruistic-autonomy/ <comment><USER2> This model is overlooking some aspects of traffic flow. The most important one is that flow does not increase and decrease smoothly. As density increases there starts to be shock waves that bounce longitundinally[0].

It would also makes sense to also distribute some autonomous vehicles along the train to minimize these shock waves. A much simplier solution is to autonomously centre between the vehicle in front and rear[1]. Doing so smoothly is simple local logic which may improve flow rates dramatically but I don't know if it's been implemented anywhere.

      [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Suugn-p5C1M
      [1] https://www.insidescience.org/news/fluid-dynamics-explains-some-traffic-jams

</comment><comment><USER3> On my commute all of the possible routes are congested. I can be as selfish as I like, but I won't get home any faster. I think we need more roads and more pubic transport and more work-from-home schemes. Autonomous cars may may allow me to chill a bit more in the gridlock I suppose...

<comment><USER4> This. We need more everything. Infrastructure improvements of all kinds have not kept pace with population increases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Funny what apparently simple differences in mathematical models can imply.

I studied an old-school "Wardrop model" of traffic flow in one class in school. In that model, your speed along a road segment is a function of the flow (vehicles per hour), and it's usually assumed to be monotonic (or at least non-decreasing.) In the article, the images _never_ show increased throughput coinciding with longer travel times.

In the Wardrop model, equilibrium traffic levels are unique, and in TFA's model they aren't. (The diagrams make this clear in a really nice way, I like them a lot.)

I wonder whether/when each model is a better description of reality. It's hard to imagine the road in that Office Space clip demonstrating especially veh/hr flow...

</comment><comment><USER6> In my reading, this says that autonomous cars, if they all behave cooperatively, can be more efficient road users than manual cars driven by individuals acting selfishly.

While it works out in the Nash equilibria they describe, I don't see it working at any sort of scale. It's too easy to defect from the better equilibrium: drive the car yourself, or buy that aftermarket app which disables the cooperative driving mode.

<comment><USER7> If there were safety advantages with cooperative driving and ultimately efficiencies I bet a public relations campaign could convince people. Or having dedicated lanes for cooperative driving. I would certainly turn this on for interstate driving.

<comment><USER8> I think the PR campaign makes people aware there is a problem, but when people are intoxicated, the access to good [nondestructive] decision making is inhibited. I would wonder if ALL vehicles should have some sort of breathalyzer interlock that could also prevent junior from "fixing" mommys car so the little green light comes on again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> black-tea I drove to work for a while and it was awful. I wished that there was some way to tell everyone what the average speed of the road currently was and limit their speed to that. Instead I found that people moved their cars forward to the next place to stop as quickly as they could every single time. It was infuriating.

</comment><comment><USER9> What actually happens with human drivers is this: everyone wants to get home/work so the distance between the cars will decrease below safe levels when more cars are added to the road.

So the breaking latency of the autonomous cars must be better than this to fit more cars onto roads.

</comment><comment><USER10> > _...when a modest portion of the autonomous cars are altruistic, it is > possible for majority of the cars to use the shortest route without causing > congestion. This can significantly (in fact, unboundedly) decrease the total > latency._

how could it decrease the total latency unboundedly? I mean, doesn't the lower bound have to be zero?

<comment><USER11> They're probably talking about a division style of 'unbounded' (dividing by your 0). But they're still bounded by the speed of light in that case. Trash article is trash.</comment></comment>


Launch HN: Optic (YC S18) – Automate Routine Programming - <AUTHOR> Hi — I'm Aidan YC (S18), the founder of Optic (https://useoptic.com). We're building a smarter code generator that helps developers write and maintain the tedious parts of their codebase. Optic is fully open source (https://github.com/opticdev) and all our code is MIT licensed.
A really simple use case that Optic enabled for some of our early users is keeping their backend and frontend in sync. Optic can read the endpoints in a backend and use that to generate the HTTP requests on the frontend. It even maintains that code over time so if the backend is updated, a pull request is generated to update the networking code. You can test that here: https://github.com/acunniffe/optic-networking-code-demo.
We have also had teams configure Optic to:

  - Write/Maintain standard tests for their React components
  - Migrate to GraphQL by generating wrappers for each endpoint
  - Generate/Maintain CRUD routes from models
  - Wrap their Tensorflow models in APIs

 There's a checkered history of optimism and failure around automated programming and many tools have promised to make developers' lives easier. In each generation of programmers there's an acknowledgement that much of the code we write is routine, but none of the solutions have caught on. I failed once before when I founded Dropsource. While we built that product into one of the most popular tools for non-programmers to build mobile apps, we failed at our goal of building a tool we ourselves or other developers would use.
I left the company and went into research mode for around 18 months. A lot of the automated programming projects do their functional job well, but when it come time to integrating into a developer's workflow they are littered with tradeoffs. Automation isn't worth it if it means giving up control, rewriting lots of code, rebuilding your app visually, describing your project in some foreign dsl, or becoming tied to a vendor. Many of these projects haven't caught on because the tradeoffs of using them have been too high.
When I started working on this problem again I was determined to get the developer experience right. For me this meant making Optic:

  - work with your existing code
  - plug in to your favorite IDE
  - useful throughout the lifetime of your project

 I knew that whatever product I ended up building would need to interface with source code so I started building an API for code that let you:
GET JSON objects describing different types of code. Powered by a regex like pattern matcher we wrote that walks AST Trees.
PUT new values of the same shape back to update the code. This was the hardest part by far. We ended up training decision trees on different programming languages using the raw code and the resulting AST tree as input. We use these models to regenerate code in the smallest sections possible so formatting and manual changes are preserved.
POST new code into the project. This was actually the easiest. A generator can be reformulated as a Parser + Mutator so we bootstrapped all the generation in Optic by combining the GET / PUT functionality.
This API was really powerful and it became the foundation of Optic. Generating code, doing transformations, syncing projects — all Optic's major features are built on top of this API. It's such a solid foundation (you get parsing, generating and the round-trip problem in a box) that I believe a lot of new meta-programming tools will be built on our platform. Our work is open source (https://github.com/opticdev) and there will always be a free-forever version available. We plan to make money from some specialty features aimed at larger teams.
It's still the early days but we hope to build Optic into a valuable open source resource that improves the workflow of developers and their teams. I'm looking forward to hearing your feedback, experiences and ideas for tasks we should automate. Thanks! <comment><USER2> Looks very powerful especially if you can popularize it. Maybe mention the plugins and other platforms besides MacOS on the website. Also the chat thing wouldn't allow me to click a reply on my Nexus Android phone.

I wonder if the parsing, schemas and the transformations etc. could be a starting point for an advanced neural network AI programmer. Perhaps if you could combine it with an interactive system that converts text to schemas.

For example, say you had a way (a skill?) to convert a schema to a web form. Then the AI would need to handle speech-to-schema-change such as "add a field for Middle Name". Then perhaps there is a skill to go from the web form to a save data request and another to accept the request and another to update the database schema etc.

But the AI might come more in handy for interpreting more complex schemas such as nesting, grouping or workflow etc.

But besides an advanced domain specific AI it seems like this foundation of parsing, schemas and transformations would be a good start for speech-based or other higher level program generation tools. I can envision a web page that generates a CRUD application from mobile front end to Firebase back end and then spits out the code that you can then add more advanced features to.

So it seems a smart strategy to embrace open source because that can allow other developers to add mappings that you can leverage for your own app or program generation tools which you can sell.

To me the interactive web-based CRUD application generator is low hanging fruit but more interesting would be to combine your tech with a Google Duplex style interactive speech based AI programmer front end. Probably only Google and a relatively small number of companies could pull something like that off though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing all these awesome ideas. I can't say I know enough about NLP to evaluate how feasible some of your speech to code ideas are, but I do think Optic is a great base to any project trying to do meta-coding.

I'd love to see a 2-way code generator built on Optic for a simple crud builder like you describe. It could let people choose the libraries they want to use from the list and design their schemas, routes and queries at some higher level of abstraction. Unlike the current generator tool you could actually make changes to the high level models and get Optic to update the underlying code for you even after you make changes.

That whole field could be huge and I think Optic's major contribution will be abstracting away all the dirtiness of code gen. People who build this next generation of tools could interact purely with Swagger-like-JSON.

Is this something you'd be interested in collaborating on?

<comment><USER2> I think ordinary NLP wouldn't get you very far at all, but it seems the Google Duplex people have some advanced tricks. But its still probably a bit of a stretch.

A two-way code generator for CRUD applications is a lot more realistic for a start. I am interested in trying to collaborate on that, although I can't promise how much time I will have because of other obligations.

But it would be fun to give it a start at least. You started describing something, maybe if you want you could elaborate a little bit more about how you think this type of tool would work in a document online somewhere or just in a reply. It would be fun to play around with Optic with that type of goal. I will need to read the docs and experiment some to make sure I understand the system better before I get too far along in coding something. Mainly I use Node and JavaScript these days so theoretically that could work for a web- based CRUD builder.. I guess by talking to the Scala server over REST? I will need to read your docs.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, two-way crud is the best starting point.

Optic React / JS for all its GUIs. We're planning to have microeditors that pop up and help you work with specific kinds of code so this might just run from within Optic somehow.

All fun ideas to brainstorm. Let's take it offline. Email me at email@example.com

Excited to chat / collaborate

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Optic looks amazing, congrats on shipping! Do you think it can be integrated with visual programming languages IDE development? There are a lot of such things in the IoT, industrial and laboratory control, game Dev, media synthesis industries and they all suffer from the limitation of poor coupling between generated code and the front end graphical elements as the type checker and static analysis on the graphical elements level have to match the syntactic rules of the language constructs.

We use it for algorithmic trading here at KloudTrader and this is an issue we suffers from. Looking forward to adding Optic to our CI pipeline.

[https://KloudTrader.com](https://KloudTrader.com)

Business rules engines would be another really great application. For a lot of IFTTT type of applications, if the rules can be compiled into finite state machines instead of simply interpreted, that would be a great boost for productivity and efficiency!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Appreciate you sharing your ideas. I started out in this space so I love the idea of solving some of these old problems.

Absolutely agree there are some meta-programming applications for Optic. It's always been difficult to build graphical tools that generate code -- everyone basically reimplements string concatenation / static analysis over and over again and then they can't handle even the slightest manual change.

Ideally visual tools would tap into Optic API to parse the code, display it, then press user changes back into code. This would allow users to add custom code as well and not break your abstraction. Our source of truth is code so there's no dsl or model saved on your end anymore.

KloudTrader looks great. Let's chat offline about your requirements and I'll make sure to document / open some of the functionality you'll need.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice podcast episode from earlier this year where Aidan talk about his work: [http://futureofcoding.org/episodes/21](http://futureofcoding.org/episodes/21)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing this. Steve Krouse is one of the best thinkers right now when it comes to novel approaches to programming. I encourage everyone interested in this space to check out his work.

<comment><USER5> I recently started listening to his podcast and I'm digging it. Any particular episode you liked?

<comment><AUTHOR> One of my personal favorites was episode 11 about how React was created. The dawn of a new abstraction is always a good story. [http://futureofcoding.org/episodes/11-how-reactjs-was- create...](http://futureofcoding.org/episodes/11-how-reactjs-was-created-with- pete-hunt.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hey, something where my two cents might actually be valuable :)

I created the VS Code plugin for Optic: [https://github.com/opticdev/optic- vscode-plugin](https://github.com/opticdev/optic-vscode-plugin). It was actually my first time writing a text editor plugin, but between the VS Code docs, Optic SDK, and Optic plugin spec, it was surprisingly easy. The information just gets sent through web sockets under the hood, but it was all just basic javascript callbacks and some VS Code specifics for finding ranges, etc.

Optic itself isn't particularly useful for me as a solo developer building small website frontends, but I must say I was a little jealous of those that this is geared towards because even developing the plugin gave me a couple of those "magic" moments. Getting to make a change to just some javascript object's property and then get to keep it in sync was pretty satisfying.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for contributing our first outside code! Let's talk about some use cases that might help you as a solo frontend engineer. I'm sure we can figure out a few things to make your life easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This looks really interesting. I hope it's successful.

What kind of AST are you using? Can you translate code between languages?

Also, what do you think of the Graal/Truffle project?

(BTW I'm getting 404 at [https://useoptic.com/docs/what_is_optic/what-is- optic/](https://useoptic.com/docs/what_is_optic/what-is-optic/) )

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! We have a common AST format we use as the representation of every language we support. You add new languages to Optic by writing a mapper from their AST to ours. It should work with pretty much any context-free AST. Here's what that looks like for JS [https://github.com/opticdev/es7-parser/blob/master/src/main/...](https://github.com/opticdev/es7-parser/blob/master/src/main/scala-2.12/com/opticdev/parsers/es7/ASTJsonToGraph.scala)

We can't translate code between languages but we do the next best thing by moving the meaning of that code around. ie backend is Flask and frontend is JS. We can generate JS code that connects to the Flask API automatically.

Graal is pretty cool, and I'm happy to see a big org backing a polygot tool. I'm most interested in Truffle and looking into ways it can make Optic better. Have any ideas?

Thanks for catching the 404! I'll look into it ASAP

<comment><USER8> How much work is it to add a new language if you have to get it into your own format? We use some esoteric languages (Clojure and Reason/OCaml) so I don't expect Optic to support our use case any time soon, but I'd be curious for e.g. Python/Ruby.

Also, a couple of other question that come to mind:

1\. Jared Forsyth gave a great talk on avoiding breaking changes as a library author by using code-mods - would Optic be able to wrap up some of the changes it makes to my library code as a code-mod that I could ship with a new version of my code to auto-upgrade all my dependents? That could significantly help with some of the higher-churn libraries (some people are iffy about this though).

2\. Have you considered using something closer to lsp for the editor protocol? Emacs support would be nice, and that'd be a good way to jumpstart the implementation.

3\. It actually doesn't look too bad to implement the plugin for e.g. even without lsp ([https://useoptic.com/docs/authoring/adding-optic-support- for...](https://useoptic.com/docs/authoring/adding-optic-support-for-new-id- es)). Looking at the 'search' event though, why use `///` instead of picking up `cmd-f` (or `C-s` in emacs)? I was a bit confused about the interaction model.

Optic looks pretty interesting, best of luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> All you have to do is pick an existing parser that works well and map the output AST to Optic's AST. I'm exploring building an Antlr extension so any grammar in their library could output in Optic's AST but that's still not implemented. Every AST have a notion of type, range, and properties which can either be primitives, arrays of child nodes, or individual child nodes. We have Python and Ruby on our roadmap for the next couple of weeks.

1\. We've been exploring migrating one Optic skill to a newer version. So far it seems promising for the cases you'd expect a code-mod to help with, but if you completely change the API and deprecate some stuff it can point out the changes but won't be able to help you -- no magic here.

2\. I looked into language servers (lsp) but the implementation was a lot more involved and I found bugs in some of the IDEs that claim to have full lsp support. As the protocol matures and we add more functionality to Optic I expect to see lsp become our main avenue for IDE/Optic interactions.

3\. We wanted to make it really natural to ask Optic a question. We thought '///' would be unique and easy to remember, but we're open to changing it. It's nice that '///' also evaluates as a comment too because before we used it sometimes characters in your search would cause the AST parse to fail. We're open to any ideas here -- a lot of users have said it's funky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is awesome! I'd love if you could do things like help upgrade library versions that have breaking changes--say something like generate a PR to go from React 16 to React 17, for instance.

It would also be cool if this could help generate code in the best-practice style defined by third-party libraries. For instance, if the Redux team defined the canonical way to define a selector, it would be handy to be able to have Optic use that information to generate selectors for me. This would take something like create-react-app and break down the best practices into more bite sized chunks.

Really excited about this!

<comment><AUTHOR> Great ideas. We've experimented with doing version migrations before and I think it's definately something we will have good support for in the next several months.

If you haven't read about our Optic Markdown it's designed for what you're describing. A team could specify their conventions and best practices in Markdown and Optic will use the example code in the generators.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great work! We are definitely interested in maintaining our React ccodebase using this.

Other than that, one vertical usecase that would be super appealing would be the ability to automatically generate (and maintain) api servers ontop of AI modules. As in if we had a tensorflow model, can we automatically create an endpoint to serve live traffic? I guess more generally, if we can define the JSON input to a function (any python function doesnt have to be AI model), Optic can write all the boiler plate microservice for us!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! That's a really cool use case. We have another AI company using Optic for something similar and I hope they share their on their blog work soon.

If you can put together an example of the kind of code you want Optic to write for each module I'm happy to help you guys create Optic skills around it. There's also information in our docs on how to do this yourself. If you generated the routes with Optic you'd also be able to consume them easily and keep all your code synced as you update the input your models require.

How often do you find your team writing these microservices / tests?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Reminds me of F# type providers. Maybe more powerful? I think defining everything at the DB makes sense and then you can generate much of the code beyond that and then you only need to write the custom code that a programmer actually needs to do.

Glad you are doing this!

</comment><comment><USER12> What are your expectations on when you might publish variants for some non-Mac platforms? Which code/modules specifically are platform-dependent? If it is only the GUI, can one already use the engine/JSON API (if available) on some other platform?

The whole idea is still not fully clear to me. After watching the video, it initially looks like some kind of code templating engine. From further reading, I seem to understand it also links many "instantiated" templates together, so that changing one of them can change others; is that correct?

Also, one thing that is still not clear to me: do I have to build such templates by hand, or does the engine somehow automatically infer / detect new templates from an existing codebase?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey thank you for sharing your first take. We definately are iterating on our messaging trying to make all your main points clearer.

We have plans to release on windows and Linux later this year. Currently investigating cross platform kits for the GUI.

The engine should run anywhere a JVM does but I haven't written any docs on that yet. Is a scriptable version of interest to you?

Your initiation is basically right. Optic is a code generator with templates. What's special about it is that it uses your existing code as input so there's no manual specification done. You can also manually update the generated code and it still works with Optic. All this combined allows you to "sync" different parts of your code that are related as you said.

You have to specify the skills by hand or import them from our registry. [https://useoptic.com/docs/authoring/writing- skills](https://useoptic.com/docs/authoring/writing-skills)

<comment><USER12> Yes, a scriptable version would be of interest. Ideally, if there was a docker image I could just easily download and run on my dev machine (and please allow passing an ENV option to limit Java heap size), with a tutorial how to use it and how to add "skills", I might be curious enough to run it. Um; and we're mostly a Go shop, but we have some JS too. Still, given infamously poor/nonexistent generics/metaprogramming support in Go, it might be an interesting niche/target for you. OTOH, as a Go dev, I must admit I'm somewhat allergic to JVM... but having it isolated in docker could be acceptable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback. When we ship a scriptable version Docker seems like a great choice for wrapping it. I'll add an env variable for ya :)

The JVM is somewhat allergy inducing, but I think Graal may solve a lot of these issues. Optic is written in Scala because a) it's a great functional language and b) the JVM is super portable. If we can get Graal working nicely in our builds, binary sizes should drop markably and performance should improve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This looks great. I'd be curious to see the decision trees, and the training corpus/objective for them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. You can find the code for that here: [https://github.com/opticdev/marvin](https://github.com/opticdev/marvin)

The objective of the training is bootstrappig a prettier. String template (pattern in the code) for each node type.

So we can learn things like arguments are separated by ", " but if the total # of chars of all of them is greater than X it's more common to use ",\n". Stuff like that.

We had LSTMs for a while but they performed worse than a decision tree with a few key features as input.

<comment><USER13> Thanks, sounds very interesting. I'll take a look.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Where are the skills and schemas stored? Are they in the main GitHub repo somewhere or separate JSON files or what? Is it possible for me to add my own transformations?

Is there a package manager or common repository for sharing and searching Optics skills?

<comment><AUTHOR> We have a registry with a frontend coming soon.

You can also resolve them locally by putting them in your optic.yml file

You can add a skill and containing as many transformations and lenses as your want.

It's explained at the bottom of these docs [https://useoptic.com/docs/authoring/writing- skills](https://useoptic.com/docs/authoring/writing-skills)

<comment><USER2> Awesome thanks for the response. Looking forward to the registry. Will there be a cli for the registry?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep it's all right there. You can use your Optic account credentials [https://useoptic.com/docs/authoring/publishing](https://useoptic.com/docs/authoring/publishing)

      npm install optic-markdown -g
      opticmd adduser

<comment><USER2> Cool. For some reason that link is a 404 at the moment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you mind emailing me at firstname.lastname@example.com with the name of your town and a trace route to useoptic.com

It's working here so not sure what could be causing this besides an issue with our CDN

<comment><USER2> For some reason it kept coming up in Chrome with an extra / at the end of the URL.. but its working now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it. We're using Gatsby and there's a rewrite rule on our CDN. I'll take a look tonight and see if I can fix the issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I take it this only works for web dev? Might want to specify that.

<comment><AUTHOR> JavaScript is the first language we have stable support for. I should have made that more clear up front.

Do you see any other areas this kind of tool would be useful? Happy to chat about our roadmap for supporting other languages.

Thanks!

<comment><USER15> I'd say keeping repos in sync with changes in $RPC for thrift, grpc, jsonrpc etc. could be a good step. Would love to see ability to write backend in go and fe in JS/react w/ auto pull requests for changes to structs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What IDEs are you currently integrated with?

I'm particularly interested in VS Code and perhaps Intellij out of the gate

<comment><AUTHOR> Our community built plugins for Atom, VSCode, Sublime, WebStorm & JetBrains. Someone started one for vim but it's still unfinished...hope it's done before emacs

All the plugins do is forward the state (col/row and filepath) to the local Optic server so they're usually <70loc. If you wanted to build support for another one we wrote a spec that all the plugin authors relied on during their development [https://github.com/opticdev/optic-editor-plugin- spec/blob/ma...](https://github.com/opticdev/optic-editor-plugin- spec/blob/master/README.md)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Could you post some samples of the JSON used to declare new code descriptors?

<comment><AUTHOR> So we created a markdown flavor called Optic Markdown. We want to meet programmers where they already write about code/styles instead of making them write templates in some dsl. Our markdown relies on HTML comment annotations (so they're hidden) to describe the important parts of a piece of code -- it's kind of like pointing out different parts of a snippet and explaining what they do.

We've been working really hard to build tooling around this because the first few versions were hard to learn/use. Would love to hear any feedback you have on the teaching process. We don't think Optic will take off until we get this just right.

[https://useoptic.com/docs/authoring/writing- lenses](https://useoptic.com/docs/authoring/writing-lenses)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Best of luck looks like a great protect!</comment>


Cass Sunstein on Star Wars vs. Star Trek - <AUTHOR> http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-star-wars-vs-star-trek-better-perspec-0617-md-20160616-story.html <comment><USER2> Star Wars appeals to kids and the kid within us, while Star Trek tends to explore adult themes and mature ideas, so the two can't really be compared. For example, there is no sex in Star Wars, while Star Trek depicted the first interracial kiss on Television.

<comment><AUTHOR> It would seem that the most recent reboots of both are bringing them closer together, no?</comment></comment>


Bug in Ryzen 3000 NVMe controller causes data loss - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/cd7pqb/warning_samsung_nvme_ssds_also_subject_to_whea/ <comment><USER2> >There's also a report of it happening on even a Haswell-E system and the common factor being NVMe on Windows 10 version 1903.

<comment><AUTHOR> Where did you see this? I have not heard of this issue before the launch of the current Ryzen CPUs and x570 boards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> An AMD rep has responded claiming no data loss

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/cd7pqb/warning_samsung...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/cd7pqb/warning_samsung_nvme_ssds_also_subject_to_whea/etsxw0e/)

<comment><USER4> > Due to the way NVMe writes, and the lack of power loss protection, it is > absolutely possible to bork a few files in day-to-day operation. That's why > enterprise-grade SSDs are built differently from consumer disks.

He's actually trying to explain away the problem saying data loss is to be expected. Poor show, this device should be fixed in software or recalled.

<comment><USER5> The contract between a block device and a host is well known.

When a write is issued by the OS and acknowledged by the device, it _must_ persist.

If write barriers are used, all writes before a barrier _must_ persist before any writes after it.

You don't need battery backup to achieve this, but battery backup helps you get more performance while still meeting the requirements.

I should be able to cut power to the device a million times, and these basic requirements should still hold. If they do, great. If not, the device should be blocked by Microsoft (or at least a very scary warning on every bootup)</comment></comment></comment>


An Elite Spy Group Used 5 Zero-Days to Hack North Koreans - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/north-korea-hacking-zero-days-google/ <comment><AUTHOR> My favorite quote regarding alleged South Korean government sponsored groups hacking:

Aitel argues that the group's sophistication should serve as a reminder that countries considered "second-tier" in their hacking resources—i.e. countries other than Russia, China, and the US—may have surprising capabilities. "People underestimate the risk. If you have this level of capability in a second-tier cyberpower, you have to assume all second-tier cyberpowers have these capabilities," Aitel says. "If you think 'I'm not being targeted by the Chinese, I'm ok,' you have a strategic problem."</comment>


Do more popular people shy away from controversial Facebook discussions? - <AUTHOR> http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/02/do-more-popular-people-shy-away-from-controversial-facebook-discussions.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter <comment><USER2> Most Facebook controversial posts aren't invitations for discussions, but biased rants.

Discussions almost never really take place. Most people don't know how to be objective.

You can make all of the arguments you want with every piece of evidence supporting it, yet most people are so entrenched in their way of thinking that they still refuse to really look at issues objectively. Even when slammed in the face with the truth, they'll generally find some weak straw man argument to still retreat to in order to maintain their biased point of view.</comment>


Neil Young's answer to iTunes - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.ft.com/techblog/2008/06/neil-youngs-answer-to-itunes/ <comment><USER2> I am rather bothered by a lot of the comments here. Have any of you actually talked with Neil about these issues? I have. He's an extremely passionate promoter of high-quality sound. I truly feel sorry for those who cannot tell the difference between 192kbps MP3s and CDs. I can always hear the difference with my headphones and eq settings. But Neil is not satisfied with CD-quality; he wants higher quality than that. At the time I chatted with him (several years ago now) he was leaning toward 24-bit 192K samples/second, as I recall. This was before Blu-Ray.

Since the original article was so vague, and we don't have a particular product to critique, can we at least give Neil the benefit of the doubt? His heart is definitely in the right place (and, in case you're wondering, he's more than just a bit of a geek - he's a first-class geek! - And not too shabby a musician, either...)

<comment><USER3> I think Neil Young is misguided here. He is a very successful musician and has spent his whole life in sound. Obviously he's going to have a much more finely tuned ear than the general population.

But the number of people who are like him and you is not enough to support a new format or business model. Most people can't hear any differences beyond a good bitrate MP3.

Consumers over the last 50 years have been on a relentless trend towards greater convenience and poorer quality (look at the quality of any of today's household appliances). A quality play is simply obsolete.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Neil Young's answer to digital distribution is physical media? A disc you have to go the store and buy in person or have delivered by a guy in a truck? A disc, I think it's safe to assume, for which you have to jump through hoops in order to get the music onto your iPod (assuming you have a Blu-ray drive in your computer)? Neil, you truly are a visionary.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't buy his aversion to mp3s. Vast majority of the population can't even tell the difference between 128kbps and 192bps. I guess quality is a red herring and a way to market his new product.

<comment><USER5> _"... I don't buy his (Neil Young)aversion to mp3s. Vast majority of the population can't even tell the difference between 128kbps and 192bps ..."_

I do.

Firstly it shows good taste. NY is a sound quality nut and I for one is grateful ~ <http://news.cnet.com/8301-13953_3-9937142-80.html>

        "We are trying to give them quality
         whether they want it or not. You
         can degrade it as much as you want,
         we just don't want our name on it."

When I listen to Old-Black <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Black> with the amp cranked up loud I really want to hear the sound (distortion and all) and not the technical limitations that some company puts on it as is the case of iPods. Don't beleive me listen to Doug Kayes explanation on mp3 recordings ~ <http://podcastacademy.com/shows/detail1600/>

As for marketing I don't think the _"rich hippy"_ really needs it.

<comment><AUTHOR> There have been so many double blind tests of various codecs (just browse here: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codec_listening_test> ) and they all show that vast majority of people simply cannot tell the difference between 256kbps MP3 and a CD (certainly not within two standard deviations). Sure, some golden ear guys can tell but even they have hard time coming to two standard deviations.

Also, some music actually sounds better as MP3s! Yes, strange...

 _The fact that some of the 128 kbps samples were consistently judged to be better than their original CD counterparts by this skilled group – even by the best among them – stunned our editor (who participated in the test although his results were not included in the evaluation, and had to confess that he got only 15 points). It seems safe to declare that there is no musical genre that is especially well-suited or ill-suited to compression. It is apparent that there are quite other factors related to the technical aspects of recording that will later adversely affect the results at low bit rates._

Finally, most of the people listen to their music on portable players and/or computers and speakers on those are so bad that you can't really tell the difference between 128kbps and 256kbps. Double blind tests show that there's no statistical significance when you listen on these devices.

So yeah, NY's latest 'better than CD' ploy might work out with audiophiles... same people who buy $400 digital cables and $500 wooden knobs so their music sounds better.

In the end, it all comes down to good mastering and not codecs and delivery medium. Modern music is heavily compressed and there's a lot of clipping and that has nothing to do with MP3s.

<comment><USER6> >So yeah, NY's latest 'better than CD' ploy might work out with audiophiles... same people who buy $400 digital cables and $500 wooden knobs so their music sounds better.

One extravagant audiophile investment that would make an actual difference is tapes from this company that sells copies of reel to reel master tapes. <http://www.tapeproject.com/> Why bother with a delivery medium?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you care about audio quality, also make sure to buy the Denon AK-DL1 audio cable. Only that 499$ cable can ensure the unharmed digital transfer of your audio data.</comment>


RAM Doubler 2 (1996) - <AUTHOR> https://tidbits.com/article/837 <comment><USER2> Hey that isn't the really impressive, but I did the same thing with DOS configuration files with only using software that came with DOS. I played a game that required 12 megs of RAM and I had 8. I used drivespace to compress the drive and smartdrive to create diskcache. The dos extender of the game automatically swapped to the disk, when there wasn't enough ram. With my set up, the game swapped, then drivespace compressed the data and smartdrive cached the data, and it never hit the disk during a combat anymore and became playable.

<comment><USER3> Heh, that is actually pretty clever.

By contrast, I remember people putting swap files (most prominently the Win386 one) into straight RAMDISKs, which should really just give you a net negative effect all across the board.

<comment><USER4> Unless the ramdisk (AKA tmpfs in modern Linux) is compressed.

Many low footprint Linux installations now include swapping to zram, which is compressed. The net effect is positive since you usually have an abundance of spare CPU cycles.

<comment><USER3> Well yeah, that was both josmala's (the original commenter) and my point. Putting the swap file in compressed memory (here DriveSpace+SmartDrive) can be good, putting it into a straight, uncompressed ramdisk is worse than useless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seventeen (!) years later, in 2013, memory compression became part of OS X Mavericks. And they refer to Connectix RAM Doubler.

[https://www.cnet.com/news/memory-compression-brings-ram- doub...](https://www.cnet.com/news/memory-compression-brings-ram-doubler-to- os-x-mavericks/)

<comment><USER6> This is interesting:

> > [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory_compression#His...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory_compression#History)

When I worked at MS I heard some chatter about people doing it with NT circa 2010 (I guess per this wikipedia article it didn't ship until five years later). Then after I left I heard there were Linux patches from before that (wikipedia cites 2008, with it being in the mainline tree in 2013). And then later, that Apple had also done it.

It's interesting that a bunch of major operating systems decided to do this roughly the same time.

<comment><USER7> > It's interesting that a bunch of major operating systems decided to do this > roughly the same time.

I'm guessing it's due to the popularity of 64-bit address space. There are lots of pointers in RAM, and while they use a lot of bits, they don't have much entropy. So they probably compress extremely well, and with compression, give one less reason to stick to 32-bit architecture. (I don't fully understand why, but I hear that people run 32-bit OSes on 64-bit machines to save memory. As long as one process uses less than 4G of RAM, maybe it's the right optimization. But memory compression certainly changes that calculus and gives the OS vendors one less use case to have to support a 32-bit OS for.)

<comment><USER8> One alternative would be to define an ABI for using the x86-64 processor with 32-bit pointers. This would let everyone leave the processor in the more modern 64-bit mode without increasing pressure on the memory subsystem.

Such a thing exists:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X32_ABI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X32_ABI)

It's been available in the mainline Linux kernel and in glibc for ages. It also breaks any code which assumes #ifdef __x86_64__ means 64-bit pointers, and the concept doesn't seem to attract a lot of excitement:

[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTU1MjE](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTU1MjE)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I came here just to say, "wow, look at that old WAIS URL". [http://cgi.info.apple.com/cgi- bin/read.wais.doc.pl?/wais/TIL...](http://cgi.info.apple.com/cgi- bin/read.wais.doc.pl?/wais/TIL/Macintosh!Hardware/Pwr!Mac!Including!Perf/Power!Macintosh!Technology/Virtual!Mem!!Diff.!on!Pwr!Mac)

WAIS rocked, too bad gopher beat it.

Of course, the real horror is that NCSA added the img tag to their gopher browser, and now it's the end of the Internet (news at 11).

</comment><comment><USER10> I actually remember pirating this from Hotline:

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

Which was another strange Mac app from that era.

<comment><USER11> I loved Hotline to the max! What a nifty little community [transgressive tendencies aside] and unique, useful associated server / client software. HL had a ton of utility, was full of creative people, and was where I learned most of my first computer skills. I think there are still a couple of trackers out there. I'd get back on HL in a minute.

<comment><USER12> HL was very interesting it took the BBS concept and moved it into the internet age. It felt very much like the old BBS dial-ups. HL brought that back for a while and I loved it as well. definitely a trip down memory lane.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There was a similar program for windows but it actually did nothing and was taken down for fraud.

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

<comment><USER14> I was the first to file against the makers of SoftRAM. I was 15 or 16, so it's in my dads name, but it was my idea to contact a lawyer and show my proof (the relevant SYS/DLLs were just renamed Windows files, hah!). I learned pretty early in life some important things about class-action lawsuits and lawyers in general... They offered to settle for $2,000 and $35,000 for the lawyers. I said no, so the lawyers offered me $2,000 of their cut on top. So that's how it went, I bought my first car off my father, and the lawyers banked $33,000.

<comment><USER15> It sounded like there is only 1 person the class action. Is it possible to have a class action with only 1 person? Sorry, I don't know the laws very well.

<comment><USER14> Many others joined the class, and there were multiple suits, but most people got like $20 each.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > [RAM Doubler 2] reclaims unused memory in application partitions, then > compresses memory it can't reclaim ... [it then uses] disk swapping ... as > its final strategy

</comment><comment><USER17> [https://downloadmoreram.com/](https://downloadmoreram.com/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Reminds me of SoftRAM, which was rated 3rd "Worst Tech Product of All Time" by PC World. It also claimed to compress memory but actually didn't do that much.

It is an interesting story, see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM)

</comment><comment><USER19> We had RAM Doubler 1 and also used it on a 660AV, originally with 8MB and later 24MB of physical RAM. I remember the downloadable updates (and there were many!) could actually update the original installation floppy disk

</comment><comment><USER20> There were some powerful utilities on the old Mac OS. Sometimes, it was a deal with the devil, like TimesTwo. It did the same thing but for harddrives. It often corrupted the darned things though... Ah, what we used to do to get another 4 MBs of RAM and 80 MBs of storage.

<comment><USER21> Recently I've been playing around with MacOS 9 for the first time in at least a decade (bought a $10 PowerMac, woohoo!) and have had a good time trying to recreate my old setup.

It really brought back to me just how many shareware and freeware utilities there were that changed how some very fundamental parts of the system worked. I've replaced the behaviors of window rendering (Kaleidoscope, Power Windows), text rendering (SmoothText), scrolling (Smart Scroll), drag and drop (Gravite), menus (Menutasking enabler), etc etc. Also how unstable everything becomes once you do that!

It really was the wild west and it's still fun to play with.

<comment><USER22> Amazingly fast window drawing too. I'd still like to have WindowShade and sounds for it. The endless series of extensions you somehow needed, until there were multiple rows across the screen at boot. (No modern OS matches holding Shift on reboot to disable extensions as a simple diagnostic.)

But I'm glad to have forgotten about handles and Carbon and having to buy your compiler -- remember Metrowerks CodeWarrior? Well, I was excited at the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Nowadays Windows and Mac use RAM compression by default. Funny thing is that most Linux distros don't do that by default (which is bad for browsers). Search for ZRAM etc. if you want to know more.

</comment><comment><USER24> I remember seeing RAM Doubler 2 on the shelf at Egghead Software... AND BUYING IT.

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

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

<comment><USER25> I always thought newegg was Egghead's online presence. Oops.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Reminds me of Johnny Mnemonic: [https://scifiinterfaces.com/2016/11/23/the- memory-doubler/](https://scifiinterfaces.com/2016/11/23/the-memory-doubler/)

</comment><comment><USER22> Very nostalgic. I find it a bit much when the author says 8MB is 'only $50'. In the US maybe, could be double that in other countries. I was always drooling over the prices in US MacWorld. But also, $50 was worth a lot more back then. You youngsters with 64GB RAM and 8GB GPUs don't know how good you have it.

Shoutout to Stacker, which did transparent disk compression in DOS, copied by MSFT as DiskDoubler. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics)

</comment><comment><USER27> ZRam makes my ancient Chromebook work nice with Ubuntu. I'm thinking about turning it on on an old Zotec Zbox that only takes one stick of ancient laptop ram so I'm stuck on 2gb there.

</comment><comment><USER28> Ah the good old days, with "in DoubleSpace nobody can hear you scream" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DriveSpace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DriveSpace))

Back then we did it because RAM was expensive, and there was rarely enough. Today we use it because RAM is plentiful, and swapping to RAM is much faster than swapping to disk.

</comment><comment><USER29> Ram doublers of the mid-90s were usually expensive hype. The most famous case is that of SoftRam which didn't even try to do anything but just reported fake numbers. It was called placebo ware by some magazines. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM)

<comment><USER30> RAM Doublers for _Windows_ were expensive hype.

Because of the way that classic MacOS (mis)managed memory, you (as in the user) had to specify how much memory was allocated to each program before you ran it and the memory had to be contiguous. It was easy to end up in a situation where you had plenty of free RAM but it was fragmented and you had to quit programs to free up enough RAM.

RAM Doubler for the Mac helped alleviate that by "doubling" the amount of RAM the system saw and then managing the memory by a combination of allocating memory dynamically in the "System" partition and compressing memory.

Another benefit of RAM Doubler for the PPC was that it could enable virtual memory (ie the modern nomenclature not just "disk swapping") without allocating as much space on the disk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> >> But, as I said, these updates were all free and available on the Internet, so downloading updates wasn't a problem for most people.

Kind of surprising in 1995. I didn't think that many people had internet access. Then again, power users probably did, who would be customers of RAM Doubler.

</comment><comment><USER32> For Windows, we use FreeMem & RamBooster :D

I remember Windows 95 or 98 have some original tool to free up the memory as well.</comment>


Federal fraud indictment: KU professor secretly worked for Chinese university - <AUTHOR> https://www.kansas.com/news/state/article234237337.html <comment><USER2> > Last year, a Chinese national who was a research professor at Kansas State > University was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for > stealing valuable American rice seeds — a trade secret — that can be used to > treat gastrointestinal disease, antibiotic-associated diarrhea, hepatic > disease, osteoporosis and inflammatory bowel disease.

Wait, who are the bad guys here?

<comment><USER3> That is a different individual... and the story described [https://www.kansascity.com/news/state/kansas/article20800977...](https://www.kansascity.com/news/state/kansas/article208009774.html)

> Zhang, a lawful permanent resident in the U.S., was a rice researcher at > Kansas State University and received a doctorate in rice genetics from > Louisiana State University. He began working for Ventria in 2008 and was in > charge of plant breeding and nursery operations.

> In 2012, Zhang and a co-defendant traveled to visit a crop research > institute in China where Zhang once worked. The following year, the two made > arrangements for a delegation from the Chinese institute to visit Kansas.

> ...

> Ventria invested about $75 million to develop this proprietary technology > and is the only company in the U.S. that has it. The lab maintains seed > banks in a climate-controlled environment. Only six employees had access to > the storage area. Zhang was one of them.

\----

The story _here_ is:

> "Tao is alleged to have defrauded the US government by unlawfully receiving > federal grant money at the same time that he was employed and paid by a > Chinese research university — a fact that he hid from his university and > federal agencies," Assistant Attorney General John Demers said in a > statement. "Any potential conflicts of commitment by a researcher must be > disclosed as required by law and university policies."

> The Kansas Board of Regents requires faculty and staff of its universities > to file a conflict of interest report when they are hired and every year > afterward for as long as they are employed.

> According to court documents, Tao "knowingly and intentionally submitted to > the University false statements concerning his lack of a conflict of > interest."

> The indictment alleges that Tao "fraudulently received" more than $37,000 in > salary paid for by the Department of Energy and the National Science > Foundation.

<comment><USER4> I imagine OPs point was that someone was arrested for stealing trade secrets that could save/improve lives of (hundreds of) millions of people.

Just the other day in another part of HN there was a discussion about the collecting and continued use the HeLa cell line for research and (a lot of) profit. If you look this up the conclusion of every discussion tends to be "end justify the means in this case", "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few", etc. One has to wonder about the double standard here.

<comment><USER5> Ironically, if society adopts a viewpoint that blesses industrial espionage/IP theft of any technology which "improves lives," companies lose motivation to develop those same technologies.

The ability to profit off of innovation is necessary to pay for facilities, equipment, and researchers.

<comment><USER6> > Ironically, if society adopts a viewpoint that blesses industrial > espionage/IP theft of any technology which "improves lives," companies lose > motivation to develop those same technologies.

> The ability to profit off of innovation is necessary to pay for facilities, > equipment, and researchers.

I'm sorry but lets not talk about incentives until the CEO and the entire board at Boeing, Equifax, and Wells Fargo are in prison. Our "justice" system openly pursues "viable" cases which means we only send people to prison who we think we can convict because we have "limited resources".

Lets not try to defend the prosecutors here by rationalizing what they do. I won't vilify them either because they are just doing what WE incentivized them to do but I won't throw any accolades their way either.

<comment><USER7> I'd be satisfied if the CEO, senior management and board members had to turn over all profits including stock options granted for the period of abuse. That would be more impressive to me than jail time and seriously discourage similar behavior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So the accusation against Tao is:

> According to the federal indictment, in May 2018 Tao signed a five-year > contract with Fuzhou University in China as a Changjiang Scholar > Distinguished Professor and full-time employee.

and not disclosing this while seeking grants worth $37000?

Am I missing something or is this behind ridiculous? I'm pretty sure I had professors who were similarly "employed" by a vast variety of universities and didn't always disclose that, not out of malice, but because they just didn't care. In fact, my college recently had a couple of high profile professors fired for the same issue, without the Feds barging in.

I also find it interesting that this article references a completely different case, where someone was actually accused of theft, but has absolutely no connection to this individuals case at all.

</comment><comment><USER9> Online certifications are no joke.

[https://www.justice.gov/opa/press- release/file/1197256/downl...](https://www.justice.gov/opa/press- release/file/1197256/download)

> On or about September 25, 2018, in the District of Kansas, the defendant, > for the purpose of executing the scheme described above, caused to be > transmitted by means of wire communication in interstate commerce an online > certification that he (1) read and understood the Kansas Board of Regents > policy concerning conflicts of interest, (2) understood that any external > personal professional activities in which he engaged that take time away > from the University must not interfere with him meeting his faculty teaching > and research responsibilities at the University, and (3) agreed to secure > approval prior to engaging in any such external activities; all of which was > in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 1343.

The indictment doesn't say whether the fraud was that (1) he didn't read or understand the conflict of interest policy (presumably not, since that would indicate this wasn't intentional); (2) he didn't understand that external activities must not interfere with his University work (same); so it must be (3) that he agreed to secure approval prior to engaging in any such activities.

So the fraud is that he agreed to secure approval, but didn't follow through.

The indictment also claims:

> Tao certified to KU that he did not labor under any conflict of interest.

But the only certification mentioned in the indictment was that he agreed to secure approval, not that he lacked any conflict of interest.

Regardless, the result of this failure to secure approval for a conflict of interest was a four count indictment for wire fraud and theft by receiving salary, plus a forfeiture request. He allegedly "embezzled, stole, and obtained by fraud" grant money that funded his University salary, by virtue of continuing to receive that salary.

<comment><USER10> So every civil breach of contract is also criminal fraud? "You indicated to your counterparty that you would obey the contract, but did not."

<comment><USER11> Fraud requires intentional misrepresentation. "You indicated to your counterparty that you would obey the contract, when you had no intention of doing so" is what may be criminal fraud. Simply failing to perform is not fraud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't see the conflict as long as he did the work. Thinking he takes it to trial and wins.

Now Iowa State University ECpE, they have full on corrupt faculty working full time for their private company, showing just up for lectures to read out of the book. Their TA's do all grading. Their RA's must sign NDAs and take forever to graduate because he won't let them publish his "proprietary" stuff. That is fraud.

<comment><USER13> 90% of federal cases end in a guilty plea, and only 17% of federal cases that do go to trial end in an acquittal.

[https://www.pewresearch.org/fact- tank/2019/06/11/only-2-of-f...](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact- tank/2019/06/11/only-2-of-federal-criminal-defendants-go-to-trial-and-most- who-do-are-found-guilty/)

Most likely he looks at the 20 years he's facing if convicted of wire fraud and decides to take a plea deal involving a couple years in prison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hm, the wire fraud count is always tacked on to everything.

Out of curiosity, can you be charged with wire fraud if you personally only transact in cryptocurrencies completely on chain? value sent to you is in crypto, value you pay out to others is in crypto?

(I've run several businesses for several years that do that and have never needed to "cash out", even easier now with stablecoins which don't fluctuate in value)

<comment><USER15> Yes. The statute:

"Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both." [18 U.S.C. 1343]

"Money or property" includes cryptocurrencies, and "wire" has been repeatedly interpreted to include the internet, email and text messages.

<comment><USER14> comprehensive one!</comment></comment></comment>


Khosla Ventures is joining the YCVC Program - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ycombinator.com/khosla-ventures-is-joining-the-ycvc-program <comment><USER2> I never understood Yuri's involvement. I always thought his investment philosophy was to enter at the Series B or later stage.

On another note, here's a recent anecdote (the plural of anecdote is not data!) about Khosla Ventures. A successful entrepreneur ($300M exit under his belt; CEO of $5B company) was in advanced talks (post-term sheet) to raise funding from them. Out of the blue, Khosla came back with a list of demands such as adding a 3rd co-founder. Obviously just one situation, but left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.

<comment><USER3> DST investments in YC seed stage are probably less than Yuri's property tax bill on just his Bay Area house. If it made it easier to get into any good Series B deals, doesn't that make it worthwhile?

<comment><USER2> Does it really make it easier? If DST knocked on the door, I know I'd answer. Well, if I was looking for funding ;)

<comment><USER4> 90% of founders would as well. He wants access to the other 10%. Or whatever ratio you want to give, he wants access to the best YC startups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Serious question: why did you bother with the press release structure for this post, complete with the (pointless) Rabois quote?

<comment><USER6> YC has gotten bigger. I don't write everything myself anymore, and other people may feel they can't take such liberties with formats.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have noticed a trend on HN whenever Vinod Khosler is mentioned, there seems to be a lot of hostility towards him. Is there any concrete examples of them doing shady stuff? I am just curious.

<comment><USER8> This trend isn't limited to HN. When talking to people (even lawyers and such who I know do not read HN) that have dealt with Khosla, I have repeatedly heard that he is shady, but I have yet to hear any concrete examples. From everything I read about him on TechCrunch and elsewhere though, he sounds like a great investor to have...

<comment><USER9> See the shoreline access issue below. To me, that whole matter signals someone impossible to work with. If he were of decent moral fiber and wisdom, he would have found a workable arrangement that preserves public and personal interests. Going to trial was just even more embarrassing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great to see them involved. I'm curious about this model... At what point does the overhead of following so many companies become prohibitive relative to the small amount invested? I suspect this could be why Milner left.

I don't have much (any) data on this, and no professional stake in this. I'm just fascinated by the YC model in general, and by a way of "buying the market" for emerging companies. (The closest thing to an S&P for startups) That, and I'm tired of arguing about unions on the other thread.

<comment><USER11> The YCVC investments are a fire-and-forget portfolio investment; VC's usually don't follow the companies directly unless they put in additional money.

<comment><USER10> I see - thanks! So it really is like an index, but of options. One or two will hit, and when they do, it's time to pay attention. I've heard stories of universities that seed firms with a Fire-and-Forget mindset, and then finding out after the fact that someone has a bunch of valuable contracts in a filing cabinet.

off-topic - I'm a fan of what your company is doing.

<comment><USER12> I doubt the "forget" part is as strong as your description implies. Instead they are "in" on a heavily pre-vetted set of companies with very little work. And then begin on Day 2 (probably Day 1, actually) figuring out how involved to get, likely getting meaningfully involved in favorites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting that SV Angel ducked out when it became YC VC, and now Yuri is out. a16z is the longest running current member.

</comment><comment><USER13> Interesting, curious if Yuri Milner was not seeing returns on the YC seed investments and decided to withdraw.

<comment><USER14> It generally takes at least five years for a seed investor to have a clear picture of what kind of returns they can expect. Yuri's smart enough to know that and he started doing this just under three years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> How does YCVC work exactly? YC invests in startups directly already, so why bring in unnecessary partner money? Is it that the YC front runs the investment and the YCVCs are allowed to come on board slightly later at worse terms? If so, that's a good deal for YC, and even if the IRR doesn't work out, the VCs are paying for access to a pool of potential deals. If that's the case VC churn doesn't send the best signal.

</comment><comment><USER16> The report makes it sound like Milner is out of investing in YC? Or just the seed stage?

<comment><USER17> Just the YCVC portion I'd guess - which is the "guaranteed" investment into all YC companies when they start YC. That's not even seed stage. That's just YC stage...

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> FWIW, Vinod's mom thinks he's a splendid human being.

</comment><comment><USER19> Ah. Is Khosla Ventures related to Vinod Khosla? The same guy who sealed off a popular surfing beach in a small California town and declared it as his own? I always found that to be a terrible reminder of how money, greed and selfishness go hand in hand. Never mind me.

<comment><USER20> Yes.

 _Buchwald based his decision on the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which settled the Mexican-American War, and required that the United States recognize Mexican land grants as long as the owner filed a claim. The original owner of the coastal property filed such a claim. The U.S. government challenged his land patent, but the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed his ownership in 1859 -- 14 years before the California Constitution was first drafted._

I can't make head nor tail of this.[1]

EDIT: OK, this[2] is clearer:

 _The judge 's ruling skirts the fundamental conflict between the rights of private property owners and the rights of Californians to access the shoreline. Instead, Buchwald rooted his decision in the land's history during the mid-19th century. Since there was no public easement attached to the property at the time the United States acquired California from Mexico, the judge reasoned, the question of whether the California Constitution now guarantees access to the beach is immaterial.

The original owner of the property was Jose Maria Alviso, who received a provisional land grant from the Mexican government in the late 1830s. He later transferred the property to his brother, Jose Antonio Alviso, whose rights to the property were upheld under the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which settled the Mexican-American War. The U.S. government challenged Alviso's land patent, but the Supreme Court confirmed Alviso's ownership in 1859._

[1] [http://www.nbcbayarea.com/Vinod-Khosla-Can-Keep-Public- Off-B...](http://www.nbcbayarea.com/Vinod-Khosla-Can-Keep-Public-Off-Beach- Near-Half-Moon-Bay-229728541.html)

[2] [http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking- news/ci_24380282/vinod-k...](http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking- news/ci_24380282/vinod-khosla-wins-key-martins-beach-battle)

<comment><USER9> Also: [http://www.surfrider.org/jims-blog/entry/vinod-khosla- beache...](http://www.surfrider.org/jims-blog/entry/vinod-khosla-beaches- belong-to-the-public-they-are-not-for-sale2)</comment></comment></comment>