The big book of particle physics - <AUTHOR> https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/the-big-book-of-physics <comment><USER2> I still have a copy from back in the day when I was taking down a subscription to PR D. Still well over an inch thick printed on very thin paper.</comment>


Using vectorization to speed up UTF-8 character counting - <AUTHOR> http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2008-06-05-faster-utf8-strlen.html

<comment><USER2> I thought the title meant it was using Altivec or SSE, but it's merely operating on a chunk of 4 bytes at a time dealing with misaligned data up front. Still a good article, despite my initial disappointment.

A similar article which originally taught me these tenants is:

<http://rentzsch.com/papers/straightenUpAndFlyRight>

<comment><AUTHOR> _it's merely operating on a chunk of 4 bytes at a time_

If you have a modern CPU, that code operates on 8 bytes at a time. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't think I believe those benchmarks. Many of those numbers are significantly slower (!) than main memory bandwidth, and for code like strlen() which can be naively implemented in about three instructions per byte.

Something is wrong with the testing, I think.</comment>


Ask YC: Do I have a chance? - <AUTHOR>

My partner and I have an idea for a website.  We are 18 and 17 years old.  I thought of idea and do web design, and he has 4 years of programming experience.  If we build a prototype or beta do we have enough for an investor to invest in our company/website? Plus I live outside SV. <comment><USER2> Sounds like a good team. What's the idea? Three things I've learned thru the YC experience:

1) Investors like big ideas. If you can't tell a convincing story about how you've got the potential to build a $500m business, almost all investors will pass.

2) Traction wins. Don't build a prototype. Build a product. Prove that users want what you build and show a healthy growth curve BEFORE you take investment. It opens a lot of doors.

3) Distribution wins, too. Have a GREAT story on how you're going to find users without spending a nickel. SEO and viral marketing win. Don't say "word of mouth", "PR", "blogosphere" unless you've proven that your startup has legs there.

Regarding, "outside SV"... It depends. Right outside? Or in the Yukon? Where are you?

If funding is the path you should follow, not living in a hub is making a REALLY hard game a LOT harder.

</comment><comment> tsetse-fly The bubble is in full effect.

There seem to be a lot of people that think their projects somehow require funding. Your online social alarm clock is not a startup.

Stop imagining how you're going to make money off of crappy widgets. Get out there, be curious and build things that solve actual problems.

<comment><USER3> online social alarm clock startup? already done:

<http://www.chumby.com/>

<comment> tsetse-fly Chumby is much more than an alarm clock; it's a cool extendable toy that people would buy. I was referring to: <http://sleep.fm/>

<comment><USER3> right, i was looking for something actually cool and useful :)

i guess my unspoken point was to try and note that even if an idea kind of sounds stupid, there might be a good way to implement it to achieve success.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why not try doing it without an investor? Does it absolutely require one? Could you get something going that would generate revenue and then grow it?

<comment><USER5> yeah, for your age, you don't need an investor until you need lots of servers. So get lots of users then investors will be easy.

<comment><USER6> You need investors when you need heavy funding. For now just live with your parents or wherever and make a prototype. From there you might be able to convince an investor that this is the next big thing. If you are hosting a website, then start it up, and show it off.

Hell I am 24 and I am not waiting for an investor to make my company a reality. If it fails, who cares, I got many years to try again :)

<comment><USER7> Right on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You'll really never know if you spend your time speculating and hesitating to take a step without 100% certainty. Just do it. See where it goes, and judge accordingly.

</comment><comment><USER9> You must build first. It is much easier to sell and you have more pull with a completed or ready system. Also, unless you have real professional experience you can't call that 4 years experience. If I could count my experience back to my C64 days and Apple II days then it would be highly inflated. Experience usually means professional work experience, at 18 you need to prove yourself more. Deliverables help this immensely and once you throw down experience means minimal.

The hard part is building and getting noticed, once that happens the investment part is much easier. Truly great business ventures dont' always need lots of investment though, just enough to buy some time to build it or get it in production.

</comment><comment><USER10> See how far you can get without raising money, even if you have to work part- time on the side. Unless you're building something that requires a lot of storage, bandwidth, or people you can get a lot done without a lot of cash. Your location outside a tech hub won't be a factor until you need to start hiring experienced people or you need to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars. By that point you may know if the site is going to be successful or not, and you can move if you need to.

</comment><comment><USER3> if you build it (and its a good idea), they will come.

at 17/18, you can (most likely, i'm assuming) live with your parents or do the work in your dorms and not have to worry about making a living while starting your business.

find some time and just do it. worry about making money after you have something.

</comment><comment><USER11> Along the lines of this recent thread and article, don't be too afraid of revealing your work outside of your cave.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=216614>

A great way to get some real feedback is to make it, then post it as an Ask YC. The community really steps up to give credit and criticism where they are due. Take this recent thread on Dabbleboard as an example.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=202798>

Don't worry about making money right away. It's more important to see if the idea goes somewhere interesting.

</comment><comment><USER12> You don't have to be in the valley to build a successful Internet company!

Boston, NYC, Boulder, DC, Philadelphia.. all have current hot startups. There is money to be found too in these areas; more in the valley of course...

<comment><USER13> which startups are you referring to in Philly?

<comment><USER14> im based in philly with my staryup

theres a bit of startup atmosphere here

<comment><USER15> I'm interested in meeting people in Philly to work on startups in the future. Are there any meetups that you could suggest?

<comment><USER13> as am i, if you find any, ping me at web @ my hackernews name.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "If we build a prototype or beta do we have enough for an investor to invest in our company/website?"

Investors _tend_ to invest in companies/people and less in ideas (unless the idea really is something revolutionary). Get your prototype in order, but also do a little business legwork. Are there competitors? Who is the market? What's the revenue potential? How are you going to market the idea?

</comment><comment><USER17> When asked what would be the main factor for someone to succeed, Bill Gates answer was how young they start their first company, Warren Buffet who really is smart and was sitting next to him agreed.

Go for it, if you start now I guarantee you will have your life fixed by 35 yo.

</comment><comment><USER18> You should do it, but don't expect to get funding. Make your site support itself. Since you are young, you can sink this if it doesn't work out and move on. This may sound pessimistic, but if you are going to fail, fail fast, so you can keep trying more things.

</comment><comment><USER19> Your ages will be a strike against you; expect problems with that for another two years or so at least. It's not a fatal strike, though, so definitely give it a shot. Apply to YC. Above all, keep building.

<comment><USER20> Umm... there are plenty of 17/18 year olds (probably younger) who make thousands online every month, all without the need for "investors". No offense to YC, but a lot of people on this site seem to think they need to quit their job, lock themselves in a dark closet for 6 months, apply for money, and build a stupid site without making any money at first. Meanwhile there are people (teens, dads, grandmas) building high-quality content sites and making the big $$$ via ads, all without needing "investors".

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If that project is building something useful for the sake of learning and having fun, do it. Getting rich and/or famous should be seen as bonuses.

</comment><comment><USER22> You should talk to this guy: <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=markbao>

</comment><comment><USER23> Why do you need an investor?

</comment><comment><USER24> Yes, you have a chance, of either invetment or (even better) market success.

A prototype might be enough to approach early-stage investors, mostly angels, and a live beta definitely is -- if either helps confirm a market exists, by demonstrating a compelling experience that attracts real use or a craving from a valuable market.

I think you're on the right track: build, build, build first. (Take up some programming yourself to help.) Use that experience to understand the interesting parts of the problem and test the concept either with representative customers or (best of all) real via-the-web users.

If you achieve accelerating adoption with users, or even hints of revenue. you have a good story to approach investors -- who exist everywhere, not just SV.

(Experienced folks can defer building a bit, because they can raise money based strictly on their proven abilities plus the intended market. But for young first-timers, proving-by-doing can offset that advantage quickly.)

</comment><comment><USER25> No, coward. You have no chance. Hide in your basement and weep.

Seriously dude just do it. You're young, fuck it. Asking if you can do it is foolish; people have no idea what you're capable of until you do something.</comment>


How to Start a Startup (2005) - <AUTHOR> http://paulgraham.com/start.html

<comment><USER2> I'll never forget this essay, because he first delivered it as a talk at Harvard that Steve and I trained up from Virginia to attend. After Steve had lent me Masters of Doom, I was already convinced we should start a startup together, but this talk sealed the deal. I know Chris Slowe (later our first 'hire' at reddit) was in the audience that evening and I'm sure a number of other future YCers were also there with no clue of where it would lead.

Thank you, Paul Graham, for making that comment about finding investment from rich people who'd done it before (but not him). If I recall, it was feeling guilty about hearing the dejection in the room that got him thinking about starting Y Combinator.

And what a difference that decision has made in so many of our lives.

<comment><USER3> My coworker and friend danced for Chris yesterday.

I don't know why but I always find anecdotes about how Reddit got started really fascinating. Perhaps personal interest.

<comment><USER4> So here's the back story: we're working on migrating the reddit blog off of blogger and have a test environment set up that we were playing around with. We have a semi-private IRC channel that your coworker, as a close friend of the reddit team and heavy duty open source developer also hangs around in.

I asked if anyone wanted login to the new blog interface to which I got a "Me! Me!" from the gentleman in question. Since he isn't strictly speaking a member of the dev team, I did the natural thing and said, "ok, but in exchange you're going to have to dance for my amusement." Suffice it to say he called my bluff.

<comment><USER3> >as a close friend of the reddit team and heavy duty open source developer also hangs around in.

I know the significance of what he contributes to Reddit, I've been on Reddit for a long time and ran into him because of IRC. He's the one that got me my job :P

I'm not surprised at all that he called your bluff, he's quite the playful fellow. I was amused when he shared it with the rest of our dev team (the video).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So as an interesting anecdote, a Squidoo lens I have has for the last several years been the #2 Google result for the phrase 'start a startup,' after this essay. The page gets on average 45 visits per week, and has sold about 40 startup-related books total over the last 3.5 years.

I think it's interesting because

* The number of people looking to learn about starting businesses seems to be flat or even slightly declining, at least if search traffic is any indicator.

* Based on what I can extrapolate from my analytics and well as my experience playing around with Google / FB ads, it seems like the total number of people searching for information on starting new businesses is on the order of a a couple hundred per week. This is pretty disturbing for a nation of 300M people.

I'm not sure how much validity there is to this, but I've always been a little disturbed whenever I've done things like, say, comparing the number of parenting books sold on Amazon to the number of children born each year.

<comment><USER6> <http://www.google.com/trends?q=startup> <\-- Kinda interesting.

That said, whatever you are using to determine that "the total number of people searching for information on starting new businesses is... a couple hundred per week" is very very very far off the mark.

Here's a list of some related US searches in the adwords tool: [http://skitch.com/webwright/dxyg5/google-adwords-keyword- too...](http://skitch.com/webwright/dxyg5/google-adwords-keyword-tool)

<comment><USER5> I'm sure that's true so some extent, but I'd bet the vast majority of 'home business' searches are people doing lead gen, e.g. 'home business' + 'palo alto'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Definitely a brilliant essay, but I might take issue with a possible interpretation of:

"It's very dangerous to let anyone fly under you. If you have the cheapest, easiest product, you'll own the low end. And if you don't, you're in the crosshairs of whoever does."

I definitely understand his point, but I am afraid others might not. This sort of mentality can lead you to under price your services greatly. I see it everyday. Our customers sell downloadables and just the other day some guy was trying to sell a brilliantly manicured and useful spreadsheet for $2. His competition charged $10-$15+ and looked 10x more confusing and horrible. He said he wanted to "sell the most possible and low price was the way to do it".

I think I may talked him into raising his price and testing a few different pricing schemes.

In short: "owning the low-end" isn't always the best way to go about it, you might be leaving a lot of money on the table and selecting a different set of customers.

<comment><USER8> I have spent a lot of time thinking about this.

When we started Virtualmin, we had one low-end competitor that charged slightly less (the software did quite a bit less) and three major high end competitors that were higher than ours (and have close enough to feature parity) prices by 25-50%. I figured we were right in the sweet spot for a new product: not the cheap option, since we can do a lot more than the cheap option, but a better buy than the big options.

Soon after we started, a new very low end competitor came onto the scene (about a third of our lowest initial price, and without recurring fees, while we have annual renewals). And, one of the big three high end competitors got acquired and discontinued. Same number of competitors (not counting a bunch of also ran products that aren't competitive for whatever reason), but now we're right in the middle on pricing and at the top on capability.

Since we're talking about people flying under you, I'll talk about the low end option. From what I can tell, that low end product sold about four times what we sold during the time the company existed, though revenue would have been about the same as ours during that time (because of recurring revenue). So, this company had four times the customers to support, with the same amount of resources. Of course, if you can get users helping users, this becomes less of an issue and more users is better. And, customers that are happy are a much better marketing value than buying ads or for trade show booths or whatever else.

Our situation is further complicated by the existence of Virtualmin GPL, which is the _really_ low priced option in the market (free). Virtualmin GPL probably has about 30 times the market share of Virtualmin Professional, and is probably in third place in the market overall now (possibly fourth, but definitely gaining).

The company behind the low price option went out of business, and the low end product has since become free. Development has dropped off significantly, and its market share seems to be slowly shrinking.

In the end of all my contemplating on the subject, we've kept our pricing pretty much exactly the same: Middle of the pack, but closer to the high end than the low end. We figure the free product will mop up the really cheap folks, and when they start making money, we'll probably get some of it for a Virtualmin Professional license.

What I'm trying to say is: It's hard to know the right price. Flying under your competitors is great, if you have some significant technical advantage they don't have (like you have a web-based service vs. their installable boxed application, or you have a much simpler product that can answer the needs of a specific niche without the complexity of your competitors). But, if you're building a complicated product that has only marginal cost advantages over your competition, it's probably dangerous to significantly undercharge. Sometimes there are reasons for the prices you see.

<comment><USER9> In other words, no one knows what the right price is: [http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.ht...](http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html) . I suspect most people luck into the "right" price—or don't.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, honestly, our pricing was set by wild-assed guessing. I'm still not sure it's high (or low) enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Now, I don't want to sound like a hopeless groupie or somesuch, but I don't know how else to say this... I _love_ this guy!

Too often my hope of ever launching my own startup one day falters after attending yet another pointless big company Dilbertian meeting or when I give in and watch a stupid action movie from Netflix that I had watched at least twice before, rather than learning Rails. After those moments, I read one of PG's essays and I feel it _is_ possible, I _can_ do it.

Maybe I'll never launch, but just for giving me that hope for a short while, I love him.

<comment><USER11> _falters after attending yet another pointless big company Dilbertian meeting_

Really? It's those mind-numbing, pointless time wasters that increase my drive to go out on my own! Bring on the meetings: it just increases motivation.

Maybe my startup should build a tool for better meetings :-)

<comment><USER10> You're right :-) But those meetings turn one's mind to mush, so it's hard (or at least I find it so) to concentrate on something at night.

If you can design an some software/hardware/toy that one can pass time discreetly during those meetings while pretending to listen, my friend, you'll have a _huge_ market

<comment><USER11> iPhone buzzword bingo? :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would like to see an updated version of this essay. I am sure many things do not apply or are out of date by now.

<comment><USER13> I've been meaning to go through everything I've written and collect the mistakes. IIRC I was wrong about the low end of the age range here. It was also a mistake to advise people to work for an existing co for a couple years before starting their own.

<comment><USER12> Hopefully you can find the time to do this soon, it will be very helpful for all of us trying to become successful and change the world (or a piece of it) with our startups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It would be interesting to know how many HN readers have first seen and/or read this essay just now, after seeing this thread. Or have we all read it years ago...

<comment><USER15> It's my first time reading it. I didn't get interested in starting a startup until a year ago, and only in the last week did I really start seriously doing it. I'm happy that old articles pop up on HN years after, since I've missed a bunch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> A classic, but it's interesting to read alternative ideas to:

>> During this time you'll do little but work, because when you're not working, your competitors will be.

such as from Jason Fried who recommends _against_ working all the time.

Overall my experience has been: work as much as you can while not burning out and still enjoying your life overall. You never know how long you'll be at it, this could be your lifestyle indefinitely especially if you enjoy startups and may do another even after a big success.

For me so far this has meant incredibly long hours come in spurts, maybe a burst of 3 days every couple weeks, and otherwise, hours that approach "normal" (10-12 hour days, take at least one weekend day completely off).

</comment><comment><USER17> _"Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can't save bad people."_

That's gold

</comment><comment><USER18> This was written in 2005, but I can see at least 2-3 businesses that have cropped up since then that match the end of the "What customers want" section almost completely. He certainly knows how to find a niche.

</comment><comment><USER19> Inspiring. Somebody recommended this essay a couple of months ago and I never got to reading it until today.

</comment><comment><USER20> Hands down the best of his essays, at least among the startup focused ones.</comment>


ARM launches free toolkit for Android - <AUTHOR> http://www.arm.com/products/tools/software-tools/ds-5/community-edition/index.php

<comment><USER2> Does this Community Edition toolkit include armcc, ARM's excellent (but expensive) optimizing compiler?

I don't understand why ARM charges thousands of dollars per seat for their compiler. gcc generates crappy ARM code. Doesn't ARM want all developers to be able to build fast ARM applications? Why doesn't ARM just contribute their compiler expertise to improving gcc rather than developing a complete toolchain?

<comment><USER3> _Doesn't ARM want all developers to be able to build fast ARM applications?_

No. Arm wants to make money, ideally off of the ARM architecture and related stuff. If they can make more money by selling their compiler, they'll do it.

<comment><USER2> But how much money does ARM really make selling (perhaps only a few hundred?) compiler licenses? Compare that revenue to strengthening the ARM platform's position compared to competing embedded architectures?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not available for OS/X.

Wants to force you to wrestle with the 600 pound monster of Eclipse.

Not free if you company has ten people or more.

<comment><USER5> > Not available for OS/X.

That's a reasonable complaint.

> Wants to force you to wrestle with the 600 pound monster of Eclipse.

The Android SDK is based on Eclipse. If you want to complain about that, talk to Google. Complaining to ARM is just silly.

> Not free if you company has ten people or more.

Yes, it is a freemium model. What's wrong with that?

<comment><USER4> There's an Eclipse plugin in the Android SDK, but the Android SDK isn't based on Eclipse.

I use it with the far more pleasurable command line tools and ultra-productive text editor Vim.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is not an alternative to the android ndk, right? I haven't had to use the ndk-gdb debugger so far (I just debug the native linux version) so I'm not sure if this project will help me or not.

Maybe the system profiler is worthwhile? Anyone know?

<comment><USER7> this is for writing arm assembly afaict, ndk is c/c++ (though u can probably do assembly) but this is kind of like an msvc vs gcc thing

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think this is one of the only times that I've seen assembly advertised as being able to be reused on multiple platforms.

<comment><USER9> _"DS-5 CE completes the serious app developer toolkit with a comprehensive C, C++ and Assembly"_

I think it's fair to say they expect most people to be writing C/C++, not Assembly.</comment></comment>


Rumor: 'Google Me' is a Facebook Killer - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5573953/rumor-google-rolling-out-google-me-their-facebook-killer-very-soon

<comment><USER2> Even if this is true and they launched with a product which had all of Facebook's features and more... would you switch? Would you bother?

I sure hope Google will release something unique rather than another social network site.

<comment><USER3> Probably wouldn't switch, unless it was a REALLY killer app.

The userbase is SO dedicated to Facebook, this is a LONG road for them to go. I can't think of anything else they've done (other than GMail) where they've moved a BIG userbase away from things they were already REALLY accustomed to. GMail did so because it was RADICALLY better than any of the alternatives at the time. What can really be RADICALLY better at what it does than facebook?

<comment><USER4> Google's original search product moved the big user base away from all the other search engines like AltaVista, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I shut down my Facebook account because of the psychotic way they handle user privacy. I'll definitely give Google a shot and might keep using them if they promise to not be evil.

</comment><comment><USER5> shit, I deleted my facebook account because I became addicted to stalking almost everybody I know... with google me, it's going to be tougher to delete it..</comment>


How I Let Disney Track My Every Move - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/how-i-let-disney-track-my-every-move-1792875386 <comment><USER2> If you're in Disney World, it's safe to assume Disney is tracking you to some degree, Magic Band or no. They have staff. They have cameras everywhere. You sign up for Fast Pass and you buy their food. This isn't some government agency tracking you in your home or in the street where you have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

My guess is the vast majority of people appreciate the convenience of automatically getting a photo of themselves on a ride. To pull out another example of putting the tracker in the ears hats for kids, please tag my kid every way you can while we're there. My fear of losing them in a busy park far outweighs my concern that you know I took them on the Pooh Bear ride.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have no problem with Disney tracking me on their property while I am there. Do we know what happens to the fingerprints and photos after we leave? In isolation, the Disney tracking is innocuous even cool, but it comes with risk that the data will be stored / forwarded to entities of which we are unaware. Sorry if I am unnecessarily alarmist. I visited Disney back a few years ago (pre Snowden) and mortified my wife by declining the fingerprint tracking (had to talk with a 'supervisor'). I am not sure you can decline these days.

<comment><USER4> This is an important point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Magic Band is amazing. We spent our anniversary at Disney World and the thing is a payment method, your park tickets, your room keys, and also holds your fast passes.

I had no expectations of privacy in a public theme park and I'm not sure anyone else should either.

They made the visit so much better. Would use again.

<comment><USER6> I really enjoyed having the band on my wrist the entire afternoon at the pool and not having to worry about losing my room key in the towel bin or carrying wet cash to the snack bar.

I actually was more impressed with the RFID drink cups and mugs that are rolling out at some of the resorts:

[http://www.disneyfoodblog.com/disney-refillable- mugs/](http://www.disneyfoodblog.com/disney-refillable-mugs/)

[http://www.validfill.com/product/](http://www.validfill.com/product/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article pretty heavily misses a lot of the points that many guests view as a benefit. Had they not been evacauted from splash mountain they would have had a photograph of their exact moment before going down the plume. Similarly certain restaurants know where you're sitting and deliver food based on the magic bands. Recently actually when riding on Haunted mansion it knew we were from California and had a hitch hiking ghost looking to head to California.

It's not to say they're not tracking you, but the tracking especially in such a closed city/community shows some of the positive smooth experiences that can be delivered when you know all those details about a person.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm in Disney right now using the band for everything and from the consumer point of view it is great. Don't have any misconceptions about it -- at the "Be Our Guest" lunch you order via touch screen and then they tell you to sit anywhere you want in the cavernous three joined dining halls. Magically your food finds you quickly without ever speaking to a human. Why? Because you're in an enchanted castle, duh!

</comment><comment><USER9> Magic Band is a great example of consumer tracking done right. The band is not a biometric, it doesn't require an app that tracks you at all other times and it used to actually improve service, not just serve up adds and 10% coupons.

<comment><USER10> Fingerprint scans are mandatory for all adult guests seeking to enter the parks. The biometric is linked to the ticket permanently to prevent ticket sharing. This is true whether you use the Band or a card at the turnstile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The article doesn't ask this, but I think it's kind of obvious: is this the future we want everywhere?

The majority of us are already carrying around personally identifiable smartphones with both long and short range antennas. The tech to both do the tracking and to the phones themselves are getting cheaper every year.

Would we be ok going to a local restaurant, tapping to pay and then they just find us? Or with Amazon's (prototype) wander in, put stuff in a bag and wander out stores?

Heck even the just passed "make your ISP data available to marketers" is I'm sure couched in this this same manner: we'll make things easier, we'll show you better ads, etc.

Disneyland feels more like a prototype of what to come than anything else.

<comment><USER12> Disneyland is a small integrated ecosystem and is entirely voluntary. I think it's quite reasonable for Disney to keep tabs on all of their guests while they're in the park. But that same level of surveillance doesn't belong out in the public.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I went to Disneyworld a month ago. My first thought when they scanned my finger prints was "bet that was forwarded to the government so they can easily unlock my phone"

As for why they do it, it's to make sure you don't share a pass. Buy 2 passes, 2 people go in. 1 person comes out with 2 passes. Goes back in with extra person, repeat.

They don't scan you on the way out. They could but it would be annoying (and maybe illegal?) to have to line up to get out of the parks.

<comment><USER14> I'm pretty much at a loss for words.. Disneyworld scanned your fingerprints? You let them? What happens if you say no?

<comment><USER15> > What happens if you say no?

They don't let you in

<comment><USER14> I can't even really put into words how crazy that is. How long this been going on and why are people putting up with this? Why isn't this a huge controversy? Am I in the minoriy by being completely shocked by this?

I wouldn't let my government do this to me without a court order I could challenge, and there's a children's theme park doing this thousands of times daily with no opposition?

This wouldn't be possible in europe.

<comment><USER16> I was just thinking that Sea World San Diego took finger prints Las summer when we went. I googled it and on the first result there is a comment from 2007 from someone mentioning the same.

[http://www.fodors.com/community/united-states/borrowing- tick...](http://www.fodors.com/community/united-states/borrowing-tickets-for- seaworld.cfm)

<comment><USER14> I'm not full on tinfoil hat, but.. but.. I mean.. Uhh.

WHAT?

Maybe I'm more paranoid than most, but I've definately been getting more defensive about my privacy in the last two years or so. I don't do social media, I at least tell my phone not to do location stuff (I have no idea if it obeys this) and noscript etc etc. Even before that, though, giving fingerprints away without being forced to do so is completely mind bending to me. I would _never_ do that.

Maybe I would have once before I got more jaded about this kind of business, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't. I find it especially toxic that they'll refuse entry if you don't do it.. It's making you chose between your crying children and a ruined holiday vs giving away one of the only things that can physically identify you to a random corp.

I used to not care so much about these things, but then I started working for a big marketing/tracking/data broker company. Going from 'Yeah, I know this stuff is going on since I read the tech news' to actually building that stuff and seeing the kind of data avail would make anyone take similar steps..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I have been to Disney quite a bit and I find the bands amazing. And yes I realize I am being tracked. But there is something magical when you get on the haunted house ride and the ghosts know you...

Super use of the tech for entertainment.

</comment><comment><USER18> What could you possibly be doing that is so private on Disney premises and that makes you freak out about tracking? They know you're in the park, they might as well know when you're in the bathroom or eating lunch or taking a ride. It's not like they're tracking you after you leave (or are they?)...

<comment><USER19> > _What could you possibly be doing that is so private on Disney premises and > that makes you freak out about tracking?_

I think it's more the principle of the thing. Why would you want to be tagged and tracked like an animal? I wouldn't want to be.

I agree with Edward Snowden: "When you say I don't care about the right to privacy because I have nothing to hide, that is no different than saying I don't care about freedom of speech because I have nothing to say or freedom of the press because I have nothing to write."

<comment><USER18> > Why would you want to be tagged and tracked like an animal? I wouldn't want > to be.

If that's how you think I should look at it, then, actually, yeah, I do. I have a huge problem with the way some animals are tagged and tracked, so if this bears any resemblance to it, it's only fair we go through it too. Not that it actually does, though.

<comment><USER20> > I have a huge problem with the way some animals are tagged and tracked

What is the issue with this?

<comment><USER18> >> I have a huge problem with the way some animals are tagged and tracked

> What is the issue with this?

Totally off-topic, not going to start a discussion on it, sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9177105](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9177105)

(This is a longer article about the history of the thing.)

</comment><comment><USER22> If you use android, take a look at [https://www.google.com/maps/timeline](https://www.google.com/maps/timeline)

</comment><comment><USER23> What would happen if you snuck in a jammer? Would half the park just shut down?</comment>


Silicon Valley's Undertaker: "We're Anticipating a Major Fallout" - <AUTHOR> http://www.pehub.com/115158/silicon-valley's-undertaker-'we're-anticipating-a-major-fallout'/ <comment><USER2> 10 megs for that tiny cemetery picture? peHub needs to learn how to resize pictures. Resizing in browser is the worst idea ever.

[http://morningjoy.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/mountain- cemet...](http://morningjoy.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/mountain-cemetary.jpg)

<comment><USER3> Bandwidth consumed must be one of their traffic metrics.

or

That's what you get when you give an 8-core, 16 GB RAM box to your interns.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> On the one hand, the article can be depressing - each fallout is a dream that died. On the other hand, one of the things that makes the Valley succeed is it's capacity to celebrate failure. A mistake? What did you learn? Now move on!

Companies that facilitate this are part of what makes for such a healthy eco- system.

Compare this to Japan - much of their lost decade(s?) was caused by an inability to accept failure, and shut down unproductive firms.

<comment><USER5> > much of their lost decade(s?) was caused by an inability to accept failure, > and shut down unproductive firms.

Unfortunately, the systemic Japanese malaise was a failure to shut down insolvent financial firms.

Kinda like the US today. (Let's face it, the VC ecosystem is mice nuts compared to the greater economy.)

<comment><USER4> In Japan it was a 2 tier issue. Insolvent (Zombie) banks were allowed to stay open. They in turn kept many insolvent companies alive. It's a testament to the strength of the Japanese that they kept the game going on for as long as they did. Of course it's not an exact analogy, but I share your concern that in the US we are trending towards a "Keep them open" mentality, rather than a "Try and try again".

A recent quote from Michael Jordan has been making the rounds: (& I believe the real @ is much higher than 9000)

"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

</comment></comment></comment><comment> eric-hu "In terms of the younger companies, what do you have to unwind exactly? What sorts of assets do they have to sell off?

Things have definitely changed. I remember in 1999, 2000, I would sell a used server for $35,000 and I had a line of people wanting it. Today, a server is $5,000 and you can get an okay server for less than $2,000. [In the meantime], we've probably become one of the largest sellers of [intellectual property] in the country. We sell tons of IP, and as you know, the IP wars have started, so we play with the big guys, the little guys, and the in-between guys. During the last bubble, there weren't as many patents. It was more ideas and URLs. So the business has matured."

I hope this means that tech patents will prove to be a fad.

<comment><USER6> It reminds me a little of trading baseball cards. The cards were mostly worthless. But "Tops" published a book that basically _defined_ what the cars were worth, and speculation was done based on what Tops might publish in the next edition. The market eventually collapsed. The same thing might happen with software patents, when people realize that there is no inherent value to owning a patent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think it's important to realize that leaders of these kinds of companies are no different from the leaders of any other company: they need to be upbeat about the company's prospects to a certain degree. The part that makes them unique is that they can't talk up their business without talking down another part of the economy.

I'm not saying that Pichinson's prediction about there being a Social Media fallout is wrong so much as I'm saying that you should take it with a grain of salt. He has financial incentive to talk the Silicon Valley economy down.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wish we knew more details on which "clean tech" firms were going under... sounds buzzwordy.

<comment><USER9> My guess would be over-funding.

When the government incentivizes an industry through grants or tax-breaks, you get an oversupply . "Clean Tech" is a hot area right now; as cities try to attract business to dig themselves out of red-ink, it's just the type of industry they'd like to see (as opposed to, say, pork rendering) coming to their area. So it gets subsidized. Hence there are more borderline sustainable businesses in the space.

Here in Canada we witnessed this with tax incentives for installing solar panels.</comment></comment>


I was a 10x engineer and I'm sorry - <AUTHOR> https://networkingnerd.net/2019/07/18/i-was-a-10x-engineer-and-im-sorry/ <comment><USER2> I'm not sure I understand why people are so eager to conflate the term "10x engineer" with "an arrogant engineer who is only seemingly productive because of either obfuscation or generation of technical debt".

It seems blindingly obvious that there are people out there who are just... dramatically more effective programmers, in a holistic net-value-to- organization/world sense. Fabrice Bellard and John Carmack, to name two that jump to mind.

And while I've definitely never worked with programmers of _their_ caliber, I have worked with people who truly were an order of magnitude more productive than me, either in sheer quantity of quality output or by dint of their efficacy at creating tooling/abstractions/apis that made other programmers more effective.

<comment><USER3> There is also a very thin difference between "technical debt" and "genius programmer". If I invented half the programming concepts Carmack did and wrote it at the company I work for, it would be considered technical debt immediately. No one else would be able to understand it and no one would be able to fix it when it broke. But for various reasons (mostly since Carmack is actually a programming genius), people stopped what they were doing to learn from him and adopt some of his techniques. Fast inverse square root is genius but it would just be way-too-clever technical debt if Carmack hadn't written it and others didn't learn from him.

No one would take the time to learn from my way-too-clever code. They'd throw it away for more obvious code in a heartbeat. Because I'm not famous, I don't work with other geniuses, and of course I'm not a genius so my way-too-clever code would just be annoying and uncharacteristic.

<comment><USER4> Fast inverse square root delivered business value that couldn't be obtained any other way, which means that it wasn't technical debt. It was a technical price. What's bad is when programmers make the system complicated purely to entertain themselves.

<comment><USER5> Agree, I will also add that technical debt != complexity.

As an example everybody uses an OS to code. An OS is incredibly complex. Maybe one of the most complex piece of software. But it doesn't mean that you should care about it. With the proper and clean interface it will have an abstraction of this complexity to its user (in your company or not) and they will be able to continue to code and never have to care about it.

So of course an OS - or like OP said anything creating value - doesn't mean that it creates technical debt only because it's complex.

<comment><USER6> Exactly: you may not be able to fully understand the OS you're working with, but you can abstract it away and use it anyway. This isn't "technical debt", it's something you need to actually get your job done: without the OS, you simply would not be able to actually create the thing you're making.

Similarly, whatever you're building likely uses a microprocessor somewhere. You probably don't really understand how that works, and would not be able to build one from scratch. But without that CPU, you wouldn't be doing your job at all.

The phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants" comes to mind here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Because I had special skills it meant that I was being relied upon more to > do work that no one else could do.

This is a textbook example of a bad system with a single failure point/bottleneck. One way to be considered "10x" is to be the only person with the know-how to keep a critical function afloat.

We really don't learn from history. Eli Goldratt wrote about this in his book The Goal--publication date 1984. Context was manufacturing but it's easy to see the principles at work and consider them in other contexts.

Gene Kim, George Spafford, and Kevin Behr wrote about this in a DevOps context in The Phoenix Project--publication date 2013.

These are just two examples of individuals who wrote books with mass market appeal that read like novels to illustrate their points. Many, many other people have thought and written about how to avoid building bad systems. And yet still, in 2019, as this 10x discussion flares up again, it's a myopic view of the individual without a scent or sight of talking about bottlenecks or systems.

Sometimes I'm in awe of Startupland and Tech World's accomplishments. Other times I'm in awe of what it doesn't even know it doesn't know.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_\(novel\))

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17255186-the-phoenix- pro...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17255186-the-phoenix-project)

<comment><USER8> > This is a textbook example of a bad system with a single failure > point/bottleneck. One way to be considered "10x" is to be the only person > with the know-how to keep a critical function afloat.

I think often (and in this article) an organization has zero people with the know-how, and then someone struggles and figures things out, and now they have one person. That one person might be someone who has figured out how to deal with a difficult stack, or might be the person who has built that stack themselves – either way, they've done something valuable because they are handling something that is critical.

The next step – spreading that knowledge, or making the knowledge more accessible, or making the system more usable – is important, but it's not wrong that the organization has ended up this position. It's part of a maturing process. And we shouldn't shit on the person who brought the organization from zero to one, just because they aren't the person fully equipped to bring the organization from one to many.

<comment><USER7> > And we shouldn't shit on the person who brought the organization from zero > to one

Very good point.

There's an underlying principle here that I didn't say. Management is responsible for the system.

Dead simple when written out, yet infrequently shown through managerial actions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For people who haven't seen the twitter thread, context is needed here.

The thread was written by a VC on what he thought a "10x Engineer" to him was, and he grossly summarized pretty much the opposite of that. [https://twitter.com/skirani/status/1149302828420067328?s=21](https://twitter.com/skirani/status/1149302828420067328?s=21)

<comment><USER10> Wtf . how did this guy beocme a VC ? His entire twitter feed is so mundane -- except for the 10X post -- that shit was hilarious. Even funnier were desperate founders who liked his post.

<comment><USER11> The only requirement to be a VC is to end up in control of a huge bag of money and a checkbook.

<comment><USER12> I have no idea what it takes to be a VC, but having looked at the tweet author's linkedin profile, he has a Master's in CS from one of the top schools in India and a PhD in CS from a US university, also has a solid work experience. People _usually_ do not magically reach positions of power in an industry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> No, that is not being a 10x engineer; maybe he managed the 10x part relative to his colleagues but nothing about his tale (keeping info to himself, letting himself become a single point of failure, etc.) says he behaved like an engineering professional. If I had to label it, it would be "rockstar", with all the positives but also negatives it implies.

</comment><comment><USER14> I agree with the other comments that say that this is not really what people mean by "10x". 10x means you make the problem ten times simpler. 10x means you build tools to make the rest of your team more productive. 10x means you sit down with users and make sure that every bit of work you're doing on the project matters to them.

It doesn't mean doing 400 hours of work a week, which isn't actually even possible. It just means using your time so much more effectively than others that it just seems like you're doing the job of 10 people.

<comment><USER15> exactly, none of what he does describes 10x. he's just a guy who learned some specific skills.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's widely accepted that olympic swimmers are more talented a person you'd randomly find at your community pool, but for some reason there's strong resistance to the idea that across a large distribution of software engineers, some outliers may indeed be much more productive than the mean.

<comment><USER17> Is Michael Phelps _ten times_ faster than your average competitive swimmer, though?

<comment><USER18> No but he wins 10 times more often.

<comment><USER17> A software development team probably shouldn't be a "one person wins, everyone else loses" scenario, though.

<comment><USER19> well to simplify it: if 2 competing companies with 1 programmer each were trying to create $popular_app_or_website then the company with the more productive developer would "win" more often

<comment><USER20> no, businesses win or lose based on sales & marketing, not how productive their engineers are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This person did not shut out his colleagues and work in a bubble because of personal shortcomings. This person was forced to work alone because his company needed very specialized skills and relied on a single person for them. No budget for hiring another person, no time allocated for training someone else. What, is he supposed to make an executive decision to stop doing his work and pull another engineer off _their_ work so he can train them? He was an IT tech, a leaf in the org chart, and management had made the calculation that they saved $X/month by relying solely on him, at the expense of some short-term disruption when he inevitably left, and $X was big enough to win out. The big ego he blames himself for was part of the solution they engineered. The more important he felt, the harder he worked, the more money he saved them.

Also, I think it's in poor taste to make this kind of "confession" or "apology" because sincere apologies can have weight and meaning, and this cheapens them. By arrogating the responsibility and the apology to themselves, this person is protecting the people who created the situation. By blaming his own personal deficiencies, he is obscuring the fact that the business chose (probably intentionally) to benefit financially by relying on a single overworked engineer instead of a team.

Yeah, yeah, I know we're all supposed to claim ownership and responsibility for everything at all times, but sometimes it's appropriate to blame somebody else.

</comment><comment><USER22> Makes me think of something I wrote a while back...

[https://hackernoon.com/10x-rockstar-ninja-wizard- vampires-f5...](https://hackernoon.com/10x-rockstar-ninja-wizard- vampires-f551c1f1411e)

"Ninjas are nameless, faceless mercenaries. The ninja's job is to create mayhem for the highest bidder. The ninja shows up in the dark of night, uses mysterious powers and ruthless violence to create disaster, then disappears in a puff of smoke.

Ninjas are nameless, faceless, heartless, merciless enemies.

Are you sure you want to hire them to work on your code?"

"what makes a wizard a wizard is that they use magic. And unless you're born with it (Harry Potter), or study ancient and mysterious tomes, you will not be a wizard. Only wizards can understand what other wizards do. Unless your whole team is wizards, you might want to reconsider the idea of using magic rather than proven tech in your code."

</comment><comment><USER23> I was certainly 10x engineer. Probably closer to 20x at my last job.

My ex-employer was an abusive(msp) employer who couldn't hold onto senior staff. The organization became so tremendously bottom heavy with people just out of school; I would literally have people lined up in my office waiting to talk to me to get help.

I was practically the only person who wrote documentation. I was literally the only person who wrote how-tos. MYself and only 1 other person was the only people to even push positivity. The place was so toxic that everyone was looking for reasons to complain. I'd have people come into my office to hide from dispatch/work.

Long story short, I reported harassment and got fired the next day. Over the next 6 months that place shed over 20 people out of 30 staff.

The workload I took on doing 60 hour weeks and 24x7 on-call had to be given to others. Everyone else said that was enough and found new jobs.

<comment><USER24> I can kind of relate to you. Not sure about the 10x but on the previous job I ended up working as team lead, pm, janitor, process developer, architecture guy, partially managing the infra, teaching the stuff to others etc. We had quite good team spirit and the people were generally awesome but there were management issues which broke our focus into pieces and we didn't get any real progress on the important stuff. In the end I didn't even realise how burnt- out I was (just trying to help and fix all the things for other devs so somebody could get something meaningful done) until some headhunter tried to recruit me and I started going through pros and cons. Switching to a job with a real focus has helped a lot and I learned a lot from that experience but happy to be somewhere else.

That company kind of imploded as there was about ten working when I left and now there's three guys left trying to get the work done. Luckily their focus has finally changed and tightened and there may be some good stuff brewing up so I'm cheering for them. Still missing working with those guys, though.

<comment><USER23> Basically the same idea, I was the team lead, DBA, PM, network admin, sysadmin, linux admin, hardware, customer relations, all emergency work.

I had to babysit coworkers who were impossible to work with and had been banned from multiple customers because they had temper tantrums toward the client.

I got so tremendously burnt out and when I started realizing it and analyzed what's going on, I had a guy harassing me, I wrote up an email detailing the shit the guy was doing to me and the day after i report the harassment I got fired.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't think the author understands what a 10x engineer is. It's not down to tons of research and work. It's a matter of having a knack for it.

<comment><USER26> The author was responding to a specific (and ridiculous) definition of 10x engineer provided by a VC on Twitter. He makes this clear in the first paragraph of the article.

Take more time to understand the context before assuming a lack of understanding.

<comment><USER15> > As I reminisced I realized that I was, in fact, a 10x Engineer.

He doesn't understand what a 10x is. Not even from the tweets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I am more concerned about the 1/10x engineer. There are a lot more of these, 1/10 as effective as any average engineer.

</comment><comment><USER28> 10x engineer = quiet working environment absent of distractions 2.6x * 2x the number of productive hours by removing and shortening meetings * 2x engineering ability and company culture with no obstacles to productivity

</comment><comment><USER29> I don't believe for a second that _actual_ 10x developers behave this way, because there's nothing 10x about this behaviour. A real 10x developer would be someone who enables their fellow team members to be 2x developers. Or who creates a solution which is twice as X, twice as Y and 2.5x more Z — for any useful metrics X, Y and Z — than an acceptable solution. Basically their _impact_ is 10x, not in terms of code or features, but in terms of value created in aggregate.

</comment><comment><USER30> One lesson we can all learn from this: You don't hire a x10 engineer, you nuture it. Year by year, as an engineer develops more and more of the skills required, their productivity increases. A lot of engineers doing hiring, think they can just get one of these engineers off the shelf by paying some recruiter 50 grand to make one materialize. It doesn't work that way. x10 engineers are born of years of company specific specialized labor.

</comment><comment><USER31> Acquiring knowledge that nobody else has in more than one critical system isn't necessarily a 10x engineer, more like an engineer who is critical to the business in (up to) 10 different systems or intersections of system. Management should try to minimize situations where only one person knows how to operate critical systems (see the character Brent in "The Phoenix Project") but that's not what I understand 10x to be. To me (as a developer), a 10x is someone who eats, breathes, and sleeps nothing but the job and can literally crank out 10x the lines of code. Whether other can maintain or understand that code is one problem with having a single person outperform their peers by so much; it also means that if management doesn't recognize this as an aberration then when that person hits the lottery/gets a better offer/gets bored and quits/is hit by a bus you're in a position of trying to explain to senior management why you're going to need to hire five people to replace the one 10x person.

This isn't to crap on the raw ability and talent of a 10x -- I'm massively envious of that ability! -- only to point out that with disproportionate output comes consequences.

</comment><comment><USER32> Excerpt:

"I wasn't just the most important cog in the machine – I was the machine. Nothing went forward unless I was doing it. And that's not scalable at all."

10x'er vs. Scalability of 10x'er (when/where/how 10x scales, when/where/how 10x does NOT scale, etc.)...

An interesting subject for future business thought leaders, is it not?

</comment><comment><USER33> It's a fine line.

I've moved up to Network Architect and I'm working hard to replicate my knowledge out to small network team so I don't have to work tickets anymore.

One of the reasons for the promotion is the understanding I have across categories- firewall, voice, VPN, APIs, Proxy, MPLS, layer 2, and so forth. Unfortunately, that really does make me more effective troubleshooting than the specialists on the team, even fairly experienced ones. But it also makes me most valuable at an architectural level. So I'm working hard to make sure that everything is documented and their is 2 deep understanding of the things I worked on so that I can be free to build up the future.

The irreplaceable man/woman can't ever get a real promotion because they'll be stuck at whatever they are doing today. Being valuable and a 'bargain' at almost any price is much better.

</comment><comment><USER34> Letting one engineer obtain so much domain knowledge that they become a single point of failure in an organization strikes me as strictly a management failure. His manager ignored the bus factor and then when he/she realized it was an issue they just... did nothing? Because it'd be hard?

</comment><comment> vincent-toups I say this every time the mythical 10x engineer thing shows up.

I've _never_ heard of a 10x salary difference for engineers. If you are a 10x engineer, that strongly suggests you're giving away free productivity to your boss.

If you own your own company, great! Even better would be to give 2x of your productivity to your boss, which is probably more than you're being compensated for, and use the 8x leftover for your own enrichment.

But there is almost literally no way that you are being fairly compensated if you really are 10 times as productive as your average engineer.

<comment><USER35> > I've _never_ heard of a 10x salary difference for engineers.

A Netflix engineer was on HN the other day claiming they make 800k and work from home.

> But there is almost literally no way that you are being fairly compensated > if you really are 10 times as productive as your average engineer.

(Assuming they exist, of course) I'd wager if a 10x engineer was involved in a mundane business, they would be 10x without giving 100% of their time. Or rather, they'd give 100% of their time sometimes, and 20% of their time more often.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> What is the term for being a bit too eager junior making some systems that become business critical and then getting some second hand shame for making something the existing team can't support.

</comment><comment><USER37> This does not look like the description of "10x engineer" at all. An "immature engineer"? Yes. But "10x engineer? No.

A true "10x engineer" would also care a great deal about documenting stuff, communicating that to the team, and be wise to ensure that a good technology system should not have a single point of failure (either technical or human). The fact this so-called 10x engineer made himself a single point of failure goes against the basic principles of engineering.

</comment><comment><USER38> So, once I had a inspiration talk to a soon to be new grads. When I was preparing a presentation, I realized, that 10x engineer is not necessarily the one who does 10x more work, but the one who can empower /inspire others to do much more work.

So, I put a funny slide - if any of you get inspired by my talk and do something great, then you are looking right now on this unicorn 10x or maybe 100x eng.

The bottom line, helping others will make you 10x, not putting yourself as a bottleneck everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER39> Are we, as HN-ers, really going to accept self-certification of the 10X moniker? What exactly makes this person a 10X engineer, leave alone a good engineer.

He claims to have not been liked while a 10X-er, but pivots successfully into founding an inter-personal-relationship heavy company, whose U.S.P. is decidedly not engineering, and we're all to believe his self certification of the 10X moniker, if such a thing even exists.

</comment><comment><USER40> I don't know about the actual "10x" label or how to even measure that objectively. And I am not even gonna go discussing the weekend tweet storm.

But, programmers can tremendously improve their own efficiency/output by building their own collection of libraries and toolkits.

Pretty much by now, we all have seen more or less the same things. So if we have a vast archive of tools, our productivity can be crazy high.

</comment><comment><USER41> When I started reading this, I thought, it may be a boast in disguise. But this article is very well written and seems utmost sincere.

I almost feel like sending this to a "10x Engineer" in my team. (Its in quotes, because I do believe in the 10x concept, minus the negative baggage which it is associated with, and as the article shows, also can be true.

</comment><comment><USER42> 10x engineering is, for the most part, knowing how to avoid 90% of useless efforts due to over-engineering solutions. It has nothing to do with being a dick to work more or alike. I think that what makes all of us 10x sometimes in our programming career is what we do when we are _not_ writing code, but thinking at how to design it.

<comment><USER43> overengineering, sure, but also underengineering

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Back in 2000 we used the term _10x Engineer_ primarily to mean _Full Stack Engineer_.

In other words, you needed to hire 10 people with individual skill sets to match one Generalist who understood the entire stack.

The term appears have morphed and skewed over the years. Regression toward the mean has shifted the expectations for "average" programmers.

</comment><comment><USER45> Back then, a "10x engineer" was something like what the OP described here: technical skill several standard deviations from the mean in a variety of areas.

Today, a "10x engineer" to me is someone that is very technically competent but is _also_ competent with people and business needs.

The latter is much harder to find than the former, IMO.

</comment><comment><USER46> This! Ten times this! Single dependencies like this are absolutely a risk management issue.

I say this as someone who's both been a single point of failure at times (and learned my lesson) and someone who's had to clean up after piles of "clever" code that someone left behind when they got hired out somewhere else.

</comment><comment><USER47> Linus brought us Linux and Git. To me, he's probably the greatest programmer of our time.

James Strachan brought us Camel and Groovy. That's pretty good.

Gavin King had Hibernate and Seam. Not too shabby, either.

There are definitely people who are very good. To me, having more than one runaway hit is a good indicator.

But there are a very few of them.

<comment><USER48> Having a runaway hit isn't just about creating it, but also successfully maintaining it. Strachan abandoned Apache Groovy only 2 years after creating it so he doesn't really count. Unfortunately he let in someone without any programming aptitude into the Codehaus despotry, and was eventually eased out with stirred up conflicts like the one over builder syntax in Dec 2005. He even had his commit privileges stripped from him afterwards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> This guy can't be a 10x engineer, because the first thing you learn when being admitted in "Rule #1: you do not talk about 10x engineers" (I can, because I wasn't invited myself and heard it via someone they dumped).

</comment><comment><USER50> _In order to truly become an insufferable 10x Engineering talent..._

Neither the author nor the toot thread that inspired the author seem to have the first clue what the term means. And it would take, what, six words to define it?

</comment><comment><USER51> This article does not represent the same concept of 10x that Brooks proposed in Mythical Man Month. The present article is about an arrogant jerk who was managed exceptionally badly.

</comment><comment><USER52> wow, that site's ads are so invasive I can barely read the content

<comment><USER53> Sorry about that. Free Wordpress installations have a lot of ads. I need to do something about that...

<comment><USER54> You've got everyone's favorite "This One Vegetable Destroys You From The Inside" and "No Diet Or Gym - Try This" advertising variety. They make your site look much lower quality than it probably is.

When I opened it in IE to see it without my adblocker I also got an alert about trying to download or run a javascript file. Probably incompetence on the ad network's part (it doesn't look any more malicious than your average ad network tracker), but prompting people to download random 3rd party js files isn't a good look either.

[https://i.imgur.com/gIoJY7v.png](https://i.imgur.com/gIoJY7v.png)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> "A 10x engineer is usually levitating, and farting out 1's and 0's as they whiteboard a proof that P=NP. They stopped sleeping before they were born. They are usually typing on two keyboards simultaneously."

</comment><comment><USER56> 10x at one job - developed huge hunks of the infrastructure, not quite at Jeff Dean level but extremely valuable, nice friendly colleague, well commented clean code.

</comment><comment><USER57> I was a 20x engineer. I apologize as well.

</comment><comment><USER58> I've never understood the fake shame one is supposed to feel at being productive, resourceful, and seeking to work with passion while removing speed limits. I'm reminded of this article about three personalities and different stages of a startup: [https://blog.codinghorror.com/commandos-infantry-and- police/](https://blog.codinghorror.com/commandos-infantry-and-police/)

There's no shame in being a Commando, or even a Rick. ([https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/we-fired-our-top-talent- be...](https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/we-fired-our-top-talent-best- decision-we-ever-made-4c0a99728fde/)) And a business can certainly continue to get high value out of these personality types.

If you are one, though, there are many practical things you need to learn. First, you need to remove temper and emotions from your work personality. I really recommend regular meditation for this. Also take vacations even when you don't think you need it (stress is a sneaky beast). You need to let go of some work you did that you hold dear, and realize that you will need to hand off to people who will not do things as perfectly or with such attention to detail, and may need structure and guardrails and speed limits that will frustrate you to no end. (E.g. Scrum, story points, more rigidity around testing, mandatory code review around trivial commits, security reviews.) The commandos need to make way for those who are able to march in step.

My second piece of advice is, as a company grows you need to narrow your scope to a point where you can still be the most productive version of yourself, but you aren't carrying such a burden that you burn out. (Also my advice for managers who find themselves with a Rick kind character.) The main skills you need to learn for this are communication and diplomacy. If the company wants to get into a new area, full of unblazed trails, with a very high amount of risk and technical difficulty, as a commando this is perfect for you.

TLDR if you are a tiger, better to find an area where you thrive vs pretending to be a mediocre wolf.

<comment><USER31> A 10x shouldn't be ashamed of their talent or try to be something else; the biggest problem with 10x talent is that they are mismanaged in a way that doesn't treat them as the benevolent freak that they are. In some cases other folks are berated for not keeping up with the 10x; in others they drown in trying to manage the technical debt being created by someone who produces an order of magnitude more than them. When mismanaged, these effects on the rest of the team lead to a drop in morale and turnover... which will likely lead to management coaxing the 10x to deliver even more which only makes the problem worse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Being a 10X engineer at a small company I would say is both true and somewhat different at the same time. In the author's case it sounds like these were smaller companies? At every small company, there are people that are "super important", but similarly many people in different non-engineering roles are also "super important". My thinking at least on the 10X engineer concept was more like somebody who shows up at a larger company like Google or Apple and proceeds to make everybody there look like they are standing still while he/she produces far more / greater quality stuff than the average person there. In that case, if they left, sure the company would still keeping going, but you are outside of the 1-2 quantization question around where somebody is truly substantially more skilled than their peers. Big fish in a small pond vs. Big fish in a bigg-ish pond on the engineering side. It doesn't mean that you aren't necessarily a 10X engineer at a small company, but it just means the frame of reference is super unclear whether you are talking about somebody who is really hard to replace and super important to the company vs. somebody who truly is just knocking it out of the park left and right.</comment>


A VPN Review Site Dominated Google Search with a Scam - <AUTHOR> https://www.pcmag.com/news/367640/how-a-vpn-review-site-dominated-google-search-with-a-scam <comment><USER2> This is pretty common in the web hosting scene, which this site's owner also runs a similar dodgy website in. You see the same dodgy news article setup, the same reliance on affiliate links for monetisation, the same questionable reviews, hell even the owner being a non existent shill under a fake name.

The likes of the FTC and ASA definitely need to get more involved in these markets, and start fining busineses/site owners hiding their links to promoted companies and what not.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not surprising. VPN referral marketing is a cesspool in general; generous affiliate payments establish a huge incentive for "reviewers" to promote whatever site is offering the best kickbacks at the moment, and a lack of easily comparable (or verifiable!) features leaves little material for honest reviewers to work with.</comment>


Vulners – Vulnerability Data Base - <AUTHOR> https://vulners.com <comment><USER2> This looks really nice service! Couple of questions that I couldn't find answer from the website: 1) who is behind this(e.g. will it be around in few years if I implement some of their APIs now)? And 2) what's the license for using APIs and data? (e.g. is it free for what ever, or do you need commercial license for certain uses)?

<comment><USER3> Kirill «isox» Ermakov is for core, API and administration. @isox_xx

Igor «Videns» is search features programmer @v1dens

Ivan «Vancyver» is frontend developer @vankyv3r

Alex «Plex» is for content crawling automation @__plex

Alex Leonov handles our blog and analytics @leonov_av

Feel free to use any API :) By the way, read more about it at the our blog: [https://blog.vulners.com/](https://blog.vulners.com/)

DB is completely freeware it will stay freeware forever.

<comment><USER2> >> DB is completely freeware it will stay freeware forever.

Thank You! :) And special Kudos for a nice and clean API and not going with [ horrors such as ] SCAP[1]. Will most certainly give it a go!

[1] [http://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/SP/nistspecialpublic...](http://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/SP/nistspecialpublication800-126r2.pdf)

<comment><USER3> We are very familiar with SCAP. So, if someone will need content in OVAL language we can make it available in one week :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Any questions or suggest? We are near :) firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER4> do you tolerate scraping?

<comment><USER3> Didn't really get. What do you mean?</comment></comment></comment>