The hyper-specialist shops of Berlin - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/apr/29/are-the-hyper-specialist-shops-of-berlin-the-future-of-retail <comment><USER2> Several hyper-specialist shops I know in Munich:

\- balloon shops seem to do really well because we have several here and every major city seems to have one

\- foam shop for when you need to fix your upholstery

\- venetian blind store which only sells the vertical kind

\- _Ketten Wild_ was a chain shop that only sold chains but chains in all forms and sizes

\- _la porcelaine blanche 's_ slogan is _" only china, only white"_ and that is what they do

\- elk shop for everything elk related - not that we have any elks in Germany but elks are cute

\- Schrauben Preisinger sells only screws. They claim they have 30000 different types in their store and this is absolutely credible. A few years ago I was there to get some M1 screws for a project when I witnessed an interesting exchange between another customer and a salesman. The customer had brought a screw with a quite wide thread. It was a straight screw, not tapered and not a wood screw, just with an obviously non-metric thread. He inquired if they had this type of screw in stock. The salesman answered slightly offended that this was a shop for machine screws and they would not sell _furniture_ screws.

Also button shops are super useful. If you lose a button you go there with your piece of clothing and they will find a suitable replacement in no time. I never visited the one in Berlin but the one in Munich saved me good money.

EDIT: I just remembered two more:

\- Gummi bear shops are a bit like balloon shops. I don't understand it but there seems to be enough demand to support several of them in a single city.

\- Berlin's Ampelmann. Maybe doesn't quite fit into the category because it's more of a tourist curiosity. On the other hand: A shop that only sells stuff related to the graphic design of a symbol on the traffic lights of a defunct state is quite hyper-specialized I guess.

<comment><USER3> Even the 75000 inhabitant city I live in has a balloon shop, but also one for brushes. Also in the neighboring city there used to be a shop just for rubber.

<comment><USER4> I imagine the margins for balloon shops incredibly good.

<comment><USER5> They keep most of their inventory uninflated so storage requirements are not that big and the designs keep a long time, and for non-specialists, it's generally not worth keeping bottled Helium around, so it's a pretty decent business I suppose.

<comment><USER6> I buy my inflated balloons at the "dollar store", which is a good deal since they are 3.99 or more at the grocery store.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For many many years there was a shop on Victoria street in Edinburgh that appeared to sell nothing but brooms and large balls of string - it was even mentioned in _Complicity_ by Iain Banks.

Here are some pics of it:

[http://www.edinphoto.org.uk/0_MY_P_S/0_my_photographs_shops_...](http://www.edinphoto.org.uk/0_MY_P_S/0_my_photographs_shops_victoria_street_40_me03_jan_1992.htm)

Edit: Sad to say that I passed that shop for many years going to uni in the Grassmarket (both as a student and working there) and never went in!

<comment><USER8> Wow this web site is like we're back in 1996. Love it. Reminded me how simple was the web back then.

<comment><USER9> Very usable and simple web design with obvious blue links and clearly defined content areas. Everything but the header/footer navigation is great, including the logical street-based interior navigation.

The HTML source is a mix of old / new HTML, which shows the author has been updating by hand for years and improved their skill (slightly).

<comment><USER10> A great submission for my subreddit :) [https://old.reddit.com/r/SpartanWeb/comments/bjmkqp/edinphot...](https://old.reddit.com/r/SpartanWeb/comments/bjmkqp/edinphoto_home_page_the_history_of_photography_in/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would assume that the decline of specialist shops is strongly correlated with rising rents for storefront properties. But with online shopping on the rise, maybe landlords (outside shopping malls and after some years to pass through the stages of grief) can accept that there just isn't that much money in rents for storefronts anymore, and that specialist shops thereby can continue to exist.

Of course, the risk is that they will just tear it all down and convert it into lofts, office complexes or something instead, leaving _nothing_ except lofts, office complexes and huge malls.

<comment><USER12> I don't know about in Germany, but the huge malls are going the way of the dodo in the US.

<comment><USER13> People say this, but both of the malls I've been to in the past few years (one in Bellevue, WA and one in Chandler, AZ) have been completely packed almost every time. Is it really still true that malls are going away?

<comment><USER14> A-class malls are still doing well. The mall you're referring to in Bellevue, where I have also been, is a class-A mall.

Class-A malls tend to be in busier, higher wealth, sometimes more urban areas, have best in class furnishings, and have tier-1 national tenants, with many of those tenants catering to more of a premium/luxury consumer.

Most B-class or C-class malls, however, are dying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hyper-specialization is everywhere if you ever step into any Asian country.

Indians even have last names based on their hyper-specialized occupation. I was in Thailand and I saw a tiny shop whose only job was to take old torn notes and exchange it for a new one by charging a small flat fee. I had an Indian friend that told me that specializations in old cities was also geographically organized. One part of street would only sell pressure cookers while another side would sell watering cans.

<comment><USER16> > I had an Indian friend that told me that specializations in old cities was > also geographically organized. One part of street would only sell pressure > cookers while another side would sell watering cans.

That's how London used to be, which is why the area around St Paul's has roads like "Leather Lane", "Milk Street", and "Poultry".

<comment><USER17> I found Kowloon to be like this when I was visiting Hong Kong a few years ago. One that stands out in my mind was turning a corner and being on a street that seemed to sell nothing but pet turtles and fish.

<comment><USER15> Wow. Did you happen to take pictures? If you do, please share as any photographic insight into Kowloon walled city is highly sought after!

<comment><USER17> Kowloon and Kowloon walled city are not the same thing. Kowloon walled city was long gone when I made that trip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I live in Paris and you can find highly specialized shops too. Some shops only sell about three types of fabric, some others will sell only buttons, a certain type of leather or a special type of ink. I love getting in those shops and meeting the people who are really passionate about their visibly small yet huge niche. It always get wonderful once you start looking at the details.

<comment><USER19> FWIW, there is likely to be a button shop wherever you got enough seamstresses, tailors, dressmakers and fashion industry.

Buttons are really something you have to see and touch in person.

As a child, my mother used to take me with her to "Parker Buttons" in downtown Pittsburgh. I remember plunging my arms elbows-deep into containers of shiny black buttons. Nothing else like it in the world.

<comment><USER20> Those Button Men can be pretty intense!

[https://youtu.be/UBOG5556_0g?t=12m5s](https://youtu.be/UBOG5556_0g?t=12m5s)

Mr. Lossoff always reminds me of another Button Man, Ted Selker, inventor of the distinguished "Joy Button".

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hhnlaUxsL8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hhnlaUxsL8)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > _Instead of shutting up shop, Ghouneim relocated to humdrum Wittenau, a > suburb of Berlin, and got some tape artists to decorate the facade of the > new building. Footfall has naturally decreased, but 80% of his business > comes from online sales and regular industrial clients, for whom Klebeband's > four employees cut and colour match tape of all varieties to order._

Sounds like they realize that people going "Have you heard of the store that only sells stickytape?" is great buzz marketing generator.

I assume they'd need space to store the tape to sell to their online and industrial clients, so why not stack it up next to a counter and make a little side cash from the consumer market?

(I also have noticed in Germany they're much more cash-friendly, so I can totally see more people in DE preferring to go to a store and pay cash than submit PII like credit card and home address to purchase some sticky tape)

<comment><USER22> Cash-friendly and bank unfriendly. I lived in Germany for a year and I haven't had to finish a branch so many times in my life as that year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> In Cambridge (UK), on an out-of-the-way side street, for many years there was a shop called "Roll On Blank Tape".

I never understood how they could possibly do enough business to stay _in_ business, and always suspected that if you asked in just the right way they might sell you some ... not-blank tapes.

Boringly, the available evidence suggests that actually it's just that the person who ran the shop was really interested in cassette tape and didn't mind not making any money to speak of.

<comment><USER24> Like, just audio cassette or all types of blank magnetic tape, or blank tape in general? Like masking-, sello-, elephant-tapes?

<comment><USER25> Just audio cassettes, though they weren't too pure to also sell blank minidiscs and the like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Another specialist Berlin shop to the list (modelmaking/art materials and tools) and very famous amoung architects:

[https://www.modulor.de/en/store-berlin/](https://www.modulor.de/en/store- berlin/)

<comment><USER5> My sister works there. It's a very nice store, but I wouldn't describe it as hyper specialized. Maybe more of a general stationery/art supplies store, but with a lot of extra depth in some areas (architectural supplies etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I also find hyper-specialist shops in america wherever there is still cheap land enough for it. When I used to live in Buffalo, there were small shops- one specifically for new agey "gypsy" clothing, one for bath soap made in house, one for herbs for witchcraft, one that specialized in stones. I really enjoyed those places and miss them now how I live in NYC (although NYC has its own quirks- big gay ice cream is great!)

<comment><USER28> New York City has tons of these too; they're just generally not well- advertised since they many of them cater to a specific market. There are a few button stores in New York, mostly in the Garment District, but also on the upper east side. There are stores selling all kinds of obscure art supplies, kitchen equipment, and lab gear too.

To be fair, I'm not sure exactly where you'd buy a currywurst cushion, but there's a shop selling bones and stuff near NYU, if you someday decide that your living in room needs more of a Natural History Museum vibe.

<comment><USER29> There used to be a bone store in Berkeley, called The Bone Room. They're online-only now, though, after the death of their founder and presumably also rising rents. ([https://www.boneroom.com/about-- contact.html](https://www.boneroom.com/about--contact.html))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > he worked part-time to build and sell his own ant terrariums, which he calls > "formicariums", from the insect's Latin name.

That's not just what he calls it, that's the official name for them.

</comment><comment><USER31> Nothing too surprising really. The largest the density of people living in the same place, the more very niche businesses find enough folks to generate a livelihood out of it. The only reason why such shops tend to disappear is when rents become too high - but then nowadays they have the opportunity to go online instead. Tokyo has lots of hyper-specialist shops in different areas of the city, too.

</comment><comment><USER32> While it's basically more of a cafe, I really like that a Brownie-specialized place opened here in Kyiv, Ukraine (called "Veterano Brownie", a concept they took from "Veterano Pizza", where only war veterans or forced migrants are hired). Always nice to see that something that you previously perceived as a treat of one type can be developed into a whole mini-company with lots of care and a variety of forms and tastes.

</comment><comment><USER33> This doesn't really make sense to me.

On the internet hyper-specialisation is obvious since space is virtually unlimited. But in real life, I mean, real estate is limited so why wouldn't darwinian market forces make a shop with product diversity + epsilon out compete a shop with a more niche spectrum of products, until only walmart and such remains?

<comment><USER34> Many reasons.

First, WalMart doesn't have everything. Only a few people in any city are interested in buying specialty items, it doesn't make sense to WalMart to stock that everywhere when some stores will never have a sale. A specialty store brings in customers from all over the city.

A human who knows one product well is very useful. WalMart salesmen don't know their product. Going to a specialist who knows the product well makes sense because you can get advice. Also, WalMart as limited space: the specialist shop will often have the exact thing you need, while WalMart will have at best something similar, for real niche items you can't even get a substitute.

For the above to work you need a large enough population. The small hyper- specialist shop only works when there are enough people who will buy from it. Small towns in the middle of nowhere have a specialist store selling only farm equipment, you won't find that in the middle of a big city (you will on the edge). A big city will have specialist stores to support the industry (and hobbyists) in that town.

When the item needs to be custom fit you need a store. WalMart can fit glasses, but they don't know anything about pens. I bet many of you didn't know that some pens are custom adjusted to the user - there are enough people who like expensive pens to support pen shop in some cities. Likewise golf clubs, bowling balls...

<comment><USER35> > For the above to work you need a large enough population

I think you also need a sanely designed city with effective public transport. For example, Atlanta or Charlotte have millions of people, including hobbyists and artists and enthusiasts, but I don't think many of the shops in the linked article would survive in a strip mall.

<comment><USER34> Not true on path counts.

You don't need a sane design, you need a large enough population. Walmart needs to be every few miles because if they aren't people will go to a competitor who is closer. For specialty stores though there is no competition. Customers often will drive for over an hour to get there and put up with a really bad location because that is the only choice.

I have seen such stores in strip malls - not the new ones, but the old almost dead ones often find a new lease on life by renting to specialty stores that bring in people from all over.

<comment><USER36> Gail K fabrics in Atlanta. 2 locations and you can find any type of fabric under the sun. Just so little competition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> In Dublin, there was a shop that mostly just sold yeast until recently: [https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/homes-and- property...](https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/homes-and- property/johnny-ronan-made-an-offer-they-had-no-difficulty-refusing-1.3396814)

It always looked closed; I walked past it for a decade or so every day without realising that it was still in business.

And then there's the top floor of Stephens Green shopping center, which mostly just contains very strange specialised shops, with no visible customers.

</comment><comment><USER38> It's a trope: [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeverelySpeciali...](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeverelySpecializedStore)

<comment><USER39> Not only is it a trope, UHF satirized this over twenty years ago. Spatula City!

[https://youtu.be/2XbCWmY0eqY](https://youtu.be/2XbCWmY0eqY)

<comment><USER38> That's the image on the TV Tropes page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This reminds me of when I was in Shenzhen's Huaqiangbei area --- it's mostly electronics, but you can find plenty of shops selling only varieties of one type of product.

</comment><comment><USER41> With online retail, brick-and-mortar retail is no longer useful just for aggregating things into a location that you can go to buy them, except for things that can't be shipped for cost or time reasons.

So the value of brick and mortar retail becomes the ability to get you exactly what you need, and this often involves human expertise which by its nature specializes.

The button store on the Upper East Side in New York City has a lady there who just hands you the button you need. You show her your jacket where the button got caught in a cab door, and she doesn't even have to hunt -- she walks to one of her thousands of teeny drawers, and pulls out your exact button or something pretty damn close. In the article, the scotch tape guy knows exactly what scotch tape you need, and that's the reason for his store existing. He could as easily have an office where he then orders you the tape online for drone delivery.

</comment><comment><USER42> FTA: _" This is Antstore, the world's first specialist ant shop, a business with around two dozen employees, a glass-cutting workshop, plastic and plaster modelling studios and a full-time social media manager."_

This sounds like a Monty Python sketch brought to life.

</comment><comment><USER43> I don't know if its still there, but west Philadelphia (somewhere around 49th St.) had a Carrot Cake store. They made the best carrot cake I've ever had, and made nothing else.

</comment><comment><USER44> I've been past a specialist umbrella shop [0] in London hundreds of times and it has always intrigued me, though I have never been inside. I'm not quite sure it's in the same vein as the other speciality shops people are listing here though, since it has been there for almost 200 years and clearly targets the more discerning customer with high quality and bespoke items.

[0] [https://www.james-smith.co.uk/](https://www.james-smith.co.uk/)

</comment><comment><USER45> Surely the obvious question is: is the high street shop really a justified expense? Surely all the sales are online? The more specialized the shop, the less one can hope to fulfill ones sales volume from people in physical cruising distance. The article doesn't seem to address this, except for acknowledging that most sales are online.

<comment><USER46> In theory it does not make a lot sense. In practice, I am amazed at how much crap most online webshops are.

In a shop I can browse through the wares much easier. I can examine them, look at the size and specs, feel the weight and texture, get ideas.

More often than not, crucial specs of the product I am looking at are not available. Dimensions and weights are often missing, I often can't look at more than 5 or 6 articles at the time.

Webshops are great when you know exactly what you need. They are hell if your need is "4 or 5 buttons that would look good on that fabric"

<comment><USER24> Just trying to find things like washers online had been a nightmare for me before -- how can they list the external diameter and not internal, how can they not say what material it is, or the thickness!??

I ended up trawling a few local plumbing supply stores and was really surprised how few washers they had, about the fourth store had a few random open boxes they let me rummage through and we agreed a price. It was unexpectedly difficult.

I've found similar problems getting screws I want (for a ceramics kiln). Gave up and used the best thing I could find in Screwfix (which aren't that good).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> The sitre of the meat textile shop is pretty interesting: [https://aufschnitt.net/](https://aufschnitt.net/)

</comment><comment><USER48> This is a classic case of what happens when key parts of doing business have a low-cost and low barrier to entry. Diversity and interestingness take hold.

</comment><comment><USER49> Yes, there is a balloon shop around the corner. They don't have anything except balloons, but they go deep.

</comment><comment><USER50> The headline asks: Are the hyper-specialist shops of Berlin the future of retail?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

No. The Internet is.

</comment><comment><USER51> > Are the hyper-specialist shops of Berlin the future of retail? > [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

Although in this case I would say YES, that specialist shops are needed to combat Amazon being non specialist.

</comment><comment><USER52> Yeah, the communists have destroyed this in the eastern part of Europe nearly perfectly

EDIT: Why am I getting downvoted for a factual, accepted, well researched and well known statement?

<comment><USER53> Wording. Your comment feels more like vitriol than fact statement, regardless of being correct.

It's an interesting point. Is there a perceptible difference for Berliners between E/W shop types?

<comment><USER54> Several of the shops mentioned in the article are in Kreuzberg which was in the west before the wall came down but now has more in common with other eastern districts like Friererichshain or Neukolln than ones like Charlottenburg in the west. These kind of quirky workshop shops or independent shops are more common in those eastern districts I think than in the west now, which has more of the usual sorts of big high street chains.

<comment><USER55> Kreuzberg was also one of the poorest parts of West Berlin and is now home to all the hipsters (and uses East German Ampelmännchen if memory serves).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> If only I wasn't so boring; some interesting retail spaces have opened up in my area.

</comment><comment><USER57> Is anyone else failing to see a legitimate need for sticky tape in tens of different colours? What about the shopping experience of the future, when such shops are destined to be the "future of retail"? Suddenly you are now spending an hour choosing between balloons of different shapes and colours or the perfectly matching button for your shirt. It's an illusion of choice, fueling pointless production of variations of the same thing and targeting your attention and time.

<comment><USER58> What do you mean "a legitimate need"?

Why do people need paint in more than one or two colors? Why do people need multiple styles of clothes, beyond a "summer uniform" and "winter uniform"? Why do people bother to maintain both vi and emacs when only one is necessary?

Most of the time, any tape will do, but sometimes you want the perfect paisley to complement your wrapping paper choice. Since most people don't care most of the time, most stores that sell tape won't have more than one or two kinds, so you go to a specialty retailer to find the unusual stuff for unusual circumstances.</comment></comment>


Dogs are no smarter than goats - <AUTHOR> https://www.irishtimes.com/news/offbeat/dogs-are-no-smarter-than-goats-scientists-say-1.3648764 <comment><AUTHOR> Anybody who's ever met a goat, would realise this isn't much of a criticism. Goats are very Smart, evolutionarily smart enough to not become sheep. They call baby goats _"kids"_ for a reason!</comment>


Introducing the Elephant Curve - <AUTHOR> http://gregluck.com/blog/archives/2010/10/introducing-the-elephant-curve/

<comment><USER2> _In the book a boa constrictor swallows an elephant. The silhouette of the boa then becomes an elephant curve._

That doesn't actually happens in the book. The image is just creative drawing by the narrator but most people thinks of it as a hat. Only the Little Prince recognized it immediately as a elephant inside a boa constrictor.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Though I did not read the book at school"

A lot of people actually read that book voluntarily, outside of school :-)

<comment><USER4> <http://wikilivres.info/wiki/The_Little_Prince>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't get it? All I see is a hat.

</comment><comment><USER6> A day's-worth of elphant-curve traffic is done not when there are no more visitors to arrive, but when there are no more visitors to leave.</comment>


Ornette Coleman, Jazz Innovator, Dies at 85 - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/12/arts/music/ornette-coleman-jazz-saxophonist-dies-at-85-obituary.html?_r=0

<comment><USER2> I've always sort of hoped that Jazz was a genre of music that programmers would most easily relate to. Jazz artists are a bit like the hackers of musical theory. I mean, they are able to disassemble a tune and effectively piece it back together again in new and interesting ways, often times on the fly.

Coleman pioneered free jazz which took even that to a new level, pretty much ignoring all the rules.

This man was a giant.

<comment><USER3> There's an album, 'Codebook' by alto saxophonist and composer, Rudresh Mahanthappa, which is laden with mathematical concepts. It isn't the most pleasant album to listen to, but it is interesting and intriguing to listen to the starkness of music set to mathematical objects of curiosity.

[https://pirecordings.com/album/pi21](https://pirecordings.com/album/pi21)

Here's an article on him, he apparently had a lot of interest in mathematics in high school and tries to incorporate some of that in his music.

[1] Science 26 January 2007: Vol. 315 no. 5811 pp. 462-463 DOI: 10.1126/science.1139629 [http://pastebin.com/B5V73iz8](http://pastebin.com/B5V73iz8)

[2] [http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/composing_in_code/](http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/composing_in_code/)</comment></comment>


What went wrong with MeeGo? 'Nokia lost faith in the project' - <AUTHOR> http://www.techradar.com/news/software/what-went-wrong-with-meego-nokia-lost-faith-in-the-project--1147770

<comment><USER2> No. What went wrong with MeeGo was that it was too little, too late.

I played extensively with the N9 and it just wasn't that impressive. It was pretty slow, had a cumbersome UI with next to no apps, ecosystem e.g. store/media or accessories.

Nokia's hardware talent would simply have been wasted on it.</comment>


Asian Nation-State hackers use fileless RAT for their hacking campaign - <AUTHOR> http://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/46557/malware/fileless-rat.html <comment><USER2> The mentioned attack vector is not "fileless". It is covertly assembling several files on the disk of the computer directly in memory to then run them from there.

So, quite a number of files and system calls involved that permit to recognize and react to this attack.

An example of true "fileless" attack would be the one demonstrated by Conficker, where an infected computer attacks by brute force password guessing the other computers on the same network, gains access to the new machine and then runs the virus code without storing any files on the local disk.</comment>


Prius used as an emergency generator - <AUTHOR> http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/prius-its-not-just-a-car-its-an-emergency-generator/?em

<comment><USER2> I find it hard to believe that they actually advocated using hybrids to give power back to a smart grid. The idea behind "giving back power" is to use renewable sources installed around the home, not to burn gas in a place that is not a power station.</comment>


Oracle in conflict with another open source project? - <AUTHOR> http://www.hudson-labs.org/content/whos-driving-thing <comment><USER2> For a little bit of context, I've done some plug-in commits in my time and met the important guys in this project.

Unlike some categorizations in the comments here, I wouldn't say that the devs are anti-Oracle, they're _pro-Hudson_. I think they've tried to work with Oracle as much as they can, and certainly shown more patience than I think I would have. Once it became clear Oracle didn't necessarily have Hudson's best intentions at heart, things started to go downhill.

Oracle has not been especially communicative, and it's not especially respectful to literally pull the plug on a project's infrastructure without decent prior warning. For all the failings of java.net, when it was run by Sun, they did at least make sure people knew ahead of time of planned outages (the unplanned we don't discuss).

From my POV, it looks like Oracle has two heads: there's the nasty, legal head that is happy to sue everyone with Sun's patent arsenal, and there's the plain incompetent head that doesn't have a clue how to interact with open-source development. We're seeing the latter here, and I guess the community is just fortunate that Hudson isn't patent-encumbered (as far as I know). I don't think there's any particular malice here, just a general level of incompetence and hubris.

<comment><USER3> I agree. This sounds like it's just a classic case of Not Invented Here syndrome more than anything else. I've been in a similar situation before: a big company is insistent that _everyone_ use their own internal infrastructure because they're skeptical of the reliability of others' networks. Of course, they ignore the fact that their network is terribly unreliable in making this decision.

</comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 As someone who has been only a light user of java.net (attempting to checkout code, navigate source repositories online, etc.) I cannot imagine how anyone could have much faith that a new architecture for this service would be any better.

Very odd that the Oracle VP states that in order to remain a part of the "Java community", Hudson should remain hosted on java.net. There is no way to quantify this but it seems like a very, very tiny minority of OSS Java projects use this service for hosting.

<comment><USER4> Wonder how Apache feels about not being apart of the Java community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Want: Github, Git, Google groups. Don't want: Java.net, kenai, Oracle messing around. Have no problems with: Fork, name change.

Silent "larger community" user has spoken.

<comment><USER6> I think by "silent larger community" with "dozens" of people, who he's really talking about is people pay Oracle a _LOT_ of money. Oracle wants these assets to stay under as much Oracle influence as possible so customers don't go getting any bright ideas about taking their money or attention elsewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm kind of rooting for a fork, just as a lab of top-down versus developer- driven progress, with the Oracle version staying on SVN.

Cool names might be 'NortheastPassage' or 'Passage', for the water-navigable route explorer Henry Hudson sought. Or something based on features near the Hudson river in New York, like 'Adirondack' or 'Albany'. Or something in contrast or crossing of the river, like 'EastRiver' or 'GWBridge' or 'HollandTunnel' or 'Verrazano'.

<comment><USER8> If we are talking rivers here then "Rubicon" might be an apt project fork name.

<comment><USER9> The Mohawk is a large river that feeds into the Hudson just out side of Albany. I think we should name it that :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is Oracle just actively trying to destroy their acquired assets now?

<comment><USER11> Quoting many people, no need to attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Fork it and rename it.

Hudson is too important to me, and lots of other developers, to be subject to the whims of Oracle executives. If ever there was a case where forking is the most obvious answer, this is it.

As for people who have built a business out of Hudson: "Hudson" is only a name and if Oracle wants the name, let them have it.

If you rename it I'll do my part in helping with the marketing of the new name by spreading the word among my peers and I suspect most other Hudson users would do the same.

</comment><comment><USER13> How did Oracle got to own this project? I imagine that thru the Sun acquisition. But, was this a project started/sponsored by Sun. I couldn't find any information in the hudson site or in the wikipedia page.

<comment><USER2> Kohsuke Kawaguchi (the founder/lead dev) used to work for Sun, and developed Hudson for them. Oracle got Hudson via the acquisition. Kohsuke stayed at Oracle for a while (longer than some other Sun devs, certainly), then left to form Infradna instead, providing Hudson consulting.

[1] <http://infradna.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> >Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software,

>package hudson;

You might own the trademark Oracle, but you just licensed the use of it to everyone.

<comment><USER15> "copies of the Software"

Doesn't say anything about the name. Trademark law and copyright law are related but very distinct. If Oracle owns and enforces the trademark "Hudson" in the context of continuous integration software, and they say "Stop using the name Hudson", you must comply regardless of any copyright licensing in effect.

Compare Firefox which has a free software license but prohibits use of the Firefox name if any modifications are made to the code. This is why it's called Iceweasel on Debian -- as I understand it, even a security patch is technically enough to violate the contract.

<comment><USER14> On the contrary: the software is called "hudson", and the license explicitly grants the right to deal in the software _without restriction_. Those rights _include_ the rights to distribute and publish, but "including" doesnt mean "only". In any case, how would one publish this software without using the name "hudson"? Does this license imply that prior to publishing the software we have to replace every instane of the letters h u d s o n with something else? That would not be "without restriction".

There are several licenses written that say "you may not use our name to promote your version of the software" or something like that. MIT is not one of them.

Oracle is welcome to fork it and give it a tougher license. Dont expect it will see many commits after that tho.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> hmm the community should apply some fun and humor..

name the fork SSBounty

</comment><comment><USER17> "Oracle in conflict with another open source project?"

I know it is chic to dump on Oracle these days. Can we please get a neutral title or the same title as the original post? I disagree with the use of the word "another" and the question mark. A better title would be "Conflict between Oracle and Hudson project".

EDIT: It looks like Andrew Bayer, a core developer on the Hudson project, submitted the story. It also looks like any comments calling for reasonable, rational debate are being down-voted. That's all I'm asking: reasonable, rationale debate.

It looks like that Oracle doesn't like the way that the project is run and this isn't an attack on open source. This is a disagreement about how the project is run. But we can't even have that debate because the topic has been slanted.

<comment><USER18> 1\. The title is not untrue.

2\. It's not known whether this will lead to a full blown "conflict" (although, who are we kidding, it probably will)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't know anything about Hudson. But when I see stories like this (big bad corporate imposes their will on open source), I always think the drama queens (on both sides) are busy having "meetings" instead of doing actual work.

Want to fork? Then fork! You don't need anyone's permission. In this day of DVCS it's about two commands to fork back should relations improve. Using github is different only in degree, not in kind, from using a different IDE on your local machine. You don't have to have a holy war about it. If your development is better as a result you will win, if not you won't. It might be fun to throw a little tantrum, but it won't make the code any better.

If I'm a developer, especially a developer on a project for which I'm not getting paid, I'll do the development using whatever the hell tools I want, thanks. And if someone tells me I can't, frankly, it's not really up to them.

<comment><USER20> > I don't know anything about Hudson. But when I see stories like this (big > bad corporate imposes their will on open source), I always think the drama > queens (on both sides) are busy having "meetings" instead of doing actual > work.

>If I'm a developer, especially a developer on a project for which I'm not getting paid, I'll do the development using whatever the hell tools I want, thanks. And if someone tells me I can't, frankly, it's not really up to them.

This is exactly the position of the Hudson developers, so why call them drama queens? They can't "just fork it". It's a large open source project with 100+ developers. They need to plan, get consensus, etc. Those "meetings" you seem to disdain aren't just for people to bitch.

I hope they do change the name and fork it. Oracle needs to learn a lesson here and they are absolutely powerless (for once) other than having the TM on Hudson.

<comment> brown9-2 In the email from the Oracle VP, he pretty much invites the developer community to fork the project under a different name:

 _Because it is open source, we can't stop anybody from forking it. We do however own the trademark to the name so you cannot use the name outside of the core community. We acquired that as part of Sun._

The issue though is of course not that cut and dry. The community would want to think over and debate any such move as it would have a long-term impact on the overall working relationship with Oracle, Sonatype, other Hudson contributors/sponsors, etc...

<comment><USER21> Invitations are usually welcoming. "We can't stop you" doesn't really strike me as such.

<comment><USER22> I dunno, maybe I'm reading into this too much, but it almost sounds like a "hint" so as not to upset others at Oracle. Kinda like "I don't have that thing you're looking for, but if I did, it would be in my unlocked office in the third desk drawer on the left. I have to go to lunch now."

<comment><USER21> I'm not sure I can see that, since the sentence following that quote is »We hope that everyone working on hudson today will do as they claim to want, and work with us to make hudson stronger.« This reads quite passive-aggressive to me, indicating that either you go the Oracle way, or you're clearly not really interested in bringing the project forward.

And even if the above were a subtle hint intended to be below the Oracle radar, it would be a suggestion or opinion of a single person, not an invitation.

<comment><USER2> I also read a bit of sarcastic "good luck making a Hudson without the name, we'll still have it". Presumably there would not be any Oracle changes that break plug-ins, so a lot of users would have to manually migrate to a fork. I'm guessing Oracle feels that puts them in a good position.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The New Deal - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ycombinator.com/the-new-deal <comment><USER3> A lot of companies talk about changing the world, but Teespring really puts their money where their mouth is. Not only have they been quietly supporting us (Watsi) since the beginning, but to commit $50k to every YC non-profit is truly incredible. Teespring is setting the standard for the next generation of startups, and we're proud to call you guys our friends.

<comment><USER4> Agreed it's amazing - are they getting anything in return? I'm not asking this in a skeptical way, I just mean do the non-profits run tee-springs or are they just donating money?

Either way, bravo!

<comment><USER3> They're not asking for anything in return.

<comment><USER5> Startups for Startups, they will get back way beyond what they gave away. Great things will come to you if you're not asking for anything in return, because people do remember.

<comment><USER4> Oh totally! And I hope it was ultra-clear - I wasn't asking because I ASSUME they wanted something in return, but rather because that's a proposition I've never heard before. They're giving them $50k not $50k in tee-spring right? Or is it $50k in tee-spring? I guess that's my question, but either way - <USER2> cool! Proud of those guys, right thing to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I predict that this is going to lead to an increase in the number of applicants who have already raised some money (though not a full round).

> Most people don't do YC for the financial investment—they do it because they > want the advice, the help of the network, the benefits of the program, etc. > But still, more money for less equity is definitely better.

This is good news for people who've issued convertible notes before YC, since the implicit valuation is now $1.7MM instead of ~$300K. This is great for PR purposes (read: bragging rights), but can also have concrete implications:

I know at least one company that had a sticky situation[0] when they were accepted into an accelerator after already raising money from an angel investor - the investor ended up owning a huge chunk (the majority?) of the company on paper, because the note converted[1]. They didn't even need the money (it was just a standard part of the accelerator).

[0] it was resolved in the end - but it caused extra headache and legal costs

[1] A well-written conversion clause in original note can also avoid this problem (e.g. by including a threshold), but hindsight is 20/20 - I know a number of companies that would have been impacted in a similar way.

<comment><USER7> I think it's also a great deal for first time founders and people who aren't all that familiar with startup funding. $120k for 7% is a lot clearer than $17k + $80k for 7% + converted shares no cap no discount.

I also think this is great news for what it will force other accelerators to do. Many people out there claim to copy YC's model with much less friendly terms on the convertible note. This puts everything out in the open if they want to keep up.

<comment><USER8> It's way clearer. Is there a book or a resource on the web to learn about startup funding?

<comment><USER9> Not sure if you meant a book on the web but I liked Venture Deals - [http://www.amazon.com/Venture-Deals-Smarter-Lawyer- Capitalis...](http://www.amazon.com/Venture-Deals-Smarter-Lawyer- Capitalist/dp/1118443616)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm more excited about the effect this will have in general than the effect it will have on YC companies.

The difference for a YC company is that they don't have to give up an extra percentage as they raise their seed round to cover the convertible note/SAFE that they got from YCVC. With no discount, if a YC company raised at a $10M valuation that 80,000 would be worth .8% of the company - not enough to really move the needle.

The difference for the industry as a whole is that most accelerators are trying to mimic YC to a certain extent, and as YC now gives $120K straight-up others might follow suit. It's really easy to say, "We give you 20K for 6-7% because that's YC does." That seems to be almost industry standard, despite the fact that $20K for 3-5 months can be really hard to live on. It will be interesting to see how other accelerators react.

<comment><USER11> POEM alert :affect...think you want effect :)

<comment><USER12> What does POEM expand into? Urban Dictionary failed me.

<comment><USER11> Professional Organization of English Majors :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Just wanted to say that we're excited to be a part of the non-profit side of YCombinator.

It's been humbling to have Watsi working with us in our office and watching the amazing things they achieve on a daily basis. I have no doubt that amazing non-profits will continue to emerge from YC.

<comment><USER14> You guys are awesome. It's rare to see a company willing to put real commitment behind their talk of social good, and to see a startup doing so is even more inspirational.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I can't help thinking that this seems a little bit unfair. While there's a nominal out for "exceptional cases", it seems to me that a company like Stripe deserves a much higher valuation than a company like Tarsnap... not to mention the difference between companies which are joining YC after they're already established and companies which are merely a twinkle in their founders' eyes.

What exactly is the problem being solved by having a standard deal which almost everybody gets?

<comment><AUTHOR> very few people do YC primarily for the money (though, as i said in the post, more money for less equity is definitely better than the opposite!), and whether a company is brand new or 6 months old, we think we can increase their valuation by more than 7%.

<comment><USER16> What about a startup that comes to YC with a product and customers already as opposed to just an idea? Surely they give up less than 7% equity? The risk for YC is maybe an order of magnitude less and the equity % should reflect that lowered risk (not saying .7% either, but lower.)

<comment><USER17> Why would a company like that approach YC and not raise a round on their own? Or better yet, reinvest every penny back into the business without giving up any equity? Won't these companies just self filter?

<comment><USER16> Well maybe my example is unlikely, although one could argue that the YC brand is worth something in that it will let you raise more from other investors. However, it doesn't need to be so extreme, just that companies that are further along are less risky to YC and it seems strange for YC to artificially offer higher than market prices to said company thus lowering demand. Why would YC want fewer lower risk companies and more high risk ones? The incentives don't seem rational to me.

<comment><USER17> I see this often, but I am starting to think this is a fallacy. A company can be further along down the wrong path, making it harder to undo the bad things it had done up to that point. A company can be based on an unsustainable idea and no amount of work put into it will ever make it viable. I have a feeling that real-world data is much more interesting than this. I imagine the risk curves are not strictly decreasing with progress from idea to product with users, and I bet YC could shed some light on this by showing when companies actually close down vs when they start at YC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The old terms weren't bad, but this is unquestionably better: simpler, and higher valuation. Great news for everyone in YC.

I don't know if any other accelerators had the same core + YCVC investment model, so I don't know what changes it will have elsewhere except maybe pushing valuations at the accelerator stage a little closer to the demo day amount. (Still higher than $1mm pre, in all but exceptional cases.)

(Also, WOW. The teespring guys are doing $50k for each non-profit? That is amazing.)

</comment><comment><USER19> I have wondered if affluent parents can replicate at least the money part of Y Combinator.

$120K is about the list price of two years of Harvard/MIT/Stanford . With a son who loves to program, I have wondered if sending him to a cheaper school and giving him the difference in installments after he graduates is better than paying for a "name" school. It depends on the quality of the cheaper school, of course. And I think school prestige matters more for investment banking than tech, so I'd be less inclined to suggest a cheaper school to a budding banker.

<comment><USER20> Off topic, but if your son has the chance to go Harvard/MIT/Stanford, he absolutely should. The difference is primarily in the caliber of the other students, and it makes a world of difference to have such a concentration of talent in one place.

(Note that I'm not saying there isn't talent elsewhere, just that there's an incredible concentration of it in the top n schools.)

<comment><USER21> It doesn't necessarily make world of difference. When you compare students who attended top private schools vs. those who were admitted but attended state schools, they actually have equivalent incomes down the line.

What's likely happening is that really smart kids at good state schools end up finding the pockets of talent there anyway.

Pretty scary implications for the value of a Harvard degree.

source: [http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/10/10/051010crat_atlar...](http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/10/10/051010crat_atlarge?currentPage=all)

<comment><USER22> To some degree, the elite universities are selling success to those already predestined for it. This is an end game state for any popular institution that accepts a subset from a pool of applicants. The battle to get in ends up being a significant source of the value creation.

Raising a venture round from Sequoia is probably a decent non-academic example of this. I would not be surprised if companies who turn Sequoia away are just as successful as those who are funded by them (although the former is probably a small data set!).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Things I had to look up because I never knew or had forgotten:

LP is Limited Partner, basically an investor.

A safe is like a convertible note but better. [http://ycombinator.com/safe/](http://ycombinator.com/safe/)

</comment><comment><USER24> The 17k for 7% is what always stopped me from considering the Y Combinator route. It's a huge chunk of your company for not very much money. If the new deal had been in place when we started, I think we would have been very tempted to join.

The real benefits of YC though are the focus it brings you, and being able to get access to the YC ecosystem. Oh, and being able to attend Demo Day, but with so many companies in the YC program, I think Demo Day isn't what it used to be (I think you get 90 seconds now?).

We would have loved to have had access to those resources, but since we had already invested far more into our company in terms of cash, it's hard to justify giving up that much equity for so little. Kudos to Sam for the new program.

<comment><USER25> 17K for 7% isn't as raw a deal as you think when you realize that at an "acceptance" into YC essentially doubles your valuation to most seed investors.

<comment><USER24> Absolutely. Being vetted by YC certainly won't hurt your company, but it's still tough though when you've dumped $100k-$200k of your own money plus your time and energy (which is not insignificant when you're an engineer in the Silicon Valley), and you're giving up that amount of equity.

<comment><USER25> Depends on what you're trying to achieve I think. I worked on my own stuff for 3 years before doing YC and it was well worth it. My thoughts after going through the program:

If you have no product and no track record, it's definitely worth it.

If you have something working, but growth isn't amazing, it's a risk because there's a chance you don't get the absolute most out of demo day due to timing -- so one might feel what you describe. That said if you blow up later, I'm sure they will do a fantastic job of getting you to the people you'd want to meet with - eg. Homejoy.

But if you come into YC with good growth (like doubling in size every month) it is without a doubt one of the smartest things you can do. You will probably never have as much leverage as you get while going through YC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This seems great - simple, better terms, higher valuation. Kudos @sama and YC.

Stepping back a bit, it's also a sign of the times -- especially given the tone of the last paragraph, it's clear there's pricing pressure on incubators/accelerators and the competition is heating up a bit. There are more competitors in the space, valuations are rising, and YC is adjusting accordingly. This isn't a good or bad thing per se -- just an observation of a byproduct of capitalism and the realism of the market in 2014.

<comment><USER27> I have trouble deciding which part I like more: the simplicity or the better valuation.

Unanimously positive move.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Getting accepted into YC immediately values your company at $1.7M.

<comment><USER29> Alternately, if your company is worth less than $1.7M then YC won't invest?

<comment><USER30> As they made clear, YC is not necessarily out just to make a profit. (The investment in non-profits, for instance, is clearly not profit driven.) Sure, they'll make a profit, but that won't be the only driver.

Besides, at this stage, no company actually has a value. Companies have a probability distribution of possible values... and it's a very diffuse distribution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This says a lot about the alternatives YC says it's really competing with - the other things people who could build great startups would otherwise be doing.

$17k is what two engineering students might have made at a summer internship in Boston in 2005.

$120k is now what two entry-level engineers might make in six months in the Valley.

</comment><comment><USER32> sama: While you have our attention, you might as well explain the details about the $120k/7% happening in two chunks.

[Edit 1:] Thanks; OK. I had read it as potentially indicating the money came at two different times rather than just from two different sources. All clear now.

<comment><AUTHOR> not much to explain--the reason for this is so that YC itself still has no LPs, and can do new things like fund non-profits without being restricted by an LPA. mechanically, the company gets two separate checks form two separate legal entities--one for 20k and one for 100k--but they work with YC for both of them.

<comment><USER15> Is the 7% equity split pro rata between those two entities?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> How can Teespring afford / justify giving every non-profit $50k?

<comment><USER34> They are a company with real revenue that's growing and they think the publicity will sort of make up for it, so they don't end up losing too much on it.

If yc does 5 nonprofits per batch, $500k is not a _lot_ of money.

<comment><USER35> I think your math is off. 5 NP's per batch * 50k = 250k from teespring which makes your point even stronger.

<comment><USER36> There are 2 batches a year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> What does it mean for a startup to be non-profit? When YC and Teespring each invest 50k into a non-profit, do they expect a return on investment? or is it purely a donation?

<comment><USER13> Purely a donation

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Props for cleaning things up. Startups have enough difficulties to overcome, without having to spend time and brain cycles navigating a complex funding structure.

</comment><comment><USER39> Why do nonprofits get less money?

<comment><AUTHOR> we tried asking some foundations if they would do a similar deal, and disappointingly they wouldn't. we will keep trying, but we wanted to get something in place for this batch. 100k is not that different 120k. i think it's pretty awesome that one of our startups is stepping up and being creative when traditional supporters of non-profits were reluctant to try a new approach.

<comment><USER40> What would be the benefit to foundations of doing a similar deal? Seems that they mostly have passed on YC-funded nonprofits including Immunity Project and Zidisha; and for good reasons. It seems that YC is a little behind when it comes to nonprofits - funding things that were very popular years ago like crowdfunding (Kiva comes to mind). These things are still exciting but they aren't at the edge of nonprofit innovation today. Organizations like Sanergy or GiveDirectly are really disrupting the nonprofit industry. Would love to see YC make a bet like one of those.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> hey sam - is it 7% of common stock or preferred?

<comment><USER42> My understanding was that it was always common stock.

I believe this is the agreement: [http://ycombinator.com/documents/YC_CSPA.docx](http://ycombinator.com/documents/YC_CSPA.docx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I really like this model. There are plenty of people who enjoy haggling and the finer points of contracts, but I'm not one of them. If all deals were this simple I think SV startups would save a lot of time, headache and money spent on lawyers.

</comment><comment><USER44> @Sama, is YC still encouraging founders to use SAFEs for their seed round or is that dead?

</comment><comment><USER45> While going through YC for no money and 7% would probably be worthwhile for many startups, simply for the exposure and advice, I know for a fact the ostensibly terrible terms have deterred many good applicants. I tried for years to apply to YC with a partner who insisted on not taking such terms. While I think he was wrong (and perhaps that signaled some other problems with the partnership,) I'm happy to see the issue go away. A valuation of $1.5-$2M is quite fair for an early stage startup, particularly with the value-add of YC.

</comment><comment><USER46> Forgive my ignorance, but what does LP stand for?

<comment><USER47> LP = Limited Partners

It's how many VC funds are structured. General Partners run the thing, while Limited Partners are investors with limited liability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Seems like YC has come to realize how easy it is out there to get massive seed funding. About time they upped their seed amount.

</comment><comment><USER49> It would be great to see this annotated on RapGenius in order to learn all the terminology and how investment like these work.

<comment><USER50> Here you go: [http://news.rapgenius.com/Sam-altman-the-new-deal- annotated](http://news.rapgenius.com/Sam-altman-the-new-deal-annotated)

Feel free to comment (it's not very intensive in terms of VC deal terminology, but I wanted to give RG a spin).

<comment><USER49> Wow, thank you so much. You made it really easy to understand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> The simple truth is that the new deal is better than the previous one and there is no denying the value add on that YC brings to startups. Also, the fact that many accelerators and incubators would follow the YC lead and increase their initial investments augurs well for the startup ecosystem. Well done YC.

</comment><comment><USER48> Sam: Time to update the 'New Deal' on the home page. It still mentions the 'Old Deal'.

</comment><comment><USER52> Upon getting accepted to YC, your company is promised $120K for 7%. Does this imply that if your company is accepted to YC, then it is worth $1.7M (because 7% of $1.7M is $120K)? Or is this not the right way to look at it? Why / why not?

<comment><USER53> There are two chunks (as Sam mentions in his post) -- one chunk is for common stock and the other is in the form of a Safe that converts to Preferred stock.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Is this going to change what the YC cycle looks like for the funded companies?

</comment><comment><USER55> Can someone explain what the difference is between before and now? Is it that before you could only spend $17k until you raised your next round but now you get it all at once?

</comment><comment><USER56> I don't know how much of this idea comes from Sam Altman, but YC looks better and better since he took over.

</comment><comment> shawn-butler Has YC / Teespring taken a position on whether a L3C is a "non-profit"?

</comment><comment><USER57> That's an immediate average valuation boost of around 5x.

(1.5 mil vs 300-ish k previously)

</comment><comment><USER58> This will help applicants cover the ever increasing SV rent.

</comment><comment><USER59> this sounds simpler than the previous one.

</comment><comment><USER60> > __ _$120k, which we hope is enough for the founders to run their business > and pay their living expenses for at least 6 months, and sometimes longer._ > __

So, do you provide personal expense guidance to the founders?

How can I get, without joining YC, just this portion of the program ;)

</comment><comment><USER61> > Most people don't do YC for the financial investment—they do it because they > want the advice, the help of the network, the benefits of the program, etc. > But still, more money for less equity is definitely better.

I know advice is a big part of it but this is a exaggeration right? Most of that network/benefits/etc that surrounds YCombinator is about the financial investment.</comment>


Good News - chris-at http://goodnews.click/ <comment><AUTHOR> I have 2 stages of news reading: The first is discovery, the second is digestion.

I've used Feedly as a backend ever since Google reader went offline to keep my lengthy RSS library usable, but never ever use the web interface, which this product reminds me of. It's too overwhelming to have everything there all at once. 100's of hours of reading starring at me all at once. Instead, I prefer to use android widgets across my various devices to display random snippets from across various categories which catch my eye over the many times daily I open up my phone. That's my discovery and selection method.

When it comes to digestion, I will sometimes read it in pocket or some other reading app on my device to optimize that experience, but curiously am compelled to send it back to my computer for social media sharing and/or saving/bookmarking/note-taking.

So I guess for my obscure usage pattern, having a type of dashboard or headline section that shows you LESS, perhaps using some type of popularity or personal preference metric would be a much preferable main interface. Keep feeding me more once I reed it, but it stresses me out to see LISTS and LISTS of stuff to read that I might be missing out on and don't have time to read!</comment>


Trump's budget calls for seismic disruption in medical and science research - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/trumps-budget-would-slash-scientific-and-medical-research/2017/03/15/d3261f98-0998-11e7-a15f-a58d4a988474_story.html <comment><USER2> Incredible how someone with the slogan 'Making America Great Again' can then get away with doing the exact opposite of that. It's like watching the captain take a sledge-hammer to the bridge of the ship that a few 100 million people are depending on.

Fortunately in NL we seem to have managed to put a stop to rightwing populism taking over politics entirely (for now, at least), it will certainly come at a price (coalition forming will be difficult) but anything better than a country governed by a party hell bent on un-doing 50 years of progress.

<comment><USER3> "Draining the swamp" by stuffing it with Goldmans Sachs and billionaire swamp monsters.

Anyone whom believes/ed DJT is/was either foolish, stupid and/or insane and gets what they deserve.

<comment><USER4> What about the rest of us who didn't believe him for a second?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What I'm getting from this is that he expects to die and there won't be any benefit in quality or quantity of life from this research.

The exact opposite of the kind of view that leadership should have.

</comment><comment><USER6> Reading this sitting at a table at APS March Meeting is absolutely surreal.

</comment><comment><USER7> "The National Institutes of Health, for example, would be cut by nearly $6 billion, about a fifth of the NIH budget."

Many of their employees have drop dead salaries. And the same time these department are corrupt as fuck (say hand out of SBIR grants to buddies). I know I will be down voted but trust me, I won't shed a tear about these cuts.

<comment><USER8> You're getting down voted because you've provided no evidence to support this claim.

<comment><USER7> Mate, I know that the plural of anecdote is not data. And I can't provide specifics because such a thing may easily blow up in my face (blow back).

But just FYI: I had a SBIR grant rejected and it was rejected with a cause. But I also had a SBIR grant rejected and the rejection was totally bullshit. There can't be another name for this but corruption. At the same time, when I submitted this application, a buddy who got a major SBIR grant in the past told me not to have high hopes. He explained to me how and why his proposal was selected from the big stack of proposals. It is not an open race.

Don't shed a tear. I am sure this officials with their high 6 figs salaries can easily find a job in the private sector. Enjoy!

<comment><USER9> > There can't be another name for this but corruption.

So you've had 2 grant proposals rejected—and even _you_ only claim 1 of them was incorrect. So your solution to a grant rejection is to burn the whole system down?

<comment><USER7> I could not know that the first one was not feasible. I had no access to the equipment (but later someone had access who published a paper). But still, one of the main points the reviewer did not get. Even if it was not a good idea from an energetic standpoint, it was still a good idea to store energy. If you have electricity (wind!) that you can't use, it may still be a good idea to convert this to fuel.

The second one had nothing comparable. We had peer reviewed publications. Nobody had this in this field. The main argument was that it is financially not feasible for mass production. The reviewer was off by factor 100.

The guy who got the proposal, he told me how it went. I don't want to go into details.

Does this answer your questions?

<comment><USER10> Of course it doesn't answer his questions, you have even less than one anecdote since you won't even go into the details of the only one you have!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


University of Glasgow builds Raspberry PI Cloud Server - <AUTHOR> http://raspberrypicloud.wordpress.com/blog/

<comment><USER2> This is cool stuff, I have also been trying to get LXC containers running on the RaspberryPi. I used their guide and it went pretty well. I want to create a downloadable image so that you can skip over all the begining steps, and get into the fun stuff quicker. Just haven't had the time yet.

I'm now trying to get Docker running on the raspberryPi, if you want to help, checkout my notes here: [http://kencochrane.net/blog/2013/05/running-docker- on-a-rasp...](http://kencochrane.net/blog/2013/05/running-docker-on-a- raspberrypi/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder how the performance (absolute and per watt) would compare to equivalently cheapish x86 server. Quick look at dell/hp shows a basic 16-thread server with 32G ram costing about $3000, which places it in the same performance and price-range (vs. 56x$35=$1960 just for the rpis).

edit: I realize that this is an educational project and as such the performance does not matter that much compared to the educational value provided by running largish number of nodes.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's tempting to think that raspberry pi makes sense as a sort of commodity blade server system, racking up loads of cheap, tiny CPUs... but it turns out that that might not be the case.

UK hosting company Mythic Beasts has a history of playing with unusual hosting devices to maximize hosting capacity versus cost - both hardware and power; they provide a hosting offering that runs on racks of Mac Minis, for example.

Now, they also took a look at the raspberry pi - and they set one up and running as a mirror of the Raspbian Linux apt repository. This was their write-up: [http://blog.mythic-beasts.com/2012/07/20/raspberry-pi- self-h...](http://blog.mythic-beasts.com/2012/07/20/raspberry-pi-self- hosting/). The tl;dr from that is this line:

"Is this sensible? We've had a few customers ask us if the Raspberry Pi would be a sensible device for hosting on as it's very cheap and very low power. Unfortunately it's also very slow for this kind of application and the supporting hardware is very bulky."

<comment><USER5> To be fair, the Mac-mini rack has real purpose: [http://hackaday.com/2012/12/09/160-mac-minis-one- rack/](http://hackaday.com/2012/12/09/160-mac-minis-one-rack/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the real promise of combining single-board computers into a grid like this is the potential to provide utility computing starting at a low cost without the curse of underprovisioning ([http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2010/06/01/under-provisioning- the-...](http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2010/06/01/under-provisioning-the-curse-of- the-cloud/)). I envision a rack full of single-board computers with specifications such that a hosting provider can rent out whole computers with specs and prices similar to a 1 GB Linode.

To achieve this goal, I think one would need a single-board computer with roughly these specs: a SoC that scores at least 1000 on Geekbench; at least 1 GB of RAM; at least 8 GB of flash storage competitive with SSDs from a few years ago; 100 Mbps Ethernet; sized such that a 2U enclosure can hold 32 of them plus an Ethernet switch; priced around $100. If any of my expectations are way off, in either direction, I'd be happy to be corrected.

</comment><comment><USER7> Very cool. I believe there is a market for really tiny VPS's assuming the costs can be kept low. Things like remote monitoring, or VPS come to mind. Also, it would be interesting to see if RPi follows Moore's law, so while currently these instances seem very underpowered, in a few years they would gain some muscle.

<comment><USER8> They won't because the foundation doesn't want to make RPi's They want to get into teaching a huge number of people about hacking on electronics. They needed the pi because there was nothing suitable to do that on for around £20.

The founders has said it would be a long time, if ever before considering making a Raspberry Tau.

If competitors spring up and make ever more powerful units they might not have to. They don't want to get into competing with arduino for example, that's not what they are for.

<comment><USER7> Currently, yes. However, what happens as components get cheaper? A year from now, will there be a RAM chip that is the same price as now but with 2x the RAM? One can hope I suppose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 1)I'm extremely excited for pi and what it means to education, 2)kids won't do this...sorry 3)this is old news...sorry 4)I upvoted.

Edit: typo

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi michaelxia, this project has been in the works for awhile but, the updated post from today shows some really interesting potential on the Management layer as well as the project's current status. Really cool stuff!!</comment></comment>


The Digital Comic Museum – Free and Public Domain Comic Books - <AUTHOR> http://digitalcomicmuseum.com/ <comment><USER2> Awesome replacement for stock photos and clip art in presentations.

</comment><comment><USER3> Would be an interesting project to slice these into individual panels, and then make them searchable by era, OCR'd text, dominant colors, artist etc. maybe bolt on a meme-generator that lets you change the text.

<comment><USER4> I would love to work on this. It would require getting a dump of all of their data, or scraping it from them however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This one was great.

[http://digitalcomicmuseum.com/preview/index.php?did=7343&pag...](http://digitalcomicmuseum.com/preview/index.php?did=7343&page=1)

I have a thing for old government pamphlets.

<comment><USER6> In terms of government funded comics, this is my favourite:

[http://digitalcomicmuseum.com/index.php?cid=1026](http://digitalcomicmuseum.com/index.php?cid=1026)

'PS preventative maintenance monthly' is basically about taking care of army machinery/weaponry, perhaps it sounds boring but it's it's beautifully drawn by Will Eisner and contains characters like Joe Dope, Connie Rodd, Half-Mast and a lot of (often very sexist given this was from the 50's to 70's) humor.

<comment><USER7> That is incredible stuff! Just reading the letters-from-the-field, you can see these guys took it all seriously. From storing phosphorus shells point-up (in hot weather it would melt and unbalance the shell) to greasing artillery after every water crossing (rust would retard the slides upon firing, tearing the mounts loose etc) each issue was packed with something for everybody.</comment></comment></comment>


Enteric nervous system - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteric_nervous_system <comment><USER2> Wikipedia is great, but it doesn't always treat a topic in the funnest or even fullest way.

Random article from Google search results: [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second- brain/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-brain/)

</comment><comment><USER3> So, gut feeling might actually be a thing :)

<comment><USER2> [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-feelings- the-...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-feelings-the-second- brain-in-our-gastrointestinal-systems-excerpt/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > The ENS is also called the second brain.

That's very interesting. How much of our personality / memories are not really stored in the brain, but elsewhere in our body ? This raises questions about organ transplants.

<comment> 2020-3030 Storage is a fascinating issue, but I doubt the enteric nervous system would store or process any of the information we find in the central nervous system including personality or personality-related memory.

Instead, we do know that the synaptic and hormonal communication between the brain and ENS allows for bi-directional influence. This is to say that no information about personality is expected to be stored in the ENS, but that signals from ENS and gut microbiome can influence the brain systems supporting the person-specific complex of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors known as "personality".

We see very short term behavioral, emotional, and cognitive changes when people get grumpy from hunger and everybody can remember feeling their stomach growl or feeling hunger pangs. We might consider these as "bottom up" signals from the digestive system to brain. Similarly, top-down signals also have an effect on digestive systems. Just thinking of a taking a bite of a big juicy burger, smelling and sipping a freshly brewed cup of coffee, or eating a hot cheesy slice of pepperoni pizza along with a cool refreshing drink may precipitate salivation or other responses from the digestive system.

When looking at the ENS, we also need to look at the gut microbiome. It is clear that sensations and activity within the enteric nervous system and the gut microbiome influence central nervous system function, including behaviors we would associate with personalty.

For an study of correlations between gut microbiome and infant temperament see ([https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25449582](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25449582)).

For the semi-famous mouse gut microbe swap resulting in behavioral change see this article ([https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/accumulating- glitches/b...](https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/accumulating- glitches/behavioral_transplants))

For a 2014 review of human and animal studies on gut microbiome, brain, and behavior relationships see this article ([https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4259177/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4259177/)).

For a study about the influence of gut bacteria on different aspects of memory in rats, check out, "Long-term multi-species Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium dietary supplement enhances memory and changes regional brain metabolites in middle-aged rats." ([https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28602659](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28602659)).

If you like considering the location of memories, one of my favorite concepts in memory is the role of the "perineuronal net". There are now many articles on that topic. For the longest time memory research focused on neurons and neuronal information processing so it is good to see more attention paid to the structures outside of and around neurons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It appears 90% of the body's serotonin is produced in the gut! Which among other things suggests a possible causal mechanism for antidepressants causing weight gain.</comment>


X server in 5000 lines of Common Lisp - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pyb/zen

<comment><USER2> Cool though it's going to be egg on OP's face when someone else implements this in 12 lines of Javascript

<comment><USER3> and subsequently in 0 lines of js.

<comment><USER4> The OP was already in 0 lines of js.

<comment><USER5> AKA no.js

My hot tip for the future of programming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One of the prerequisites for using this is, apparently, an already-running X server.

<comment><USER7> So by implementing none of the hard bits, LISP wins again!

<comment><USER8> Lisp featured support for Garbage collection, exceptions done right, macros, optional typing, native compilation. In fact I would argue that many in the lisp community were so obsessed with the hard bits that they overlooked building simple things that see everyday use in the real world.

<comment><USER9> Quite some bits were implemented in Lisp. Both simple and hard. Some of the bits are lost.

For example the TI Explorer Lisp Machine came with an X11 server written in Lisp. On my Symbolics Lisp Machine I used the usual MIT X11 server written in C - this was possible because the Symbolics Lisp machine had a C compiler.

<comment><USER10> I was under the impression that those machines evaluate Lisp forms at the hardware. How could a C compiler work? Does it translate your code into Lisp s-expressions, or is there like a bytecode layer in between?

<comment><USER11> What do you think a compiler does? The target instruction set can be any Turing-complete language. Compiling C to LISP is no different than compiling LISP to C (e.g., GNU Common Lisp), compiling ML to Java (which is so easy students can do it in 300/400-level CS), and so on.

<comment><USER12> You make it sound of easy. How hard is it to go from a GC language to a non-GC language? What methods do you use to fill in GC?

<comment><USER13> How would a language's support for garbage collection make it any harder to compile a non-garbage-collected language into it? Why would you think that?

<comment><USER12> There's no code to hint at how garbage collection should be done, since its automatic. You have to essentially include a library that would emulate the source language gc that it came from so its not a direct translation from one language to another. At least that's what I was thinking

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I actually left this project alone after I got the very basics running... It's very very slow and rather buggy. I guess a profiling run could help a lot though.

</comment><comment><USER15> Wait, you need an X server to run it? What's the point then?

<comment><USER16> It looks like it just uses an existing X server as a way to create an OpenGL context, not as an X server per se. Perhaps it would be possible to port it to some non-X method of producing an OpenGL context, such as EGL.

<comment><USER17> So its a really hard way to run an X server on top of an X server?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> To me 5000 lines of C code is a LOT of code. Linus's first release of Linux was _only_ 10,000 lines of code. Given much higher expressiveness of Lisp, I think 5000 lines of List code is not all that to boast about. I can't pull a reference here but according to one of the studies, the productivity of some of the well known programmers was measured at 10K LOC/year (yes, it's very loose measure of "productivity"). So writing 5000 lines of _good_ code may require ~6 months, i.e., not a trivial amount of work. Although I agree it is cool to have X server in Lisp.

<comment><USER19> 5000 lines isn't really a lot for a real-life project in any language. Besides, a lot of the code here seems to be in the data.

E.g. [https://github.com/pyb/zen/blob/master/data/request- specs.li...](https://github.com/pyb/zen/blob/master/data/request-specs.lisp) describes X spec request syntax, accounts alone for nearly 1000 lines, and it's not really possible to trim down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Isn't Lisp really hard to understand? Or is it just because I'm unfamiliar with the syntax?

<comment><USER21> I guess it's you who is just unfamiliar with the syntax. Do you find (+ 2 2) harder to understand that 2+2?

If the code is well indented, IMHO it's quite understandable. For example, what do you think of this Lisp code snippet (it's not the best possible code, just some stuff I have at hand to show without you needing to know the context):

        ;;takes two list l1 and l2 of same length, and return (l1[0] l2[0]
        ;;l1[1] l2[1] ...)
        (defun mix (l1 l2)
          (if (null l1) nil
              (append (mix (cdr l1) (cdr l2)) (list (car l1) (car l2)))))

EDIT: formatted the code as per gcr suggestion.

<comment><USER10> In HN, use four spaces to indent code blocks, like this:

        ;;takes two list l1 and l2 of same length, and return (l1[0] l2[0]
        ;;l1[1] l2[1] ...)
        (defun mix (l1 l2)
          (if (null l1)
              nil
              (append (mix (cdr l1)
                           (cdr l2))
                      (list (car l1)
                            (car l2)))))

(Also, for the record, you should say (append (list ...) (mix ...)) or else you'll reverse the result list, which I don't think is your intent)

<comment><USER22> This shows off one of lisp's (INHO) unfortunate anachronisms, namely that your "other car is first".

CDR and CAR refer to machine instructions on the IBM-704 that had a (by today's standards) a somewhat quaint handling of "words" in memory, roughly allowing CAR to refer to a data element at the head of a linked list, and CDR to refer to the pointer to the rest of the list (or the empty list) (As well as a CONS instruction to build a word in memory from for parts, including the two 15 bit values that CAR/CDR refer to)[1].

Lisp then extended this by allowing programmers to combine c(a|d)+r, to get the equivalent of second, third, first-of-second-sublist etc. I'm not convinced the succinctness is worth it -- apparently experienced lisp-coders disagree. The TL;DR is that if you don't know lisp, this code is the same as the above, and is a bit more intuitive:

        ;;takes two list l1 and l2 of same length, and return (l1[0] l2[0]
        ;;l1[1] l2[1] ...)
        (defun mix (list1 list2)
          (if (null list1)
              nil
              (append (mix (rest list1)
                           (rest list2))
                      (list (first list1)
                            (first list2)))))

Other languages might use head and tail, rather than first and rest. I'll agree that list1 and list2 might not offer much more readability than l1 and l2 -- at least not with the comments given.

[1] Most of this is paraphrased from wikipedia, and what I remember from various times I've tried to get started with lisp, without ever really getting entirely comfortable with the language. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAR_and_CDR](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAR_and_CDR)

[edit: I didn't notice the comment about reversing the list, but I think it is rather obvious that (append rest list(first)) does indeed reverse the order...? I actually wondered if append had a strange order of parameters while I "rewrote" the code :-) ]

<comment><USER9> Basically nobody should write such code. As a style guide: use CAR and CDR on cons data structures. Use FIRST, REST, SECOND, ... on lists.

Actually on day two of Lisp, fifty years ago, these patterns have been abstracted. Recursion of lists has been replaced by higher-order functions in many cases.

        (defun mix (list1 list2)
          (mapcan #'list list1 list2))

Above maps the function LIST over the two lists and concatenates the results.

<comment><USER22> Hm, am I right in thinking that numbers are defined to be atoms in lisp. And also that there are limits to how one can use macros, in that you'd not be able to a) rename FIRST, as in (FIRST list) to 1 (or '1): (1 list) or ('1 list); and b) that you couldn't modify the syntax to "decompose"/parse a slice syntax like: (1:2 (list-of-lists)) (here 1:2 would mean for example first element of second sublist/cons) ?

Now, you could of course write an interpreter for such a language in lisp, but am I correct in assuming that there's no reasonable way to get a (standard'ish) lisp to compile an expression like (1:2 ...) to the equivalent caadr(?)-like expression?

I saw there's a library for clojure that adds "slice notation" \-- but does so by adding a (slice x y list)-macro which of course is fine -- but it would seem that (x:y list) would give similar benefits to the cadr/cddr etc -- allowing selected subsets to be highly optimized, for example? (As well as offering concise syntax)

<comment><USER9> Functions like CADDR are not much used in modern Lisp.

I would not write `slice` as a `macro` or special syntax. I would use the `SUBSEQ` function, which already exists.

        CL-USER 7 > (subseq '(a b c d e f) 2 4)
        (C D)

The simplest way to introduce a special syntax for it is to use different parentheses:

        {1 '(1 2 3 4)}  -> 2

But the default Lisp style is this

        (functionname arg0 ... argn)

where `functionname` is a real symbol. It may be longer on the character level, which may be a problem for some users - not for me.

<comment><USER22> I suppose what I was really wondering, but cleverly hid in formulating my comment, was "what are read[er] macros?".

That'd be how you could redefine "{" and "}" to work something like this?

At least I came across the following that seems to indicate that:

[http://letoverlambda.com/index.cl/guest/chap4.html](http://letoverlambda.com/index.cl/guest/chap4.html)

[http://jlongster.com/2012/02/18/its-not-about-macros-its- abo...](http://jlongster.com/2012/02/18/its-not-about-macros-its-about- read.html)

<comment><USER9> Reader macros allow you to write parser functions for characters. So you could write a reader macro for { such that it collects all enclosed content until a } character. The it could transform that content and return the transformed result. The result is always Lisp data, not a string. How you transform the enclosed text is up to you.

Common Lisp itself tries to minimize its usage of characters. It is expected that users or libraries want to make use of characters like {, }, [, ], and many others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Apparently this is 3 years old.

</comment><comment><USER24> Good luck groking that mess.

<comment><USER25> Banging on file descriptors looks pretty much the same no matter what language you do it in. I expect that a Python equivalent would be pretty much the same length.</comment></comment>


I Built Jamstackthemes.dev over the Weekend - <AUTHOR> https://www.netlify.com/blog/2019/10/07/how-i-built-jamstackthemes.dev-over-the-weekend/ <comment><USER2> Great write up! Just noticed my theme popping up in the examples</comment>


Creating More Using Less Effort with Ruby on Rails - <AUTHOR> http://www.alistapart.com/articles/creatingmoreusinglesseffortwithrubyonrails

<comment><USER2> Is this true?

"You need 100–200 MB of dedicated RAM to host even a low-traffic Rails application"

<comment><USER3> No it's not true at all

<comment><USER4> You need MUCH more...I kid, I kid</comment></comment></comment>


Crafting Interpreters – Inheritance - <AUTHOR> http://www.craftinginterpreters.com/inheritance.html <comment><USER2> I cannot rate this book high enough. Anyone with an interest in how languages are implemented should read this. Bob has a fantastic writing style making it a pleasant read. Additionally, he doesn't stop at the point many tutorials do (simple arithmetic and control flow) but he actually goes into how to implement classes and, now, inheritance.

</comment><comment><USER3> Probably better to link to the main page: [http://www.craftinginterpreters.com](http://www.craftinginterpreters.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> The book is coming out chapter by chapter, so I linked to the latest chapter that was just published.</comment></comment>


Visualizing Process Execution - <AUTHOR> http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/2012/02/12/visualizing-process-execution/

<comment><USER2> Graphviz is very useful for visualizing large graphs. You can learn to use it effectively in under five minutes. It's also very easy to transform CSV data into graphviz markup by piping it through one or two sed scripts.

<comment><USER3> Where can you learn to use it effectively in under five minutes?

<comment><USER2> Assuming you have dot installed:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOT_language>

Also, these are useful:

<http://www.graphviz.org/pdf/dotguide.pdf>

[http://linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/05/06/graphviz_do...](http://linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/05/06/graphviz_dot.html)

<comment><USER3> Thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The visualizations of processes are crucial to my understanding of Brendan's analysis. As a visual person, I can't imagine using this data another way.

Once again we see that screen size remains a central UI limitation to better UX. Give me a wide printer and a big wall any time!

<comment><USER5> You may be interested in this work: <http://infovis.cs.vt.edu/gigapixel/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've made something very similar, but using Ubigraph and for Python: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2kyssgtUvM>

<comment><USER7> Looks very nice - I'd love to do something like this for Lua. I went looking for more details, but it looks like your blog is down, alas .. anyway, if there is already something out there on the subject of using Ubigraph, tutorial/howto-wise, I'll go looking for it. It'd be great to have something like that when debugging a large Lua project.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Increase your revenue and sales instantly, Fix your website now - <AUTHOR> https://www.theusabilitylab.com/expert-ux-audit <comment><USER2> It is hard to give you feedback on the actual product since it costs $250, but here are a few questions from reading the site:

Do multiple humans review the website? How many? Are they better at UX than me? Is there automated analyses that are ran too? Is there any way to provide a free/trial product?

It is hard to tell what I'll actually get from using this. My initial thoughts are that the price is too high (again, because I'm not sure the quality of what I'll receive). Is this cheaper than hiring a freelance UX expert?</comment>


Announcing Tectonic: Commercial Kubernetes Platform - <AUTHOR> https://coreos.com/blog/announcing-tectonic/

<comment><USER2> Great to see CoreOS launching a supported version of their stack with a push to make Kubernetes easier to consume in the enterprise.

IMHO, one should always consider if being opinionated about the fundamentals of a platform is good thing when most enterprises will want to chose their own fundamentals.

<comment><USER3> This is something that all companies that set out to build great products have to figure out. Do you take the Apple path and attempt to build the best product possible, even if that means limiting where and what it runs on?

While we try to answer that question, I'm pleased that CoreOS has taken great effort to keep our opensource projects[0] separate from our commercial offerings[1]. This allows the community, and even our competitors, to support the "chose your own fundamentals" use case. Tectonic simply represents the CoreOS fundamentals, which we believe encapsulates the right patterns that will lead a large group of people to success.

[0][https://coreos.com](https://coreos.com)

[1][https://tectonic.com](https://tectonic.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> See also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9329259](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9329259)</comment>


Ask HN: Can you ask someone to be your mentor? How do/did you find one? - <AUTHOR>

I read a lot about how a great asset it can be to have a mentor when you want to be an entrepreneur. Today as a young entrepreneur (20yo), I'm asking myself if I should have a mentor. I know a lot of people in the business and I would love to have someone especially as a mentor, I often talk to him, he gives me some advices but it's not mentoring though.
So I'm asking HN the question, should I ask him to be my mentor or just see if it comes up some day, how do people do usually ? Is it different whether it's in the US or in Europe ? Also if you have a mentor, how did you find yours ? <comment><USER2> The best mentor is having a daring attitude. Dare to do things and learn from them. No one can teach you what you get from that. If you want to learn a bit more about business (real stuff, not book fluff), I have a project on github that is focused on me sharing knowledge gained from more than 15 years of doing business and software/startups. Check out my profile for the link.

</comment><comment><USER3> Having people helping you with their ideas (or challenging yours) is mandatory in entrepreneurship. That being said I think the best way to have your mentors is to actually ask them to be advisors in your startup.

You will have to pass them some equity on your startup but you're going to gain knowledge and maybe prevent a few mistakes.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the best alternative now that Wunderlist will be gone? - <AUTHOR> In usual fashion, Microsoft acquired Wunderlist in 2015 and has decided to sunset Wunderlist for the successor To-Do. (http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-wunderlist-successor-to-do-hits-public-preview/)
Unfortunately To-Do requires a Microsoft Office subscription so it no longer works for me. What are some alternatives for Wunderlist users?
On another note, it's a bit sad that Microsoft acquired two of my favorite productivity apps: Wunderlist & Sunrise and has sunsetted both. I really miss Sunrise Meet. <comment><USER2> You don't need an Office subscription. A regular Microsoft account works just as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> Its not gone, I just signed in and all my wunderlist to do's got transferred immediately and the interface looks like wunderlist a bit. This is mostly them rebranding, everything remains the same more or less.</comment>


The IPO Market is Broken - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2013/02/15/the-ipo-market-is-broken-heres-how-we-fix-it/

<comment><AUTHOR> I think this is such a sham analysis. I came away not understanding what the core tenet of the piece even was -- it seems that HFT is the villain.

What really drives the IPO market is (a) the business cycle -- i.e., how many new companies have been successful enough to attract demand for an IPO, and closely correlated with that, (b) equity multiples and relative valuations -- i.e., how attractive it is to sell equity at that point in time.

What the author doesn't mention, which is perhaps one of the real forces between a relatively smaller IPO pipe, is a significant change in regulation that makes it harder to be a public company. (Sarbox)

She also doesn't mention the enormous pools of capital available to the secondary market that provides liquidity well ahead of an IPO. It's no longer necessary to IPO for early investors / founders to get rich. See Evernote and Surveymonkey, among others.

Finally, she wants there to be more aftermarket support for company stock (presumably to fight off the evil high frequency traders making the market unstable) -- but that's exactly contra what an IPO does! You become a public company and you no longer control who your owners are. It's no coincidence that in many countries public companies are called "Anonymous Societies".

Anyway, if you can't tell, I really thought this article was BS and needed a place to vent.</comment>