Announcing RStudio v1.0 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.rstudio.org/2016/11/01/announcing-rstudio-v1-0/ <comment><USER2> I've been co-teaching a class in computing for statisticians this semester (some details on the previous iteration here [https://www.refsmmat.com/posts/2016-01-22-stat- computing.htm...](https://www.refsmmat.com/posts/2016-01-22-stat- computing.html)) and have mixed feelings about RStudio.

Most of our students use RStudio for their work. It's convenient and easy. For developing standalone scripts or functions, rather than notebooks or R Markdown files, the typical workflow is to write code in a file, then run it in the current R session by selecting pieces and hitting "Run".

But this encourages terrible practices. After a few iterations, the current environment does not reflect what's written in the file. If students write tests in a separate file, they neglect to source in their functions, because they're already in the workspace and so the tests run fine. Datasets that were loaded in the R console are used in code without being explicitly loaded there. Code gets changed without being run, or variable definitions are changed but old copies in the workspace accidentally used instead.

We end up getting many homework submissions that simply don't run if you start them in a new R session. Pieces are missing, code is out of order, tests only run if you manually select the test code and run it. It only worked in the R session of the original author.

R Markdown is a decent step, since rendering the HTML should start a session from scratch, but when we're asking them to write well-tested and modular algorithmic code, using R Markdown doesn't really fit.

I've begun to appreciate DrRacket's approach, where there is a "Definitions" pane and an "Interactions" window. When you Run the definitions, the current workspace is blown away and everything is defined from scratch from the Definitions, so there's no lingering state from REPL interactions. (Unfortunately your REPL history is lost, which can be annoying.) You can't run into the same inconsistent state as RStudio actively encourages.

<comment><USER3> Isn't this a simple instruction you give students in the very first class like "before you submit your homework, restart R session, and make sure your submission runs in the new session"? This only requires them to click a menu item (Restart R session), and a button (Knit or Source or something). Not really a burden for them, but will save your life as the instructor.

As someone who had been a student in statistics for more than 10 years, I confess I had never written a single test for my homework. Frankly I just didn't have the time or interest (too much homework, and becoming a professional software engineer was not the goal of the homework assignments). That said, when I put on my software engineer hat now at work, I'd definitely do what you advertise here and write tests carefully. If you want your students to enjoy the benefits of both R packages and R Markdown, I wrote some thoughts here a couple of years ago: [http://yihui.name/rlp/](http://yihui.name/rlp/)

Don't get me wrong. I'll all for teaching students good practice of software engineering. I just want to speak from my own memories and experience as a student. Sometimes I feel teachers are like parents: they want kids to learn all possible right things, no matter if they are practically able to swallow all the good stuff (sometimes this has bad psychological consequences, like rebellious children). If I were an instructor in statistics, I'd only require students to submit an R Markdown document. Other things like tests can earn extra credits but not required.

<comment><USER4> > Isn't this a simple instruction you give students in the very first class > like "before you submit your homework, restart R session, and make sure your > submission runs in the new session"? This only requires them to click a menu > item (Restart R session), and a button (Knit or Source or something).

It's the nature of learners to make mistakes. The more things they have to remember to do, the less cognitive power they'll have to focus on what they're trying to learn.

<comment><USER5> That's a good point, though in this case the thing they need to remember is a key part of doing the job. Seeing a line of code run correctly once does not mean it's correct. It's one of those concepts that comes up in many forms.

Perhaps one way to make a teachable moment of it is to help them set up a baby CI environment. Then every time it catches something the value of good practices is driven home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you're looking into learning data science/visualization, RStudio is one of the best IDEs out there in that field.

One of the reasons I switched to using Jupyter over R/RStudio directly was the native rendering of notebooks on GitHub, which made it pretty (example of mine: [https://github.com/minimaxir/stack-overflow- survey/blob/mast...](https://github.com/minimaxir/stack-overflow- survey/blob/master/stack_overflow_dev_survey.ipynb))

The addition of _native_ R notebooks may make me switch back, although I'll have to experiment on the differences between Jupyter Notebook rendering and .Rmd rendering on GitHub. (and since the notebooks are theoretically language agnostic, it might be fun to experiment with Python code too!)

Native sparklyr is something I'll also have to research/experiment with, since according to the official Spark documentation, although R has first class support with Spark, there is not API parity with Python + Spark, for example. (although, sparklyr has most of the important transformers/models so it is definitely worth a look: [http://spark.rstudio.com/mllib.html](http://spark.rstudio.com/mllib.html))

<comment><USER7> The older/official Spark integration for R (SparkR) is quite lacking. Sparklyr is newer and makes up much of the ground that was missing on the Python integration. Still a few features that need to be checked off the list, but I think most users will find that sparklyr has the subset of features that they need.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The updates here are massive.

I'd been waiting for the official release, instead of preview because of some issues, the official release seems to have ironed out the issues.

Excited to code directly into notebooks as reproducible code for fellow workers.

Sparklyr is really also changing the game for me in how I can integrate new users into R. It used to take a little work to get people off SAS EG or whatever statistics package they looked for. Not so much anymore.

<comment><USER9> R Notebooks are such a killer feature!

<comment><USER10> Funny, many people say this, but iPython notebooks have been around for a while (now called Jupyter Notebooks since they are not Python specific anymore) and it didn't spur a massive migration to Python...at least as far as I can tell.

Not a bad thing, it's just R Notebooks kind of seem like old news to me.

Addendum: I looked it up and it appears that Jupyter Notebooks actually have an R kernel ([https://irkernel.github.io/](https://irkernel.github.io/)).

<comment><USER9> Yeah but jupyter leaves bad taste in the mouth. Very frustrating to debug, binary file (no git/diff), much harder to layout than RMarkdown, no variable explorer. Additionally, the kernel idea is kind of lame/not implemented well. And you are getting nowhere in the data world without proper R support.

There wasn't migration to python because there's a total lack of anything to migrate to in python. It has only textbook examples as far as statistical models go. That's around 10% coverage and pretty much 0 coverage for all the abstractions and utility packages in R. Pretty much the same with machine learning (minus neural networks where it is strong). Python took some share from matlab and data processing tools but I don't see it retaining that. IMO it will lose it to Julia for the engineering & science people and to Scala for the data processing people.

The "second best language for everything" doesn't really work too well in the "data science" world.

<comment><USER11> What machine learning tools are missing from python? I think it's the best supported language but I would like to know what I'm missing

<comment><USER12> GAMs, BARTs, extensions to the Cox model, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For all the naysayers... Try installing python/jupyter in a corporate environment. It was a no go from the start at the last 4 companies I have worked at.

R and RStudio just installed and worked for 3 of the 4 companies. The 4th required a tweak to one environmental variable and everything installed/worked after that.

Corporate IT restrictions can make or break software.

<comment><USER14> The flip side is that RStudio is AGPL [1] – although not too surprisingly this is not heavily advertised. It may be easy to setup, but your legal department will have a heart attack if they find out that you're using it. At some point, RStudio will ask you to comply with the AGPL or pay them for a non-AGPL license.

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

<comment><USER15> We're proud to be AGPL. The AGPL license is pretty clearly stated on both the product page and the download page. We were an AGPL licensed project years before we were a "real" company, because we thought that for server-oriented software (RStudio was originally conceived to be server only), it was the license most aligned with the principles of the R project.

It's certainly not our intention to deceive and then submarine our customers, and I sincerely hope that's not what you were implying. IANAL but RStudio users have nothing to fear from the AGPL, as the copyleft provisions are for derivative works of RStudio itself.

If OTOH someone is trying to build an R editor interface for their commercial SaaS data science startup, and want to leverage our code to do it, then yeah-- the AGPL is going to apply and if that's a problem then we try to work something out.

(BTW I'm a fan of the work you're doing with Julia!)

<comment><USER14> That's a fair reason for the AGPL license choice for RStudio. It is a product- like software project after all. My experience with corporate legal is that they are much more wary of GPL software than strictly necessary – hence the warning about AGPL since ease of use != ease of permission. (We've had JuliaBox fire-walled from a few big banks, albeit not for license reasons, but because they don't want private data on the cloud, so it's a familiar issue.) I had a hard time finding any mention of the AGPL on the RStudio site, including some broken links.

Congrats on the release! RStudio pushes the envelope on very many data analytics UI features. Excellent work.

<comment><USER3> Just for the record, if you follow the Download RStudio link on the RStudio homepage, or go to Products -> RStudio, you will see the license clearly mentioned before you try to download RStudio. AGPL is also displayed in our Github repository if anybody cares about looking at the source repository: [https://github.com/rstudio/rstudio](https://github.com/rstudio/rstudio) So I don't know why it was so hard for you to find the mention of AGPL...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The profiler integration is so cool! I've never seen anything like that in a free tool.

AFAIK RStudio is now being lead by JJ Allaire, same person who did Coldfusion and stuff. Also in there is Hadley Wickham, of ggplot2 / dplyr fame.

</comment><comment><USER17> we have recently started migrating to python from R because of notebooks and pyspark.

I dont see us moving back anytime soon, because production code in python is orders of magnitude better than R.

I just wish there was a decent dplyr for python though :(

<comment><USER18> I haven't used dplyr much, is is not similar to pandas?

<comment><USER17> I think you should read the discussion here - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11335491](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11335491)

It explains it better than i can

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wish there was something like this for Python. Sure we have Jupyter/iPhyton and sure we have Spyder, but nothing even comes close to RStudio.

<comment><USER20> Check out Rodeo[0] from Yhat. Its not RStudio, but its an IDE with data science in mind. Been getting better and better each release.

[0] [http://rodeo.yhat.com/](http://rodeo.yhat.com/)

<comment><USER19> I was trying Rodeo these past few days. It still has a lot to improve, I really don't think the autor should have put this out of beta so fast, it's clearly still a 0.x version, not a 2.x.

Markdown is extremely limited (what we need is something more like knitr), there are quite a few bugs and it's difficult to access documentation of the packages.

I appreciate the work of the author, but all in all, it's nowhere near RStudio and - except for the fancy interface - actually behind Spyder.

<comment><USER21> There something close to knitr for Python: [https://github.com/pystitch/stitch](https://github.com/pystitch/stitch)

<comment><USER19> This is great thank you.

It would be great if Spyder would add a plugin to edit these formats or something similar.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Evaluating yourself as a Product Manager - <AUTHOR> https://blog.orangecaffeine.com/how-to-measure-yourself-as-a-product-manager-1d920aaf0d33#.3h8ddr6qg <comment><USER2> I'm a developer and I've only worked with 2 people whose job title was "product manager" (both at the same company).

They didn't seem to have the any stake in building and inspiring teams. I don't think the product managers were involved in hiring at all. They were always remote and traveling so they weren't in communication enough to inspire anything.

The team was given vague goals by the CEO, but the product managers prioritized work on their own pet projects. In the end, the message about what we were doing was confused.

Is this typical? What should I expect from product management?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not typical.. here's what you should expect from PM: \- Align with the CEO / business goals and prioritize accordingly. Every feature should map to a top level business theme you're trying to accomplish. \- They may not be involved in hiring, but they should provide clarity on the product side and inspire the team on company vision and how it positively impacts users and customers. \- As an engineer you can / should ask questions and hold them accountable.. "what are our filters for selecting features?", "why are we building this feature and how does it map to our business goals?", etc.</comment></comment>


How to Reduce Shootings (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/06/opinion/how-to-reduce-shootings.html <comment><USER2> As a German I find it a bit unsettling that the ratio in guns-per-person between the US and Germany is smaller than that between Germany and, say, Italy. We do like to fingerpoint a lot at American gun ownership (it really feels absurdly archaic to the average German), but we're apparently not _that_ much ahead.

I wonder how the numbers would look if they were broken down further into "made to be pointed at people" (designed for military, law-enforcement, or self-defense use) and "others" (hunting, dedicated competitive marksmanship). Hunting must be huge in the US, but the whole field of "testosterone booster" use cases from small scale "defend my family" right up to the field of full- scale second amendment militia fantasies (sorry if you are a believer) must account for quite a bit as well. I guess that dedicated competitive marksmanship might be low, I suspect that Americans who are into that kind of thing would tend to do it with hardware from somewhere in the "designed to be pointed at people" range.

<comment><USER3> Not sure what you mean by "fantasy", since it's the case that, _right now_ , widespread gun ownership would have completely prevented the catastrophe that is current Venezuela, and probably wouldn't have allowed Hong Kong to escalate to this point. It's always crazy that the government would turn against its citizens, until it isn't, and it's happening.

<comment><USER4> You are seriously positing that HK with guns would somehow have avoided its current fate? That is surely fantasy.

<comment><USER3> How so? Would the Chinese government be able to just wantonly and unilaterally degrade HK citizen rights as they've done? They know there is no consequence for their actions, because HK citizens have no power. The threat of force only comes from one side. As of now, HK's only hope is to appeal to international actors that _do_ have power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A frustration I have with articles like this is that it's very easy to for the author to make the statistics support the conclusion they want to write. For example, from this article:

> _One study by the Violence Policy Center found that in 2012 there were 259 > justifiable homicides by a private citizen using a firearm._

The implication is that firearms were only successfully used for self defense 259 times in 2012, but that's not true. Most incidents of successful self defense using a firearm do not lead to the death of the attacker. The same report from the VPC[0] says people used firearms in self defense an average of 67,740 times per year from 2007 to 2011.

> _Tightening Gun Laws Lowered Firearm Homicide Rates_

But did it lower homicide rates overall? I don't think it's much of a benefit if murderers switch weapons and complete the same number of homicides. If the overall homicide rate is reduced, that would be a much more persuasive figure to cite, which leads me to suspect it isn't.

[0] [http://www.vpc.org/studies/justifiable15.pdf](http://www.vpc.org/studies/justifiable15.pdf) \- note that the VPC is an anti-gun advocacy group, and this study is written to be persuasive rather than analytical.

<comment><USER2> > I don't think it's much of a benefit if murderers switch weapons and > complete the same number of homicides.

I guess you'd keep the deviously planned murders (even if guns are available, I'm not sure they would be the weapon of choice in most cases), but lose most of the escalated arguments, escalated property crime, fights that would otherwise have ended with a fracture or two. And mass shootings. Mass stabbings can be surprisingly deadly as well, but the same killer with a bag of guns? Surely not less deadly than with a knife.

<comment><USER5> That _may_ be true, but if it is, why don't people quoting this statistic talk about the overall homicide rate?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Cars getting safer is cars getting better at what they are designed for, I think it's a rather poor comparison and the chart of them getting safer over time makes it seem silly in contrast with guns.

It's also silly to say "guns keep you safe but from a birds eye view more people die" because it has to be viewed on a case by case basis, if someone was able to defend themselves or their family that was good, it shouldn't be viewed as if it was at the cost of other people who were killed by guns unjustly.</comment>


There's a mini RTOS in my language - <AUTHOR> http://blog.adacore.com/theres-a-mini-rtos-in-my-language <comment><USER2> For people wanting to learn, this article trying to use it for audio applications will give you a nice taste of the language:

[http://www.electronicdesign.com/embedded- revolution/assessin...](http://www.electronicdesign.com/embedded- revolution/assessing-ada-language-audio-applications)

This Barnes book shows how it's systematically designed for safety at every level:

[https://www.adacore.com/books/safe-and-secure- software](https://www.adacore.com/books/safe-and-secure-software)

Note: The AdaCore website has a section called Gems that gives tips on a lot of useful ways to apply Ada.

Finally, if you do Ada, you get the option of using Design-by-Contract (built- in to 2012) and/or SPARK language. One gives you clear specifications of program behavior that take you right to source of errors when fuzzing or something. The other is a smaller variant of Ada that integrates into automated, theorem provers to try to prove your code free of common errors in all cases versus just ones you think of like with testing. Those errors include things like integer overflow or divide by zero. Here's some resources on those:

[http://www.eiffel.com/developers/design_by_contract_in_detai...](http://www.eiffel.com/developers/design_by_contract_in_detail.html)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARK_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARK_\(programming_language\))

[https://www.amazon.com/Building-High-Integrity- Applications-...](https://www.amazon.com/Building-High-Integrity-Applications- SPARK/dp/1107040736)

The book and even language was designed for people without a background in formal methods. I've gotten positive feedback from a few people on it. Also, I encouraged some people to try SPARK for safer, native methods in languages such as Go. It's kludgier than things like Rust designed for that in mind but still works.

GPL download for AdaCore GNAT:

[https://www.adacore.com/community](https://www.adacore.com/community)

<comment><USER3> SPARK might be kludgier than Rust, but the guarantees it can make are stronger. And from what I've seen, it's less kludgy than the dependent type systems I've seen.

<comment><USER2> I meant integrating it into FFI's expecting C code. It's true that it makes stronger guarantees. I have a concept also that's called Brute Force Assurance where one source gets converted into Rust, Frama-C, and SPARK. Idea is static analysis tools for each knock out errors others can't catch. Final result is portable C.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if the lack of mechanisms like Ada's rendez-vous or QNX' mailboxes in other ecosystems are due to patent encumbrance.

<comment><USER5> Those are quite old concepts - I would imagine any patent to have expired by now.

They are also available in almost all embedded/rtos ecosystems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if rust's "fearless concurrency"[1] allows you to create threads which can migrate between CPUs.

[1] - [https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/11/14/Fearless- Concurrency-I...](https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/11/14/Fearless-Concurrency- In-Firefox-Quantum.html)

<comment><USER7> Threads which can move between CPUs? That's up to the OS, no?

<comment><USER6> According to the article, an ADA partitioning scheme (ravenscar) enforces this option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Saw this on reddit. Comments were full of "What's an RTOS?" ... which made me sad.

Real Time Operating System people.. cmon..

<comment><USER9> What makes me sad is the arrogance of your comment. There are 1000 of things that each of us know that you don't.

<comment><USER10> Not knowing is normal.

Not learning is bad.

If I don't know what RTOS is, my first reflex is to try and learn it on my own. Only if I fail this I will try to make others to give me an answer. I don't like wasting their time and making them provide the same reply for the thousandth time looks pretty wasteful to me.

In this case, looking up RTOS in Google is as simple as it gets. People who ask what it is do so because they didn't try to learn this by themselves.

I'm not exactly a fan of such people. I accept that they have different beliefs than me, and I try my best to be tolerant, but a sense of discomfort when dealing with people like that never leaves me. Is it arrogance too, I wonder?

<comment><USER9> If you are in a thread about a specific topic, likely filled with people knowing what they are talking about, asking there is only natural. It's quick, prevent you from learning the wrong information by looking it up wrong, filter the essential... And last but not least, the answer will be added to the thread, allowing the next readers to find it in the right context, including search engine bots.

This is as close as it gets to a win-win.

<comment><USER10> > If you are in a thread about a specific topic, likely filled with people > knowing what they are talking about, asking there is only natural.

Sure. But, is it also natural and a win-win situation if your exact question is answered multiple times upthread? Shouldn't you use your browser's search function to see if it's not answered already before posting the question?

<comment><USER9> Yeah that's fair.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


My Dear Larry page: a pathetic attempt to get a Cr48 w/CSS3 - <AUTHOR> http://dearlarrypage.com/

<comment><USER2> Viewing source gives this tidbit:

               <!-- PS -
                I work at SLAC in a group called Scientific Computing Applications.  Our goal is to
                use GWT as much as possible to support as many experiments as possible in many ways,
                leveraging HTML5 and AJAX/RPCs to meet these goals.

                In addition, while I dearly love GWT in it's native Java form, I'd like to confess
                a greater love for Pyjamas.  It'd be absolutely wonderful if Pyjamas had some of the
                more advanced features of GWT, especially in regards to Javascript optimization.
                Just sayin...
               -->

</comment><comment><USER3> Larry Page once posted on Slashdot. See <http://slashdot.org/~larrypage>

<comment><USER4> Wow, that thread is, in of itself, a fascinating time capsule.

<http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/06/04/1347253>

"How long before the google engine only becomes accessible through some overburdened overbranded 'portal' site?"

This made me smile in particular (a perfect sum up of the fears I had back then as well). Glad to see it never really happened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You know you can just apply for one right? <http://www.google.com/chromeos/pilot-program.html>

<comment><USER6> I suspect he's one of the many who have applied without receiving one. Not all who applied have been so lucky.

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah, I figured my time had passed and then I saw on Engadget that somebody recently one. I was already playing around with the CSS for this just for fun, so I decided what the hell. It probably looks horrible on IE, and not as nice on firefox<4.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Any Google employees here, can you ask about how Larry, Sergey, and Eric respond to email? I wished Larry and Sergey had a public Buzz or Twitter account.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hell, why not? I wouldn't be surprised if a Cr-48 found its way to you.

</comment><comment><USER8> while not really necessary here, the author reminded me of the bare protocol (href=//foo.com) trick to prevent http/s mismatches of page assets.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wish people outside US were eligible :-/

</comment><comment><USER10> Not the most meaningful markup, huh..

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah you get lazy when you edit over ssh with nano.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> this is awesome! Larry if you read this I want one too :) (I did apply with no luck :/)

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't understand why he doesn't put his email address in the signature?

<comment><AUTHOR> I figured Larry would know how to do a whois.

<comment><USER13> He's busy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This may be better addressed to Eric. He is still the CEO.</comment>


I'm an Engineer for Facebook and am helping build a Facebook office in NYC. AMA - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/we565/im_an_engineer_for_facebook_and_am_helping_build/ <comment><USER3> "i probably shouldn't talk for that team too much, but generally we think of ads the same way we think of other communication on fb. if it's starbucks talking to their fans it's not fundamentally different than me talking to my friends. so we're not trying to shove ads on the side and pray people click on them - we're trying to integrate them more with the other naturally social stuff on the site. I think sponsored stories are going to be huge, for instance"

Looks like some kool-aid over there about advertising. A brand advertising to its customers is the same thing as someone talking to their friend? Since when? They are not trying to shove ads on the side and pray people click on them because they know people increasingly will ignore them. Instead, they've opted for tricking you into clicking them by putting them in your feed with your friends' avatars slapped on top.

<comment><USER4> I do like following the updates of the businesses I "like" on Facebook. I would be accepting of Facebook taking payment for businesses you "like" having their latest postings at the top of your news feed. That's not disruptive to the site, and they already know you like that company. I also wouldn't be disappointed if Facebook took payment for businesses your friends "like" putting their updates at the top of your page, as long as you can click the dropdown and say "don't show me posts from $company" until you "like" them as well.

Product placement isn't disruptive as long as it makes sense. I feel Facebook should know enough about their users to make the call on if the user would like to see that post. Notice I say "post", not "ad". I want to see companies the way they are, not the way their ad firms want me to see them.

<comment><USER5> I love my friends, but I don't take purchasing cues from them, and certainly not because they 'like' it on Facebook.

Sure, there are edge cases. But generally, 99.999% of the time I don't want product updates from companies whose products I use.

<comment><USER6> Likes are a pretty useless signal, IMO. So many businesses offer contest entries or coupons for "Liking" them, that many users (if most of my friends on FB are any indication) have Liked tons of businesses they've never had any interaction with.

This is part of the reason I think FB's advertising value is overrated - <USER2> Like is so noisy that it is almost useless, whereas other entities may have actual purchase data, which is far more useful than a "Like".

<comment><USER7> Not sure there is much better out there for pushing continuous engagement. I want to keep people interested in my business, I don't want to overdo the mailing list though, especially not for little things that work much better as a small Facebook post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> [http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/we565/im_an_engineer_f...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/we565/im_an_engineer_for_facebook_and_am_helping_build/c5cjvw9)

 _now that we've done that we can change the language (we've added a ton of stuff like yield, type hints for primitives, new scoping rules, native HTML elements as real classes etc.) and we're building our own VM and JIT for it. so it's only php kind of.

[...]

b) generally php has only two scopes - function scope and global scope. you can get into trouble with this since something that looks like it should be out of scope is, surprise, still the same variable later. we made it have real scope, like in most other languages_

</comment><comment><USER9> For me, my neews feed is getting more and more noisy , less valuable and diffuclt to consume.

<comment><USER10> I block all apps, have few likes, and have silenced my chatty aunties... not too bad now.

<comment><USER11> You can silence people without unfriending them? TIL

<comment><USER12> You can also tell Facebook if you specifically want more or less updates from specific friends, without completely unsubscribing from them. When hovering over a story, a "down arrow bookmark thing" appears in the top-right of the story, and gives you many options for controlling your experience with that user/page/app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I imagine the episode of the Dilbert TV series where Dilbert had to design the new office.

</comment><comment><USER14> His/her ARP anecdote actually sounds like an STP problem, rather than ARP.

<comment><USER15> Can you elaborate?

<comment><USER14> Sure, STP is described at: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanning_Tree_Protocol>

When an 802.1D capable bridge appears on a network with STP, the other bridges will all drop their forwarding table and learn again from scratch.

Failure mode sounds spookily like the one described.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I, for one, was surprised by the lack of PHP related vitriol.

</comment><comment><USER17> Having read the article I have to conclude that his email address is broken as "go ahead and email me at email@example.com and I'll go through it this week"

Does not have @facebook.com anywere!!! Or is this a perk of working for facebook?

<comment><USER12> Our email addresses are actually @fb.com -- as for the rest of your comment, wat?

<comment><USER17> No that was the only part of my comment - I was asking as the mass conversion of alot of peoples emails( _1) and contacts due to `bugs` to facebook.com(_ 2) recently to all the facebook users.

This and given he is using a gmail account, how do we know he works for facebook? So do people who work at facebook have a @fb.com email address only? Why did he not use that email address?

References in case your oblivious to the user interaction aspect of facebook transpiring recently.

( _1)<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18590929> (_2) <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18687044>

<comment><USER12> Sorry, I didn't grasp that context from your comment.

Since employees are "normal" Facebook users like everyone else, we were also subject to having firstname.lastname@example.com added to our profiles, and I for one immediately replaced it with my personal email address, just like anyone else can do.

By contrast, our @fb.com address is our "official" account that goes to a standard email client, and has no relation to our actual Facebook profile. Some of us (including me) still prefer to use our personal email address for anything not directly related to work topics.

And for what it's worth, I can vouch for the authenticity of the FBSerkan account on Reddit.

<comment><USER17> Thank you for confirming that @fb.com is only for employee's and also for vouching for the authenticity of FBSerkan. Good enough for me and thank you.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is It Finally Hammer Time for Apple and Its App Store? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/opinion/apple-app-store-hey.html <comment><USER2> It's funny how Microsoft is becoming more developer friendly than Apple nowadays.</comment>


Apache Maven SCM 1.11.1 released - <AUTHOR> https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/maven-announce/201809.mbox/%3Cdbab2763-6a48-9002-4fcd-8d80c7011f3c%40apache.org%3E <comment><AUTHOR> [SCM-834] - Commit encoding is platform-dependent instead of UTF-8</comment>


Hey DevOps Leave My UI Alone - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/hey-devops-leave-my-ui-alone-9a6994a2f655 <comment><USER2> I guess I'll take the bait... why bother putting on the disingenuous facade of pretending like it's DevOps fault when you almost immediately go on to admit that the issue is product management?

I feel like someone just told me a really bad riddle and then gave me the answer to it before I even had a chance to think about it... I suppose I should be thankful for that though XD</comment>


Treehouse CEO says 32-hour, 4-day workweek created "a lack of work ethic" - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/productivity-tips-four-day-workweek-2018-8 <comment><USER2> Not much of value at all in this article, but it's worth pointing out the actual quote used for the head —

"It created this lack of work ethic in me that was fundamentally detrimental to the business and to our mission," Carson added. "It actually was a terrible thing."

In other words, all we know from the article is that this affected _the CEO's_ work ethic.

Edit: In fact, I think this is worth a flag for being both misleading and unsubstantive.

<comment><USER3> It was unclear to me from reading the article whether the thirty-two hour week is still in effect for employees or not. He's abandoned it, but has the rest of the company?

It seems reasonable that a schedule that suits the deep focus and creativity required for knowledge work is not as well adapted to the demands placed on a CEO.

<comment><USER2> There is a little note in there re: the employees:

"Carson explained to GrowthLab Live recently that the four-day workweek he had for his employees was ultimately nixed in 2016."

And I generally agree that a CEO in particular may struggle with this, which is why I give his personal statement the benefit of the doubt. Beyond that I would expect some sort of actual data to support any other claim about the business as a whole. This article implies a lot and delivers essentially nothing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I always wondered[1] if shorter days would be better for folks than fewer/longer days would be. 5x6 instead of 4x8.

I figure you would have shorter "monday/friday syndrome" days. Longer hours also make you more mentally tired, etc.

[1]: I have /absolutely/ no evidence to back this up.

<comment><USER5> I switched to a 5x6 schedule earlier this year and its fantastic. Less traffic in both directions, more time in the morning to exercise and enjoy breakfast, easier to run errands in the afternoon. I also feel less burnt out and more productive during the time I am at work.

I took a small cut in salary to do it, but it was completely worth it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Did he start the shorter work week in 2006 or 2015?

The article quotes

> Back in 2015, Carson said he was motivated by those findings.

but if you go to the atlantic article ([https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/396527/case-32-hour-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/396527/case-32-hour- workweek/))

It says since 06. A 1 year experiment doesnt seem that long or if it was since 06, shouldnt he have noticed it was bad for him before a whole decade passed (ended in 2016)

</comment><comment><USER7> As technology advances, it seems there will be a need for less work hours. Not yet, though it seems.

</comment><comment><USER8> As with any other big cultural shift (I see some parallels with remote working), it looks like there must be processes and other practices/support systems/safeguards in place to make sure it runs smoothly.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's important to note that the CEO makes pains to specify that it created a lack of work ethic _in him_ :

[https://youtu.be/CJcTdA55aWA?t=65](https://youtu.be/CJcTdA55aWA?t=65)

Whether or it meant his employees were delivering less work wasn't mentioned. _He_ felt like he had less of a work ethic, so it seemed to be nixed.

Which is kind of shitty tbh, if it was just him. Because I think it's also reasonable to say that the CEO/founder of a startup will probably need to put in more hours than their employees. It's not fair maybe, but then, the CEO/founder is also reaping most of the rewards.

<comment><AUTHOR> If the 4-day week was good for the rest of his employees, why would he roll it back? I think he's being diplomatic in his explanation, as it doesn't look good to insinuate in public that the failure of a bold idea was the fault of the employees.

<comment><USER8> That's fair enough, it sounds like as with any other big cultural shift (I see some parallels with remote working), there must be processes and other safeguards in place to make sure it runs smoothly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I work 12 hours on Wednesdays and only 1-2 hours the other days. I'm plenty successful, and most importantly, ridiculously happy.

</comment><comment><USER10> Do any of these supposedly lazy employees have meaningful equity participation? Or is this just another self-entitled techbro whining that other people aren't making him richer at the rate he's accustomed to?

<comment><USER11> He said it made for a lack of work ethic in _himself_.

<comment><USER10> But it's his employees that he's making work more hours, so that doesn't make any sense

<comment><USER11> So, what, your initial comment had truthiness even though it made a complaint based on not reading or misreading the article?

<comment><AUTHOR> We aren't required to automatically accept someone's claim as the truth when the evidence suggests otherwise. The CEO removed the 4-day week for _everyone_.

<comment><USER11> For sure, but the starter of this thread suggested he called his employees lazy. He didn't. He said it killed _his_ work ethic, and that _he_ now worked a 65 hour week.

It might be that for his median employee, it increased hourly productivity -- but by less than 12%. Or that it didn't affect hourly productivity. Or, as a peer suggested, that it just felt shitty to lay some people off while others worked less than a conventional "full" work week for full salary.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Anonymous' new weapon - <AUTHOR> http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Anonymous-s-new-weapon-1418337.html

<comment><USER2> what a sad attack. A browser will only issue six simultaneous http requests per domain, so you have a per-user concurrency ceiling of six. The only thing they're proving is that the DOJ website was built by disinterested consultants and doesn't handle a large number of concurrent users. Bravo. What a revelation. You could probably say the same about most websites on the Internet.

This type of behavior isn't insignificant; it's dangerous. The fact of the matter is that most people have no idea what programmers are capable of, and what makes one attack sophisticated and dangerous or another one benign. These high-visibility, low-value attacks do absolutely no damage to "the establishment". On the contrary, the visibility of the attacks makes this type of behavior doublespeak fodder.

 _Computer hackers broke into government computers last night, disabling government communication. What can hackers do to your Facebook profile? Does your child have a Facebook profile, and are they safe? Tune in at ten and find out how you can protect your children._

Etc. All closing civilizations invoke a powerful and unseen enemy. What is more powerful and unseen than The Internet? We must be careful, as a collective, to draw the line in how we protest. "terrorists" were the last great invisible enemy, but people are getting tired of hearing about "terrorists". They're just not scary like they used to be. Will "hackers" be the next great invisible enemy? Why not? Everyone has a computer; a little fright center in their living room, or held up to their head. We get up in arms about location tracking in iPhones, but:

 _Law enforcement officials say that the tracking technology was put in there to help locate lost children or assist in the pursuit of known criminals. But now, officials say, computer hackers have found a way to get to this information, tracking you wherever you go. What information is your phone sending that you can't afford not to know about? Find out at ten._

There's a right way and a wrong way to defend Net Neutrality. This is not the right way.

</comment><comment><USER3> One interesting side effect of this tactic is that actual LOIC users may now have some plausible deniability, as they can claim they were duped into participation.

<comment><USER4> I did some Googling but was unable to find a lot of technical detail on the type of attack executed by LOIC. A quick glance at the source code on Github shows the capability for HTTP flooding, but the Wikipedia page mentions a TCP flood. I'm not sure whether it's capable of both, or which is used more in practice.

In any event, the traffic from a web browser is going to look different from traffic generated by LOIC. A web browser is a very high-level tool with lots of constraints to keep web pages from doing "bad things". These constraints would make it pretty easy to profile traffic from web browsers vs LOIC. Granted, LOIC could mimic these constraints, but that would significantly diminish its operating capabilities.

The whole conversation surrounding LOIC and this new web based tool is full of bad information and misunderstandings.

<comment><USER5> LOIC is a simple tool which executes a SYN flooding attack. I wonder why this wasn't mentioned here in the comments yet.

It works like this: Your computer asks to open a TCP connection by sending a SYN packet to the server. The server responds with SYN/ACK. Your computer is expected to send ACK to complete the 3-way-handshake and to establish the connection. Except for, in this attack, your computer never sends ACK.

The server usually reserves a few resources to maintain that half-open connection, such as a socket and a thread that waits for the connection to finish.

If enough people do this, the server runs out of resources rather quickly and it's practically impossible to block it without a server farm. Even if a firewall-script prevents the server from crashing by limiting the number of open (half-open) connections, by blocking attacking IP addresses and by reducing their timeout, it can't be distinguished between legitimate traffic and DoS-traffic.

So, given that a single computer easily pumps out several hundred or even thousand requests per second, the amount of traffic quickly grows when many users are involved.

By the way, with a single computer, it is more or less impossible to take down a server with only SYN flooding, as your computer requires more or less the same computational power to establish the connection and most servers have more RAM and a bigger connection to the internet.

It really gets messy, when you use encryption, where the server has to do more computational work than a client. Then, you can easily DoS a server from a single computer. However, this is NOT done with the LOIC, but there was a tool recently that performs this kind of attack against, I forgot, I think Apache with a vulnerable OpenSSL version.

So, this whole attack is on OSI layer 4 and is indeed a TCP-based attack. HTTP traffic is on layer 5+ and it's not possible to achieve half-open TCP connections with a browser.

Nevertheless, a DoS is still possible. There are two ways:

1\. Many clients ask simultaneously for a computational expensive operation. For example, some sort of filtering mechanism for the member list of a community site. Depending on the database backend, such a request can cause a more or less sophisticated SQL query.

These are usually the places where programmers should optimize their queries (or use caching etc.) to prevent the server from crashing.

2\. Simply ask for a resource like an image or a larger JS-file, but do this often with many clients. This happens also, when a small blog writes a good article and is linked on HN or reddit. The incoming traffic is too big be handled.

Generally speaking, it depends heavily on the server's environment regarding caching, optimization, load balancing, a firewall script, an Intrusion Detection/Prevention System etc. whether or not a browser-based attack can be successful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anyone have a source? I'm curious how crafted GET statements can lead to a DDOS.

<comment><USER7> I was able to find one without too much difficulty (not linking to it though). Pastebin and the like seem to be removing the links almost as quickly as they show up though.

As with everything I've seen from "Anonymous" so far, it's a completely unsophisticated attack. All it does is create an image object in JS and set the src of the image object to the URL to be attacked, with some random garbage appended to confuse naive caching systems. It initially attempts to do this about once every millisecond, but it looks like it will shut itself down if there are too many failed requests.

It's pretty lame. I mean, they're not targeting an especially bandwidth-heavy thing. They're not submitting forms to flood a database or crash an email server. They're not attempting to exploit any vulnerabilities at all. They're literally just trying to spam it for as long as their attention span lasts.

The only thing a network monkey needs to do to mitigate an attack like this one is mount a few nginx proxies to handle anything with the garbage URL attached and then immediately close the connection while letting everything else through.

edit: Hah! The biggest single element on the justice.gov home page is the _jquery script_ it includes, which is almost twice the size of the index page. Anon could have doubled their effectiveness just by sending requests for jquery instead. :-)

<comment><USER8> There was a similar project a while ago called Lad Vampire (by a group called Artists Against 419) that used to do the same thing to fake baking sites. It was pretty effective and to be honest, it was kind of cool seeing the sites being listed as going down over time.

<comment><USER9> "fake banking". The trip to urban dictionary for "fake baking" didn't turn up anything plausible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm still not sure what DDOS'ing a government website will ultimately achieve. So you cant access justice.gov for a few days...how many of you visit that site daily? How does this affect the Justice department other than making some IT guy look bad?

I see what they are trying to do. They want to show that the will of a few can control the masses...but hijacking a bystander's browser will only make Anonymous look like a bunch of assholes. This tactic will give the media and/or government a way to paint Anonymous in a different light.

<comment><USER11> I think if they really wanted to hit someone where it hurts they should be targeting banking frontpages ie: where you sign in for online banking.

Since anon is basically reduced to tearing down posters they may as well tear down the posters with functionality built in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here's the source code for it: <http://pastebay.com/302697>

Here's what it looks like w/o the JS attack code: <http://pastehtml.com/view/bloqs5aae.html>

d0z.me (<http://d0z.me/>) is similar in effect to this, although not the same.</comment>


Revel Systems Raises $100M To Grow Its iPad Point-Of-Sale Business - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/11/revel-systems-raises-100m-to-grow-its-ipad-point-of-sale-business-sets-sights-on-ipo/

<comment><USER2> A confluence of events that are coming to head in the last year and coming year is creating significant opportunities in the retail point of sale space. The retail technology stack has become pretty stale in the last 10 years. What you see at many retailers is decade old technology. The existing legacy players have carved out their domain and have fought hard to fight off any change.

All this is changing due to a number of events that are coming to head now.

* EMV liability shift in October 2015 is forcing merchants to upgrade their payment terminals. When merchants are upgrading, they all want to future proof their investment. So, they are all looking at the latest and greatest technology. The new Verifone and Ingenico terminals are filled with every type of technology that they can think of. This includes wifi, BLE, high res lcd screens, etc. In addition, both Verifone and Ingenico have opened up APIs for third parties to write apps for these terminals outside of the secure PCI sandbox. Then you have newcomers like Poynt that is trying to disrupt this entire space.

* Windows XP deprecation: many of the existing pos, like micros and Aloha, run on top of Windows XP. With the Windows XP deprecation, retailers are required to upgrade their pos to maintain PCI compliance. Instead of spending thousands on upgrading to the latest Micros and Aloha POS, they are now looking at tablet based and cloud based pos systems. This allows companies like Revel, Square, and Clover to move into the space of existing legacy players.

The largest challenge for these newcomers (that many underestimate) is the depth of software in the aloha/Micros pos. These pos not only handle order management and payment, but they also run the entire store operation (ie inventory, payroll, scheduling, etc). For a newcomer to come in, it's very high cost to replace all of these functionalities. At Money2020, one of the speakers stated "Changing a Pos is equivalent to changing the way they run the business"

* POS as a platform. Micros and Aloha treated their platform as an ecosystem that they wanted to protect. They make it very difficult for third parties to innovate on it. For example, to get access to the Micros SDK, it requires a $25k license plus $1k per deployment. This is a great barrier to entry for startups. The new players have all created open ecosystems to enable third parties to write apps on them. Verifone, Ingenico, Poynt, and Clover have all gone as far as to create an app store to enable third parties to sell and distribute their app.

Where we are at now in the pos space is where we were then in the mobile space when the iPhone first came out. There are lots of opportunities to innovate in this space. Lots of developers and startups are waiting at the gate for the entire retail technology stack to refresh to get into this space.

Definitely very exciting times.

<comment><USER3> Totally agree. Many of the lessons learned in reliable systems on the internet are only beginning to be applied in the POS space.

Compared to the pricing that retailers are used to paying (easily $5000-$25000 per terminal) an iPad is a deal even if it must be replaced more often.

As you say, the depth to replace an entire Micros or Aloha setup would take years of development. (I have extended and developed POSs myself.) That is why I think the POS(s) with open data standards will win out, by integrating with existing inventory and financial tools.

There is a ton of room and will be competition, so focus will be key. The POS vendor no longer needs to develop the hardware or database, just the software. But -- high-volume POS UX is unlike any normal web or app UX. A intuitive POS that drives sales and proves it with easily exportable/readable data? I don't think there's a clear leader yet.

<comment><USER2> Agreed. A lot of the new players are trying to build pos like a consumer product with sexy uis and animations.

In qsr space, a 10 sec decrease in time equates to roughly 1% in revenue. (1)

Legacy Uis look terrible but they are built for speed. One thing that would help this space is applying learnings about A/B testing, metrics, and UX research in the POS space. If you can demonstrate to merchants using data that you can decrease time and increase revenue, that is a huge opportunity.

(1) [http://hospitalitytechnology.edgl.com/news/Are-You-Fast- Enou...](http://hospitalitytechnology.edgl.com/news/Are-You-Fast-Enough-55209)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If anyone's interested in working in this space, Lavu is looking for developers and DevOps people.[1]

Full disclaimer: I work for them.

[1] [http://www.poslavu.com/en/ipad-pos-jobs](http://www.poslavu.com/en/ipad- pos-jobs)

</comment><comment><USER5> I've been in a store when one of the Revel iPad terminals couldn't get online. highly annoying. Don't traditional POS rely on the telephone lines? Usually more reliable than my ISP, that's for sure.

<comment><USER3> In the past, yes POS card processing relied on a telephone connection to the processor, but this is less and less common. Regardless POS intranet was always isolated from the internet, for PCI compliance and security.

Only these new entrants have become reliant on an internet connection -- but most seem to be marketing the novelty of mobile technology, rather than creating an offline-first db-synced app built on proven internet technologies.

<comment><USER6> Shameless plug here – I build an iPad point of sale that does exactly that. It's called Ambur (amburapp.com). We started with a local SQLite DB, then built syncing depending only on the _router_ functioning (i.e. no internet dependency, one iPad acts as a server) using Bonjour discovery, and I just added NAT traversal so people can still remotely access the point of sale. It's the best of all worlds! Now to find some venture capital...

BTW, why in the world don't any of the other point of sales do this? None of the stuff that's required is rocket science, you need a Core Data maven, a networking maven, and a decent UI programmer in the same room and you'll get a ton done. Removing reliance on a server seems like a no-brainer both for clients with unreliable internet connections with business-critical needs, and for avoiding complexity of having a "split brain" across iOS/the cloud for the service. It seems like server devs are valued over iOS devs for no clear reason.</comment></comment></comment>


Fighting Tasty Invasive Fish With Forks And Knives - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/08/17/340648935/fighting-tasty-invasive-fish-with-forks-and-knives

<comment><USER2> There are lots of Lionfish around Florida, and people have come up with all kinds of recipes for them: [http://www.lionfishhunters.org/Recipes.html](http://www.lionfishhunters.org/Recipes.html)

There are also Lionfish derbies to encourage people to kill them: [http://www.reef.org/lionfish/derbies](http://www.reef.org/lionfish/derbies)

I spearfish near Tampa every once in a while and was always told to kill Lionfish on sight. The state now has a special exemption that allows spearfishing of Lionfish in areas where spearfishing is normally illegal.

</comment><comment><USER3> Makes some good sense: where no natural predators exist, introduce one. Humans work.</comment>


S3git: Git for Cloud Storage, Written in Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/s3git/s3git <comment><USER2> _> Q Do you support encryption? A Simply encrypt it before streaming into s3git add, eg pipe it through openssl enc or similar. Q Do you support zipping? A Simply zip it before streaming into s3git add, eg pipe it through zip -r - . or similar._

A "no" would have sufficed.

This is relevant to my interests, so I was going to try to read the source to see how it works: it seems that the internals are in [https://github.com/s3git/s3git-go](https://github.com/s3git/s3git-go) which is a dead url?

<comment><USER3> The library is not yet open sourced but will be soon. Some internals about how s3git uses the BLAKE2 hashing algorithm are described in [https://github.com/s3git/s3git/blob/master/BLAKE2.md](https://github.com/s3git/s3git/blob/master/BLAKE2.md) which may be of interest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just FYI, JGit [0][1] also supports S3 outside of being a fully-featured Git client.

[0]: [https://eclipse.org/jgit/](https://eclipse.org/jgit/)

[1]: [https://github.com/eclipse/jgit](https://github.com/eclipse/jgit)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the links. However s3git more applies the git philosophy/way of working to Cloud Storage rather than being compatible at a binary level.

<comment><USER4> I agree. Just wanted to add some perspective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> FYI, this isn't actually git, this is something entirely different that also has `git` in the name.

<comment><USER3> That is correct (see also earlier reply), it is aimed at really large repos with primarily non-text blobs backed up cloud storage like S3, but doing so in the spirit of git and hence the name.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are there better countries to start my SaaS company for tax reasons? - <AUTHOR> We are about to launch a sass product and I'm wondering if it's too imaginative to incorporate in another country for tax reasons. We're using stripe, based in the US and most of our clients will be in the US. Also it's a .com. <comment><USER2> Hah.

I am an international tax lawyer and I advise startups that do business all over the world.

I do not have a good answer to your question. There is insufficient data upon which to make a suggestion.

However, here are my guidelines:

\- if there is a US person involved in this business as an officer or owner, you will experience exquisite agony in opening a bank account abroad.

\- until your net profits from non-US sources amount to $2M - $3M per year, the tax benefits are likely to be trivial.

\- an hour of founder time spent thinking about tax is an hour wasted. Think about building your product. Think about getting a customer. That's much more valuable.

\- as soon as you add a foreign corporation to your business structure you have probably added $10K - $20k to your overhead. Minimum.

There are exceptions to every rule. Your situation may be different. Good luck.

<comment><USER3> This needed to be said. I think a lot of the problems founders try to solve begin as responsible research, and slowly morph into a means of procrastination. I have certainly done it. Fear of shipping manifesting in 'productive' ways.

<comment><USER4> This is a brilliant way to put it. "Fear of shipping manifesting in 'productive' ways." We tend to manufacture busy work instead of focusing on what is necessary right now. (OP himself might be in a situation to seriously consider incorporation, so may not be applicable at all.)

I find so many startups in APAC incorporating in USA, with justification that they "need" a US company to get customers, or get a better payment gateway etc. That's just focusing on the wrong problem. 1\. Get enough visitors by getting the word out. 2\. Convert enough trials. 3\. Talk to (email) real users. 4\. Get to the point where they are ready to pay. 5\. If objection clearly indicates payment experience, terms of service (location of company), then consider incorporation.

By setting up subsidiary / parent company elsewhere, you are committing to too many overheads in time and money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you work in the US, and most of your clients will be in the US, most tax agencies (and probably IRS, but I'm not sure) will effectively presume you're a US-based company. It doesn't matter if your company is registered somewhere else, they'll presume it as a US company. The same laws apply in most European countries.

Why? Because otherwise all freelancers would simply register in the country with the lowest tax to dodge their national taxes. Obviously governments don't want that.

If you have the opportunity to physically relocate to another country though, then it becomes interesting to find places with lower tax rates. Countries like Singapore won't care if you're a foreigner opening a company and are never there. It's mostly about your personal tax residency what matters.

An increasingly common construction with people working remotely is a Hong Kong or Singapore company, and either no personal residency anywhere (e.g. traveling around perpetually), or a personal residency in a place with lower personal tax. Think Bulgaria or Panama.

If you're a US citizen, there's extra difficulties here. You'll be taxed for any income above $100K/y, even if you're not a US resident anymore. If you don't want to be taxed in the US, you'll have to forego your citizenship (!).

P.S. IANAL.

<comment><USER6> I'm always curious how people that have no personal tax residence deal with health care insurance? At least in Europe, many private health insurance plans for travelers have the prerequisite of being covered by the countries social security first.

<comment><USER5> You're very right. This is one of the main challenges for people to move away. There's expat insurance though (usually in the same country as where you're from) and usually the fees are way lower since you're now in a pool of higher educated wealthy expats instead of the overall population.

You can also usually move back, become a resident again and get covered again.

<comment><USER7> I believe expats insurance (at least the one I had) is significantly cheaper because they only cover acute conditions + transport back home – meaning they won't be paying for the really expensive cancer/diabetes/alzheimers/etc.-treatments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you're business never takes off, it won't matter where you are incorporated. Get some decent advice for a professional you trust. When you start making mad stacks of cash, let the profits from your business pay for the super duper advice on a tax strategy that makes the most sense for your business.

About 10 years ago I decided to become a one person tax expert, read a NOLO press book on incorporating, and found what I thought was a clever solution to optimizing taxes in the most favorable manner. About a year later, my accountant told me two things... 1. "I've never actually seen a client choose this tax structure" 2\. "You picked the worst possible taxation vehicle for your business, which is hard to do on purpose!"

<comment><USER9> IMHO tax law also depends heavily on experience.

The rulings and the operation are quite different in most countries.

Since you're dealing with the state, it's also hard to protect your rights alone. If you're going it alone, I would advise talking with a friend with a law-degree. At least, that way, you could probably avoid grave errors.

And if you're being audited, or in trouble with the authorities in any way, definitely try to get some legal help.

PS: These are my own opinions, take it with a grain of salt. I just took the exam for the first semester of tax law :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wanted to lob more to the comments here on keeping it simple (and in the US):

You'll find that most US companies want to deal with US companies. This isn't just preference, but is part practicality. Contracts "Governed by the laws of Panama" isn't going to fly. I've even seen companies argue over the US state specified. This can be true elsewhere, but most places are more used to dealing with US-based companies and contracts than another random country.

Related: As a foreign company you might find you're subject to provisions and laws you weren't aware. Could be privacy or even simple reporting. Knowing your own country's business requirements is hard enough, knowing another could compound that.

It's going to be a similar story if you intend taking investment. To some investors it won't matter. To many it will matter a lot. Either way, a US (esp. Delaware) company is simple for both -- and you'll probably find the investment legals are significantly cheaper.

Eventually you'll want to employ people too. Granted there are ways of doing this without a US entity, but it's not going to be pretty.

</comment><comment><USER7> You've had all the benefits of the country you're in: roads, schools, research universities that created the software industry, a foreign service that advocated for your right to sell globally. It's time to return part of the favour.

(Also what everyone else said: it's premature optimisation)

<comment><USER11> Question: "Comcast sucks and is overpriced, are there any other internet providers that give me a better deal?"

Answer: "You've had all the benefits of the internet, which you've already overpaid [1] for. Rather than switching to a better internet provider, it's time to return part of the favor."

Spot the flaw in your comment yet? It's a generic non-response that applies to every possible service and ignores the fact that the service has already been paid for.

[1] Most government spending - which he has already financed with his taxes - is merely wealth transfers to non-workers. Only a small fraction consists of the services you mention.

<comment><USER7> Your argument is quite dishonest, which is why those non-working 80-year olds living on the dole are starting to have trouble reading your grey text.

As to your spotted flaws: firstly, it's obvious that people start their lives with 20+ years of being as net recipients of government transfers, and while the services you consumed may have been paid for at the time, those that paid them would now like their pensions, and a new generation of children need (apparently better) education.

It's unfortunate that three-year olds are not in a position to rationally choose to rather live in Somalia, and that they therefore become part of a social contract they never actually signed – but can you come up with a better arrangement? It's very similar with parents, btw.

Funny thing though: I just now notice that I've actually always shared your opinion, in that if you actually stop consuming government services, i. e. leave the country, I'e always taken for granted that you're henceforth taxed at your new residence (strange US rules nonewithstanding).

But Comcast example is obviously wrong because OP clearly intents to remain living in the US – i. e. using Comcast. And my arguments above actually make the case that you should pay severance and assume your share of the debt if you leave. But, considering the US is the prime beneficiary of smart 18-year old immigrants, it's probably in your interest not to change the SQ.

Oh, and only about 30% of the gov spending is in transfers, and most of that is SS and Medicare. While you could make the case that these lazy 80-year olds should stop sulking and get a job, some of them may protest and insist that they're just getting back what they paid into the system.

<comment><USER12> > in that if you actually stop consuming government services, i. e. leave the > country

Stop spreading the nonsense that Govt is owner of the land. Its not. At best Govt/Army is protector of the land for which almost everyone happy to pay.

So no I dont have to go anywhere Its my land. The onus to figuaring out feasible payment method falls on the "mafia" or close the shop, IDGAF.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Consider yourself lucky and incorporate in the US.

Do not, under any circumstances, even think about running a SaaS business from Europe. EU has made invoicing hell for small businesses, especially those selling SaaS. You will spend time on things like VAT number checking, verifying customer's country using their IP (yes, I know), several kinds of invoices, prices inclusive or exclusive of VAT, calculating VAT for each EU country differently (and in different currencies), reporting VAT, and lots of other silly annoyances.

And if you think this is a "solved problem using a third-party service", you haven't tried it yet.

The only disadvantage of being US-based is that the first serious lawsuit will basicaly crater your business. Otherwise, you are _way_ ahead of your buddies in Europe (like me).

<comment><USER14> VAT is payed by the buyer. The percentage depends on the country where the buyer lives. The seller is required to collect the VAT from the buyer and pay that to the relevant country tax authorities.

The location of the seller is irrelevant for calculating, collecting and paying European VAT. Its applicably to any company in any country in the world.

However, for now having a company outside the EU does make it more difficult to be tracked by EU tax authorities. But its likely that at some point in the future that will change. And tax authorities fine easily.

<comment><USER15> If/when that happens, I would halt sales in EU on my niche SaaS. EU is a fraction of my user base and just wouldn't be worth all the hassle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Having run companies in various countries, some of them more tax friendly then others, my advice is to keep it simple. Unless your turnover will be in excess of about a million USD annually, the compliance hassles are not worth it. with your money coming from somewhere else, your tax department is going to flag you up, and turn you inside out. you might not be doing anything wrong, but it will be something you will have to deal with, and pay lawyers and accountants to sort out.

I currently have an LTD in Cyprus, and am shortly moving to France. On paper, it is going to be hugely advantageous to keep my LTD in Cyprus, and move income via Cyprus to France. In reality, the likelihood of hassles with the French Tax and social insurance departments is very high, so I'll be setting up shop in France. When the millions start rolling in, I'll figure out some kind of construction, if it will be worth it.

</comment><comment><USER17> Doesn't Ireland have a 6.5 % tax rate? Isn't that why all the companies like to incorporate there?

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/10/15/ireland-r...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/10/15/ireland- reduces-corporate-income-tax-rate-to-6-5-good-but-correct-rate- is-0/#6769a77536d8)

<comment><USER18> Ireland's corporate tax rate is 12.5% [1]. The 6.5% referred to in that article is for particular types of R&D activities.

[1] [http://www.revenue.ie/en/tax/ct/](http://www.revenue.ie/en/tax/ct/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> No. You're going to be taxed in the US anyways. Incorporating your company in another country just adds significantly more tax compliance, and potentially foreign income taxes, to the mix. Even worse, incorporating as a foreign corporation may make you ineligible for a variety of local, state, or federal tax benefits only available to domestic (meaning US-based) companies.

<comment><USER20> What exactly in your reasoning is US-specific? Wouldn't everything in your comment be equally true if "Japan", "China" or "EU" were substituted for "US"?

<comment><USER21> Because the US taxes American citizens' personal income regardless of the country in which it is earned, which almost nobody else* does.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_taxation#Citizen...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_taxation#Citizenship)

* except Eritrea, although China also might want to start doing it [1]

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/08/business/international/chi...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/08/business/international/china- starts-enforcing-tax-law-for-citizens-working- abroad.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column- region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The country you're looking for is Delaware.

<comment><USER23> Why? Care to elaborate?

I asked my Accountant in California about Delaware LLCs. He said that if I am doing my business "in California", it's not advisable to open LLC elsewhere. Esp. if physical good are involved - like a Kickstarter product or some other physical product that is partly or wholly made in another state (i.e. other than Delaware).

<comment><USER24> Your accountant is correct. Delaware is preferable for C-corps. So if you were setting up stocks and a management structure for future growth / VC investment / Sale you would go with Delaware for low state tax and pro business courts. For LLC/S-Corp that just adds overhead. So it depends on your end game with the business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> New Zealand: [http://www.doingbusiness.org/rankings](http://www.doingbusiness.org/rankings), well actually Singapore because the corporate tax rate is lower (both countries have a corporate tax rate lower than the US).

But seriously if you're based in the US and all of your employees are based in the US then pay tax in the US. The US government doesn't look kindly on tax shells and unless you've got a lot of money to spend on accountants and lawyers you're going to struggle. The US is the only country in the world that forces their citizens to pay tax on income earned (and taxed) while living overseas, so if you were thinking of relocating to a tax haven you'd end up paying more tax once your income reached a certain threshold.

And it's only going to get tougher with the new administration.

Just pay your taxes, and take joy in the fact that you're contributing to the society that you live in.

</comment><comment><USER26> As a European, I would choose the US any time. More friendly biz environment, many consultants there knowledgeable and no one, even the Europeans, ask why you are there and bill from there In case you have some really simple mass- market product, you could also consider the Dubai Internet Free-Zone where you have ZERO percent taxes, only about 3000 Dollar fees in the beginning (and some cost for license renewal every year). In case Europe is a must, Cyprus might be a low-cost option.

<comment><USER27> I'm quite surprised no one else has mentioned Dubai.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Possibly Singapore. They have very rational and simple tax laws, legal stability and are generally a good place to do business.

I'd be worried about the EU, even the more corporate friendly places (Ireland, Estonia) - the recent retroactive ruling on Apple's Irish taxes make the EU seem potentially third world-like unstable.

Of course, if you eventually plan to bring the money back to the US, probably incorporating in the US is your best bet.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, well. technically all tax rulings are retroactive. And while we're disparaging other nations: I'd also be weary of doing business outside the US. There's some 3rd world president-impersonator on twitter who's talking an awful lot about punitive tariffs. (When he's not preoccupied with the size of his wall/hands/genitalia)

<comment><USER11> Punitive tariffs going forward are far less scary than going back. But for different reasons than you [1], I too am leery of tieing my future to the US. I don't plan to reside there long term.

[1] Trump is just a president signalling being a member of cultural out-group, I'm also an out-group member so I don't much car e. My reason for fearing the US is obligations exceeding ability to pay, a weak and sick culture, and also overbearing tax and regulatory authorities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I can make a case for Bulgaria. The corporate tax is 10% and the insurance tax is about ~ 50 to 80 EUR/month (can't recall exactly). If you pay dividends it's an additional 5%.

Banking service is rather poor, although they tend to reply via email in 24h. Finding an accountant that does speaks/writes English properly and reply on a timely manner can be a challenge but it's not impossible, especially in Sofia. On the other hand, in other cities you could get an accountant for 1/10th of the cost.

The major benefit is that the legislation is __stable __which is a big plus. Requirements for opening bank accounts are pretty loose compare to most other European states, although account expenses are considerably higher to neighbour states - but still we 're talking ~ 120 USD/year. Starting a business is easy and rather straight forward. Most official documents (like company statute) come in PDF with official (reckoned by the BG state) digital signature on them. As long as you pay your taxes, mail your invoices to your accountant, etc. You're good to go even if you live in Alaska.

</comment><comment><USER29> Many countries, and I think most countries in Europe, have language related to "place of effective management" in their tax code. Even a corporation incorporated in Cyprus (say), it could be considered resident in Germany (say), if the tax authorities feel the place of effective management is in Germany.

Interestingly, this link says that in the US: "Generally a corporation is treated as a domestic corporation if it is created or organized under the laws of the United States, any State, or the District of Columbia. No other criteria related to place of management will cause a corporation to be domestic."

[https://www.oecd.org/tax/automatic-exchange/crs- implementati...](https://www.oecd.org/tax/automatic-exchange/crs- implementation-and-assistance/tax-residency/United-States-Tax-Residency.pdf)

If you do decide to incorporate somewhere else, and you manage the company from the US, make sure it's a place where the tax code also doesn't care about the place of effective management.

However, if the income is US-source, aren't you always taxed on that income in the US anyway? "A foreign corporation engaged in a US trade or business is taxed at regular US corporate tax rates, but only on income from US sources that is effectively connected with that business, and at 30% on US-source income not effectively connected with that business. By contrast, US-resident corporations are taxed based on their worldwide income."

[https://www.pwc.com/us/en/tax- services/publications/assets/d...](https://www.pwc.com/us/en/tax- services/publications/assets/doing-business-in-the-us-2014.pdf)

<comment><USER30> What if the team is made of digital nomads working remotely from different areas?

<comment><USER29> Good question. I'm not a lawyer; I assume edge cases will be decided by the relevant tax authorities. Speculating here, but if there's a single place where management decisions are made, say where the CEO lives, the corporation might be tax resident there. Otherwise, they might decide to tax you in place of incorporation.

For such a company, what address would it have? Maybe where you place its headquarters has some significance too.

<comment><USER31> IANAL, but my understanding is that common law jurisdictions generally consider a corporation to be resident wherever "management and control" is exercised; corporations which are at risk of being considered resident in a jurisdiction where they do not want to be considered resident normally ample evidence of the locations of their board meetings and the physical presence of board members in order to prove that control is not being exercised within the avoided jurisdiction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Start making money before worrying about taxes.

If you are planning to bootstrap the company then incorporate wherever you want. On the other hand, investors would be a lot more comfortable investing in a US company and clients prefer to deal with other US companies.

</comment><comment><USER33> Did you mean SaaS?

<comment><USER34> Nope, it is a Bootstrapped startup :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_foreign_corporation...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_foreign_corporation#United_States_Subpart_F_Rules)

</comment><comment><USER36> Note, I am not an accountant, but these are my experiences running a business in the U.S.

If you are a passthrough entity like a sole-propietorship, partnership, or S-corp, probably not. Note, this doesn't matter if you're an LLC or not because the IRS doesn't care. Basically, passthrough entities calculate all business income minus deductible expenses as personal income. Therefore, the amount is subject to federal and state income tax as well as payroll tax (FICA). Certainly, income tax is tiered and FICA caps out at $118,500, but let's assume that you're pulling in $100,000. This mostly puts you in the 25% tax bracket. We'll assume that there's also 5% of state income tax. For FICA, since you're both the employee and the employer, you pay 15.3%. All together, that means you're losing about 45% to tax off the bat. Note, this taxes apply regardless of where you register your company unless you live out of the country for 330 days a year or can claim foreign residency. Then, it gets complicated because a certain amount of income is tax free, but not over a certain amount. Anyway, if you decide to live in the U.S., that 45% or so of tax from above applies regardless of where the company is registered. The reason people register their company outside the state where they do their business, other than liability and tort concerns, is because they're trying to avoid sales or gross receipts tax. However, everyone just bills that amount to their customers anyway, so it's really a wash.

If you really want to know the implications where you live, just hire an honest accountant for an hour and ask. That's what I did. It's worth the money.

\--- Edit 1 \---

Look, if you really want to save money on taxes, just make more money. That sounds silly, but it's true. Register as an S-corp. Your first $118,500 are brutal because you're paying an extra 15.3%, but after that FICA goes to 0%. Now, the top tax rate in the U.S. is 39.6%, but dividends are how people cheat that rate. Basically, an S-corp is required to pay the people who work in the company the prevailing wage for that position. However, money above that amount can be distributed to the shareholders as dividends. These are taxed at 15%. Note, you can't just underpay yourself and then claim everything as a dividend. That's illegal and you will get caught eventually. That said, the overall tax rate for someone who's running an S-corp and making $300k is almost certainly lower than someone making $100k. For example, if you can convince the IRS that the prevailing wage for your position is $120k, and you made $300k, then the first $120k gets taxed at 45% or so (see above) and the last $180k gets paid out in dividends and taxed at 15%. That's how you get your tax rate down. Note, at this point, really, just hire an honest accountant who can do the correct calculations and paperwork.

\--- Edit 2 \---

Note, I talked about being an S-corp above. However, even if you register your company out of the country, it doesn't matter. Americans must file their taxes every year regardless of where they live. If you are a bonified foreign resident, then the first $100,800 is tax exempt, but we still have to file this number. We also have to file what bank accounts have foreign assets over $10k at any time during the year. So, basically, when you file your taxes, the IRS doesn't care where your company is registered at all. You're going to pay your income tax and FICA, which is going to be in the 40% range if not more. Quite simply, if you're self employed, you're paying 15.3% in FICA. If you try to cheat this and your employer didn't pay the other half, the IRS will still want its money and you'll get caught. Even if you setup a foreign bank account with a foreign business, if a company pays you more that $600, they're probably going to file a 1099 in order to deduct that expense from their taxes, which means that the IRS knows about your income. Further, if you try to wire the money into the U.S. from your foreign bank, that goes through a check as well. Really, the IRS wants to get paid and they will one way or another.

It's not that illegal action can't hide money. Certainly, it can. However, it's difficult to hide money or reduce tax liability unless you have a lot of money to pay someone with a lot of know how to do it for you. At that point, just be happy that you're rich.

<comment><USER37> Wow 45%? What is this, the socialist state without any benefits of it? In Germany you pay less taxes (30%-42%) but you get free healthcare, education, 1 year maternity and paternity leave and tons of other similar benefits...

<comment><USER36> It's actually worse. The numbers above do not include the cost of healthcare nor retirement past what FICA pays for in social security. Say we're working with the magical $100k number above. In my state, my healthcare premiums were $500/month, which are not tax deductible. That means, I lose another $6k in premiums, or 6% of the $100k. My out of pocket max was $3300. I never want to be in a position to not go to the doctor because of money, so I always budget for it. Though, the payments for qualified medical expenses in that $3300 are tax deductible. So, let's pretend that 3.3% is really 2% after tax savings. That means that I spend 8% of $100k income on healthcare. If I add that to the 45%, then we're at about 53% of the money gone. Again, the number is slightly lower because of graduated tax brackets, but, candidly, it's not that much lower.

I lived a few years in Norway and have my company registered out there as well. I paid less in taxes there and got more in services. Other than culture, it's literally easier to start and run a company is many socialist countries. Simply, the taxes are lower; the services are higher; and the risk is lower because there's a safety net to fall back onto. That said, cultural does count for a lot and American culture is supportive of taking a risk as a small business. The U.S. is also the home to some of the world's largest companies, so opportunities to make contacts and contracts here can be higher.

<comment><USER38> Employment law also makes it harder to hire employees. Every employee hire in places like Germany and such are huge risks to small corps, since it's very hard to fire bad employees who are net negatives, and they know it and abuse it. That is ironically probably the biggest barrier to starting a corp in Europe for me.

Health care insurance costs although should be tax deductible, and there are things like FSAs and HSAs that help make health costs even more tax deductible. Are you talking about the costs for paying other things in health care costs, like the $XXs per doctor visit and so on?

\-----

America is ironically a high tax nation, but these things usually reduce tax and COL:

1\. The mortgage interest tax deduction. That is easily a +$20k/yr tax deduction right there. There are other small tax deductions that can remove a few thousands here and there.

2\. States like Washington or Nevada that have no state income tax.

3\. Almost everything is significantly cheaper to buy in the USA

4\. Sales tax / VAT is %0-%10 vs the common ~%20 that is common in the EU. Because the US is a mismanged mess governmentally, buying something online from another state is a common sales tax dodge.

5\. Pay is significantly higher in the USA for software professionals. I once read it doesn't matter how much you spend, but really how much you make and that can make up for the tax rates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Have you looked at US territories like the USVI? Might make things simple and keep a low corporate tax rate from what I hear.

</comment><comment><USER40> It just depends where you are located most of the time yourself.

</comment><comment><USER41> In general, your lawyer and accountant should review anything you bring to their notice, especially suggestions via the internet, before finalizing things. Incorporating in Hong Kong is said to have many benefits, though please remember to be compliant with FATCA. Detailed blog [1]

[1]: [http://www.locationindependent.co.uk/nomad-guide-to- incorpor...](http://www.locationindependent.co.uk/nomad-guide-to- incorporating-in-hong-kong/)</comment>


Verify the configuration of your OS X machine - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kristovatlas/osx-config-check <comment><USER2> Appreciate the effort, but this one seems waaay too strict for mere mortals:

CHECK #53: JavaScript disabled in the Safari web browser.... FAILED!</comment>


HOWTO: Be More Productive by Aaron Swartz (2005) - <AUTHOR> http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/productivity <comment><USER2> > _" Life is short (or so I'm told)"_

Oh man, this hit me in the feels. The actual text is good so far, but those words stayed with me.

<comment><USER3> It's great that so many of his thoughts live on. Where as there are lots of books that live on after people these books go through lots of editing and you're never sure how much of the direct thought of the author is still there.

But these posts are direct from Aaron's thoughts, so it's much more personal reading them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Similarities to the Sam Altman productivity post [0] from yesterday (other than the regular eat well / sleep well)

* Choose good problems

* Make a list

Make a list is also very common, but both of them spoke about good problems and lists as their highest priorities.

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16802530](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16802530)

</comment><comment><USER4> The section quoted below at excruciating length, to me, has the most interesting insight. It's like a koan: complete the task without ever assigning it to yourself.

 _Assigned problems are problems you're told to work on. Numerous psychology experiments have found that when you try to "incentivize" people to do something, they're less likely to do it and do a worse job. External incentives, like rewards and punishments, kills what psychologists call your "intrinsic motivation" — your natural interest in the problem. (This is one of the most thoroughly replicated findings of social psychology — over 70 studies have found that rewards undermine interest in the task.) People's heads seem to have a deep avoidance of being told what to do.

The weird thing is that this phenomenon isn't just limited to other people — it even happens when you try to tell yourself what to do! If you say to yourself, "I should really work on X, that's the most important thing to do right now" then all of the sudden X becomes the toughest thing in the world to make yourself work on. But as soon as Y becomes the most important thing, the exact same X becomes much easier.

This presents a rather obvious solution: if you want to work on X, tell yourself to do Y. Unfortunately, it's sort of difficult to trick yourself intentionally, because you know you're doing it. So you've got to be sneaky about it.

One way is to get someone else to assign something to you. The most famous instance of this is grad students who are required to write a dissertation, a monumentally difficult task that they need to do to graduate. And so, to avoid doing this, grad students end up doing all sorts of other hard stuff.

The task has to both seem important (you have to do this to graduate!) and big (hundreds of pages of your best work!) but not actually be so important that putting it off is going to be a disaster. Don't assign problems to yourself

It's very tempting to say "alright, I need to put all this aside, hunker down and finish this essay". Even worse is to try to bribe yourself into doing something, like saying "alright, if I just finish this essay then I'll go and eat some candy". But the absolute worst of all is to get someone else to try to force you to do something.

All of these are very tempting — I've done them all myself — but they're completely counterproductive. In all three cases, you've basically assigned yourself a task. Now your brain is going to do everything it can to escape it._

</comment><comment><USER5> The rest of the article was good, but this wasn't the best example and caught me off guard:

> Another way to make things more fun is to solve the meta-problem. Instead of > building a web application, try building a web application framework with > this as the example app. Not only will the task be more enjoyable, but the > result will probably be more useful.</comment>


Bitcoin Block Size Debate: "Blockstream has a very serious conflict of interest" - <AUTHOR> http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/34223117/ <comment><AUTHOR> Here is the key part of the response to Adam Back, founder of $20m funded BlockStream, who wrote a long post with lots of accusatory questions directed at Mike Hearn and by extension Gavin Andresen:

=== SNIP ===

\- Did you accept payment from companies to lobby for 20MB blocks?

Oh please. Conspiracy theories, now, Adam? My position has been consistent for years. I don't care whether the figure is 20 or something else (looks like it'll be lucky 8 instead), but I have always been clear that the limit must rise.

But for the avoidance of doubt: the answer is no.

Gavin is paid by MIT. The MIT deal gives Gavin complete independence.

I am currently self employed and most of income comes from a client that is actually interested in Lighthouse. Luckily they have given me some leeway to do general Bitcoin development as well, which this business falls under. I would _much_ rather be working on Lighthouse than this, and so would they.

But seeing as you've gone there - let me flip this around. Blockstream has a very serious conflict of interest in this situation. I am by no means the first to observe this. You are building two major products:

       1. Sidechains, a very complex approach to avoid changing the Bitcoin
       consensus rules to add new features.
       2. Lightning, a so-called "layer two" system for transaction routing

No surprise, the position of Blockstream employees is that hard forks must never happen and that everyone's ordinary transactions should go via some new network that doesn't yet exist.

The problem is that rather than letting the market decide between ordinary Bitcoin and Lightning, you are attempting to strangle the regular Bitcoin protocol because you don't trust people to spontaneously realise that they should be using your companies products.

I know that many of you guys had these views before joining Blockstream. I am not saying you are being paid to have views you didn't previously have. I realise that birds of a feather flock together.

Regardless, that conflict of interest DOES exist, whether you like it or not, because if you succeed in running Bitcoin out of capacity your own company stands to benefit from selling consulting and services around your preferred solutions.

With respect to user rights: all the polling done so far suggests users who are paying attention strongly support increasing the block size. For example:

Q: "Should the bitcoin block size be raised in the next two years" A: 92% yes

[http://www.poll-maker.com/results329839xee274Cb0-12#tab-2](http://www.poll- maker.com/results329839xee274Cb0-12#tab-2)</comment>