SanDisk announces 4TB SSD, hopes for 8TB next year. - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9248070/SanDisk_announces_4TB_SSD_hopes_for_8TB_next_year <comment><USER2> Over the last decade SSDs have increased their storage capacity at an incredible rate. This growth has mostly been fueled by adapting better process technology. I read a while back that the move to ever smaller scales (now 19nm) came at the costs of increased errors rates and that the limiting factor going forward would be error correction. Has this situation changed, or is SanDisk just throwing chips at the capacity problem, along with better controllers, and targeting an enterprise segment willing to pay the price?

<comment><USER3> One of the interesting changes has been folks have been thinning out silicon wafers. Typically 700 microns there have been examples of working wafers as thin as 5 microns. If you stack 5 micron silicon you can put 100 chips in the same place you put 1 before, assuming you can figure out how to talk between them. Thru-silicon-vias (TSV) is the current poster child but there are better alternatives coming. Should be interesting when that comes to market.

<comment><USER4> This is a precursor to the next revolution in chips, 3D. It's funny how chips have of course always been three dimensional but the heat removal issues have so far stopped true 3D from happening (as far as I know). But SSDs have a completely different use pattern and likely don't run nearly as many Watts per volume of silicon so you could probably stack them way higher even if you didn't reduce the thickness of the layers all that much. Then it becomes a matter of routing and placement rather than heat dissipation.

Xilinx is already doing something like this: [https://www.semiwiki.com/forum/showwiki.php?title=Semi+Wiki:...](https://www.semiwiki.com/forum/showwiki.php?title=Semi+Wiki:Three- Dimensional+Integrated+Circuit+3D+IC+Wiki)

Eventually this might even converge on something like a spherical shape, that's when the sum length of the connections is minimal (the surface area of the sphere is too, and that again is a heat removal problem).

<comment><USER3> Jim Gray was famous for predicting that the end point of computers were "smoking hairy golfballs". His reasoning was that spheres give you the shortest path length, there will be thousands of wires (hence the hair), and it will be difficult to dump the heat (smoking). I loved his image of a computer that looked like a a box of golf balls :-).

<comment><USER4> I read the paper you refer to, it in turn credits Frank Worrell as the original person coining that particular metaphor in ... 1985!

The paper quoted:

"To minimize memory latency these 4B machines will likely be smoking-hairy- golf-balls3. The processor will be one large chip wrapped in a memory package about the size of a golf ball. The surface of the golf ball will be hot and hairy: hot because of the heat dissipation, and hairy because the machine will need many wires to connect it to the outside world."

With a footnote:

"Frank Worrell used this metaphor in 1985."

The paper is here:

[http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/gray/papers/su...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/gray/papers/superservers.pdf)

It's very interesting reading, especially when you look at how much he got right.

We don't quite have those smoking hairy golfballs just yet but we're slowly getting there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> With all the process shrinks, and packing more bits per cell, NAND flash is getting to the point where its characteristics are closer to DRAM than traditional magnetic storage; like hard drives the data will stay there for a while when they're powered off, but like DRAM, it's not going to be there forever. However, unlike DRAM and more like hard drives, they wear out.

For enterprise cache-like applications this makes sense, but with DRAM prices not that far off (only a few times), I wonder if battery-backed DRAM might actually offer better value (and theoretically could be far higher performing) than having to replace worn-out SSDs periodically.

</comment><comment><USER6> Fun Saturday question. It's 2014. How long until we see notebooks (or tablets or any other portable computing device) with 1PB of storage?

15 years? I'd say no longer than 25 years -- _if_ we're still carrying around computing devices by then (and it hasn't all just been subsumed into the cloud)

<comment><USER7> You'd think; but with all this "centralisation" trends (fb/g+/cloud/etc) there might be no need for them.

<comment><USER8> Everyone will need one to hold the blockchain ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm sure they wear out quick with heavy writes. On the other hand, the killer app for these has to be media streaming. How many more movies can Netflix support with these new drives? I wonder if they are space limited or iops limited.

"The drive is aimed at read-intensive applications, such as data warehousing, media streaming and web servers. The typical workload envisioned for the 4TB drive is 90% read and 10% write, SanDisk stated."

<comment><USER10> >How many more movies can Netflix support with these new drives?

Netflix doesn't do their own hardware, they use AWS. One can also assume that the cost of the content far outweighs the cost of delivery.

<comment><USER11> The AWS marketing folks don't get paid enough.

[https://www.netflix.com/openconnect/hardware](https://www.netflix.com/openconnect/hardware)

<comment><USER12> They do, however, use AWS to run most of their service:

[http://gigaom.com/2013/12/02/netflix-is-balancing-its- stream...](http://gigaom.com/2013/12/02/netflix-is-balancing-its-streaming- traffic-across-amazons-cloud/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What is the anticipated price/TB curve of SSD over the next five years? at what point would most consumer storage switch from HDD to SSD?

If we start with a HDD/SSD price ratio of 1:7 (based on a quick check with Amazon) and hope for SSDs to get cheaper/TB by 50% each coming 18 months (?) we'd have a strong incentive to switch by year 2019.

<comment><USER14> That already happened. The biggest computer manufacturer (Apple) doesn't sell a machine without an SSD.

<comment><USER15> [http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/imac](http://store.apple.com/us/buy- mac/imac)

I think you are being a little premature. All iMacs have hard drives by default.

<comment><USER16> They are hybrid drives, though. The only pure HDD option seems to be the 3 TB drive.

<comment><USER15> No, the default in every iMac is a 1TB Hard Drive.

[http://store.apple.com/us/buy- mac/imac?product=ME086LL/A&ste...](http://store.apple.com/us/buy- mac/imac?product=ME086LL/A&step=config)

[http://store.apple.com/us/buy- mac/imac?product=ME087LL/A&ste...](http://store.apple.com/us/buy- mac/imac?product=ME087LL/A&step=config)

[http://store.apple.com/us/buy- mac/imac?product=ME088LL/A&ste...](http://store.apple.com/us/buy- mac/imac?product=ME088LL/A&step=config)

[http://store.apple.com/us/buy- mac/imac?product=ME089LL/A&ste...](http://store.apple.com/us/buy- mac/imac?product=ME089LL/A&step=config)

<comment><USER16> Weird, the product page seems to present the hybrid drive as the default option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> just a data point: for our enterprise customers, 800GB intel datacenter 3500 series flash drives (the penultimate model good for most write-heavy applications) are already basically the same price as 600GB 15k SAS drives and actually cost less if you drop the raid controller which isn't that great with ssd (in our experience).

</comment><comment><USER18> I wish intel was innovating a little more.

<comment><USER19> Me too. But I guess Intel is not that much strategically interested in competing in ever more competitive SSD space, with decreasing profit margins and increasingly larger R&D budgets needed. Not that Intel couldn't afford them, but I think it's not as attractive for them as the CPU market right now.

<comment><USER20> And they already have a money bleeding segment : smartphone class SoC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is it just me, or are the performance numbers a bit disappointing given the size and price tag? I guess its a balance between size and speed.

<comment><USER22> The drives are for enterprise datacenters, not consumers.

<comment><USER23> Thats a cop out. Its synonymous with 'yes they suck, but we will charge arm and a leg for them so some enterprise sucker is bound to bite'.

They also have VERY limited writes/sector count (brobably in the hundreds) before they will start to fail, this has been handled by another PR statement "The drive is aimed at read-intensive applications"

<comment><USER24> Enterprise means reliability (specific NAND quality, long validation process at multiple levels), long term support (including warranty costs), and firmware tailored for enterprise workloads.

Enterprise pays for SSDs that's tested throughly at firmware, controller, memory levels. They're not paying for the fastest, just the most reliable.

Many of the consumer SSDs are not tested to this extent, that's why the prices are so cheap. Look at OCZ as an example.

Would you as a business owner pay 100$ for 1000 SSDs that may glitch out early and have firmware bugs or would you pay 300$ for SSDs that's solid without having to go through firmware updates, glitches, and so on?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Wow, 8TB, that's a lot of girly pictures! For the same general use purposes, do SSDs put out significantly less heat versus HDDs and also burn less electricity, and enough so to, for example, help eliminate the need for fans?

For the typical consumer, not necessarily what to decide what to stuff into an HP 980, is it now clear that cost per byte is evening out and that soon the typical array of laptops in your local Best Buy including the cheaper of the lot will have SSDs?

Tl;dr, are hard drives being completely phased out faster and faster?

</comment><comment><USER26> It'll be 2022 before I can afford one though... (I still have a 128Gb SSD).

<comment><USER27> Well, in 2010 a 256GB ssd was upwards of $500+. Today, a TB SSD costs that. So yeah, capacity for price increases 4x over in 4 years. So 2022 is a good estimate for commodity 4TB SSDs.

I wonder if we will ever get nand storage below mechanical in price per GB. Even in 2022 I can image 8 - 10 TB mechanical disks being only $100 still, while the 2TB SSDs cost about that. Because by then we are probably hitting some physical limits.

<comment><USER28> 3.5 years for commodity 4TB SSD or less. I have a 1TB SSD, would gladly switch to a 2TB model for twice the price. As the Sandisk announcement shows, it is market not physical forces that will get us to 4TB.

<comment><USER29> RAID

<comment><USER30> In a notebook?

<comment><USER29> Its quite common, I have one for example.

<comment><USER28> Only the Lenovo W series supports RAID afaik.

<comment><USER29> My laptop is an Asus g7. A college of mine did some tricks to get a RAID0 in his macbook pro. The future is now.

<comment><USER28> I know, I was waiting. I have the optibay in MBP15 with a rotational disk for backups since SSDs have been so unreliable. The 1TB samsung has been amazing. You are correct, I should swap out the 1TB rotational for another 1TB and run RAID.

<comment><USER30> At this point you'll probably get the most increased performance by upgrading your MBP rather than RAID its storage.

<comment><USER28> I do want more Performance, but I really want more and faster storage so I think RAIDing another 1TB SSD is in order. And I couldn't get this with a new MBP. I think they only will accept a single PCIe drive.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Feed Creator 2.0 – Generate RSS feeds from web page elements - <AUTHOR> https://createfeed.fivefilters.org/ <comment><USER2> Cool project!

I've recently created something similar for personal use. I have many websites (mainly webshops) I want to be notified about changes on, but they don't have RSS feeds, subscriptions or APIs than you can use.

I set up a cron job that runs daily, scrapes websites according to some XPaths, and saves the results to a DB. If any new elements have appeared, an email will be sent out. The biggest challenge is handling false positives: being able to distinguish between a new element and e.g., a previously seen element with an updated title, description etc. For websites that directly expose what seems to be unique, server-side, identifiers in their HTML, using that as a primary key seem to work well. If that's not available, the href of the HTML element seem to be fairly static.

Do you have any thoughts on the issue of false positives and unique identifiers?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I haven't given the issue of unique identifiers too much thought because in most cases I assume the item URL is less likely to change than the text and will serve as the unique identifier for the RSS reader. It's possible to create feeds without item URLs in Feed Creator, so in those cases maybe letting users select an identifier to be the guid element in the feed would be helpful.

Generally though, I'm hoping users understand that feeds produced in this way could be a little more brittle than if the site offered its own feed.

One difference with your approach is that you have the data from previous fetches in your database. With Feed Creator everything related to producing the feed (source URL, selectors, filters, etc.) is embedded in the feed URL to avoid having to record data on the server. So each request is treated as if it's the first one - the server doesn't know if an item in the feed is new or old. If we referred to feed data from previous fetches, maybe we could let users introduce a delay before having a new item added to the feed. This might help in cases where a typo is spotted and corrected by the publisher minutes after publication. Can't think of a much better way of avoiding false positives at the moment though.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Happy to get feedback and answer any questions about this here.

Here are two feeds we made earlier to give you an idea of what Feed Creator is supposed to do. The links below will pre-fill the form with the parameters you'd enter and produce a preview of the RSS:

* Chomsky.info articles: [https://createfeed.fivefilters.org/index.php?url=https%3A%2F...](https://createfeed.fivefilters.org/index.php?url=https%3A%2F%2Fchomsky.info%2Farticles%2F&in_id_or_class=main_container)

* Latest articles by John Pilger: [https://createfeed.fivefilters.org/index.php?url=http%3A%2F%...](https://createfeed.fivefilters.org/index.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fjohnpilger.com%2Farticles&item=.entry&item_desc=.intro&item_date=.entry-date)

<comment><USER3> Is this service self-hostable?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. If you have access to a server with PHP, you should be able to run it yourself. We have a simple PHP file you can download to test the compatibility of your server.[0]

We sell the self-hosted version[1] and have a blog post with some instructions if you want to run it on a VPS[2].

[0] Zip file with PHP file inside: [https://createfeed.fivefilters.org/fc_compatibility_test.zip](https://createfeed.fivefilters.org/fc_compatibility_test.zip)

[1] [https://www.fivefilters.org/pricing/](https://www.fivefilters.org/pricing/)

[2] [https://blog.fivefilters.org/2020/06/04/feed- creator-2.html](https://blog.fivefilters.org/2020/06/04/feed-creator-2.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd be worried about copyright issue.

In many cases, the client doesn't care/know about content copyright and just crawling.

(P/s: I used to develop a blogging platform and find RSS links to seed content)

</comment><comment><USER5> This seems a halfway before create a webscraping solution. Adding support for integrate automation with zapier or ifttt could help to close the circle. Nice project

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! :) I don't have much experience with Zapier, but I assume the RSS feed this produces can be plugged into both Zapier and IFTTT if they have RSS support. Or maybe you had something else in mind?

<comment><USER5> You're right. RSS could be enough to use for automation</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Spleeter Web – Isolate the musical parts of any song - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/JeffreyCA/spleeter-web <comment><USER2> Cool. I was playing with audio landmarks[1] last week to remove ads from podcast before I listen to them. I wonder if something like spleeter could be used together with landmarking as an elegant way to remove copyrighted music and retain speech for videos to be uploaded to Youtube.

[1][https://github.com/dpwe/audfprint](https://github.com/dpwe/audfprint)</comment>


Evan Spiegel's Imperious Style Made Snapchat a Success Until Users Fled - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/evan-spiegels-imperious-style-made-snapchat-a-successuntil-users-fled-11545588892 <comment><USER2> Here's the money quote:

> Nearly all senior executives who worked with him before the IPO are gone, > and more than 10 senior employees have departed in the past year.

If you want to retain good people, you need to give them real input and control.

Senior managers were trying to prevent a disaster and Spiegel did not listen to them -- but even if every decision he made had turned out to be correct, his leadership style still would have alienated many of them to the point they would have wanted to leave. These are successful people who have no problem finding other opportunities.

<comment><USER3> I don't think he wanted to retain them. Pretty sure his logic was that the company is grown up and it needs new leadership.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Speigal is yet another disciple of the Steve Jobs school of management. The idea that if you are an asshole to everyone and care a lot about fonts, you'll repeat the success of Apple. It's a toxic notion of startup culture and it needs to die.

<comment><USER5> But on some level it worked for Steve Jobs, arguably it worked two times. What are the differences that made it work out for Jobs, but didn't make it work out for Evan Spiegel to the same degree?

<comment><USER6> Jobs was right more often and despite everything, people still wanted to work with him. I guess the answer is "you can be an asshole if you're a once-in-a- generation product developer with charisma". Otherwise, stick to the tried and tested ways of using a team as a lever.

Perhaps in twenty years we will hear about "awful conditions at Tesla but I knew we were changing the world" or some such.

<comment><USER7> How about "You can be an asshole if you're a once-in-many-generations product genius with charisma".

I have yet to see a SINGLE sign of Evan any where close to Steve Jobs quality. Evan may be good, but he is not a genius like Steve. The only one praising are his VC which during Pre IPO era were constantly spamming twitter about how good his Keynote and unseen since Steve passed away.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I'm fine with that. Essentially, Steve Jobs was exceptional so everyone tolerated exceptionally shitty behaviour from him. If you're not exceptional, nothing useful is going to come of acting the same way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I will never understand the desire to radically change an interface on any product <10 years old. Especially Snap's, as I don't remember anyone complaining about the interface. Instead, why not make your app use less battery power and improve the camera's functionality? Those types of improvement are universally appreciated, yet the least likely to be implemented.

<comment><USER2> Snap, and also Twitter, are in a bit of a bind. They can't change anything without alienating some of their most passionate users, but if they change nothing they will stagnate and cede all of the possible benefits of innovation to their competitors. A company that lets its competitors come up with all the new ideas is probably not going to survive very long.

It's understandable that Snap wanted to improve its design. On principle there is nothing wrong with that, but that's not what they actually did because the CEO ignored a lot of warnings that the changes were not improvements.

<comment><USER9> Twitter's problems aren't confusing: fix the abuse problem and add an edit button.

<comment><USER10> > fix the abuse problem

This has been a problem for about 30 years online, so good luck with all that.

> add an edit button

User tweets out something nice. 10k retweets. Then changes it to something political.

<comment><USER11> HN both has an edit button and is not susceptible to your hypothetical. these are solvable problems.

<comment><USER12> HN also has a stricter set of community guidelines (which aren't in themselves all that strict to start with), more heavily moderated, and a generally well- educated, mature-minded user base that is generally appreciative of these two elements.

<comment><USER13> And way less users.

<comment><USER12> Yep, way fewer users. And what spam accounts exist get squashed pretty quickly. If HN ever releases statistics on the number of users, I'm sure they have more dignity than to include spam and bot accounts — which is, I'm sure, the majority of Twitter accounts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Full article: [https://outline.com/SztunV](https://outline.com/SztunV)

<comment><USER15> not working..showing almost empty page

<comment><USER14> Working for me. Do you have JS disabled or something weird?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Snapchat is really bad at doing the one thing I want it to do well: take pictures. It takes awful pictures most of the time. Applies some kind of super-harsh filter that I don't get with my camera?

<comment><USER17> They deliberately give you a bad quality photo and I don't know why. Snapchat takes a screenshot. It doesn't use the camera API on your phone as it should. So it doesn't get _any_ of the processing which is integral to taking good photos on phones. Apple should reject it from the App Store for doing this, but for some reason they let them do it, as well as Instagram and Facebook.

<comment><USER18> Well it's almost certainly going to be faster (thumb to save latency) to run the camera in video mode and then snatch a frame when the user hits the button than the normal preview-stillshot way the phone takes pics natively.

Cell phone OEMs differentiate with camera quality and so some run some pretty heavy post processing to make images come out okay.

Snap probably cares more about quickly taking picture and the filters.

<comment><USER17> Why is the latency of concern in Snapchat but not anywhere else? The native camera app isn't slow on modern phones.

<comment><USER18> Latency is a concern on the native apps too, but as tradeoffs go, cell OEMs care about mag/site reviews and "it takes a little longer to take a capture" buried deep in the text will be worth much less than better-looking example photos in the side by side.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This feels like what happened to digg.

Reddit did their redesign right. Many people hated it and they gave the option to go to the old reddit immediately after the new version was released.

<comment><USER20> Honest question: what's so bad about the reddit redesign?

<comment><USER21> It's very slow and unresponsive. Any time saved with not having to reload the page is wasted several times over in the clunky UI, and the lags in loading data still remain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Really wonder if articles like these are produced by people shorting the stock.

I think the guy is a genius but he made a very bad mistake with the redesign and is clearly paying for it. There were some very interesting people producing content for entrepreneurs on there but they're all gone for now.

I've gone from daily to monthly use. But I keep checking in because I'm really convinced that they can still pull a rabbit out of the hat.

<comment><USER23> > Really wonder if articles like these are produced by people shorting the > stock.

Everything is about money, so I always assume that to be the case for all these kinds of articles. Regardless, I'm pretty sure snap will be gone in a couple years. No way they can stand up to Facebook imo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Mr. Spiegel, you are no Steve Jobs.

</comment><comment><USER25> This may be a good time to buy Snap. I remember FB being worth $33B some time after going public.

<comment><USER26> $294 million operating loss on $297 million in revenue for their latest quarter.

Snap's operating picture is an accountant's nightmare.

By the time Facebook was five years old, fiscal 2009, they generated a $229m profit on $777m in sales. They turned profitable in the second half of their fourth year. Why? Relative financial discipline. Snap has taken the opposite approach, wild financial irresponsibility (no doubt encouraged by the fairly bubbly funding environment they got to enjoy).

By the time Facebook went public, they had been profitable for over three years. They generated a $1b profit on $3.7b in sales in 2011, the year prior to the IPO. The situation could hardly be any more different from Snap at IPO or today.

<comment><USER27> While I agree with your statement, I think you are giving "financial discipline" way too much weight.

As you probably know Facebook( Instagram) did copy " stories" from Snapchat. When your competitor effectively steals your secret sauce, what do you do? I believe that is why they went with their radical UI design change.( In order to retain users, which backfired)

I am not justifying the cash burn that snap had, just saying that competitors definitely were a factor in them not being financial disciplined.

Another major negative was from the get go with that their shares listed are non voting which was a major turn off to wall street which got them blackballed from being included in the SP500.(Has nothing to do with running a company or financial discipline, but definitely a negative when large institutions cannot invest in you because of strict bylaws.)</comment></comment></comment>


Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_waronscience

<comment><USER2> If Paul Offit just creates vaccines and publishes factual research, then all the anger directed at him seems completely absurd. But if he or RotaTeq advocates or lobbies for _mandatory_ vaccinations, then it is at least fair to criticize him as a moral agent.

People often throw up absurd objections to factual research because they have a moral stake in the debate but limited evidence (or knowledge, time, or interest) to engage on a utilitarian front. Unfortunately, it seems to be more politically successful to fight via convolution of facts than to engage in the moral issue directly.

The public seems to undervalue legitimate moral arguments, so competing interests instead engage in a proxy war of claims about benefits and harms.

<comment><USER3> Please further explain your moral agent statement. I can see mandatory vaccines on the one hand as a moral position (you must save your kid my way) and on the other as a socially responsible position (not vaccinating your kid provides disease vectors to mine.. not all vaccines provide 100% immunity so more vaccines is better protection for all). Im interested in hearing more on both sides of this.

<comment><USER2> Sure.

If you were to publish neutral research showing that, were the US were to draft all men 18-35, then the US armed forces would grow by X% and we could fight Y major wars at once while occupying Z square miles of foreign territory, then it would seem mostly senseless to direct anger or criticism at you if your claims were factually sensible.

If on the other hand, though, you were to promote the idea that the draft was _needed_ , that it would produce a _socially useful_ outcome, and that people who oppose your view are being _irrational_ and _selfish_ , then you've entered into a moral debate.

And further, if you own a large defense contracting firm, then your claims and your moral position about the necessity of _forcing_ people to join the military would be subjected to additional, admittedly ad hominem, scrutiny.

<comment><USER3> OK, first, I am not convinced that socially responsible is strictly a moral position. Disease vector analysis is just an analysis on a directed graph. In this case there is a strong mathematical model, with scientific evidence, that not vaccinating children can harm other children. Because of this I am questioning your analogy, since in the case of the draft there is not a non- opinion social component.

Instead I analogize with drunk driving -- significantly fewere drunk drivers equates to significantly fewer 3rd party injuries and deaths as a result of drunk drivers. Similarly in the vaccination case, there are 3rd parties who stand to suffer from the actions of those who do not receive vaccines.

Edit: I forgot to put my second point, which is:

I agree with your analogy in that those who stand to benefit should be closely scrutinized when advocating a position.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's always some risk with injecting anything into yourself (or your child). With a vaccine that risk is miniscule compared to what it prevents, but, if everyone _else_ in society takes that tiny risk, _you_ can get all the benefits without actually taking the risk yourself. So, if I give my son his a shot and he gets a little fever, or a sore arm, etc, you can skip it with your kid and send him off to school where he's assured to not get the flu/pertussis from mine. It's just downright selfish to put it on everyone else.

<comment><USER2> That assumes you want the benefit.

If living a 'natural' life is higher on your value scale than preventing a possible infection, then you wouldn't want the vaccine even if no one else was getting it either.

Let's say your neighbors want to build a $1M lake. They want you to chip in $50k. You're going to get the 'benefit' of the lake one way or the other. But you don't even like lakes. In fact, you'd prefer they didn't build a lake, as lakes attract mosquitoes, and you are (perhaps irrationally) concerned about infections from mosquitoes. Would it be _selfish_ for you to not chip in? Would it be _rightful_ for them to take the $50k from you by force since you're getting the 'benefit' of the lake?

<comment><USER5> I'll give you that, with the side note that if "living a 'natural life'" is that important to a person, it would be rather strange for them to spend all their time surrounded by machinery and copper wires and airplanes and roads and tall buildings and clothing.

Edit: I'm not saying people should be forced into taking the shots or anything. Just that I'll laugh at people who use reasoning that doesn't begin to make sense to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Full page link: <http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_waronscience/all/1>

</comment><comment><USER7> "Science loses ground to pseudo-science because the latter seems to offer more comfort."

Or more likely because the U.S. government lies to its citizens about health information all the time; I'm not getting the H1N1 vaccine for the same reason I didn't sign up to go breathe the air at ground zero.

<comment><USER5> _I'm not getting the H1N1 vaccine for the same reason I didn't sign up to go breathe the air at ground zero._

Apologies, but I'm not very good at guessing what people mean when they construct sentences of this general form. Could you say explicitly what your reason is?

<comment><USER7> I'm saying that I don't trust what the government says about health, because they lie about health all the time. That has nothing to do with pseudo- science, that's just being an intelligent and rational person.

For example, after September 11th the EPA and NYC government said that the air at ground zero was perfectly safe to breathe. What's more, no one is being held accountable even though dozens or hundreds are dying horrible deaths because of these lies. This is just one example, there are literally hundreds of cases like this that we can point to in the last fifty years.

Therefor, it's

A) Reasonable to assume that the government may be lying about the safety of this vaccine.

B) Reasonable to assume that if they are lying about the safety, no one will be held accountable.

<comment><USER8> Few things.

1) This has everything to do with pseudo-science. There are no credible studies pointing to ill health effects outside of extremely rare cases in which a person is allergic to some part of the vaccine or has some other pre- existing condition. And there are numerous studies indicating that you're more likely to get struck by lightning than to have any reaction to a vaccine, outside of a sore arm.

2) "The government" is hardly a single entity. You're displaying conspiratorial thinking here, which is pretty tough to take seriously. You're discussing the EPA and NY city government, which is not the same as the NIH and CDC. Additionally, it's not only the U.S. government which is strongly recommending these vaccines. If you'd like to continue that line of argument, you'll have to take it up with probably every single first-world government.

3) Being an intelligent and rational person means evaluating claims individually, regardless of the source. Starting from the position that the government is lying to you is just as stupid as assuming they're always telling the truth. Of course there are fuck-ups and cover-ups, but that doesn't mean everything is.

<comment><USER7> "Starting from the position that the government is lying to you is just as stupid as assuming they're always telling the truth."

If this is true, then the rational position would be to assume that the government may or may not be lying to you. Which is what I believe.

"'The government' is hardly a single entity."

The people are different, but if the Milgram experiments (and sociology in general) have taught us anything, it's that a person's social influences are as important to their decision making as their intrinsic character. And the laws, rewards, and punishments are largely the same across departments.

I realize the EPA is different from the FDA. However, the reasons why the EPA buried studies about the amount of mercury in freshwater the day before issuing new guidelines on acceptable mercury levels are largely the same as the reasons why the FDA approved OTC plan-B only for women 18+.

The takeaway is that bad things don't (usually) happen because of bad people. They happen because organizational behavior, psychology, and sociology allow us to make an educated guess that if an organization looks like X, then what tends to happen will be Y.

Now if I see patterns across organizations that you don't see, maybe that makes me a conspiracy theorist and maybe I'm seeing patterns that aren't there. Or maybe I just see patterns that you don't see.

I agree that at the end of the day you have to think about these problems individually for yourself. I don't actually believe the vaccines are all that dangerous, but at the same time I'm not going to take them just because the CDC or NIH or whatever say they are safe. The reason is that the people running these departments are operating under largely the same structures and incentives as the people running every other government department, and history as a whole shows that these sets of structures and incentives tend to produce unsavory behavior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> maybe we don't want to end up like this chick [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvtnS8wXBi8&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvtnS8wXBi8&feature=player_embedded)

and we're tired of propagandists

<comment><USER10> Out of all the people that received the flu vaccine, how many had reactions this severe? I'll guarantee you that it was less than would have otherwise had severe reactions to the flu virus itself...

Everything comes with a risk. If there is a problem here then it's the the average person does not make the effort to make that they are aware of the risks that they are taking.

<comment><USER9> yeah how are you going to guarantee that?

<comment><USER10> By abasing myself before the community if I am proved to be incorrect. Would that be deemed sufficient? Bring the evidence.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Y Combinator here I come – update - <AUTHOR> http://new.novelog.com/my-first-story/y-combinator-here-i-come-update

<comment><USER2> Hi, here are a few bits of advice based on your current and previous posts.

First, please make sure to proof read your posts and find a few folks who are willing to help you do so: ability to write well counts a great deal ( _especially_ if you're serious about running a business). Good news is that you already enjoy writing and thus you are far more likely to invest in deliberate practice.

Second, I think you drew the wrong conclusions in your previous post. Big companies are rather predictable: you have (with some margin of error) a fairly good idea of what the culture, environment, et al are going to be like when you decide to join one. Startups, on the other hand, vary greatly from one to another: you're more likely to have a horrible experience, but you're also more likely to have an amazing experience. You've had an unpleasant experience at one startup, but it doesn't logically follow that your only option is to start your own company: there are plenty of companies that are actually great to work for.

To be honest, I don't think this is the right time for you to do a startup: looking at your previous posts and comments on this site, it sounds like you need to build your technical skill-set (looks like the last company you've worked for didn't even use source control!), confidence, and a network of like minded people. If somebody asks you "why would I want to move to Silicon Valley to start a company if I already have a great job?", they have a very different set of values from somebody you'd want as a founder. Great engineers (or product managers, designers, and so on) always have many options available to them _besides_ starting their own company: it's a matter of choice and not a last resort.

Spend some time improving your online presence: at the least fix the gramatical errors (e.g., its/it's and build/built), build a few web or mobile applications (assuming that's what you're interested in), put up a few projects on GitHub/Bitbucket (but have a few strong programmers review them before making the repositories public). This will make it easier for you to show people (potential co-founders, clients, customers, employers, coworkers, or just like-like minded folks) that you're serious and have potential.

Essentially I feel you're running _from_ something (in this case a job you didn't enjoy and the experience of being laid off). Instead, put yourself into a situation where a startup is something you run _to_.

[Edit: corrected a few grammatical errors of my own]

<comment><USER3> The irony of the first few sentences here...

"your advise" -> "advice"

"proof read" -> "proofread"

"invest" -> "invested"

Misplaced comma, missing "a" and "the" in a few places, awkward wording, unusual omitted/implied words...

I don't disagree with the content, but what's that saying? "Take the log out of your own eye first?"

<comment><USER2> Good point: I'll go through and do a second round of proofreading.

That said, there's a different standard for blog posts as opposed to comments. The few posts on my own blog take took several days to write and edit.

<comment><USER3> That's true—blog posts should definitely be held to a higher standard. But so should comments that correct others' writing. :)

<comment><USER2> Made the edits you've suggested and a few more. Thanks! That said (and I think we agree on this), it doesn't invalidate my argument (see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque>). The grammatical mistakes I made _did_ distract from the point I was making (ironically demonstrating it all too well).

It also wouldn't be good use of my (or my friends') resources to ask others to proofread an HN comment :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Marketing is SO much more than "telling the world about it". But yeah, it's nearly impossible to imagine a successful company without great marketing. Check Peter Thiel's thoughts on the topic (they are amazing):

[http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/22405055017/peter- thiels...](http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/22405055017/peter-thiels- cs183-startup-class-9-notes-essay)

</comment><comment><USER5> Reducing success to "marketing" is too trivializing and narrow. Marketing's a big part of it, sure, but the how of marketing matters a lot more than the why. Especially at the early stage, when marketing budgets are wafer thin.

If there's any single variable that seems to be best correlated with early- stage success, it isn't "marketing" so much as "hustle." How many different ways can you think of to get the word out about your product? How many people can you get yourself in front of, and in which novel situations? How can you inspire better-connected, deeper-pocketed, and more influential people to evangelize on your behalf?

I've got two friends right now running startups. The first started out in investment banking, so he's got a big ol' warchest. The second started out in relatively modest circumstances -- but she's somehow managed to weasel her way (I say "weasel" lovingly, as a compliment) into blogs, journals, conferences, Entrepreneur magazine, lectures at our alma mater, and so forth. More important, she's actually built something and is actively acquiring users, one small batch at a time.

I'd bank on her over the first guy any day of the week, and I'd have banked on her even before she started getting all her press and attention. We've all heard the old cliche about not taking no for an answer. In her case, the cliche isn't nearly sufficient. I'm pretty sure she's pathologically _incapable_ of understanding the word no.

I say this with a lot of respect for your honesty, integrity, and bravery in putting yourself out there. But if you're the type who's constantly starting and stopping projects -- who seems to put up imaginary barriers before he even encounters real ones -- then you need to think very carefully about whether you should be a founder. Joining an existing startup? Sure. But being a founder? You need grit, hustle, balls, and borderline fanaticism. You also need an ability to break a bigger picture down into smaller, bite-sized chunks, and to tackle those chunks systematically. Most people look at the set of all activities called "marketing" as a single lump of work. Founders look at "marketing" and see 2,500 discrete activities they need to perform every month.

<comment><AUTHOR> What you say is true, I need to work on the hustle of building a company, not just the marketing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _"Truth be told, I've had trouble convincing myself that the product is worthy of the effort needed to make it succeed. I've thought about a pivot and will probably work towards it, but at the same time its hard to know if it has the potential to be worth the effort."_

That statement plus your co founder staying home probably didn't help.

Why lack of enthusiasm for current product? Why not build the right product, rather than build the wrong one (and need to fix it later)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Its hard to know what the right product is. I've recently moved, so I'm hoping I see something that inspires me as to what to do next.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Heres an idea:

Work on projects that are more objectively inclined. iPad apps ( although the guys @ YC like them ) aren't exactly simple to evaluate objectively.

IMO the more objectively _valuable_ something is ... the less marketing hocking you need to do.

This coming from a BS in marketing and a programmer / hacker. People like to do simple shit and the _app_ is the current easy eval for YC.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is a great attitude. My team and I didn't make it into YC either this round, but I just moved here to the valley today. See you here soon?

<comment><USER9> I also just moved to the Valley and would love to meet up. Here's my story: <http://kurtvarner.com/post/19347794553/man-car-startup>

<comment><USER6> Dude, in your car?

Good luck in the valley!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If it serves any consolation, Mark Zuckerberg's sister was unselected as well: [http://www.businessinsider.com/y-combinator-arielle- zuckerbe...](http://www.businessinsider.com/y-combinator-arielle-zuckerbergs- rachel-sklar-2011-11)

</comment><comment><USER11> Maybe make another update post regarding this topic when your pivot is ready so you can gain some exposure to it?

<comment><AUTHOR> good idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> You're not there yet. But you get there, I hope I'm lucky enough to be a part of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.</comment></comment>


There Will Be JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://speakerdeck.com/mmozuras/there-will-be-javascript

<comment><USER2> +1 for slides 18, 51, and, best of all, 54. Great presentation :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, glad you liked it :)</comment></comment>


On eve of bankruptcy, US firms shower executives with bonuses - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-bankruptcy-bonuses/on-eve-of-bankruptcy-us-firms-shower-execs-with-bonuses-idUSKCN24I1EE <comment><USER2> While it looks immoral if you don't understand the mechanics, people are simply responding to incentives around bankruptcy laws. Nobody wants to try to turn around a bankrupt company at their old salary (with their old RSU's and options now worthless). The real question is, should Chapter 11's even be allowed for corporations (as opposed to Chapter 7)? Shareholders vote for these because they know that in a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, their shares will likely be worthless because the creditors are owed more than the company's assets. So it's the creditors who are getting screwed.

If you try to research companies that successfully turned around after a Chapter 11, you will be hard pressed to find major success stories, and I tend to think the world would be better off with more creative destruction. Even the ones listed here [0] did not have a pure Chapter 11 process -- some were bailed out by the government, Apple got private investment, and in the case of Marvel, the end result might have been the same if their assets were liquidated in Chapter 7 and Disney ended up picking them up.

[0] [https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal- finance/05111...](https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal- finance/051115/7-bankrupt-companies-came-back.asp)

<comment><USER3> > Nobody wants to try to turn around a bankrupt company at their old salary > (with their old RSU's and options now worthless).

Why not? These executives are paid considerably more than rank-and-file employees under normal circumstances, yet still manage to get bonuses when things turn sour. In contrast, that rank-and-file will be expected to take a pay cut, work more, or lose their livelihood. It flies in the face of the traditional reasons given for the high pay of executives: this has nothing to do with how much value any given person contributes, since everyone is expected to contribute more while a certain population is expected to receive a smaller share; this has nothing to do with the burden of risk, since the people taking the greater risk are the ones who are paid least (in terms of employees) or are taking the brunt of the losses (in terms of investors).

So yes, it is immoral.

<comment><USER4> I've actually helped manage a company in financial distress. Here's reality:

\- First, most executives have little impact on the specific event that put the firm under. (I was a senior marketing person; the building burned down. Fire safety was most assuredly NOT within my purview or even something I could ask about)

\- Running a business in financial distress basically sucks. Take your job and make it 10 X harder. You're basically running a startup, except your credit is officially shot, your employees know layoffs are coming, your competitors and customers know you're vulnerable, and key personnel with families are saying to hell with this, I want to be sure my kid is going to college (and bailing out).

\- I'll go one better, speaking from experience. Most key executives can take part of the business with them. So when they leave, part of what little is left of the company leaves with them (customers, technology, capabilities). What are you going to do, sue? bwahahah. Good luck, your lawyers are already swamped...

\- Most executives are actually reasonable talented people. They have value on the open market. Often significant and freed of any golden handcuffs they once wore.

\- Oh yeah... there is a high probability of failure or other drastic changes. So promises are worthless. Our leadership structure changed three times in five months. You have no guarantees that the person who made a promise will be in a position to honor it (or even be around). Turnarounds are a cash-only game.

So unless you like working for free - in hell... the current system is the only way to get decent talent to stay.

<comment><USER3> There is no denying that it takes skill and hard work to keep a business afloat in these times, or that it is stressful, or that it is easier to walk away than deal with the situation.

On the other hand, very few businesses are the product of a small subset of its people. In many businesses, such as some of the businesses mentioned in this article, it isn't a question of whether those other people can afford to send their children to college. They already knew the answer to that question: they cannot. Instead, it is a question of whether they provide their family with the bare essentials.

I am not suggesting that executives should sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the company or other employees. What I am suggesting is that it is immoral to take more when others are given less. If you disagree with that, that's fine. Consider it an ideological difference. Yet it is also important to realize that there are people who would disagree with both of us, that those who have more also have an obligation to sacrifice more in a time of crisis.

<comment><USER4> "very few businesses are the product of a small subset of its people"

Hate to break it to you but that is EXACTLY what is going on here. Some people have EXPONENTIALLY more impact on saving a business than everyone else in the building. Real world examples:

\- Two sales people who knew every high profit customer in our local market, which was the core of our turnaround plan

\- My product engineer, with "the specs in her head". We could have never rebooted the business without her.

\- The last manufacturing engineer standing, who we needed in the event we could secure a new facility for operations.

\- My boss, the master deal maker who knew every major retail chain on our side of the country. Our secret to rebuilding the critical mass required for survival.

\- One commercial manager (there were two of us), who was tasked with re- balancing the entire business on the fly to deal with massive swings in costs and competitor activity. Our pre-fire business model was completely shot and the banks cut us off, so we needed to reorganize around the new reality and find a way to generate positive cash flow to survive.

Without those five people / groups, the game was over - there would be no recovery plan, no road back to sustainable operations. Everyone else is irrelevant, potential cost savings when we needed them. You are playing a very high stakes short term game for the humble prize of survival...

Finance's job was basically to keep the tie fighters off our back, keep the lawyers, bankers, and insurance people away from folks doing the actual work. Customer Service was there to gently wind down relationships with non-critical accounts, in the vague hopes we could come back someday. We were able to give a few people some runway on those teams, moving anyone who wasn't able to hit the street immediately onto those lists to give them a little more time.

And your key people are irreplaceable in that world. There's no way someone of equivalent expertise is walking into that mess for what you're able to pay them.

At an individual level? We had to invoke our worst endgame due to other issues (deal fell apart); four of the critical five are no longer with the company. Each of them landed with a promotion and a fairly substantial raise elsewhere, often with instructions to "go take their business back". (at that point, it was open season for those accounts; our prior employer was unable to service them) The typical job search for that level of talent is hours / days rather than weeks or months (there is a very specific set of people who will hire them immediately if given the chance) .

Any visions of nobility needs to balanced against your obligations to support your spouse and children. You're going to sacrifice your kids future for some random people they never met? Your spouse is cool with that? Get real. (Mine knew what was going to happen; I had "the talk" with her beforehand. We knew my job was going to be eliminated and I couldn't break ranks without screwing my people. But we've both done turnaround work before, so we had a plan to handle it. She's one in a million.)

So that's the shit-show you're trying to hold together.

Heck, I had a financial model sitting on my laptop to go buy one of my dying brands from the company, once it was very apparent that they weren't able to protect it. At that point, it was basically sitting by the side of the road waiting for someone to claim it...

<comment><USER5> This is the Pareto Principle at work. 20% of the people involved in an enterprise produce 80% of the value. It's not that you don't need the other 80% of the people, it's that it doesn't matter who they are.

If you remove the people in the high productivity group and replace them with people from the low productivity type then the organisation loses (roughly) 80% of its productivity. Replace people in the low productivity group and nothing happens.

Yes I agree it's galling to see a few people compensated so highly in these situations, but as has been pointed out a) they individually most likely had little or nothing to do with bringing the problems about. b) What else are you going to do? The alternative is let the most critically essential personnel go and watch the whole organisation seize up for good.

<comment><USER6> There's also Price's Law: half the value is produced by the square root of the number of people.

<comment><USER7> If you have a calculator on hand, could you post the n such that these two rules are equivalent? It's wrinkling my brain.

<comment><USER8> How can you? One is taking about 80% of the work and the other is talking about half the work. You would need a distribution of the work impact across the employee population first.

<comment><USER7> The Pareto rule (at least my interpretation, due to its similarity with a power distribution) is recursive: 80% completeness from 20% work also implies 64% completeness from 4% work which in turn gives 51.2% completeness from 0.8% work (half of success is just showing up).

Accepting 51.2% as an approximation to half, the problem becomes 0.008 x = sqrt(x) which gives x = 125^2 = 15,625

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There are so many comments in this thread justifying this behavior.

> The last thing you want is key employees jumping ship

> Of course they do. How else do you get people to stick around on a sinking > ship?

> While it looks immoral if you don't understand the mechanics, people are > simply responding to incentives around bankruptcy laws

Do people really believe that the mechanics of bankruptcy laws, and the incentives to retain executives instead of workers, are just part of the natural order of the universe? That they appeared out of nowhere, align perfectly with morality, and haven't been _deliberately_ structured this way to protect the ruling class?

<comment><USER10> No, they are not part of the natural order of the universe, but with respect, thinking about this in "ruling class" terms is completely wrong.

Neither word "ruling" nor "class" means anything in modern Western society, and neither do the two of them together. Using inaccurate and imprecise language commits two sins- fails to communicate why things are and fails to elucidate how they might be changed.

The word _owner_ has precise meaning, as does the word _creditor_. This behavior is entirely about protecting the interests of owners and creditors. Sometimes people/orgs playing these roles are large and powerful but often they are not.

There is a huge literature here. The most recent best book I've read on these issues is Katarina Pistor "The Code of Capital."

Highly recommend pursuing a path to adopt more precise language on these matters. Cheers.

<comment><USER11> You pedantic rant aside, you didn't actually explain your point. How does paying large bonuses to executives protect the interest of creditors? I'm no expert but this sounds like how a person declaring bankruptcy might max out their credit cards at the apple store then sell them off for cash on Craigslist. I.e. Draining the bank so it doesn't go to creditors.

This same pool of money used for gratuitous bonuses could also be paying worker severance, so you justifying it as otherwise moral is exactly the GP's point.

<comment><USER10> Heh, no, I didn't say it was moral, and my point wasn't to explain, it was to redirect.

But to explain-

In fantasy world the money going to bonuses could go to severance, but in reality that is a misuse of cash, in some cases illegal.

The owners are the only ones entitled to the cash in the business, well, after creditors are repaid. Reducing the debt owed to creditors is the function of bankruptcy.

Workers are not owners and they definitely are not creditors. Giving them severance could in fact be considered stealing.

Putting cash into keeping operations going to service debt- THAT is how the owner/creditor dynamic plays out.

And key employees- managers- without whom the business crank does not turn- they become MORE valuable. Hence, bonuses.

Is this moral? No. It isn't. I never said it was.

But the way to make it moral isn't to rant- which I didn't do- and make use of undefinable and wrong/inapplicable terms like "ruling class".

Neither "ruling" nor "class" has anything to do with these dynamics.

There are a very precisely defined set of roles and relationships here, enshrined in law, going back to tradition, for thousands of years.

The way to make it moral is to understand what an owner is, what a creditor is, how the law works, and then to define what morality means.

Does it mean that workers become creditors, that labor creates a debt? That might be one avenue to explore, from a moral universe perspective. But changes to one role will change the other roles, and what one person considers moral, others may not.

My experience is that most people who make claims of immorality do not understand ownership, a foundation principle upon which nearly all societies that have practiced philosophy and have attempted to define morality have been based on.

Forgive me but you cannot talk intelligently about morality if you do not understand ownership.

That's my point.

Cheers, best wishes.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for finally making your point, when you use your words to support your arguments instead of ranting it helps people understand you better.

For the record everyone understands the concept of ownership from a very young age, it's the complexities of business and its jargon that confuses.

> Forgive me but you cannot talk intelligently about morality if you do not > understand ownership.

Yikes, you're very inclined to rant aren't you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Of course they do.

How else do you get people to stick around on a sinking ship? You and I wouldn't stay out of some sense of altruism, why would they? Heck, tech companies have to vest stock options over 4 years because most people would take the money and run.

What does everyone think happens when everybody quits because there's no reason to work there? The money is just returned to investors? Even if that's all you did, you still need people who...

        - know where the money is
        - how to distribute it
        - how to stay compliant with the law
        - how to make sure oversight is in place so that people don't straight up embezzle
        - keep outside players away that would try and take equity

Why on earth would someone stick around for such a sucky job, if the reward for doing well is getting laid off because the company tanked. Of course you need to pay people to stick around

<comment><USER13> Those tasks are handled by people that report into the CxO's.

The executives set broader directions and hire people to keep the lights on.

Use the money that would have been executive bonuses for retention packages that make sure the lights stay on.

Honestly, even a juicy bonus isn't going to keep many executives at a sinking ship unless they're not able to find another job.

<comment><USER14> > for retention packages that make sure the lights stay on.

even you admit that people doing any work in a bankrupting company needs a retention package to continue working - why should the CEO (just another worker in a company) be any different? Why is their retention package somehow less important than the retention package that you proposed for the "keep the lights on" workers?

<comment><USER15> That's not a "retention package". That just paying regular people a normal salary in the mundane work of winding down a company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't really have a problem with this. I've never been an executive, but I have seen first hand what happens when a company is in distress.

I worked for a small company that was on its last legs and had been through rounds of layoffs. Our investors wanted to keep the company afloat long enough to get someone to buy us out.

They made all of us one promise - for every hour we worked, we would get paid and on time.

They made some key employees an offer of a retention bonus to stick around for 6 months or until the company was sold. I happen to be one of those employees because I took over development of a key piece of software after the founder was kicked out. (It was an obscure proprietary system written in C++/MFC with a little bit of assembly and I was the only graybeard that knew enough to maintain it.)

The last thing you want is key employees jumping ship at the time you are trying to either save a sinking ship or at least get some type of salvage value from it.

<comment><USER17> I've had the same experience.

No one wants to work at a bankrupt low-morale company, so the only way to keep key people was to offer special bonuses for retention to keep things together through the bankruptcy process

If you think about it, it's literally the only way to do it. These folks have usually lost a ton of money on their company stock options. The only way to keep them around is to pay them more in the short term.

<comment><USER18> "The only way to keep them around..."

I call BS. It's not as if there's a shortage of employees or execs to go around right now. When a company is taking its lumps, the execs should too. That should be part of the deal. If the people who _actually do the work_ are getting laid off or asked to double their efforts to compensate for people laid off, then the execs ought to be content to ride out a period without bonuses and work to make those stocks rise in value again.

As usual, when things are good - execs see the profits, the vast majority of workers don't. When things are shit, the execs hand themselves bonuses while they cry crocodile tears about laying people off to please shareholders. Fuck them.

<comment><USER17> This comment is 100% your emotional baggage and 0% logic.

You expect an employee to stick around to "take the lumps" voluntarily, for LESS compensation than they would get elsewhere?

The reality is that you just don't give a shit what happens to the company or the employee, so you're happy to see the whole thing fail.

...and that's 100% your baggage - don't subject the rest of the world to your emotional problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is there any research claiming that giant executive bonuses, in this case seemingly at the expense of the company they govern, is optimal for some macroeconomic quality that benefits the society at large? Or do we allow this behavior because we believe it is immoral to prevent giant executive bonuses as a matter of principle?

<comment><USER20> There is evidence in both directions, but the data isn't great, because one of the reasons that boards offer large bonuses is to attract 'talent' to troubled or stagnant companies (which don't look great on the resume). Jim Collins (author of "Good to Great") has made the case that other factors are much more important.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the 'huge' bonuses usually aren't very large from an income statement point of view; if you bought an extra 0.5% growth (or savings), it was easily worth it.

As to why this is allowed, I think it's seen as a private transaction between well-informed and consenting parties, so there needs to be a compelling reason for legislation and regulation.

<comment><USER21> It is, however, very difficult to prove that it was the executive who actually got you that extra growth, since there's no control group and many variables. Executives will claim victory for any profits and blame outside factors for any losses, making it impossible to really know if a different candidate for half the salary would have done just as well.

<comment><USER22> I've heard an economist suggest that instead of tying executive bonuses to the company's own performance, they instead compare it to the performance of other, similar firms.

Still a fuzzy measure, but it would at least give them better incentives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I have trouble seeing how this is Something That Needs Fixing(tm).

It's a shareholder problem because it's shareholder capital being spent on these bonuses. Both pre- and post-bankruptcy, shareholders are in the primary position to fix it.

<comment><USER2> It isn't shareholder capital; it's almost always creditor capital when a public company is going bankrupt. It's a broken process when creditors don't get a vote in whether a company can apply for Chapter 11 bankruptcy (as opposed to Chapter 7 where the company assets are just liquidated). It incentivizes shareholders to vote for Chapter 11 because they know during a Chapter 7 their shares will be worthless anyway, because there won't be much (if anything) left after paying off debt.

<comment><USER13> It's not just creditors that get screwed. Many of these companies have pension plans that will likely be zeroed out during bankruptcy.

Also, if the company no longer exists (or contracts to cover the bonuses), then it stops serving whatever societal purposes it used to serve.

For retail, all the infrastructure supporting the malls ends up being wasted, suppliers go bankrupt, communities lose jobs, neighboring stores fail once the mall loses its anchor store, etc, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This sort of thing ought to be grounds for a lawsuit from shareholders, or other creditors.

<comment><USER25> Generally it's the shareholders approving these payments. It's in their interest, and perhaps in the interest of the creditors as well, to have a competent management team who know the company well in place to maximise enterprise value through Chapter 11.

<comment><USER26> The boards approve right? They are mostly a boys club rather than shareholder representatives. A executives union so to say.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Well we had a chance to make such activity illegal, but we didn't. Maybe we can do it now, to prepare for the next downturn?

</comment><comment><USER28> Can't creditors go after them in bankruptcy court? If not I see a easy way to make money.

<comment><USER29> According to the article it's a loophole

> Under a 2005 bankruptcy law, companies are banned, with few exceptions, from > paying executives retention bonuses while in bankruptcy. But the firms > seized on a loophole by granting payouts before filing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Hmm. Under US bankruptcy code any payment made in the 90 days prior to filing is subject to being undone by the court (you have to pay the money back). Perhaps this rule doesn't apply to employee bonuses??

<comment><USER31> There is a look back cause for executive compensation. And it claws back. To make it worse, it's also very reputationally damaging to have your name dragged through the mud for a payment like that. So not best practices to do something like that by experienced management.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I think many executives simply have good and secure contracts in first place. I'm not surprised if they have clauses to cover bankruptcy scenarios.

In some cases it's also wilt of a few executives, who try to onboard other executives so they don't stand out as the greedy guy.

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm not pro this or trying to justify it. But I just had a thought.

Maybe they want to retain the execs to fix the mess?

I think most people would start looking for a new job as soon as they heard that the company they work for is filing for bankruptcy.

What would happen to a company if all good people left?

<comment><USER34> You could argue the people responsible for the decisions that resulted in the company going bankrupt aren't the good people.

<comment><USER19> It's legal to be a bad person in the United States. The government is purposely mute on the matter of the morals of its citizens. As a democracy, the principle that allows us to prevent this behavior, if we deem it unacceptable, is to codify it in law, and make the specific behavior illegal.

<comment><USER35> They could mean good/bad in terms of business acumen and competence, not morality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> What exactly does an investor get in exchange for their money when they purchase common stock? Generally not dividends. Generally not assets. Generally not liquidation. Book value is meaningless in these scenarios. Every business fails eventually.

</comment><comment><USER37> The execs getting the bonus know that other USA execs won't frown on this.

The execs getting the bonus know regulators won't come after them.

The execs getting the bonus know the media won't name and shame them.

The execs getting the bonus know that nobody in their social circle will shun them.

The execs getting the bonus don't even think this is wrong, as the main aim is to grab what you can when you can, and if it's immoral, well someone should change the rules.

Yes laws need changing, but laws are set by culture, ultimately.

This is a deep, deep cultural problem that is killing the USA, and I've yet to see it acknowledged anywhere in the mainstream.

<comment><USER38> It's completely rational. The company is going into bankruptcy. The money can be mine or someone else's. If you had a chance to get $1,000,000 or the bank takes it with no consequences what do you do?

<comment><USER39> The money is already someone else's, by law: the creditors'. Rational != ethical, which is what the GP is arguing.

There are many things that are entirely rational to do that we nevertheless don't do. Either due to societal mores or laws, or both.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Let's be clear here, "firms" are not thinking, sentient things.

"On the eve of bankruptcy, US executives shower themselves with bonuses"

</comment><comment> d--b I am appalled at the reaction I am seeing here. People on HN really think that it is ok for executives to maximize their own personal interest at the expense of other employees and creditors?

Is that the true face of silicon valley? What happened to "make the world a better place", or "don't be evil". Capitalism works as long as the people in charge are responsible, not if they try to extract as much juice from the system as possible.

Your company is going bust, and you get a bonus? Fuck those guys, seriously.

</comment><comment><USER41> > Hertz - which recently terminated more than 14,000 workers - paid senior > executives bonuses of $1.5 million days before its May 22 bankruptcy, in > part to recognize the uncertainty they faced from the pandemic's impact on > travel, the company said in a filing.

Compensate the C-suite for confronting uncertainty, but fire the workers.

This seems like another variant of "brutal capitalism for the poor, socialism for the rich". Normally we hear it for governments bailing out companies but not (normal) individuals, but here it's companies ensuring their highest paid remain well-paid and thousands of workers are fired.

<comment><USER42> It has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism, it's a corrupt compensation scheme for C level executives. Corrupted schemes exist in any political system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Grifters. What else is new?</comment>


Launch HN: Piccolo (YC W18) – Camera for controlling your home with gestures - <AUTHOR> Hi HN — we're Marlon and Neil, founders of Piccolo (https://www.piccololabs.com/). Piccolo is a smart camera that lets you control your TV, lamps, fans, speakers, and other devices with simple gestures. For example, you can point at your lamps with your hand to turn them on or off.
The two of us have had an interest in computer vision for a long time and were in Udacity's first self-driving car nanodegree cohort in 2016. We started this as a side project to control one lamp and soon had our entire house connected. For some actions, we found gestures to be much faster and more intuitive. For example, pointing at a lamp to turn it on is way more natural than saying "Hey Alexa, can you turn on my left living room lamp?"
To set up Piccolo, you can place it anywhere (near the TV is usually best), and then on the app you can indicate with bounding boxes where the devices are. After that, you connect those same devices (Chromecast, Hue lights, smart plugs, etc.), and you're good to go. Some processing happens on-device, but the more complicated models are run in the cloud. Since we're not a security camera, there's no need to store video and so no image/video data is ever stored.
We're excited about the experiences you can build when you have a camera and apply computer vision techniques. With recent progress in human pose estimation, object classification, and object tracking, there's really a lot you can do. We're starting out with gestures, but our goal is to build a platform that lets anyone create and deploy vision apps. Here's a few things we're excited about:
- New apps. For example an app that detects medical emergencies (like an elderly person falling). We'd also love an app that can tell you where you left your phone and keys.
- App integrations. For example, letting Netflix know which people are in the room to get tailored recommendations for everyone vs. just the person signed in.
- Smarter hardware. For example, an Espresso machine that, with one click, makes your favorite drink because it knows who pressed the button.
- Voice-vision fusion. You should be able to trigger Alexa just by gazing at the Alexa device instead of saying "Alexa". You should also be able to hold something and say "Order 5 more of these".
We're giving away 20 pre-release units next month to anyone that joins the waitlist. We're happy to answer any questions and look forward to your feedback. If you want to follow up, our emails are email@example.com and firstname.lastname@example.com. <comment><USER2> From the Hitchiker's Guide:

A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive--you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.

Zaphod waved a hand and the channel switched again.

<comment><USER3> I wanted to post the exact same quote.

To understand the problem faced here it's worth trying to just watch people. Guess what people are saying to each other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Definitely cool technology, only not for me. I'll never place a camera in my home that is connected to some cloud service or company database. That data is simply too valuable for me to send out to a "trusted" party.

<comment><USER5> That's a fair concern. We are very serious about privacy. Existing cameras today focus on security so they have to store your data. Piccolo on the other hand is for real-time interactions so images are never stored.

<comment><USER6> What do you plan to do with other sorts of data?

Like does the cloud just trigger events and this it, or does it keep a log of where people are located in the scene and whether they have their arms crossed, etc?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The demo on the front page looks super cool. Signing up and looking forward to more progress and updates in the future. I wonder how accurate the finger recognition is? Is it accurate enough to pick up numbers so your fingers can be used to change the channel for example?

I did my final year engineering project with the Kinect (years ago!) and controlled a robotic arm to pick up an egg. Didn't know how else to apply this, but it seems like you guys really thought outside the box.

Only thing is the name...not sure about naming after the green alien from DBZ.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's accurate enough to pick up number of fingers from a fairly long distance (~5m), and it works well in most lighting conditions, including complete darkness.

<comment><USER7> Actually the lighting was the other question I had in mind. Impressive. When I worked on the Kinect code, lighting was never really an issue we had or wanted to tackle.

I think something that people don't realize until they start using motion sensing technology is that how intuitive it can really be. It might look awkward at first, but once it's seamlessly integrated (ie. stepping into the sensor's view), it's really just like magic. A good enough sensor can pick up and understand very specific motions.

Anyway, good luck guys.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very cool. I shudder to think of the GPU costs to run these models though. Perhaps they're using TPUs to be as efficient as possible. If you imagine a room occupied in the evening by people for several hours and you have any decent framerate, you're running your pose estimation network on each frame for several hours. And these models are big as far as I have seen. So that pretty much means you have one cloud GPU per camera allocated every evening. I suppose another option is they are running pieces of the network on the device but I think that's unlikely.

Of course these models are getting smaller over time and I'm incredibly impressed that these guys have put together the hardware, computer vision, and cloud setup. I also think they've nailed the MVP - not too easy but not too complicated either assuming they have decent models.

I'm signing up!

<comment><USER9> I think you're overestimating the processing requirements. The original 2010 Kinect did fundamentally similar processing (multi-person tracking and skeletal mapping) on the Xbox 360 which had a PowerPC CPU from 2005.

<comment><USER10> Running neural networks is usually much easier than training them (computationally).

Was the Kinect even a neural network? I don't think it was.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> First off, signed up. This looks like a pretty sweet tool for home automation.

I'm slowly adding home automation to my house, but I'm a little more privacy oriented. I totally recognize I might not be your target audience with some of my constraints. Couple questions: If the service is paid (monthly or for a 1 time app purchase); how much is getting published to your servers? Because I like the control over something as intrusive as cameras in my house I'd prefer to self-host as much as I can.

Does it have to be the camera you provide/sell or could a high enough quality camera do that?

</comment><comment><USER12> > but the more complicated models are run in the cloud

This is a massive problem with home automation tools today. I need to rely on Comcast to stay alive to be able to turn lights on and off in my house? To me, it's an absolute dealbreaker. I've spent more time than I feel like I should have had to in order to control devices I own without any data leaving my LAN. Am I the only one who feels like it's a totally absurd situation?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our first prototype ran locally end-to-end. To make that work we used a Jetson TX2 ($600 computer), but the performance was abysmal. In a few years, it might be possible to do what we're doing locally and at a reasonable price.

<comment><USER12> I just think it's unfortunate that every player in the space has to ship their own hardware (and, obviously, force the user into a walled garden so that competitor's products are inconvenient to use.)

Give me (a power user) something I can run in a docker container locally, or on any of my local Macs or PCs.

Or, assume as a constraint that smart homes need to be able to run themselves. I would appreciate if everyone in the space made an effort at detente while the technology matured to a point where a massive privacy and security hole wasn't required in order to have the thing work at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Super cool idea, although the privacy implications are a little bit discomforting.

Anyway, I'd be interested to know how you're dealing with the depth problem. For example, if there's a light behind you and a light above you, pointing up looks like you could be pointing at either light.

<comment><USER5> This is one of the most challenging parts of this problem. We're in the middle of transitioning to a 3D model that will be able to tell the difference really well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow, that short clip on your homepage is crazy effective. I understood it immediately. Super cool product. I would buy this in a heartbeat if it came in a self-contained hardware package that included the camera and a module that does the CV processing in a way such that no video of my home touches a 3rd- party server.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I think in a few years we'll see devices that can do everything locally, and cost a reasonable amount. For now, like others have said, some of the models for pose are too complex.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is it basically a smaller Kinect without the Xbox platform tie-in?

Looks very neat. If you open the API, I'd love to play with it!

<comment><USER5> That's right, Piccolo is not tied to any console or platform. We're also very excited about opening this up. We think there is potential to build really powerful applications with the information available here. Stay tuned!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Smartthings integration would be nice. I mean I guess its possible to do it yourself, but out of the box would be sweet because all my lights and motion run off it.

<comment><USER5> That's a great suggestion. We are working on connecting with a few different smart home hubs including smartthings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Brilliant home page video. Explains the premise quickly and clearly. I suspect the power and convenience will evaporate privacy concerns for many.

It could recognise a couple in a dancing pose and randomly play something appropriate. It could recognise heroic arms aloft and play applause. So much potential.

There are countless things we do daily that have loads of room to be simplified. Even getting an Apple TV where the remote can switch on the TV and the device, and auto-change the TV's source to the device input felt like a game-changer, but this could ramp that up significantly.

</comment><comment><USER17> I had a similar thought on the OpenPose library. How did your team end up with such a robust model without using OpenPose? As far as I know, OpenPose is only licensed for Academic use and was created using the Panoptic dataset which I believe is open. The problem is, creating a system that reaches the parity level of OpenPose with simple 2D image rec could be a startup in itself. I'm a bit cynical...

EDIT: you answered my question with DensePose. Had no idea that exists!

</comment><comment><USER18> Your demo on the front page is super spot on. I get what you do instantly.

Hope you guys all the best. This is so cool, I am on the waiting list!

</comment><comment><USER19> This looks interesting... No pricing listed, but I'm guessing it will be between $200 to $400. My main issue with "smart" devices is the price vs the longevity.

(Cameras + bulbs + switches + doors + sensors) * how many rooms you have = this automated home thing get's expensive really fast.

And then you end up with a not so smart home. Not to mention the struggle that's to figure out what devices talks to what system and the many apps... everyone want's to make their own app, and then you need a middleman app to talk to other apps. All of this work, and in 5 years you will probably need to replace everything. Just thinking about it, a smart home today will probably devalue the price of your home in 10 years.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think this is a great idea, it reminds me a lot of the OpenPose library. I found very interesting how you found each other via Udacity's course. Could you expand on how you went about actually teaming up and starting out? Thanks and good luck with the final pitch!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, OpenPose gave us a lot of inspiration. DensePose is similarly impressive and came out recently.

We did the course together but met many years before, in high school in Canada in '07.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Do you see the entire video and process it, or do you only see the skeleton + target areas?

<comment><AUTHOR> We do some preprocessing on-device and run our more complex models in the cloud. It's similar to Alexa which always listens for the trigger word, but only streams to servers for the few seconds afterwords. While some image data is processed in the cloud, it's never stored.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've wanted to do this but with the Nest cameras I already have in my house. It's too bad that Nest has made the decision to completely discourage anyone using the video from these devices.

</comment><comment><USER23> I love home automation and I love this idea but I'm deadset against having a cloud service connected for my home automation. Would it be possible to run a server locally, using my GPU for the processing?

</comment><comment><USER24> Awesome! Can't wait to no longer have to yell "ALEXA. HEY ALEXA" -> "sorry I could not find birdroom lights".

</comment><comment><USER25> Very cool!

I got a 502 and "Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form" initially though but it worked on the second try.

</comment><comment><USER26> _We 're giving away 20 pre-release units next month to anyone that joins the waitlist._

Are you sure that wording is accurate?

</comment><comment><USER27> I wonder if this could be an iPhone app, so we can just use an old iPhone. Do we need a special camera at all?

<comment><AUTHOR> You could but the downsides are: 1/ It doesn't have the ideal sensors (stereo cameras, or other depth sensor), so you'd have limited functionality 2/ Most people wouldn't want to run their iPhone consistently day after day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Looks really cool. Your landing page does a really great job at demonstrating what it does. Great work!

</comment><comment><USER29> Congrats, this is very impressive! I'm curious are you computing the 2D or 3D pose of the person?

<comment><AUTHOR> The demo video on our website was done with 2D pose. We're in the middle of transitioning to 3D.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Few things come to mind:

1: Amazement 2: DBZ's character 3: Google's Project Soli

</comment><comment><USER31> As an aside, what was your background before doing the self-driving nanodegree?

<comment><AUTHOR> I taught myself programming a few years ago and did the ML nanodegree before. My cofounder Neil studied software at Waterloo and was an engineer at Pinterest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This looks AWESOME! Can't wait to run around the house like Iron Man.

</comment><comment><USER33> Does it work with Apple HomeKit?

</comment><comment><USER34> congrats guys!

</comment><comment><USER35> Will Piccolo help you not hit me with your car again Neil?

</comment><comment><USER36> It's funny because, ycombinator loudly boasts that, ideally, it seeks to fund billion dollar ideas, and yet I so very much do not want a thing like this.

Computer vision is this incredible thing, until you realize it means you'll be in front of a camera you cannot control, and that camera will require broadband internet, if not for a one-time activation, then perhaps continuously and indefinitely.

I've never seen a high-end electronic device produced after 2010 restrict itself from the internet. No company seems have the self control necessary to consider even the idea. No internet? Impossible!

What kind of echo chamber would shout down such an idea? Do people understand why I might worry about a camera with unrestricted internet access? Why must I trust anything so deeply?

I don't want to hear about how I should just give up this fight, because I've already lost anyway. I don't care about what other devices already do. I don't care about how different this time is.</comment>


Why we build 7 productivity apps within a month - <AUTHOR> We launched our new startup a productivity tool Due.work on September 17th on ProductHunt.
Within a month we hit almost 1000+ users. We are a team of 5. We started with a web application and our customer was happily using it. As our user base started growing people started asking for Mobile and Desktop apps.
As time progresses, we recorded something very strange pattern followed by most of our users. So, we decided to study the lifecycle of our users.
We found that when a user signs into Due.work and starts using it. The average first-day analytics for its time spend was between 20-45 minutes. This time starts declining as each day passes and after a week's time spend by our users decline to almost 5 - 10 min.
We went up studying data further and categorize our users into 3 separate groups based on some conditions: Super Active | Active | Inactive Users Super Active was that user who is using our platform on a daily basis. Active were those who use our platform but spend by less time compared to Super Active users and Inactive users were those who were an Active or Super Active user in the past but became inactive as time progresses.
From the data, we calculated the percentage of these groups which was 20% | 35% |45% that means 45% of our signup users become inactive after some time.
That was an alarming situation for us so, we started talking to our users to find out the exact reason for the same. We find out almost all users using our platform have already used or are currently using Trello, Monday or Basecamp. This was the main reason for our user being inactive over time because it is very difficult for a team to switch to a new productivity solution all of a sudden, It takes time to make the change.
So, we needed something with which our users can feel more connected with us. Thus we decided to build apps for due.work targetting all platforms.
We end up building due.work apps for Mac os, Windows os, Linux, Android, iOS, Google Extension, and Firefox extension.
During our development we spend many sleepless nights developing it but all it was worth considering we finally end up building apps for all major platforms that we wanted to have.
It's been 2 days now since we have published all our apps. We never have been more than excited before.
Want to try our productivity tool visit: https://www.due.work
Original Post: https://www.due.work/blog/why-we-build-7-productivity-apps-within-a-month/ <comment><USER2> [duplicate] from 10 hours ago

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21604089](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21604089)</comment>