Some thoughts on when NYC last opened new subway stations - <AUTHOR> http://secondavenuesagas.com/2016/03/15/brief-note-opening-new-subway-stations/ <comment><USER2> I am a NYC native that left for the warm weather of Los Angeles. The city has a long way to catch up to pretty much every city of its size, but he has done more in the past year than NYC has done in decades.

It is hard to critique the NYC subway since it does cover a lot of ground and it is 24/7\. I have been to cities like Tokyo, and I still prefer the subway (commuter and long distance trains is another matter). Only one company, one fare, very simple.

"Can we add transit on par with European counterparts?"

Has the author ever been to Europe? The NYC subway is far bigger than the London Underground. A really quick search found the following comparison:

[http://www.timeout.com/newyork/travel/infograph-the-nyc- subw...](http://www.timeout.com/newyork/travel/infograph-the-nyc-subway- versus-subways-around-the-world)

<comment><USER3> That article is a bit odd.

It has a graph of fare prices which shows the LU as being absurdly expensive.

It is expensive, but not that much (about half). I've seen single digit numbers of people using paper tickets, and most of those were probably travelcards.

No-one pays the cash fare, we use Oyster (smart card). The cash fare has been artificially inflated in price to force people onto the smart cards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yet another clueless articles bemoaning the lack of investment in subways. I'll just link to my previous comments on this topic.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10979537](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10979537)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10247109](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10247109)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11242655](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11242655)

The tl;dr; is that the costs for the MTA are 10-50x more than every other major city outside the US. The solution is to shut down the MTA, fire all the employees and bar them from ever working for any government agency again, and and replace them with Spanish, or Indians, or Hong Kongians, or French workers, all of whom who seem to be able to build subways at very reasonable prices.

<comment><USER5> I highly doubt that someone who has been writing extensively about the MTA for almost 10 years is "clueless".

You make a good point that the cost per km is exorbitant and needs to be reined in, but comparing the costs of a 10-15 year old system to one that is 100+ years old is probably not the most accurate comparison.

<comment><USER4> The Budapest metro is 6 years older than the NYC subway. The Tokyo metro is also 90 years old, as is the Barcelona metro.

High density rich cities like Hong Kong do it cheaper. Sprawling low density cities like Delhi do it cheaper. Ancient systems like London, Paris and Budapest do it cheaper. Shiny modern systems like Singapore do it cheaper. Cold places like Malmo do it cheaper. Hot places like Mexico City do it cheaper.

[https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/us-r...](https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/us- rail-construction-costs/) [https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/comp...](https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/comparative- subway-construction-costs-revised/)

The question isn't why one specific city is cheaper than NYC. The question is why _every single city outside the US_ is vastly cheaper than NYC. The only place that even comes remotely close to US prices is _one line_ of the London metro.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One of the sad things about 'zero interest money' is that we aren't using that to save the taxpayer millions by investing in real infrastructure improvements. It doesn't help that infrastructure costs are the only construction costs that cost more in real dollars today than they did 50 or 100 years ago.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. Infrastructure development doesn't really play well given US politics today. The right distrusts any non-military government spending, while the left is more interested in entitlements and social programs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Least you (NYC) have some big projects going on (long island rr to grand central).

[http://gothamist.com/2015/11/04/east_side_access_photos.php#...](http://gothamist.com/2015/11/04/east_side_access_photos.php#photo-1)

All we have in Boston is a couple of new trolley stops in Somerville and even that is in question. They stopped building mass transit here in the 80s. The North Station South Station connector was killed because the big dig cost two much, and despite lobbying from 2 former governors hasn't got off the ground.

Infrastructure is not popular. Though with more and more of us living/working in Cities, critically important.

I always thought a heat map around cities with commute times to downtown would be an interesting project.

<comment><USER9> That heat map should be entirely doable with just the Google Maps API, right? That would be pretty interesting to see.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Meanwhile in China: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/SHM_evol...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/SHM_evolution_mid.gif) (Shanghai Metro 1993-2015)

<comment><USER11> Are there any other visualizations like this? The growth of poor developing countries into something resembling a modern one is insanely fascinating

<comment><USER12> There's one visualization [1] for the Taipei Metro's growth [2] in Taipei, Taiwan/Republic of China.

[1]: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/Taipei_m...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/Taipei_metro_history_map.gif)

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The time has probably passed for this, but I did wonder a few years ago if a New Deal style government program would have been worthwhile. Vast unemployment, crumbling infrastructure... those two things could go a ways to fixing each other.

<comment><USER14> That's what the stimulus package of 2009 was sold as. Then it turned out that seven-eighths of it went to various government cronies or to allow states to put off their pension obligations one more year. There were also, as I recall, complaints that spending on infrastructure projects would unequally benefit men over women.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The cluelessness of this article is beyond words.

New York City has one of the most amazing transit systems of any city in the world, and most of it is at least 100 years old.

By focusing on stops and forgetting to mention the dozens of large projects taking place in the NYC transit system, he makes it sound like nothing is changing.

Here's just a small list off the top of my head:

1\. new Penn Station

2\. Yes the 7 train to Hudson Yards

3\. Yes, the 2d avenue subway (which has been in the offing for 100 years)

4\. new East River tunnels

5\. new ferry system (including 18 new ferries announced today)

6\. new Select Bus Service

7\. new New Jersey tunnels

8\. repairing East River Bridges

9\. new tunnels for LIRR service to Penn Station

</comment><comment> awinter-py As systems age they get bogged down with stale infrastructure. We need to give our local governments political cover for hitting the simcity 'delete' button. Until we collapse the pipes & tunnels that aren't working we won't be able to build the ones we need.

A midwestern state is considering reducing their total highway miles based on declining usage stats. This is a really brave stance considering the cultural bias against it.

</comment><comment><USER16> I live off the 1st Ave L stop (Stuy town). Take the L during rush hour and you'll see exactly what I deal with every day.

I'm all for the 2nd Ave expansion, however I think that something needs to be done about over-ridership with our existing infrastructure. As Brooklyn becomes more gentrified, the L (and others) will only get worse. Queens, I'm looking at you Astoria, is only going to get worse.

<comment><USER8> And I think they want to shut the L train down for a bit to fix the tunnel (Huricanne damage..). Thats not going to be good for anyone in Brooklyn.

<comment><USER17> Not just a bit: 18 months in both directions, or 3 years of single tunnel shutdown. Pretty horrible for anyone who depends on that train.

<comment><USER18> I can't see why anyone living in non-JMZ Williamsburg would renew their lease this year, unless they're biking regardless of weather conditions.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Get What You Want – a short primer for ambitious people - <AUTHOR> http://thewantbook.com <comment> con-templative "In 1954, Roger Bannister set a world record, running one mile in 3:59.4. The 4 minute mile had become a white whale, with medical experts arguing that the human body wasn't capable of completing it. Prior to Bannister, the previous one mile record had stood at 4:01 for nine years. Less than a year later, someone else ran a sub 4 minute mile. Today, hundreds of American runners, and likely thousands around the world have achieved this feat."

This is often noted as a mental breakthrough, but what isn't told about this story is that Bannister had the advantage of a better running surface and pacemakers. Those that broke the 4-min mile after Bannister did it because they too took advantage of a better running surface and pacemakers.

[http://sportsscientists.com/2014/12/2-hour-marathon-4-min- mi...](http://sportsscientists.com/2014/12/2-hour-marathon-4-min-mile/) "The difference that track surface makes is enormous – biomechanists estimate that modern synthetic tracks are worth 1.5% compared to the cinder tracks that Bannister and Landy ran on (some cinder being better than others, of course). And that's why, as my friend David Esptein so elegantly presented at TED, of the 1,034 men who have broken 4-min for the mile since 1954, only 530 would remain if you applied that "correction factor" that predicts that synthetic tracks are worth about 1.5% per lap compared to the cinder tracks of the 1950. It means only 10 men per decade have joined the club since Bannister created it, and that should give you some context to this argument that "Four minutes used to be impossible, and now it is easy"."

<comment><AUTHOR> Really appreciate that link - and definitely a fact I will tuck away. Pacesetters and track surface... fascinating!

Still, I think the fact that the fastest man in the world at the time had tried multiple times to beat it and could not definitely puts a damper on anyone else trying to break a record.

Clearly technology and social forces were at work. Believing you can do something does not make it so. But NOT believing you can do something sure as hell isn't going to help you make it happen.

<comment> con-templative > Still, I think the fact that the fastest man in the world at the time had > tried multiple times to beat it and could not definitely puts a damper on > anyone else trying to break a record.

It didn't put a damper on Bannister. In fact, you could argue that the press coverage around the limit motivated more people to try to break four minutes for the acclaim. Without that narrative, maybe Bannister wouldn't have been motivated enough to do it.

> Clearly technology and social forces were at work. Believing you can do > something does not make it so. But NOT believing you can do something sure > as hell isn't going to help you make it happen.

You may be right, but the 4-minute-mile anecdote doesn't show this. In Landy's case, it wasn't new-found belief, but technology and knowledge that pushed him under four minutes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Just curious, how much detail does the book go into "figuring out what you want"? Most books like this go into more detail for the second part ("how to get what you want"), which I've never had as much of a problem with.

<comment><USER3> I used to struggle with is this too. So I started with the basics. Stay alive; breathe; eat, drink, sleep; get laid ( _with_ someone else in the room); stay fit; get rich; be happy.

That was my first list, and I just added concrete goals to each as time went on. Eat now includes a constraint (never again will I eat what I don't like) with a goal (healthy, balanced). Sex was easy and I now have a son. That in turn changed other goals. I keep refining. When I don't know I don't push it. It will come.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like the idea of specific action-oriented guides to X (even if X is, in this case, somewhat general). Non-fiction could be splitting along the axis of practical-vs-curiosity-exploring, which is great, as it makes room for more things like this.

The focus on chapter count / selected chapters is kinda odd, considering each chapter has, on average, less than 300 words. Vocabulary that speaks to the value of the book more (like "steps"? that might be too late-night-tv-sales, but "topics" or "subjects"?) might make more sense to people who haven't yet read the book.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey hawkice - thanks for the feedback. I did aim to write something that was both generally applicable, but also included specific tactics and relevant case studies. We'll see if I succeeded.

Agree that chapter count is a little odd, and that's why I also included a small preview (if you click the cover, you'll get an overlay with 4 of the chapters). Also the six "Selected Chapter" hopefully also hint at the contents of the book.

Hope you enjoy it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't feel like you provide enough sample content to convince me that this is worth paying money for.

What does this book say that hasn't already been said by various mainstream self help authors, Steve Pavlina, people in the human potential movement, etc. ?

<comment><AUTHOR> I just added another 3 chapters to the book preview that you get from clicking the cover. That brings the total to 7 chapters, nearly 20% of the 36 chapters in the book. If you're not excited to get the book at that point, you're probably not going to like it once you buy. Which is totally cool.

As for your second question, there are 6,000 books in the "Applied Psychology" category on Amazon, and 28,000 books in the "Success". Between all of them, I'm sure that none of the ideas I've presented in this book haven't already been said.

What this book offers is _my_ unique take on those ideas, the personal stories I've shared, the way I've presented the research, and the voice through which I've expressed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> 10000 words in 36 chapters? 300 words per chapter seems a bit short, doesn't it? This comment is already more than twenty words long, so each chapter would be just one or two paragraphs.

<comment><AUTHOR> One of my favorite bloggers in the world is Seth Godin.

Here's a post he wrote recently: [http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/01/unprepared.h...](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/01/unprepared.html)

It's 247 words and 9 paragraphs. I don't think he's worried about the number of sentences in his paragraphs, nor were the 796 people who liked his post on Facebook.

<comment><USER6> I didn't mean it as an attack, nor was I suggesting you _should_ be worried about the number. But its presence on the marketing page as a selling point confused me. The fact it's there reads to me as if you're saying, "this is valuable because it's 10k words long." But 10k words is not long -- it's quite short. Especially compared to almost any other book of prose you might pay $4 for.

I understand that's probably not what you meant, but that's how I interpreted it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Who is Jason Shen and why should I give him $10 for a book with a terribly silly title?

<comment><USER6> From the linked page:

"Hey, I'm Jason Shen. I'm a writer, athlete, and lifelong tech geek.

I do marketing and product management at Percolate, an enterprise software company based in NYC. Previously, I co-founded Ridejoy, a YC-backed transportation company, and served as a Presidential Innovation Fellow at the Smithsonian. Back in the day, I was captain of an NCAA championship gymnastics team at Stanford.

B.S. + M.S. from Stanford University Author of the Amazon best-seller: Winning Isn't Normal: Meditations on the Art of Ass-Kicking"

It is an impressive biography, there is no question about that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thanks for this book, I enjoyed reading the beta version.

</comment><comment><USER9> Congrats Jason!</comment>


The Mathiness of Nassim Nicholas Taleb - <AUTHOR> http://www.inexactchange.org/blog/2015/07/24/the-mathiness-of-nassim-nicholas-taleb/ <comment><USER2> I like the term "mathiness" for this, because it seems like exactly the same kind of thing that's complained about in economics under that name.

Namely, you claim (necessarily without proof) that a real-world phenomenon is analogous to a certain mathematical model. Then you prove some things about the model. Finally, you claim that the things you've proved about the model are also true about the real world. It doesn't matter how rigorous the mathematical steps in the middle are, the strength of this kind of argument is determined by the first step: how strong is the analogy between the mathematical system and real life?

In physics, we can build models where the analogy is very strong: when we try out new situations in both the model and in real life, we get the same answer in both. In (macro-)economics, we typically do something weaker, where we start with a set of models determined by intuition, and then choose the one that gives results most similar to real life in the situations we've already seen. Prediction of future events is really difficult.

It seems like the approach in Taleb's paper is even weaker. We choose a model based on pure analogy, explicitly disclaim the usefulness of evidence ("While evidentiary approaches are often considered to reflect adherence to the scientific method in its purest form, it is apparent that these approaches do not apply to ruin problems"), and then attack anyone who says that we've done something other than prove a mathematical theorem about the real world.

It's too bad, because underneath all of the "mathiness" is one of the strongest arguments against GMOs that I've heard (and I say that as a GMO- eater). It just should have been an opinion piece in the NYT rather than a research article on the arxiv.

<comment><USER3> From the point pf view of a biologist, his argument against GMO is pretty weak. He is essentially saying that we _don 't know_, therefore there _could_ be a large negative consequence.

However, he has failed to grasp, or educate himself sufficiently, that gene transfer between organisms is in fact a common occurrence in natural ecosystems [0].

Further, at this moment at least, the genes that are being transferred artificially are in general not genes that would cause havoc if they somehow became mobilized from the species into which they were introduced. By way of example, the protein Bt confers resistance to insect predation,it is originally derived from a bacterium that killed insects in a parasitic cycle [1]. Plants, generally, have hundreds or thousands of ways of resisting insect predation, and adding one more to the mix is not going to devastate any ecosystem, at least not in the long term.

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

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

<comment><USER2> I am not a biologist, but I think of the ecological risk of GMO as something akin to AI risk: Not a serious risk at the current level of technology or in the near future, not sufficiently dangerous to stop research or forego the benefits of today's versions, but serious enough that it would be good for a few people to be thinking about it right now.

<comment><USER4> > but serious enough that it would be good for a few people to be thinking > about it right now.

Of course, GM-technology is a huge area of tools, tools which are being used in all kinds of situations and outcomes: modifying bacteria to create insulin or washing powder ingredients (both of these have been done on an industrial scale for decades now); modifying plants to have a better defense against various pests (being done with Bt cotton and soy IIRC), or just to glow in the dark (there's a kickstarter), etc.

These are all more or less "good" outcomes of GM, but you could also use GM for "bad" \- you could make maize express a human neurotoxin and spread that plant in order to attack a country (a not very directed attack). The only thing that's stopping you is that it's still very hard, expensive and time- consuming to do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure if Taleb's precautionary principle should be applied to GMO's or not, but I found this critique to be somewhere between uncharitable and misguided.

For example, Taleb is already measuring earthquakes by the energy released. This is how "magnitude" is defined for earthquakes. Thus statements like "For instance, in the coffee cup example, Taleb measures the intensity of an earthquake by its magnitude. What happens if we measure an earthquake instead by the amount of energy it releases?" make me conclude that the author of the critique understands neither earthquakes nor Taleb.

As for the overall claim of fuzziness, it's probably best to let readers make their own judgement. Appendix C here is Taleb's "Mathematical Derivations of Fragility". While one can dispute where it should be applied, it's far from devoid of detail: [http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf](http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf)

<comment><USER6> > For example, Taleb is already measuring earthquakes by the energy released. > This is how "magnitude" is defined for earthquakes.

No, as the article notes, the measurement of magnitude (in the Richter scale) is proportional to the base-32 logarithm of energy released (its defined as proportional the base-10 logarithm of seismic wave amplitude.)

Taleb's use of the coffee cup example to suggest a disproportionate impact of large events vs. small events -- suggesting that the real relative impact of a magnitude 6 quake compared to a magnitude 1 quake is disproportionately greater than their size because one magnitude six quake does more damage than six magnitude one quakes -- is vacuous from its structure because you can arbitrarily choose scales of measurement to make the impact proportional or disproportional in either direction, and ludicrous in its particular choice of measurement scales since, well, I mean, who would expect an earthquake releasing 1 billion times as much energy to do only 6 times the damage?

Taleb makes a comparison that sounds significant because most people don't know what the numbers involved mean.

<comment><USER7> While you are right, this completely misses the point Taleb is making. The earthquake thing is just an analogy to explain the principle of non-linearity. Yes, the analogy is bad because the richter scale is logarithmic, but the principle it illustrates is still perfectly valid and applicable to the discussion at hand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The GMO argument like so many things now seems to be divided into "Best thing since sliced bread" or "Bringer of the end of the world" camps. Not understanding the deep details I would like to see more nuanced debate. What are the actual and potential risk, and what are the actual and potential benefits.

On the risk side, GMO proponents like to argue that the technology is safe because we haven't found any ill effects. But what they are really saying is that we haven't found any so far. I remember studying genetics and being told about junk DNA, even Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA's double-helical structure, suspected it was "little better than junk." Since then this opinion has changed. We find out new things about DNA all the time, it is now thought that previous generations experiences can change decedents. Reading the recent articles about Chinese scientists using CRISPR to modifying embryos they started with 86, 71 survived, and 28 were successfully spliced, not really a precise operation. With this in mind I find anyone who says there is no risk is not being intellectually honest. The question that comes up is what are the chances that we are Marie Curie working with something that ultimately harms us?

In terms of assessing benefits I like to take the example of X-ray technology. From the 1920s to the 1970s a machine known as a shoe-fitting fluoroscope was used to see if shoes fit feet (especially children's feet). With the growing understanding of the harmful effects of radiation these machines were phased out, although never banned. That doesn't mean we don't x-ray people, we do, if you break a bone or go to the dentist the benefit of diagnosing the injury or cavity is considered to outweigh the damage from the radiation. For people in Western nations with plentiful food supplies the macro scale benefits of GMO seem limited, we weren't starving to death or going blind before GMOs. However if my family and friends were going blind due to Vitamin A deficiency the benefits would weigh more heavily on my opinion.

I don't claim to be an expert in this area but am interested in being provided with a more neutral analysis to help me form an opinion.

<comment><USER9> There is also the whole regulatory capture side of GMO. The ownership of all plants on Earth by a few corporations. That part is also worrying because it brings all food under the control of a few corporations under the patents regime.

<comment><USER10> How is it that this isn't THE major issue?

<comment><USER11> Because patents are just legal constructs which can be repealed or ignored, unlike catastrophic damage to the ecosphere...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The "mathematician" who call Taleb mathiness has made a critical mistake. [https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/624767423049269249](https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/624767423049269249) reply

</comment><comment><USER12> Has been debunked [https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/624767423049269249](https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/624767423049269249)

<comment><USER13> That's hardly debunking. I would call it further obfuscation and and an appeal to motive. Taleb is a noble truth seeker and the GMO proponents are out to silence him.

Hardly.

Having read his books, he's a bright guy often with compelling ideas. If he would leave them as thought experiments and appeals to common sense honestly I think his arguments would be more effective. His need to formalize everything mathematically, for a reader with a moderately sophisticated mathematical background, ends up undermining his argument.

<comment><USER14> That's most of his writing though: throw a lot of complicated words at the reader and hope some naive ones start seeing mystique depth in his thought. His writing is incoherent though. Even reading abstract of his paper [1]:

>>We present a non-naive version of the Precautionary (PP) that allows us to avoid paranoia and paralysis by confining precaution to specific domains and problems. PP is intended to deal with uncertainty and risk in cases where the absence of evidence and the incompleteness of scientific knowledge carries profound implications and in the presence of risks of "black swans", unforeseen and unforeseable events of extreme consequence. We formalize PP, placing it within the statistical and probabilistic structure of ruin problems, in which a system is at risk of total failure, and in place of risk we use a formal fragility based approach. We make a central distinction between 1) thin and fat tails, 2) Local and systemic risks and place PP in the joint Fat Tails and systemic cases. We discuss the implications for GMOs (compared to Nuclear energy) and show that GMOs represent a public risk of global harm (while harm from nuclear energy is comparatively limited and better characterized). PP should be used to prescribe severe limits on GMOs.

Leaves little doubt. You can't call him a truth seeker - he is a quack with some talent for wooing people.

[1] [http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.5787](http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.5787)

<comment><USER11> Seemed coherent to me. Which part didn't you understand?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Anyone over 6-feet should be Banned from the NBA - <AUTHOR> https://outlookzen.com/2014/06/01/anyone-over-6-feet-should-be-banned-from-the-nba/ <comment><USER2> I understand this is about banning women because of testosterone levels. Wouldn't a more straight forward argument be "stop the sexism, we're all humans, let's just all compete"?</comment>


KickStarting a Revolution - <AUTHOR> http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/08/16/kickstarting-a-revolution/

<comment><USER2> I know that it's superficial, but I have an extremely hard time taking a blog post interspersed with large meme pictures seriously. I think you should only use them if your target audience is teens, and when you're near their age as well, trying to write something "popular". Definitely not when attempting to write a serious post.

Note that this is the same blog that recently started a post[0] with:

      TL;DR? Why not just go watch another five second video of a kitten
      with its head in a toilet roll, or a 140 character description
      of a meal your friend just stuffed in their mouth. "nom nom".
      This blog post is not for you.

which makes this seem quite ironic.

[0]: [http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use- co...](http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/)

<comment><USER3> These are not "meme pictures" but rather image macros[0].

[0]: [https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_macro](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_macro)

<comment><USER4> They are both.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great article, just one major inaccuracy concerning the Pirate Party:

> they have a silly name and their focus seems to be solely on 'sharing > culture' at the expense of everything else.

Then you go on to say:

> What we need in this country is a protest party that campaigns on the issues > of Internet privacy, censorship, copyright/patent reform and computer misuse > laws.

The Pirate Party campaigns precisely on these issues. For those that think the Pirate Party is just focused on protesting against unfair monopolies, please look up their actual ideas.

A good illustration is given on Rick Falkvinge's blog:

[http://falkvinge.net/files/2012/manual/PirateWheel-2012-11-1...](http://falkvinge.net/files/2012/manual/PirateWheel-2012-11-10.pdf)

<comment><USER6> Thanks. I'll have a think about this and then edit the article to give a fairer representation to the Pirate Party.

<comment><USER7> The Pirate Party's manifesto ([https://www.pirateparty.org.uk/media/uploads/Manifesto2012.p...](https://www.pirateparty.org.uk/media/uploads/Manifesto2012.pdf)) specifically addresses privacy. On p.25 it says:

 _We feel that citizens ' right to private and confidential communication is vital, but at present it is not respected. We will forbid third parties from intercepting or monitoring communication traffic (i.e. telephone calls, post, Internet traffic, defend the right of citizens to expose emails) and require specific warrants to be issued by a court before the police are allowed to monitor communications traffic._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why not raise £338,568 for the Open Rights Group ([http://www.openrightsgroup.org/](http://www.openrightsgroup.org/)) instead? They're a British group who actively campaign and defend privacy, freedom of expression, and innovation. They could do with the financial support, technical help, legal aid, and public awareness.

Putting your time and money behind groups like ORG ([http://www.openrightsgroup.org/](http://www.openrightsgroup.org/)), the EFF ([https://www.eff.org/](https://www.eff.org/)), and Privacy International ([https://www.privacyinternational.org/](https://www.privacyinternational.org/)) feels more productive to me than playing an expensive system for a one-off political statement. We need to support and create sustainable groups with a vested interest in putting pressure on the policy makers in power. Groups who are well-established, who share your views, and who have a head start.

Expressing your distaste for existing parties is valuable. But it is easily ignored, especially if you do not intend to fight for seats.

If the EFF and ORG grew as big, influential, and sustainable as other pressure groups such as the National Rifle Association, then privacy and technology matters could start to influence policy makers pandering for votes.

If you're reading this from the UK, go ahead and join ORG today: [https://www.openrightsgroup.org/join/](https://www.openrightsgroup.org/join/) They need more members. £5 a month can make a big difference to them.

You should donate to the EFF while you're at it: [https://supporters.eff.org/donate](https://supporters.eff.org/donate)

<comment><USER7> > Putting your time and money behind groups like ORG > ([http://www.openrightsgroup.org/](http://www.openrightsgroup.org/)), the > EFF ([https://www.eff.org/](https://www.eff.org/)), and Privacy > International > ([https://www.privacyinternational.org/](https://www.privacyinternational.org/)) > feels more productive to me than playing an expensive system for a one-off > political statement.

I agree that a one-off campaign in the 2015 general election is unlikely to bear much fruit. However, having said that, the Pirate Party's strategy of tackling these problems by being a political party and fighting elections _is_ already bearing fruit.

For example, one reason the European Parliament decided not to go ahead with ACTA is that they fear it would give a major impetus to the Pirates, who the oldparties would rather not see getting bigger in the 2014 European election.

There is no reason, of course, why digital rights activists cannot do both -- political parties and campaigning organisations -- together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I care about this issue quite a lot, and the central idea - Kickstarting a new party - is a good one.

Having said that, there are an enormous number of problems with this suggestion.

 _" There should be no need for local campaigning. I've never had a politician knock on my door to discuss who I'd vote for, but I have had plenty of leaflets and fliers put though my letterbox and they end up straight in the recycling. "_

Good - because everyone else thinks the same as the OP, right? If we promote on Twitter and YouTube, everyone who matters will learn about the party?

Not so much. A project like this is going to need a marketing budget, and a big one - as well as volunteers on the ground, whether the OP likes it or not.

Most people don't even have a Twitter account. Most people don't follow YouTube particularly closely.

And as many, many marketing professionals over the years have noticed, you need to tell people about your product a lot more than once for them to buy into it.

 _" There are 650 constituencies in the United Kingdom."_

And for each of these, you're going to need a candidate. That's 650 people you need to find, who can appear credible to the media (so, they'll need to be skilled public speakers who can handle a debating environment as well as a media interview focused on soundbites), who don't have any skeletons in their closet or non-standard lifestyle choices that the other parties can use to discredit the entire organisation ("GEEK WHO WANTS TO BE PM IN BISEXUAL ORGY SHOCKER!"), and who are willing to give up their current careers should they win.

One of the biggest problems the mainstream parties have is finding qualified candidates - and they've got 100+ years of experience and network to do so. For an upstart party like this, it's going to be a far, far bigger problem than finding the money.

None of which means that this idea should just be disregarded, but it definitely needs more consideration.

<comment><USER10> > That's 650 people you need to find, who can appear credible to the media

They don't need this; I think the idea is purely protest, with no intention of the person actually getting voted in.

<comment><USER11> As long as the candidates are not batshit crazy some controversy might actually be a benefit in getting PR, as long as everyone knows to answer everything with "You know as well as we do that we don't stand a chance of getting elected and anyone trying to make a point out of that are just trying to score points; the point of this campaign is to give people an opportunity to show their displeasure with the big parties stance on privacy; [launch into info about the point]"

<comment><USER12> I would invite readers to consider just how non-trivial the following task is:

Here is a list of 650 people that are almost as geographically diversely located as it is possible to be while remaining in the UK. Demonstrate that none of them are "batshit crazy".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I followed the, quite successful, foundation and raise of the Pirate Party of Germany very closely. Many of my friends and follow activists from our privacy movement, AK Vorrat, became members. I can not recall, money ever having been a major problem. This was certainly true for AK Vorrat* and I think it was true for the PP as well.

Sure, you would always like to have more money, but it never stops you from doing sensible moves. On top of that, not having boatloads of money makes you look authentic and fresh. When you campaign, you spend so much of your own time and energy, that you happily spend some of your money as well. The listed costs in this article are peanuts for any group of people that can afford to start and propel a political movement. You certainly don't need Internet crowdfunding for that though it might be a good idea for financing an election campaign. In my experience, there are many, many people who want to support your politics but don't think they have the time. Those people are very willing to support you financially with what ever amount they can easily afford.

So, at least in Germany, starting a political movement is not limited by money.

PS: There was actually some crowdfunding. The company Spreadshirt included donatations for every T-Shirt with the popular Stasi 2.0 logo. [http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi_2.0](http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi_2.0) About 11,000 Euros were raised very quickly and I remember the many discussion on "How shall we spend all this money."

<comment><USER14> Political parties in Germany receive state funding, which doesn't happen in the UK.

<comment><USER13> Fair point. But again, even if you are not a party, your political movement will have to overcome a lot of major problems. I wouldn't count money as one of them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can someone enlighten me as to how this achieves anything, other than a count of people who abstained?

If you want to reform something, it seems like the required action is to reform it. Saying on record 'i want reform', or 'i don't like the old system' does not achieve anything, and in fact wastes everyones' time. The hard part: working out reform and enactioning it, still needs to be done.

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER16> I think that what this could achieve is stating the importance of the issues to the main political parties. Most "mainstream" political parties that I've seen will change their positions on things if they think it will get them more votes.

So what would this achieve. Well having a "privacy reform" party candidate on all the ballots would draw attention to the problem, in that voters would see the name and potentially hear about the platform. Also getting on the ballots would be likely to draw some mainstream media attention (heck the Monster raving loony party gets attention in the UK when it's on the ballot at by- elections)

Then if the party actually gets a decent number of votes, it may persuade mainstream parties to change their positions. My feeling is that at the moment none of them think it's that important a topic, so aren't formulating policies on the topic.

Personally I think it's a good idea to try and do something about this now, as once the idea that PRISM etc are fine and accepted gets embedded into culture, the next steps are likely to follow (e.g. what the US seems to be seeing with DEA and other law enforcement areas getting access to data). How long would it be before your local police are trawling your smartphone GPS data to see if you were speeding...)

<comment><USER17> _Most "mainstream" political parties that I've seen will change their positions on things if they think it will get them more votes._

Yep, this has happened before. 25 years ago the Conservative party brought in a law banning the "promotion of homosexuality in schools", now they are legalising same sex marriage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm not a Brit but how can a country be run by corporations if the government is telling them what to do? Whether through judicial orders on what to filter, legislation on how to filter even more, and extraditions at the request of US federal _government_.

There is a legitimate concern about regulatory capture, about large entities having an unfair advantage... However, whenever I see the whole "OMG CORPORATOCRACY" shtick nowadays I just think that the author has seen one too many scifi movie from the 80s about how we will be ruled by some Japanese Omni MegaCorp and it has forever tainted his world view.

And then there's the signalling. UKIP is, of course, racist. The Pirate Party has a silly name. "What would my peers and colleagues think? We need a party that would make me, a constituent, look good to my friends!"

On the other hand, moral preening as a primary political concern surely is a first world thing. So that's a good illustration.

Not to mention that this article is yet another political manifesto with tenuous connection to technology at best.

<comment><USER19> The relationship between corporations and governments can be seen as roughly analagous to that of the King and the Church 400 years ago: both colluding and competing for power.

</comment></comment><comment> chestnut-tree I think the biggest problem is that single-issue parties never gain widespread support. I may be interested in internet privacy and technology issues but I might also be interested in education, transport, housing, the economy and many other issues. If these subjects are secondary (or presented as secondary) to your party's main focus, how can you ever gain broad support among the electorate? Unless the real goal of starting a party is to make the main political parties sit up and take notice of the issues you're campaigning for.

The alternative to creating a party is to create a campaigning body or organisation - which of course may struggle to get noticed.

Raising and highlighting important public issues, questioning official claims is also the role of the press, but we can never expect that from the utterly abysmal UK press.

<comment><USER11> > Unless the real goal of starting a party is to make the main political > parties sit up and take notice of the issues you're campaigning for.

That's exactly what this blog post argued for.

Consider that in 2010 there were 40+ seats where taking less than 1000 votes would have been enough to spoil the incumbent party's chance at winning the seat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am from India, and our parties do not give a shit for the ideals engraved in our constitution. Like the ones in most(all?) other countries, they have transformed from leveraging a shitty status quo to enforcing a shittier status quo.

Back to your post. What I understand is, you want to show to the existing parties that a sizable population wants something the parties are not offering, and hope that they will notice. And you yourself cannot support any of the existing parties because you disagree with several of their policies. Won't your proposed party face a similar problem? It probably will be less of a problem because the degree of disagreement on issues won't be so big, because the kind of people you will gather think similarly of most issues, have a similar (modern, liberal?) morality.

But I think you have to relay the implicit message of your post explicitly. LETS STOP BEING FUCKING LAZY.

</comment><comment><USER21> _> Kickstarter won't allow crowd-funding of political parties from what I can gather.

Kickstarter cannot be used to raise money for causes, whether it's the Red Cross or a scholarship, or for "fund my life" projects, like tuition or bills.

Indiegogo has no problem with it though._

Does anyone know why that's the case? Why would Kickstarter be so restrictive?

Kickstarter also requires each project team to sign up for their own Amazon payments account. Why wouldn't Kickstarter just collect the money and then wire it / cut a check to the funding recipient?

Also, why does Indiegogo charge upfront while Kickstarter waits until the campaign is successful.

The whole crowdfunding space seems to operate pretty illogically. Are there legal complexities that aren't apparent to an outsider that force their hand?

<comment><USER22> I think it's more a "who we want to be" kinda thing. Kickstarter doesn't want its brand associated with any potentially controversial/etc. topics.

<comment><USER21> That's true, some of the Indiegogo campaigns I've seen do sort of have an "off-brand" feel to them.

Still, I wonder why Kickstarter has each project set up their own Amazon Payments account and not collect the money themselves? Could it be a legal or tax reason? And how do they extract their 5% if the payment is processed with the campaign owner's Amazon account?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is such a bad idea.

(a) null voting is already a "none of the above" option

(b) they ask to give money to do... what exactly? Why give this guy 300k£ to basically waste? Give it to charity FFS.

<comment><USER24> Does null voting leave the seats in parliament empty? Or do the other parties just get a bigger share?

<comment><USER23> Leaving empty seats is much worse than null voting. It doesn't accomplish anything more, as in either case your vote doesn't go to a real, voting politician. It surely wastes more money as the corresponding parliamentary stipends are given to - I guess - the party for _doing nothing_. Surely doing nothing has a much better price point at "free".

<comment><USER11> Why do think they'd do nothing? Do you think Sinn Fein does "nothing" with the money it receives for it's Westminster MP's?

It's certainly possible for it to be a total waste, but in Sinn Fein's case, for example, whether or not you agree with their goals, it is a very clear principled stand: They don't believe Northern Ireland is rightfully part of the UK, nor that the queen is their rightful head of state, so they can't in good conscience give an oath of loyalty to the queen.

Voters who vote for them know full well that this will the outcome, yet they still vote for them because it accomplishes something to these voters: It (now) gives funds to Sinn Fein _and_ it keeps sending a signal that a substantial number of people in these constituencies see British rule as unjust.

Surely there can be any number of other causes where the signal effect can be preferred by voters who otherwise don't see sufficient difference between the major parties to believe it makes a difference which one of them gets their policy through.

The reality anyway is that in the vast majority of votes in the Commons, the small parties votes have no bearing on the outcome at all because the first past the post system means the big parties has such a disproportionate portion of the seats, so most votes for parties outside the big three are still totally "wasted" by similar logic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "There's a single protest party, the UK Independence Party, but UKIP and I don't really see eye-to-eye, due to the fact that I am married to a naturalised British citizen and together we have three mixed-race children.".

Rather than cast an unpleasant slur on UKIP (what nasty visions your comment conjures up) it would be helpful were you to identify the perceived problem. As far as I am aware, UKIP are not planning to discriminate against my own UK naturalized marriage partner or my child.

<comment><USER11> UKIP may not "plan to", but there's been plenty of unpleasant connections between people involve in UKIP and organizations like BNP and EDL, and with EDL endorsing UKIP candidates for upcoming local elections etc.

Enough that as a non-UK citizen with a UK born (and hence citizen) mixed race son, the thought of UKIP getting anywhere near power would make me consider leaving the country.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Why not start with a smaller country like Luxembourg. We are currently running in elections and want to make of Luxembourg a privacy save heaven. We have a pretty good chance of making it into parliament and every support helps!

Look we even made a video ;) [https://donate.piraten.lu/](https://donate.piraten.lu/)

</comment><comment><USER27> I'd love to see an idea like this flourish.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's much, much, more important for a party that cares about digital rights to fight the 2014 European election than the 2015 general election, for two reasons:

1\. the Euro election is fought using PR, meaning it's possible to actually win seats

2\. a lot of the relevant issues are decided at Brussels as much as at Westminster.

</comment><comment><USER28> I would be very interested to see people running the numbers on past elections, and seeing what the results would have been under different voting systems.

The UK has a weird 'first-past-the-post' system, and it'd be neat to see what the different results would have been.

<comment><USER11> The UK's "weird" first-past-the-post system is very close to the US and French systems, and many others.

Unfortunately re-running data on past elections would be wildly misleading, as people vote with the knowledge of which parties stand a chance in their seat, and hence a lot of votes that might have gone for smaller parties in a more proportional system goes to one of the biggest parties.

But you might look to the EU Parliament elections for a demonstration of how different people here _might_ vote (with the caveat that the issues are different, and so people might certainly vote differently) with a proportional system:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Parliament_election,_2...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Parliament_election,_2009_\(United_Kingdom\))</comment></comment>


Google bans F-word in company documents and URLs - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/google-bans-f-word-internal-documents-2018-10 <comment><AUTHOR> My favorite quote from this is, "Google kept the life-after-the-dorm around way past the shelf life"</comment>


Chrome Steals Second Continent From Firefox - <AUTHOR> http://www.conceivablytech.com/9590/business/chrome-steals-second-continent-from-firefox

<comment><USER2> why is IE still used so much? do these people know what they're missing?

<comment><USER3> probably because a significant number of users still use the products that come default with windows.</comment></comment>


Clearbanc raises $300M to fund more startups equity-free - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/31/clearbanc-300m/ <comment><AUTHOR> $50M in equity and $250M for a new fund. Happy to answer any questions.

<comment><USER2> "VC in the form of non-dilutive revenue-share agreements."

What if the startup can't pay for x amount of time?

"Coupling data and machine learning technology, Clearbanc is quick to make decisions about potential investment"

What does this mean?

<comment><AUTHOR> We invest in fast growing companies using machine learning models. So our algorithms make the investing decision, not humans. We connect you with a human to walk you through diligence process, but your funding status is determined by our algos

<comment><USER2> I got that much from the article. Was interested into factors that got into it. Also "machine learning" is generally a cop-out term, what's your training set, etc, or is even a broad answer proprietary??</comment></comment></comment></comment>


GOG fakes out gamers, is back and fully revamped - <AUTHOR> http://gaming.icrontic.com/news/gog-fakes-out-gamers-is-back-and-fully-revamped/

<comment><USER2> "fakes out gamers"? No, "pisses off customers."

It's not a 'stunt', it's a debacle. That they would plan to cause that much fear and anger at their own company is just amazing to me.

I've only bought one thing from there, and that was pretty recently. I was considering buying things in the future. But if they think this is an acceptable way to treat customers, it's ridiculous.

Word got out pretty quickly via gaming blogs that this was probably fake. There was talk about how they notified investors that they should ignore what they see on the site soon.

Yes, that's right... The investors are a lot more important to them than the customers.

A half-arsed apology is not enough to make me trust them again. They obviously don't have any idea how upset people really are, and this will probably cost them a lot of money they don't even know they are losing.

</comment><comment><USER3> The forums are still down. User content was made unavailable for days with no warning. I know it's not technically criminal, but maybe it should be.</comment>


Finland plans to give every citizen a basic income of 800 euros a month - <AUTHOR> http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2015/12/06/comment-finland-plans-give-every-citizen-basic-income-800-euros-month <comment><USER2> See also: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10685076](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10685076)</comment>


I like negative feedbacks for my startup botstar.com - <AUTHOR> https://app.botstar.com <comment><USER2> Is there a way to preview it without logging in or signing up?

<comment><AUTHOR> the sign up is quite simple, just add username/pw and you done</comment></comment>


First Round 10 Year Project - <AUTHOR> http://10years.firstround.com <comment><USER3> Removing Uber seems to defeat the purpose of this a bit. After all, the goal of venture investing is pretty much "find the Ubers". Most of the "rules" don't actually apply to Uber. For example:

Rule 1 - Uber had no female founders.

2 - Travis and Garrett were "older" founders.

3 - Neither went to a "top school".

4 - Neither worked for one of the name brand companies listed.

5 - Both were repeat founders. If included, FRC's investments in repeat founders would likely perform much better than first-time founders.

8 - Uber is based in the Bay Area. If included, FRC's investments in "Big Tech Hubs" would likely perform much better than outside of tech hubs.

A couple of the other rules might also not apply to Uber (don't have enough data to assess).

On the whole this is a well-intentioned exercise but I wonder if the exclusion of Uber doesn't lead to wrong conclusions.

<comment><USER4> But isn't this the point of removing outliers, to avoid a single data point overly clouding the significance? To be fair, by similar logic they should arguably remove one or more of the least successful businesses, but all failures are generally 'equally unsuccessful' but no two successes are equivalent.

<comment><USER5> The whole point of startup investing is to search for outliers. The way returns are distributed in the tech industry, it's not unusual for 1-2 companies to be responsible for 90%+ of a fund's financial returns.

[http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html)

Including Uber would probably have made most of the data meaningless - <USER2> their conclusions are valuation-weighted, their data would show that the ideal startup founder is...Garrett Camp. But then, that's how the startup investing business _actually works_ \- your data is useless unless you find the one outlier that everyone else missed.

Edit: It occurs to me that this effect could be overcome by taking the log of valuation (or whatever metric is of interest) and then running your statistics over that. That's standard procedure when trying to do statistics over a Zipfian or other power-law distribution; it lets the outliers count, but prevents them from distorting the averages too much.

<comment><USER6> The mean (or average) is a good choice for data with a normal distribution. However, if your data has extreme scores, such as the difference between an Uber and everyone else, you should look at the median or 90th percentile, because it's much more representative of your sample.

<comment><USER5> Median and 90th percentile are still pretty meaningless for the question that First Round is asking, notably "If I want to maximize my financial returns, what qualities should I look for in founders?" Miss that one company at the 99th percentile, and your return could be 10x lower.

<comment><USER6> It's still relevant to founder who want to know what it takes to be in the top decile of their cohort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Articles like this really bother me because its really unclear what data here is significant (if any) since all of the data is just quoted as a % without standard error and the sample sizes are very small:

e.g. on comparing companies that do better. You could have a data set of 150 companies whose exit performance (or current value) looks something like this (numbers in millions):

5000,1000,500,400,200,200,100,50,50,30,30,20,20,20,15,15,15,15,0,0,0,0,0,0,0 (repeated 6x to get 150 data points)

Now compare that against a data set that is those exact numbers divided in half:

2500,500,250,200,100,100,50,25,25,15,15,10,10,10,7.5,7.5,7.5,7.5,0,0,0,0,0,0,0 (repeated 6x to get 150 data points)

If you compare these data sets with a Two Sample T-Test you have to go down to 91% confidence to get a significant result ([http://www.evanmiller.org/ab- testing/t-test.html#!307.2/986....](http://www.evanmiller.org/ab- testing/t-test.html#!307.2/986.137554/150;153.6/493.068777/150@91))

That may not sound that bad, but now add a super-unicorn to each one of those data sets, a $20B exit. Now the differences aren't even significant at 80% confidence.

e.g. in Item 7 about technical co-founders: "consumer companies with at least one technical co-founder underperform completely non-technical teams by 31%"

Lets say that First Round has 150 consumer businesses and we're just going to look at a binary outcome of something like "valued over $50m". Now lets say that 100 of these consumer companies have technical co-founders and 50 are completely non-technical. Say 40% of the non-technical teams are "successful" by the $50m metric. That means that 30.5% of the technical teams are successful (if they are doing 31% worse by the numbers in the article since 40%/1.31 = 30.5%). That's not a significant result at 80% confidence ([http://www.evanmiller.org/ab-testing/chi- squared.html#!31/10...](http://www.evanmiller.org/ab-testing/chi- squared.html#!31/100;20/50@80))

I understand why they published the piece and think it will get a lot of reads, but really wish I could read a version with statistically relevant insights instead.

<comment><USER8> Considering...

> Venture capitalists are constantly telling the entrepreneurs they invest in > to make data-driven decisions.

...the scant amount of real data presented is surprising.

<comment><USER9> "Data-driven" as in "we looked at some data and made a decision." Whether that was good data or bad data, lots of data or just a couple points, is out of scope. :p

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The methodology matters a lot here: Were a set of preselected questions answered by the data, or was there exploratory analysis of the data which uncovered these results? If the latter, the effects of data fishing[1] would largely invalidate the conclusions.

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

<comment><USER11> Agreed. There seems to be lots of "correlation without causation"[1] here.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Really cool of First Round to share this data. Whenever I see interesting data it makes me ask more questions and these are some of the things I'm wondering about after reading the post.

Female founders outperforming male teams: My hunch would be that the bar for women to get funded (at least historically) has been higher than men so the female led start-ups would be a better calibre of company. Related, since this is based on investment performance, could it be that the female founders received smaller initial investments so performing on par with male teams would make the ROI look better?

Halo effect: This to me would indicate that we shouldn't be encouraging fresh college graduates to work at start-ups and instead get experience at a more mature company. I wonder how much tenure they had at their halo company prior to founding the start-up and how it ties with the average age of founding.

Solo founders perform worse: I wonder what happens if you frame this from the point of view of the founder. If the solo founder had a $100 return and the team had a $260 (160% better) return; assuming equal dilution and equal division between founders, solo founder get's $100, a two founder team get $130 each (30% better), a three founder team gets $85 (15% worse).

Next big thing from anywhere: Also interesting, I'd like to see how this varies by referral source. Do companies referred by other investors perform better than non-investor referrals (or can other investors pick companies better than social connections).

<comment><USER13> I think we should be encouraging college students to get that experience at mature companies earlier -- ideally as soon as the summer after freshman year. College students can do just fine without summer vacations. That way, by the time they graduate from college (or hit third year and drop out) they'll be poised for success (assuming that a successful startup is your definition of success).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think the the things they highlight are all attributes that define hungry/ambitious people, and/or they correlate to things that would hold people accountable and keep them on track.

For example:

Ivy League School and working at a prestigious company? You don't get either of those by being a slacker.

Younger team, woman co-founder and more than one founder? You better believe there is going to be more pressure to prove yourself and not sell early or give up (vs. being a single founder or an older proven founder).

Standing out from the crowd at demo day or getting noticed out of all the noise of social media? That takes some dedication. I guarantee that the people who did get noticed that way didn't just send one email or one tweet. They were hustling their idea hard.

Great read though. I loved the point that startups don't have to come from SF or NYC to be successful!

<comment><USER15> """Ivy League School and working at a prestigious company? You don't get either of those by being a slacker."""

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

<comment><USER16> "10-30%" Seems awfully high. Still, that leaves 90-70% legitimate entries.

<comment><USER17> [http://gawker.com/ivy-league-admissions-are-a-sham- confessio...](http://gawker.com/ivy-league-admissions-are-a-sham-confessions- of-a-harv-1690402410)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Lies, damned lies, and statistics. This is just a shoddy report on their own biases, not a scientific analysis of any kind. BuzzFeed.

<comment><USER18> Exactly. This looks precise but is not accurate. As some other posts indicate there are many other correlations here. I would love to see the underlying data they use. Good effort but disappointing results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This seems to be a lot of confirmation bias and use of data that is likely not significant.

For instance:

"The results were stark: Teams with more than one founder outperformed solo founders by a whopping 163% and solo founders' seed valuations were 25% less than teams with more than one founder."

How many of the 300 investments in their portfolio were solo founders? 10?

Solo founders are rare, and it's often harder to raise money as a solo founder. That means less companies have solo founders to begin with.

Source: I am a solo founder

<comment><USER20> The 25% less on seed valuation is actually a good news for solo founders. The seed round is just a bet on the team, so if a team of 2, 3 or 4 people are worth "only" 25% more than one guy/girl, then this one guy/girl is doing something very right (as well as optimizing his/her financials, because they have 25% less than people who diluted themselves at least 50% more).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Obviously there are three kinds of selection bias here: companies which raise money; companies which approach First Round; companies selected by First Round. So it's possible these aren't overall trends, but specific to this set.

I think that _probably_ explains the "no tech cofounders do better" bias in Consumer; the bar is probably higher there.

<comment><USER5> There's also a form of selection bias where many consumer companies without cofounders acquire them before talking to VCs, because they know they're better off with one and it's relatively easy to convince a friend to join you when you can demonstrate a good idea and market demand, which is what the VC also looks for. DropBox, Google, Apple, Instacart all acquired cofounders in- between the prototype being written and them taking venture capital.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Single non-technical, first time founder, 33, no ivy league degree, non- technical, no big brand experience searching for a co-founder. You should be a former Google or Apple employee, repeat founder, ideally technical, with an ivy league degree,active on twitter with no connections to First Round Capital.Oh, and you should be female, and 16 years old. We're gonna build the next Unicorn. \</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---- Seriously, This is the type of irresponsible analysis that sinks ships. Fun to consume...But causes serious damage because it is complete non-sense, but everyone exposed to it will believe it...even with knowing it isn't accurate...it will still influence people who read it long into the future.

<comment><USER23> >it will still influence people who read it long into the future

I can't see anyone with any understanding of statistics being influenced by this "study", but I do agree there is a real risk that the less skilled VCs might be influenced by it, but I thought you weren't supposed to accept dumb money anyway :)

<comment><USER22> It would be nice if it was true,but cognitive psychology indicates we are influenced by things we once believed even if we no longer believe them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What an awful title to the first insight "women are winning". Its that sort of clickbaity, reductionist and divisive language that's turning gender relations in tech into such a warzone. Where's the data for all-women teams vs. all-men teams? Only then could you draw such a conclusion, if you even wanted to in the first place. Total garbage, and damaging to gender relations to boot. A more constructive (and appropriate, given the data) conclusion would be "we work better as a mixed team".

</comment><comment><USER25> "We also looked at whether the college a founder attended might impact company performance. Unsurprisingly, teams with at least one founder who went to a "top school" (unscientifically defined in our study as one of the Ivies plus Stanford, MIT and Caltech) tend to perform the best. Looking at our community, 38% of the companies we've invested in had one founder that went to one of those schools. And, generally speaking, those companies performed about 220% better than other teams!"

I'd love to see an inverted analysis of this effect, ie. _which_ schools had the best indication of success. Pre-deciding to look at their definition of "top schools" is probably only seeing part of the picture.

<comment><USER26> umm.... I think a major oversight here is leaving out IIT founders. The valley startup and venture scene is rife with IITians and there's a pretty tight network effect at play for founders/VC's etc. there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Could some of these be attributed to selection bias that ends up just confirming the conclusions/lessons learned? Prime examples - the ones re: age, schools, former employers, and repeat founders. Would it be fair to assume that they have a greater bias to fund companies with founders exhibiting these attributes to begin with?

<comment><USER28> Wouldn't a greater bias to fund them lead to worse outcomes for those categories?

<comment><USER27> not necessarily, if you're picking better-than-average apples, why would the outcome be worse than for other categories? also consequently, your conclusion would of course be, these apples > other apples. I'm not saying the data is bad or calling them out. I'm just saying some of their lessons learned might just be a consequence of their selection bias.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> TLDR version; Here's their success factors ranked by magnitude:

Technical co-founder, enterprise product: +230

Elite school: +220

ex AMZN, AAPL, FB, GOOG, MSFT, TWTR employee: +160

Female founder: +128

Discovered investment via non-traditional VC channel: +58

Technical co-founder, consumer product: +31

Team average age under 25: +30

Solo founder: -163

<comment><USER30> One correction - Technical co-founder, consumer product: -31% (over non- technical founders)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think the headline for #1 is a bit misleading. I'd infer that teams with a female founder doing better than ones without one does not correlate to "Female Founders Outperform Their Male Peers." I'd think a better title would be more along the lines of, "Diverse Founding Teams Outperform All-male Ones."

<comment><USER32> We don't actually know if that's what the data shows. For one, diversity can refer to age, race, national origin, etc. They only refer to sex, all those other forms of diversity could actually be a negative for all we know.

Additionally, it's possible teams with 100% female founders do better than ones with a mix of sexes among the founders. That would mean again that diversity is not good, but being female is.

Obviously though, this is an n of 300. I would guess that includes less than 100 companies with female founders, making it not exactly proven.

<comment><USER31> > We don't actually know if that's what the data shows

Naturally. I'm only basing my comments on the article contents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This analysis is probably way too sensitive to investment price and all sorts of hidden causal relationships.

The biggest problem is that "performs better" is thrown around a lot but never defined. My hunch is that performance is measured as a return on investment. For instance if First Round invested in a company at a $5M valuation and the company is now worth $100M, that's a 20x return. If they had invested at a $10M valuation, the return would only be 10x. So I suspect in their eyes the "performance" of the first investment is better. Could be wrong, but my point is there's no way to know.

Without knowing that it's hard not to look at their conclusions such as young founders do better and repeat founders cost more with a large helping of grains of salt.

A young founder is less likely to be a repeat founder. Therefore these founders will cost less, per the conclusion they reached. And if performance is measured as ROI then they will "perform" better even if underlying talent or company growth is constant.

So it looks as though there's just a lot of observational data without much insight.

</comment><comment><USER34> _Solo Founders do Much Worse Than Teams_

How come? If the valuation for Team is 25% more than a Solo founder is clearly better than a Team.

A team is 2+ founders. Which means your shares are divided by 2+. Solo is clearly winning here even if the total valuation is less.

</comment><comment><USER35> Great data overall.

I'm not convinced about the age conclusion: depending on which statistics you focus on, you either conclude that 25 is best or 32 is best:

 _Founding teams with an average age under 25 (when we invested) perform nearly 30% above average [...] for our top 10 investments the average age was 31.9_

<comment><USER36> If your goal is to be a top 10 investment, 32. If your goal is to get funding, 25. Most founders, I would suspect, especially at First Round's target, are happy to get investment period, even if they aren't in the top 10 (yet).

I think a lot of these figures are correlated. Multi-company founders command higher valuations, who will tend to be older than their first-company peers, so it makes sense the top 10 list is slightly older on average.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> A lot of people have concerns about the methodology here, but I haven't seen this really big one addressed: what does "perform" mean? Are we talking about the performance of the startup, or the performance of First Round's investment? If we're talking about the performance of the investment, then these stats are skewed towards those founders who are willing to accept lousy terms.

</comment><comment><USER38> The comments here make it clear that I am not alone in my skepticism regarding their conclusions.

But to be fair, at the bottom of the page, they say that they are not trying to claim any statistical significance... just trying to look at their own data to gain some insights. It doesn't sound like they expect any of this to be taken too seriously.

</comment><comment><USER39> No wonder the results skew towards elite education, they measure performance by market value. Your market value, under a certain threshold in terms of company size, is dominated by your network. Which the top schools are very good at providing. I wonder what difference would it make if First Round analysed revenue and profitability instead of market value.

</comment><comment><USER40> How many minority non Ivy League startup founders did and have they funded?

The majority of their team consists of white guy ivy leaguers who have a penchant for funding their younger counterparts. No offense to first round as that is how the VC market looks and resembles

Until that goes away the diversity issue still stands.

</comment><comment><USER41> It's unclear to me what "did better" means here? Is it that they raised more money, perhaps at higher valuation, OR are they looking at exits. I hope it's the latter and not the former since raising money and/or valuation is not success.

</comment><comment><USER42> Given that none of them were +100000% it's all basically noise, right? If you can successfully identify 100x or 1000x companies some percentage of the time you're a good VC. If you can't you either get lucky or go out of business.

Everything else is secondary to finding the home runs. Even if you multiply all those advantages together you get:

1.63 * 1.3 * 2.2 * 1.6 * 1.5 * 1.63 * 2.3 * 1.58 = 66

So if you manage to somehow get every single one of those attributes at max in a company you'll get roughly 66x the valuation or performance or whatever versus a company/team with none of them.

Of course if you go for all those things you'll probably only get one deal per year.

This isn't terribly meaningful.

<comment><USER43> They didn't say that these factors were independent and causative. In fact there is likely to be a high correlation between a lot of the factors with high value. What would be more interesting is if they made a model of success with all ten factors and published the coefficients.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wish I could see these factors ranked against other metrics, eg. # users, revenues, profitability, exit size, % exited. Their key metric is valuation, which makes sense when judging your performance as an investment firm but is relatively useless to a founder. And their top 3 factors (has cofounders; brand name school; brand name employer) are all things that investors value highly, probably more highly than customers. I'd love to see whether the magnitude of the effect of each of these remains true when ranking companies by more founder-focused or customer-focused metrics.

</comment><comment><USER44> While the data is interesting I don't think it's very useful. For founders, many of these are things you can't change. One of the few actionable points for founders is about having the right kind of cofounders. For VCs this data doesn't tell them what they really want to know. VCs want to invest in outliers. They say right near the beginning of the article that they removed Uber from the data. Actionable data for VCs would have info to help identify potential Ubers or AirBnBs.

</comment><comment><USER45> Just looking at data and making assumptions is no better than astrology. For a supposedly scientifically literate field, tech makes use of a TON of pseudoscientific hand-waving.

</comment><comment><USER46> How much of this is self-fulfilling? Ie companies with certain qualities do better because they get funded, and they get funded because VCs think those qualities matter.

</comment><comment><USER47> "these findings won't dictate how we choose to invest"

What is the value of performing an analysis if the results don't help you to improve future decision making?

</comment><comment><USER48> I seriously doubt First Round will dogfood their own "data" and invest only in startups that follow these 10 learnings over the next 10 years.

<comment><USER49> They actually say explicitly that they won't:

> _these findings won't dictate how we choose to invest from now on_

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I wonder if the outperformance of organic picks (non-referred companies) is a selection effect. That is, VC prefers to invest with a referral, but will go in on a non-referred investment only for the most promising opportunities.

</comment><comment><USER51> Isn't average the wrong value as outliers skew data considerably? Median would be much better.

</comment><comment><USER52> I would like to see the sample sizes, e.g. how many only-male teams are there?

<comment><USER53> Assuming it tracks to the norm you've got between 10%[1,2] and 22%[3] of teams with a female founder - or 78-90% all male.

[1] [http://blog.pitchbook.com/what-percentage-of-u-s-vc- backed-s...](http://blog.pitchbook.com/what-percentage-of-u-s-vc-backed- startups-are-founded-by-women/) [2] [http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/26/female- founders-on-an-upwar...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/26/female-founders-on- an-upward-trend-according-to-crunchbase/) [3] [http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/78-percent-of-y- combinato...](http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/78-percent-of-y-combinator- startups-have-no-female-founders-and-thats-progress/)

It seems the number is rising. Sample size is 300 companies according to the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I wish I could see the statistics on how many successful founders have successful parents.

</comment><comment><USER55> interesting that technical founders do better in enterprise. I guess the MBA and sales experience doesn't help in enterprise if they are a founder?</comment>


The meek shall inherit the web - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11999307

<comment><USER2> Hate to rain on your parade, but this was posted a little while back: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=295817></comment>


Dropbox Relaunches as an Enterprise Collaboration Workspace - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/11/dropbox-search/ <comment><USER2> Is this going to compete with basecamp?</comment>


Ask HN: Differences between a personal project and a production app? - <AUTHOR> From a development standpoint (not DevOps or infrastructure), what's the difference between the two? <comment><USER2> This difference could not exist at all or vary depending on which personal project or production app you're talking about. However, I think that because personal projects generally have solo developers and are more about single use or fast shipping, they tend to have less tests, less of a focus on architecture and modularity, and less documentation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Those seem like pretty easy hurdles to get across if you've never created or been on a team that creates large-scale production applications. Why is the distinction so prevalent on job postings?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nothing. The distinction is completely arbitrary.</comment>


Show HN: Get anonymous feedback from your colleagues - <AUTHOR> Hi everyone,
We have developed a platform to help tech professionals solicit anonymous feedback from colleagues and discover tech content relevant to their skills. Check us out at www.pleasantfish.com
We'll be super happy if you find it useful! <comment><USER2> Colleagues as in co-workers? How anonymous could that possibly be?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! By colleagues we assume both former and current workers. We try with three things:

1\. Allowing coworkers to write anonymous private message to the user.

2\. Asking user feedback though rating system on their technical skills. Rate users as beginner, intermediate, expert and advanced.

3\. 4 simple questionnaires with 7 multiple choice questions in each to get reviewed on their qualities. These questionnaires review users on their professionalism, collaboration, leadership and interpersonal skills.

The collected data from Point 2 and 3 above is then aggregated based on the colleague relationship (current has more weightage then former coworkers) and presented to the user in an easy to understand graphical format which basically identifies their strengths and weaknesses. In the whole, user identity who rated is not revealed in any step, we just tell user that he has been rated by one his coworkers in one of the companies he has worked and listed on his profile.

On top of that on each quality and skills, we have assembled list of articles curated from top sources so that user can improve these skills. He can also subscribe to other skills he is interested in learning and they are made available to him in his personalized feed.

Hope that helps!</comment></comment>


Tesla remotely disables Autopilot on used Model S after it was sold - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-autopilot-disabled-remotely-used-car-update <comment><USER2> The real story is totally missing at this point, so it's not surprising that the discussion has gone totally off the rails.

My understanding is this; _any time_ Tesla buys back or is returned one of its cars, all optional features are cleared off the car.

If you sell your used Model S or Model 3 with FSD back to Tesla, one day in the future you may see that VIN for sale on Tesla.com or elsewhere, but the FSD, Acceleration Boost, Homelink, any software upgrades will be cleared off, and available for purchase optionally by the new owner.

In a _private party_ sale, the optional features that are currently active on a car will always stay intact. Tesla does not and will not remove a feature from a car unless they have legal possession of the car.

The software features on the original sales sticker are irrelevant. The used car dealer bought a car from Tesla _without_ EAP or FSD, and we have no documentation to say otherwise. The feature was disabled while the used car dealer still had the car, before it was sold to the now current owner.

When the car was returned under lemon-law back to Tesla, they have every right to reconfigure it however they see fit.

If the used car dealer can provide documentation that Tesla sold them EAP or FSD then it's a different story. That has not happened.

</comment><comment><USER3> Discussion thread from earlier today: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22263721](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22263721)

<comment><USER4> Thanks—we'll move the discussion there.

This isn't just a dupe, it's a ripoff of the original source. I feel like this is the third or fourth ripoff article from The Verge that we've had to merge or change the URL on lately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The title of this article is so misleading that it's borderline flat out lying.

<comment><USER6> I don't see it edited, but what the title says is factually correct.

<comment><USER7> The best lies are based on the truth.

In this case the lie was misrepresenting the position by leaving the reader to assume that Autopilot was intended to be active on the vehicle a Tesla sold.</comment></comment></comment>


Worst PPT Slides Contest Winners - <AUTHOR> http://www.infocus.com/labs/all/visual-communication-%2526-collaboration/worst-ppt-slide-contest-winners

<comment><USER2> Submitted 54 days ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2558664></comment>


Aussie inventor in $388m Microsoft damages win - <AUTHOR> http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2009/04/15/1239474914416.html

<comment><USER2> Patent link: [http://www.google.com/patents?id=K7MoAAAAEBAJ&dq=uniloc+...](http://www.google.com/patents?id=K7MoAAAAEBAJ&dq=uniloc+registration)

didn't serial-code-based shareware registration schemes exist before the 1993 filing date? certainly shareware and the concept of "registering" did -- maybe the novel part of the patent is the idea of an identifier tied to your environment as a constituent part of the serial #?

<comment><USER3> I hate software patents, but the article mentions its author presented to MS, and the company knowingly infringed it.

 _Knowingly_ , I guess, it's the key here. MS knew they were doing "something illegal", but decided to go anyway.

Of course, neither I or the article present any proof, as an internal corporate email saying "Yay! Let's do it anyway", but if we assume the judge gathered enough evidence to show this was done, then damages are owned.

USD 388m worth? No idea.

<comment><USER4> With patents, you are not allowed to infringe, knowingly or not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Other inventions patented by Richardson include ... an open standard for online forums"

er, what?

<comment><USER6> Hard to know what this is, I couldn't find it anywhere.

Looking at his blog though: <http://ricrichardson.blogspot.com/>

Down on the right hand side it says "PC Online" and the title tag states "Open standard for online forums. Beta tested with advertising community".

Looking at the rest of the claims he makes, nearly all are obvious at the time that they were made.

Obvious is defined as "would another developer given the same problem create the same solution", if so then there has been no inventive step and the patent should be dismissed. This is before even considering prior art and other things... the guy is a joke.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _but the Uniloc damages fee only amounts to about eight days of profit for the company_

Thats nearly 50m USD profit PER DAY. few companies can match that I guess.

</comment><comment><USER8> Please note that that's 537m worthless Australian dollars. The award was for USD388m.

<comment><USER9> "worthless Australian dollars" That's not cool mate

<comment><USER8> I'm Australian. My salary is in worthless Australian dollars.

Also I said this to point out that the title was misleading, and it's now been fixed. Humour was evidently an inappropriate way to bring it up.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wouldn't call the Aussie dollar worthless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I hate software patents, but in this case since its being used against microsoft instead of them using it to bully linux vendors, it makes it a little easier to swallow.

<comment><USER11> No, it's as immoral as always. Information has no other place than being free, even information that doesn't necessarily produce things that are deemed good.

(It's a juicy case, that assuming there was any kernel of ingenuity to the actual patent Microsoft just made the Windows world a slightly worse place by using this patented antipiracy technology. It's kind of two evils battling against eachother. But it's no different to other patent litigations, really.)

I'm a huge believer in that people don't invent truly new things because of money but because they have to -- a man always has some vague feeling that just keeps finding a way out until it materialises into an idea.

It's also given that the one who gets the idea rarely is the one who actually benefits from it. That may hurt some people but in the end it's better for everyone to have the idea pop out from one place and let other forces build the necessary machinery required to market and distribute the idea to everyone.

Patents should be banished at once.

<comment><USER12> The idea of patents is to allow innovation that wouldn't otherwise occur right? I can't see any examples of ideas historically that wouldn't have been made in the absence of a patent. And to patent an idea rather than an implementation...

The exception would be investors stealing an idea they see and the solution would be contracts but I doubt investors would sign these.

<comment><USER11> That's the idea of patents as I've understood it.

However, I guess it hasn't worked well even before our times when trivial programming solutions, plant seeds, indigenous herbs, and probably soon-if- not-already DNA are being patented.

I happened to browse through the history of steam engine on <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_steam_power> (because pg mentioned it in <http://www.paulgraham.com/revolution.html..>. :)) and one thing caught my eye: each time some significant steam engine related patent expired the steam engine business expanded and spread rapidly.

New ideas were combined with the previously patented ideas and new constructs became commonplace. I think that companies and patent holders, too, realise that patents are rather useless and they would all be better off without them. That is because nobody has successfully lobbied for longer patent periods in the last 100-200 years or so.

In contrast, the copyright has been extended tremendously because companies can actually make money because of it and have lobbied for decades to keep Mickey Mouse off the public domain. Makes me wonder.

<comment><USER12> Yeah the idea that you need a patent that extends well beyond the life of both the company and inventor to have any motivation to invent things is ridiculous.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to evaluate a financial model for potential investment? - <AUTHOR> I'm an intern at a small VC that has been tasked with vetting a financial model for a startup we are considering investing in. The analyst that's overseeing my work said he wanted to throw me in and see what I could figure out, but will actually guide me threw the process next week. I just want to get as much of a head start as possible.<p>What should I be looking for? What process should I use? How is this generally done? <comment><USER2> I just went to a super relevant talk on this!

Basically, you want to understand what assumptions they've made and what they have backed those assumptions up with. It should start from customer acquisition channels, and widdle away until you have a cashflow statement that tells you the answers. Start you assessment from the basic business inputs.

In the end, you want to figure out if their model is realistic. That includes the assumptions and calculations.</comment>


Clojure's approach to Identity and State. - <AUTHOR> http://clojure.org/state

<comment><AUTHOR> Great explanation regarding how to think about state and mutability (place oriented programming).

A brilliant related talk by Rich Hickey: [http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Value- Values](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Value-Values)</comment>


UK government to spend extra £1.9bn fighting cyber-attacks - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/01/philp-hammond-to-spend-extra-19bn-fighting-cyber-attacks <comment><USER2> An entire page-long article, with no details! Amazing.

While having more awareness about cybersecurity is never a bad thing, I dread to see how this money is spent.</comment>