Startup options are better than they look (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.benkuhn.net/optopt <comment><USER2> Having worked at an early startup, I share the opposite view: startup options are much worse than they look. The expected cost of not working at a big company is much larger than mere 10% (go check levels.fyi if you're curious) that the author calculated. The upside of stock options is also bound by the slim chance of any startup's successful exit and dilution that comes after each round. Here's a good calculator ([http://optionsworth.com/](http://optionsworth.com/)). If you have 1% equity (rarely given) of a company that exits for $100M, you gross ~$1M. That's before dilution and tax. Aside from the financial cost, you also sacrifice your career mobility because you are forced to exercise your options if you leave the company before a liquidation event (rarely happens before an exit). Do not work as an employee at a startup if your primary motivation is making a lot of money.

On the other hand, if you want to start your own startup, I think working at a startup is a great way to minimize your own risk while maximizing learning if you're like me ;)

<comment><USER3> Your last point is really relevant. You can actually get paid to learn all kinds of things at startups including which company destroying mistakes to avoid. Not to mention there aren't very many roles at FAANG where you can work directly with the C Suite and see how the sausage is made.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a cool analysis with a bunch of giant caveats. The author lays them out at the end.

The most important seem to be that it assumes people are risk-neutral and optimizing their expected wealth, instead of trying to reach goals like maximizing the probability you'll be able to buy a house in SF. If that were the goal, I think early stage startups would fare incredibly worse in this analysis.

The next most important seems to be that there's no way for a company to fail in this model. The companies that become worth less can't become worthless. Since these early private companies' stock aren't liquid, you can't cash out before they fail. You get zero dollars from those, which is a huge difference from the model.

And the whole crazy tax thing. If you quit as this model suggests, you almost always have to exercise within 90 days (spending a bunch of your money for an uncertain future). Then the IRS sends you a huge bill if you left a successful company where you might get more than zero dollars. But you still haven't earned any cash from the stock.

<comment><USER3> FWIW, re: taxes - TrumpTax raised the AMT thresholds so aggressively that the % of folks to whom this applies is probably a lot smaller than it used to be.

<comment><USER5> And even if you are pushed over the AMT threshold, and if the only reason you went over was due to purchase of ISOs, and if you don't go over the threshold in the following year, you can get credit in future years for that extra tax you had to pay.

<comment><USER3> Correct. You can claw back a chunk every year until you have that AMT paid back so depending on your inflation and investment opportunity cost expectations you are not actually risking that much money, just the cost of the shares.

I think that really speaks volumes to how relevant it is to join early stage if you want to play the options game - later stage companies _seem_ safer but may not actually be that much safer if you consider everyone already in the investment aggressively driving the price of the shares up and forcing you to risk more on exercise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> FTA: "For instance, if the company is worth $1m, and you are granted options on 1% of the company, then this basic model says that the expected value of the options is 1m * 0.01 = 10k."

The options are _options to buy_ , so if you are granted 1% options of a $10m company your options are worth just above zero -- you can pay $10k to get $10k of stock back. You only make money if the company value goes up relative to your strike price, and the amount of money you make is proportional to that.

E.g. if the company literally doubles in value, you now can pay $10k to get $20k worth of shares. Only then do you profit the $10k in the above model. So the model only makes sense if you get in and the company _doubles_ in value, and even after that you still only make $10k.

<comment><USER7> This isn't actually true, because 409a valuations (where your options are struck) sit at what most would consider a meaningful discount to the actual value of the company (often 30-50% of the preferred, below where secondary is even happening in late stage companies).

That said, the strike does reduce the value of the options vs something like RSUs, but less than this comment infers.

<comment><USER8> Not only that, but it's kind of a nominal value. There's some shares you'd be lucky to find a buyer for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So, huge mistake in the article right away... It assumes total comp at Google is 110k..... The reason startup pay is nonsensical for many people isn't because startups don't have big upside, but that the upside didn't keep up with the massive increases in pay the bigcos have driven. Eg starting sde I comp at Google is 180k... , Or 60% more than the article assumes.

There is also value that bigco provides in terms of stability, benefits, professional hr (hr isn't your friend, but bigco hr will probably at least follow the law)....

Dan Lu's articles on startup vs bigco pay are well worth looking in to.

<comment><USER10> Is this base comp or final comp?

<comment><USER11> 180 is mid senior according to levels.fyi.

<comment><USER12> For Google, that's entry level (L3). L4 (between fresh graduate and senior) makes $250k TC.

L4 is ~2 years out of school.

<comment><USER13> It is pretty near impossible to beat that at a startup...

<comment><USER14> The startup can get you hired at bigcorp at a higher level than if you joined and crawled up the ladder. This is never mentioned when discussing comp comparisons.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, but it's still a gamble. Unless you become a VP/Director it's tough to get to a sufficiently high level to make it worth it. It's rare, for instance, for someone from a start-up to come in as a Staff/Senior Staff engineer (L6/7).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm glad someone said it. So tired of the advice I constantly hear on HN to assume your grant is worthless.

I forward exercised my stock options when I started a job for $7k in 2013. Last December I was able to sell some that valued my initial grant at $1.3m (still private but probably will raise at higher value or go public soon). Because I forward exercised I paid taxes at the 2013 value of the company, which was basically nothing. And I only pay long term capital gains when I sell, which is less than the earned income tax rate.

Of course there is a certain element of luck involved, but to say that the mathematical probability of building wealth from your share of equity in a startup is the same probability as winning the lottery is completely disingenuous.

<comment><USER16> I don't think you understand how rare your situation is.

All these things are unusual:

1\. You joined early enough that you can early exercise for such a low price ($7k)

2\. Your company allowed early exercise (still unusual these days).

3\. The startup 20x-ed in value (my conservative estimate)

4\. You stayed in the job for 6 years!

5\. Your startup let you sell some of your shares before exit (This is extremely unusual still).

Still, even with those assumptions this turned out only ok. Assuming you sold everything in December, you made $1.3 million over 6 years, so $217k per year. Considering that for a typical senior software engineer, the equity portion needs to make up about at least $150k of compensation (conservative estimate of a Google L5 from levels.fyi), I would say you did roughly ok, making an extra $67k per year. That's pretty good, but not amazing. Getting promoted to L6 would be more than twice as good.

Sorry for being so negative about your good situation, but I really think current equity compensation is far too low and tricky, and that workers, and especially new workers, should not be optimistic about the benefits.

<comment><USER15> I didn't stay for 6 years. I don't work there anymore. And like I said, the company will likely raise soon, potentially at a much higher valuation. There is a comparable company that is already public that is trading at a much higher valuation.

I also didn't say my experience is/was common, but it certainly was not the same as winning the lottery. That is my point.

<comment><USER17> > but it certainly was not the same as winning the lottery

I am happy that things worked out so well for you, but you're not sharing any data to back up this claim. I mean someone could literally win the lottery and say how great things worked out - it's anecdotal evidence.

[https://xkcd.com/1827/](https://xkcd.com/1827/)

For many people, and I _strongly_ suspect most, startup options are a losing bet. The worst part is you have to wait years before you know whether or not they're worth anything.

<comment><USER15> The odds of winning the CA lottery is 1 in 42 million. There are fewer than a million residents in SF. I don't know the exact number of startup winners (both founders and employees who made more than $1m) living in SF at this moment but I would conservatively estimate something in the 5k range.

<comment><USER17> The odds of winning the minimum $38 MM payout in California are 1 in 42 million. The odds of a smaller payout are orders of magnitude higher. And you can play twice a week, instead of having to wait a minimum of 1 year between potential payouts. You're also allowed to buy other lottery tickets in that period of time.

To put things in perspective, of the dozens of people I know who joined startups, almost all of them felt the stock wasn't worth it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Startup options aren't so bad"..."adding risk aversion would decrease the offer value by a huge amount"

So the author shoots his main premise in the foot by not including one aspect of human behavior that we see in just about every worker. Sure, young people with no family are less risk averse than old people with families, but just about anyone seeking a salaried job is risk averse when considering jobs. Risk seeking individuals aren't very common in the standard job market.

Ben's articles are usually well informed, especially when it comes to probabilities and decision analysis, but not factoring in indifference curves in an analysis that is already this complicated is a pretty big miss. The bottom line is that working for a startup is a pretty big gamble, and expected values are misleading in terms of how people actually make decisions.

<comment><USER14> Eh, not really. I could be risk-taking but self aware enough to know I am a far better engineer than businessperson. I'd join a company and dive into an experimental projects that might fail or get me a huge bonus. Or I might....join a startup!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Estimate the valuation of the company

Good luck with that.

Also, you need to factor in that the probabilities of the start up becoming significant (IPO / become profitable / survives) are probably way below 1%.

At the end of the day, you don't go to a start up for the money but for the experience. Any other intention is guaranteed to not work out.

</comment><comment><USER20> There's a real danger for young tech employees to put too much faith into models like these. A nice probabilistic graph appeals to our logical and mathematical sensibilities by appearing to cover the range of possibilities and giving some well-reasoned projection of likelihood, but it doesn't account for the human element.

Picking a successful startup with growing valuation is just the prerequisite, if you are lucky enough to do that then the likelihood of getting a good payout from stock options becomes dominated by the behavior of the board of directors and the founders. So actually the number one question is: do you trust the founder(s) to look out for their employee's interests? Number two question is: are the founder(s) savvy enough to avoid investors triggering scenarios that totally screw early employees (dilution, liquidation prefs, etc)? These are super hard questions to answer even for savvy veterans, and probably totally outside the depth of the inexperienced young people flooding into tech right now.

I don't think its responsible to advise young people to give significant value to options based on spurious models. Instead I'd recommend they go read Steve Blank: [https://medium.com/@sgblank/startup-stock-options-why-a- good...](https://medium.com/@sgblank/startup-stock-options-why-a-good-deal- has-gone-bad-5e711d9819b7)

</comment><comment><USER21> This whole thing fails to account for the fact that on every subsequent round of funding, your percent ownership goes down. Even if the company is doing well, at the next round of funding, you'll pretty much be reset to the original value if you're lucky. If you're _very_ lucky your options might be worth more.

VCs have gotten too good at extracting value from a company. In this day and age, I consider startup options to be worth $0.

If I'm looking at a startup, it's because I am either super excited about their idea, or super excited about having a lot more responsibility/learning opportunities than at an established company.

Those are the factors I'm valuing in my head vs. the actual dollar opportunity cost.

<comment><USER22> Can you explain "on every subsequent round of funding, your percent ownership goes down" ? Maybe a naive question. But if you are given say 50% of a company, how can your percentage of ownership decrease if someone funds it ? What's the mechanism for this ?

<comment><USER23> Say you have 50% of the company and your cofounder has the other 50%. That's all the stock, right?

If you want to raise money you need to sell some stock. So the company creates new stock and sells that -- increasing the total number of shares. You don't get any of that new stock yourself, so your total ownership percentage goes down.

<comment><USER24> What you are saying is true, but at least in theory you don't lose any 'value', because the money raised makes the company worth more. It's like going from 50% of a $1m company to 25% of a $2m company.

Of course in real life things are much more complicated. And, if I was a cynic, I'd say they are purposely complicated in an effort to screw people over.

<comment><USER25> Two ways this happens are liquidation preference and "participation". In both cases (they work differently but mean similar downsides for employee stock), your stake's value becomes conditional on a best case scenario exit and investors in practice gain more ownership than the numbers immediately reveal.

If the company fails, all that means nothing. If the company goes big, it won't matter. But in the most likely exit case where the company sells for less than everyone was hoping, now you get into the interesting territory where the investors might make their 1.5x return before you see a cent.

It's not that founders don't understand this. It's that founders end up taking these conditions when they're low on negotiation leverage and choose between that and running out of funding, so it's an understandable decision. However, they also avoid talking about it unless forced to because it changes how you will value your stock, which changes how attractive your offer or current compensation is. As a rule I ask about it when I talk to startups about job offers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> A model that assumes every engineering hire is given 1% of the company but also ignores the risk of dilution would seem to only apply to a very small part of parameter space...

<comment><USER27> It also seems to ignore strike price and the scenario of an acquisition where only the VC and founders get paid.

<comment><USER28> Footnote 1: "You may be asking yourself, 'what about the strike price'? The answer is that, because almost all of the expected value of the options comes from a very small fraction of scenarios in which you exercise them, the strike price doesn't contribute very much to the expected value."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Another (very) important consideration is the tax you will be liable for _at the time of exercise but possibly before liquidity_ in the event of success and the information asymmetry between most engineering hires and the founding team.

It's for this reason that I believe 10 year exercise windows are the right thing to do, and young engineers should be encouraged to avoid startups with ~90 day post-employment exercise windows.

P.S. Hi Ben!

<comment><USER30> The 90 day post-employment exercise window is a requirement for them to be treated as incentive stock options, which have significant tax advantages over non-incentive stock options.

It's not a clever thing that startups do to try to increase retention.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are the tax advantages meaningfully different for ISOs vs. NQSOs if you 83b your NQSOs?

It seems to me anyone who really is banking on their startup having huge valuation growth (and can afford to do it) should 83b their options, either way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This model focuses on numerous secondary factors while ignoring two of the most important variables, dilution and probability of success.

Dilution will continually decrease your stake... Likely at the same rate you vest (year).

Most important of all... The entire upside needs to be multiplied by the likelihood of success. No matter how much the company is 'valued' today, more often than not it will be worth 0 in 5 years.

Pouring one out for the WeWork employees this weekend...

<comment><USER32> You are correct- probability of success is (in my opinion) the single most important factor when evaluating options. Even if on average employees did well with stock options, the fact of the matter is that the distribution of payouts is very lopsided, not unlike professional athletes or actors. So most start-up employees will get nothing at all for their hard-earned options.

From personal experience, I have worked as an employee at 3 start-ups, and in only one of them did I get any payout at all from my options. And the amount of value I got from that one "success" was trivially small after multiple rounds of dilutive funding (financially, I would have been far better off flipping burgers in lieu of all that overtime). Most of my peers have had similar success rates with start-ups, with a few notable exceptions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The implicit assumption here is that you can _always_ change jobs. That's not true if the economy is bad. We now have a generation of people in the workforce that have not seen a downturn. Back in 2001-2003, I was locked into a startup that cut our already below market pay by 20% due to the poor job market at the time. There are simply times when it is difficult to move companies due to macroeconomic trends.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Some folks commenting seem to be missing some of the point.

Ben isn't trying to say "startups pay $100k, Google pays $110k". Those are round numbers deliberately picked out of the air (which obviously don't match expected comp at either startups, or Google).

It's an analysis of how to value stock options in high growth startups.

As someone who routinely tells people to value stock options at zero, this analysis has convinced me to value them at something closer to 5% expected return lottery ticket. So, still basically a garbage deal, but I'm convinced by his argument.

I'll note one other downside I haven't seen anyone else mention: BigTechCo managers (including me) won't hire people who appear to job hop every 1-2 years. Why would I invest in you, when your contribution to the team is barely positive for the first 6 months, if you're going to change teams in such a short time.

I understand it's different in startup land, but job hopping more than once is a red flag for most hiring managers I know at big tech companies.

</comment><comment><USER34> Stock options in the UK are a near fraud. Your a ability to excercise them is contingent on an exercise window opening at the next funding round (a long time) and you lose said options on your last day of employment. Unscrupulous management trying to claw back options can force employees out.

I do not take stock options in UK companies seriously and neither should you.

<comment><USER35> It's no different in the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I was in a situation where the company was trying to sell itself. I was 1.5 years into 4 year vesting schedule. I decided to leave for 10k more and not buy my options and a few months later it sold with all employees getting vested. If I would have stay that would have worked out to 100,000.

But I ended up much better off. The extra 10k allowed me to qualify to buy a house. The house was 1/2 a million and rose to a million in 4 years. During those 4 years I would be stuck at the new company (those were the terms because they fully vest everyone). I avoided the endless flying trips to hq to train them. I kept my freedom to move to other opportunities.

Options do payoff but salary is worth more because your purchasing power increases. Real estate (single detacted houses) in a world class growing city always goes up.

</comment><comment><USER37> What this leaves out is salary spikes by job hopping. If I get 100k at the startup and 10k more at another company and the startup gives me options of 20k, (regarding both give me similar raises for simplicity) it seems the startups offer is easier.

However if after 2 years I quit my job and take another offer for 150k and the startup won't counter, its a loss of 20k I get by being the 2 years at a startup instead of at another company. Even worse when regarding that the early stages (unless you love that lifestyle) of startups is stressful I'd always go to another non-startup company unless I do actually like the product at a startup and see myself in it.

If money isn't a purpose then the way should be. People as purpose is an argument but honestly I'd just not work somewhere with ass people

</comment><comment><USER38> You also get to quit publicly traded companies based on how much your unvested RSUs have increased or decreased in value since you signed on to the job. So this isn't really an advantage for startups, except to the extent that startup volatility is higher.

</comment><comment><USER39> This all sounds nice but it ignores the issue of liquidity... You can't afford to exercise your options because you can't sell them. The secondary market sounds nice in principle but I never had success with it. And if you can afford to buy them you have to budget for the tax bill that will hit you with the AMT truck. The move to the 10 year option exercise period helps though so you should only consider companies that offer that. 30 days, 1 year.. not long enough.. 10 years might be enough.. For example, Palantir has been in business for 16 years with no IPO in the near future. So the "deal" here, or the implicit bargain isn't great.

</comment><comment><USER40> The number of startups that reach a liquidity event is about 1%. a liquidity event is the company gets sold to a bigger company or an IPO. 99% of companies fail to be sold and fail to IPO. about another 9% of companies become zombies which means they don't die but they don't thrive. Options or RSUs are stranded and not saleable due to SEC rules. The other 90% fail.

the numbers reaching liquidity events are higher in Silicon Valley maybe 5% of companies reach liquidity events but the Outlook is still poor for most start- up companies.

</comment><comment><USER41> Startup stock options are good when: \- there is no liquidation preference overhang \- you feel confident your contributions will significantly move the needle for this startup \- you're not giving up much in terms of salary \- you're ready to take on a bigger role/build up experience

A friend of mine managed to get this right 4 times in a row. (joined 4 companies, made solid return on all of his stock options). so it's definitely not impossible. obviously a large ammount of risk involved though.

</comment><comment><USER42> The opportunity cost is not just the lost wages, it needs to also factor in the _years_ of having less-known or no-name/failed startups on your resume. This absolutely will impact your career opportunities. Having 3 early-career years at Google on your resume has a compounding effect for the rest of your life (sorry, but it's true). That opportunity cost is way, way higher than the n 5-digit dollar value this article rather blithely assumes.

</comment><comment><USER41> There is a lot of content like this on HNews. There are many factors that go into startup options. Definitely worth more than 0 on average though.

On the other hand, many startups nowadays pay market level comp + stock options. So in terms of opportunity cost it's just plain upside. (unless you are getting FAANG level offers, thats a whole different game. those are above the majority of startups)

<comment><USER43> Established tech companies that have IPOed are offering market level comp + stock as well. They also, in my experience, give out better bonuses, have better benefits, and offer better work/life balance.

<comment><USER44> Indeed. It would be...suboptimal to work for anyone not offering what you described. Anything else is undervaluing/short changing yourself, while enriching someone else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> > You receive a job offer from a startup currently valued at $10m, with a > strike price of $2.5m.

Isn't backdating employee stock options like this kind of sketchy/illegal? If the company is worth $10m and you accept a job offer and get an option grant, you don't get options priced as if you accepted the job offer back when the company was worth $2.5m.

<comment><USER46> Backdating to skirt FMV is not allowed, but the valuation is ordinarily based on the last funding round--for preferred stock, with some terms favorable to the investors--and what you're getting options for is common stock, with no terms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> This is a compelling mental model, but not practical — one person can't _live_ expected values. If you want to actually realize expected values on options, the best option might be to become an accredited investor as fast as possible and invest in high-volatility companies :P

</comment><comment><USER48> No they are not, speaking from experience.

One debt financing round and your golden stocks lose 90% of its value. It's worse when you have exercised your options.

Plus you won't get class A stocks, class B or worse, which means you won't make much unless company goes public and goes big like FB or Google.

<comment><USER49> This makes 0 sense except in a failing startup where the stock isn't worth much to anyone, including the founders and investors.

<comment><USER48> Well it does makes sense because this is the ground reality, not all startups make it. Engineers never get preferred shares no matter how hard we try to think so.

Class shares are a thing to protect investor money not engineer interest.

<comment><USER49> But they are irrelevant in a successful startup and no one really wins in an unsuccessful startup. At most preferred shares get invested funds back unless the startup took some really bad deal with multiple liquidation preferences. What I would say is that in an unsuccessful startup engineers are likely to make out better in an acquihire than the investors do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Curious. I hadn't thought too much about startup hopping, since there is a large opportunity cost to staying in a startup that doesn't take off.

</comment><comment><USER51> I think is interesting to apply this reasoning to entrepreneurship. When you are receiving no salary and possibly even investing your money on a company.

</comment><comment><USER52> TL DR: The author argues that startup options are "better than they look" because you can quit (and keep your options) at any time.

The model is extremely naive: it doesn't account for (a) dilution due to continued investment, (b) investor preferences, and (c) (perhaps the most important), most options need to be exercised (or forfeited) shortly after departing.

A departure situation can trigger a significant out of pocket payment: from the actual exercise price PLUS a possible tax trigger (AMT in the US) that gets larger as the company value increases.

Many employees that leave with vested options often can't afford to exercise them (or all of them).

</comment><comment><USER53> Plenty, _plenty_ of startups will have options that are worth 0.

</comment><comment><USER54> Numbers in the example don't line up with what I've seen of Bay Area trends. $110K TC at Google is low for a new grad, and good luck getting 1% of a company valued at $10MM straight out of college.

More realistic numbers for me would be:

early career: $125K TC bigco job vs $100K + 0.1% at $10MM startup

Experienced: $350K TC bigco job vs $150K + 1% at $10MM startup

When you run these numbers it's real hard to make the case that startups are the best move financially. Plenty of other reasons to work at startups, but increased comp at big companies + founders giving less equity to employees has changed the equation.

</comment><comment><USER55> Though I agree with the general analysis, one important point anyone joining a startup should consider is exercise windows. Obviously if the company is worthless this doesn't matter, and if it's a rocketship you'd probably want to stay around anyway, but if it's somewhere in the middle and you're stuck with a three month exercise window it's a really hard decision to leave.</comment>


In which I stomp on some of our glorious "green shoots" - <AUTHOR> http://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2009/10/13/in-which-i-stomp-on-some-of-our-glorious-green-shoots/

<comment><USER2> It's from Business Week. 'Nuff said. Business Week is to business journalism what Mariah Carey is to business journalism.

<comment><USER3> Slightly offtopic, Bloomberg just bought Business Week for a song: roughly 2-5 million. It will be interesting to see what changes happen at the magazine.

[http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/FineOnMedia/archives/20...](http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/FineOnMedia/archives/2009/10/bloomberg_wins.html)

Personally, I always found BW too bland, compared to Forbes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> entrepreneur == someone who makes money by running their own business

entrepreneur != someone who invents something revolutionary

The vast vast majority of the people in the world will never invent anything new.

This is a list of people who found a less-than-common way of making money.

This is NOT a list of people with revolutionary ideas.

<comment><USER5> Whilst I agree with your logic, I think there is still a difference between being an entrepreneur and running a fairly standard business. Your definition would say that someone who buys a franchise or setups up a basic shop is an entrepreneur - I think few people would see it that way. An entrepreneur need not be trying to be revolutionary but they should be shooting for the stars and trying to at least improve on the way the competition does business

One of these people designs logos etc for medical practices, employs 5 people and has revenues of $225,000. By my calculations that is an average of $25/hour per person in revenue. That is not pushing the boundaries in revenue or ideas - that is just another person who has a small business. I'm not criticising that person in the slightest, that is great for them, but if they are making a list of top entrepreneurs under 25 then that is pretty sad.

As I think someone else pointed out this is probably more just a case of very poor journalism.

<comment><USER6> The dictionary definition of entrepreneur is simply "a person who organizes, operates, and assumes the risk for a business venture." So innovation can be helpful, especially in achieving a competitive advantage, it is not necessary (and certainly not sufficient) for successful entrepreneurship.

<comment><USER7> If, however, you do exactly what your competition is doing, the only risk you are taking is the one derived from being less competent than them.

The article's point is that if average is the best this generation can offer then it's doomed.

<comment><USER6> I think Scott (and you) are confusing _average_ with _boring_. It's true that you can't be better without being different. But you can be different (and even be _better_ ) without being (at least overtly) _innovative_. You might just, for example, provide better customer service than the competition. Or lower prices. Or greater selection. My point is that to succeed, _all_ you have to be is _better_. Being _cool_ is _not_ a requirement. (And being too focused on being cool can therefore actually be detrimental to success.)

<comment><USER6> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881032>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> a-priori Seriously, he needs to get rid of that "snapshots" tooltip. Why do people put those things on their sites?

<comment><USER8> It has been a few years since my blog was on *.wordpress.com, but my recollection is that they opted me in when they introduced the feature and it took me a while to figure out how to turn it off. (Settings -> General, as I recall.)

<comment><USER9> Appearance -> Extras -> Enable mShots site previews

I am on wordpress now, and just turned mShots off a few minutes ago. I had no idea this feature was causing anyone problems. Open in new tab still worked fine for me.

<comment><USER10> It's more of an annoyance when you use your cursor to indicate where in the text you are while reading. Or when you just park the cursor somewhere and it happens to be on a link. Quite annoying on articles with a lot of links like this one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> While I agree that most of the entrepreneurs don't have brilliant ideas, I thought there were two clear standouts:

1) The guy that developed carbon nanotube probes for microscopy applications (www.cnprobes.com)

2) The guy that hacked away in his basement and created new higher performance heavy duty machine lubricants (www.greasewarehouse.com)

</comment><comment><USER12> Your post is flawed because it assumes that this is some sort of an authoritative list that took into account _all_ entrepreneurs across America. Untrue.

May be you should attack the magazine that created the list instead of the entrepreneurs? Better yet, create your anti-list of guys you think should be there but never will be because they are too busy doing too many important stuff. Simply cherry picking flaws in a bunch of businesses is very easy--even if I agree with many of your assessments about individual ones.

<comment><USER13> Yes, this critique suffers from a quite typical problem: Sample bias in the press. Some business plans require PR in order to work, so those are the businesses you'll hear about. The businesses that don't thrive on PR are effectively invisible.

I'm particularly amused by this guy's citation of Philo Farnsworth as the sort of entrepreneur we should all aspire to be. There are plenty of Philo Farnsworths in America today. You've just never heard of them. Just as _nobody in America has heard of Philo Farnsworth_ , except for entrepreneurs who are looking for bedtime stories to tell their kids.

Farnsworth did his best work in obscurity, in a tiny startup consisting mostly of himself and his immediate family. He then managed to secure a patent, which enabled him to get a piece of the action when RCA turned his invention into a household word. If he had been a little less stubborn and independent RCA would have succeeded in buying him out completely; if he had been a little less of a romantic figure ( _the Idaho farmboy turned electronics genius_!) only historians would know his name.

It's easy to meet people who are as smart and inventive as Farnsworth. They're designing graphics processors or creating MEMS devices or building robots or developing vaccines. They're designing the tiny components that make the iPhone possible. If you run into them on the street in Silicon Valley, they look just like everyone else. And none of them are famous, because they're not trying to be famous. Their business doesn't depend on that.

<comment><USER14> Also, _none of them are entrepreneurs_ and none of his examples are examples of entrepreneurship -- they're examples of inventors inventing things.

[Edit: to be clear, Gates is an entrepreneur, but "writing BASIC at 20" doesn't make him an entrepreneur, it makes him an inventor. Starting a company around that invention and organizing the capital to get it off the ground makes him an entrepreneur.]

And that is great. Maybe there's something intelligent to say about how we need fewer entrepreneurs and more inventors, or what the difference is, or why hardly anybody knows two of those three inventors.

Instead he went for the easy article and decided to piss all over everyone. Gratifying, to be sure, and there's going to be a coterie of people saying, "Yes, right on. Here are other ways in which all these people suck," but I think everyone is a little worse off for having an article like this written.

It was mean and no less venal than the entrepreneurs he is criticizing.

<comment><USER12> _need fewer entrepreneurs and more inventors_

You are making a similar mistake. How do you know how many inventors there are? How do you know there aren't people writing stuff like BASIC? I am guessing it is because you don't see their faces splashed or hear much about them. But just visit most COMP SCI programs and you'll find very technically brights folks working on new things.

This ends up with the boring conclusion that may be we need both inventors + entrepreneurs. But just because it's boring doesn't mean it isn't accurate.

<comment><USER14> Huh? I'm not saying anything about inventors or entrepreneurs; I'm saying something about the author's article and why it was unnecessary and unproductive, particularly if it was meant to be a critique of BusinessWeek as well as the entrepreneurs it highlighted.

I have no idea how many entrepreneurs or inventors there are, what the appropriate balance between the two is (if that even matters), whether the world needs more or less of either, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Jesus what a nay-sayer. I wonder if in early 1999 he would have dismissed Google saying, "A website to search the Internet? Why? I can just go directly to what I want!". Sheesh.

<comment><USER16> Thanks to the participatory nature of technology these days, its become fiendishly difficult to predict what's going to produce wealth[1].

It used to be easy, wealth was made by growing something and eating it or digging something up and banging it into a shape. It got a bit more subtle when people realized that dragging stuff places (where said stuff was likely eaten or banged into a shape) could create wealth too.

It got even harder when information became wealth. Mostly at first by letting people know the best places to drag stuff and the best shapes to bang stuff into.

Now we are at the place where the idea itself can attract wealth when it goes viral and millions of people suddenly contribute to it. Facebook, wikipedia, twitter etc. It might actually be a clue that these are hard to "monetize" yet are seismic forces in peoples' lives. Wealth and money might finally be starting to go their separate ways.

I think maybe the author might have a little bit of dig stuff up and bang it into a shape bias, but I understand how it might be difficult to spot the wealth creation potential in some of these "new fangled" ventures.

[1] Wealth in the "bettering all human kind" sense, not the "pile of government printed paper" sense.

<comment><USER17> Wealth and money have always gone in slightly different ways. Every positive externality is wealth by your definition, but I unless its internalized I don't get paid for it. (And negative externality are basically stealing or looting.)

To give less abstract examples: I don't get paid for being a good citizen, voting, reading the newspaper to be informed. And I do not pay for being angry, putting a lot of strange gases in the atmosphere with my care (yet), congesting the streets. Or putting systemic risk on the financial world.

There is something to be said for connecting externalities with incentives. Giving the right incentives makes people's choices more compatible with the outcomes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> He forgot a few:

1\. A guy who threw daddy's money at the ridiculous idea that people would buy books without seeing or touching them first.

2\. Two college nerds who thought people would use a TV screen instead of the yellow pages.

3\. Two more college nerds who thought people would come to their web-site solely for the purpose of going to someone else's website.

4\. Another college nerd who thought people could be friends without actually being together.

5\. Some people who thought other people wouldn't mind storing their electronic mail on someone else's computer.

6\. Some guy pussy-whipped by his girlfriend to trade her beanie babies on the interwebs.

7\. Some guys who thought people would be willing to send money over the internet.

8\. A guy who built a place for people to give away their published writings for free.

9\. A guy who thought people could meet their next SO on the computer in his apartment.

10\. A guy who thought people could actually communicate something in only 140 characters.

<comment><USER19> Yep, those are all grounds for interesting ideas that one could discuss over coffee for a good while. The entrepreneurs identified in the article that is being criticized however seem to have very bland businesses (coffee intern placement doesn't really capture the imagination).

<comment><USER20> Actually internships are quite eye-opening stuff when done at the right place. So i'd say the internship website was a brilliant idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think you have to distinguish between nay-saying as a stylistic means and arguing with his point. I think there is a valid philosophical point to be made that young entrepreneurs are not daring enough. Aside from the fact that it's really, really hard not to settle for "easy" execution, society would probably indeed be better off if people dared to go for more daunting tasks. I guess you can say: If you want to glorify some people - like BW does -, select mostly those who try (and most certainly will fail in doing so) the truly groundbreaking stuff. Those are the ones that society needs to succeed. But it's all philosophical.

</comment><comment><USER21> Aagh, why is there Javascript on the site that breaks "open in new tab"?

</comment><comment><USER22> Quite a bit of vitriol in there, but it seems it would more appropriately be directed at lousy journalism rather than bemoaning the state of entrepreneurship. While the BusinessWeek article claims to evaluate on "potential for growth," the projected revenue figures sound like PR fluff. I was left wondering which of the 10 were selected just so they have a nice round number for their list.

<comment><USER7> I think this illustrates why fluffy press-release-transcribing journalism is so prevalent these days better than a whole collection of BusinessWeek ever could:

<http://twitpic.com/ds64u>

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> _A service where some woman (who isn't under 25 or very well dressed herself) plays "queer eye" for a dude over webcam and demeans him into buying her choice of clothes._

At first I thought this referred to one of those "financial domination" sites where you pay to be humiliated and ignored by some girl over the internet. Now _that's_ entrepreneurship, American style!

</comment><comment><USER24> "Dear America: you can't have an economy based on narcissism, good intentions, marketing, catering to rich bored people, really excellent webpages, and selling underpants on the internet."

Quite a statement coming from someone working on "problems in quantitative finance." Not sure which adds less value, high frequency trading or (insert any activity on earth here).

</comment><comment><USER25> The only difference between this and a strawman argument is that _Business Week_ provided the strawman.</comment>


Is the popularity of unit tests waning? - <AUTHOR> http://binstock.blogspot.com/2008/05/is-popularity-of-unit-tests-waning.html

<comment><USER2> Unit testing hast it's own use, but I never really drunk the kool-aid.

In my experience with unit testing:

1\. It doesn't help much if you are working in client side enginering. No matter how clever your unit test is, it can't help on detected ui rendering errors, animations, or multithreading programming.

2\. Java + unit test, means you have to throw away all encapsulation, and good OO design to apease your unit tests, exposing your program to your coworkers to create havock by calling methods that shouldn't be visible to them.

3.Unit tests can give you a false sense of security. Oh, look, it passed the unit tests, my code must be good. Well, most of the time unit tests != real world scenarios.

4\. TDD (test driven design) of software, can be slow. I would recommend it to all my competitors. In a startup, I'd rather release something fast, that might be still little buggy, than something that works well, but it took forever to get there. Plus TDD is constraining, as you are programming around your tests, and not around what the user will see. I found often, that my final design on a functionality, is different from how I thought it would be at the beginning. When working in large systems, you don't have the luxury to know how your final design will be.

5\. Unit testing stiffles creativity in design, goes against "Exploratory programming". If you already know the answer on what you are building when you start, then you probably are not exploring around.

6\. Unit testing != fun. Honestly, I'd rather be implementing features, than testing them.

Where unit testing is good:

1\. When building an api that will be used by other people amd that is more static, less fluid. As oposed to UI enginering, something like geoCoding api's, have simple and clear results. That is very easy to unit test, as the value returned by the api is within a determined range, and the unit tests can be few, simple, and clear.

2\. Scripting languages. Unit testing helps on detecting errors, where in a static language they would have been caught earlier. Plus it is much more easier to unit test on something like Python, then something like Java, or god forbid C/C++.

3\. Coorporate enviroment. If you are waiting for something form a different group/department, you can build some unit tests to test if this group's code is meeting minimum standards.

Overrall Unit testing has its place, but be careful not to rely on it too much. It can't be substitue to real testing.

<comment><USER3> I drank the Kool-Aid and I still like the flavor. I still practice TDD every day. And yet I agree with most of what you said.

When people get dogmatic about unit tests, they write way more than is needed to bring value. The value is: you can refactor code more easily; you can think things through a little bit at a time and let the design evolve; the code you write tends to be really simple and easy to understand; you get executable documentation of code as a side-effect. And for me, a huge benefit is that when pair-programming, the current test defines the current task.

If the unit tests are making the code harder to refactor and evolve, then it's time to write fewer of them. And if unit testing isn't fun, then something is seriously wrong.

Do people not know that when you want to just explore a wild design idea, you should abandon unit testing and just go wild?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't see it waning. I do see it dissolving more into general programming practice, as opposed to being a big deal in and of itself. What _does_ seem to be waning is the evangelical fervor surrounding it, which seems like a good thing to me (though not to the author). Like other fads in software, unit testing was oversold.

Meanwhile, the logic of the article seems weak:

1\. A company that claimed to auto-generate unit tests for your code failed? Give me a break. You can't write good tests without understanding what you're testing. If it could do that, why didn't it just auto-generate all your code in the first place? One needn't look far to see why this failed.

2\. Few OSS tools have been adopted (except xUnit which is used massively)? This is normal. Most open source projects fail, a few succeed big. xUnit won. You don't need much else.

3\. Not everyone teaches it? Why should everyone do anything?

4\. Not many new unit testing books? There are many such books already. What don't they cover? Why should there be a whole book about JUnit 4?

5\. Alternative unit-testing frameworks aren't used... see #2.

The author seems to think of unit testing as if it were a domain. It isn't, it's a technique. Why should there be an industry around it?

</comment><comment><USER5> I am not sure that the failure of commercial products, frameworks and books on unit-testing are a sign for the decline of the usage of unit-tests in general. In our company, we are extensively using unit-tests, but use no books neither commercial products (only the junit-framework). Maybe unit-tests have just become common programming practice without the need for any more hype?

<comment><USER6> I looked into Agitar's JUnit Factory, but had to turn away from it when I realized that you send your source code to them to generate the tests. I have yet to work for a company that would feel comfortable doing that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> We're always looking for a Silver Bullet. Does someone know if there are papers out there that correlate unit testing with better results in software projects?

<comment><USER8> Even if there were papers on it, I think there are too many confounding factors to elicit anything useful from them. Personally though, unit testing and test first development help me focus on a small problem and solving that, while ignoring the rest of the system. It's really easy to get pulled into the big picture. I also found my code to be more modular and decoupled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It takes as long to master TDD as it does to master a new language. I didn't get good until I had been doing it for a few years. @ardit33 is dead-on about the coolaid analogy. You either get it and can't imagine programming any other way, or there are significant roadblocks you don't want to overcome (UI) / just can't TDD fast enough to justify the time.

I haven't hit a point where I've invested too much into the quality of the software. It's fine with me if TDD isn't popular. I'll just keep using it as a tool in my arsenal to beat the competition.

</comment><comment><USER10> Unit Testing works great in Smalltalk. Refactoring Browser handily refactors your tests at the same time you're refactoring your code. I've heard complaints from people using other languages that Unit Tests make refactoring twice the work. There is no excuse for this. If your Unit Tests are just code, then the tools that change your code should just as easily change the tests that use the code.

</comment><comment><USER11> We don't use unit testing because 1) it kills agility. We're small, new & rewrite our software base every year. Complete code coverage slows us down by a factor of two and doesn't give that time back (so far) in reduced dev time. 2) we have a graphical application that's hard to unit test. 3) it's shooting bugs in a barrel & assuming that because you don't hit a bug there aren't any.

</comment><comment><USER12> Does it matter? The guys who made Twitter are unit testing fanatics and it doesn't seem to have helped their situation.

<comment><USER13> Unit testing is not load testing.

<comment><USER12> I understand that. It was a serious question, though. How worthwhile are extensive unit tests if your end product is still broken?

<comment><USER14> That's a very good point. IMO the biggest problem with unit tests is that so many people mis-use them, believing that they are a replacement for QA, integration testing, and load testing. You need people to look at your user interfaces to validate their usability, for one thing.

When I was working with Rails, I found the unit test framework to be nearly useless for my application since it relied on a SOAP service (and at least back then, you couldn't hit the service with a unit test), but the Rails integration tests were great.

So I ended up writing a fairly extensive suite of integration tests, but nearly no unit tests at all.

<comment><USER3> Yup, unit tests are a programmer aid, not a replacement for QA. If the unit tests aren't helping you code faster (by preventing debugging), they're not worth it.

It's probably close to impossible to prevent people from using unit tests as a substitute for QA, though. The concepts are similar enough that people are bound to confuse them, or at least take the confidence they get from passing unit tests as "good enough" to substitute for QA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Let's hope.</comment>


Ask HN: What is a reasonable price for the development of this site? - <AUTHOR>

Hello,
I'm the sole web-developer for a small startup and I created the company's entire product (a website). I may be renegotiating my contract, and I was hoping to get some third party opinions about how much the web development of this site is worth. The site is notescentral.org and is a website for students to share notes.
If any developers out there have a few minutes to kill and wouldn't mind looking over a few of the pages on the site, then giving me an estimate of how much you would charge if you developed this, that would be greatly appreciated. I want to make sure I'm not under/over valuing myself.
Looking over these pages should give you a good ideas of the majority of the capabilities of the site:
notescentral.org
notescentral.org/login (login using username & pw "resume")
notescentral.org/browse
notescentral.org/all
notescentral.org/notes/150
notescentral.org/notes/84
notescentral.org/upload
notescentral.org/rewards
Any opinions would be appreciated <comment><USER2> I just read your previous submission. A question: Have you already received at lest $1? (The green paper real $1, not a promise of a $1MM in the future.)</comment>


Using Python to Parse Spreadsheet Data - <AUTHOR> http://www.sitepoint.com/using-python-parse-spreadsheet-data/

<comment><USER2> While I think Pandas are a far better way to deal with spreadsheet type data, using xlrd and xlwt come in handy when you are dealing with irregular spreadsheets.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like ethercalc.org an open source google like spreadsheet that puts spreadsheet data into an online database.</comment>


Show HN: WikiMatrix – wiki comparison site relaunched - <AUTHOR> https://www.wikimatrix.org/ <comment> wes-k Hey there! I've got yet another wiki platform for ya! Wikiful! I'm a biased cofounder but I truly believe it is one of the nicest and easiest to use wikis out there. More features in the works!

You can try out our demo here: [https://www.wikiful.com/@demo/dev-team- welcome-wiki](https://www.wikiful.com/@demo/dev-team-welcome-wiki)

</comment><comment><USER2> I never knew there were 81 wiki platforms. I am hoping you could help me choose one for my needs. I want to make a wiki site where anyone in the world can edit a startup information. Think something like crunchbase. I have a few features planned and need to extend it, preferably in Python.

I also want to be able to put a modern looking UI (most wiki's skin is bad, by default).

Can you suggest me one ?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> 12 years after the initial launch we relaunched WikiMatrix in a new design and an updated feature set. WikiMatrix allows you to compare various wiki software based on their feature sets. A wizard helps newcomers to narrow down what they need.

The goal was to build a lightweight site that's low maintenance but helpful to its users. It's made with the PHP Slim framework and uses an SQLite database to store the data.

Let me know if you have any questions.

<comment><USER3> Very slick! Have you thought about generalizing this to compare other things?

I could see this being used as a framework to build other matrix comparison sites.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the whole thing is multi-site capable. We also relaunched [https://www.forummatrix.org](https://www.forummatrix.org) using the same code. We have a couple of other sites that are still waiting to get the relaunch.

We also have a few ideas for other topics, but starting a new site requires a lot of initial research, so it's nothing we can do lightly.</comment></comment></comment>


Sirius: A distributed system library from Comcast - <AUTHOR> http://comcast.github.io/sirius/overview.html?attempt=2

<comment><USER2> I'm not an american citizen, but I can't have been the only one with a reaction of: "Comcast? ... Comcast?!". But this is really awesome -- hope more tech is going to get open sourced from Comcast and similar companies.

<comment><USER3> Comcast is terrible to its consumers because they know you can't run away from them and get better service at that price point [generally].

Open sourcing stuff that costs them [very little] and may result in a cost savings in the future and doesn't allow you to disrupt their core business? Why not?

Maybe I'm just a bit cynical. ;)

<comment><USER4> You are cynical.

People _complain_ about comcast because they are the only choice - when you don't get a choice you hate what you get.

Their actual service is perfectly fine. I'm sure you can dig up some bad stories, but think about it from a percentage point of view: Comcast is huge, there are bound to be some problems, but as a percentage of total customer the number of problems is perfectly normal.

PS. No connection with Comcast, I have a sore spot about herd mentality. People just believe things without checking for themself (or based on anecdotes).

Said a different way:

If you have tons of choices you will highly review your choice as a form of choice validation. If you have only 1 or few choices you will only review the company if there are problems.

The result of that is poor reviews without actual poor service.

<comment><USER3> I refuse to use Comcast due to my experience with them which is anecdotal. But fair enough to call me cynical. :)

So, ummm, maybe you should ask if I've used them before going on a rant?

<comment><USER4> It wasn't really directed at you (except maybe the cynical part).

<comment><USER3> Fair enough. :)

I just assumed it was because it was in reply to my comment. My mistake.

<comment><USER4> I wrote "people" to try to make it more general. Your comment was just a jumping off point for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reminds me of Infinispan [1] or other similar Data Grid software.

[1] [http://infinispan.org/](http://infinispan.org/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Hazelcast is a favorite of mine: [http://hazelcast.org](http://hazelcast.org)

<comment><USER7> On cursory first glance Sirius looks more advanced than Hazelcast: Sirius seems to provide substantially more flexible cluster topologies along with "real" consistency behavior (via Paxos). Plus, Sirius seems to come with a built-in persistence system with at least some thought applied to it, while last I checked Hazelcast left persistence entirely up to the library consumer.

As a disclaimer I haven't looked at the implementations of either, only the documentation (and I used Hazelcast in a project a while ago).

<comment><USER8> Having used HazelCast extensively, and considering making some of my code Sirius-depentant, I can tell you that it is not more advanced. Sirius is basically just a distributed key-value store w/no partitioning, whereas HazelCast has a lot of abstractions built on top of the simpler principle[1]. In fact, it might be a bit overkill in some situations, and that's one of the reasons I will consider Sirius.

[1] [http://www.hazelcast.org/docs/3.1/manual/html- single/](http://www.hazelcast.org/docs/3.1/manual/html-single/)

<comment> comcast-jonm Our particular reference dataset (TV and movie data) had some application use cases that required custom data structures to get the in-memory performance we wanted. Sirius doesn't provide datastructures per se (and isn't really even a datastore itself)--it provides an eventually-consistent, replicated update stream that you can use to maintain your own datastructures. Having that developer freedom and control over the datastructures was an important design principle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How does it compare Redis?

<comment><USER7> Redis implements operations against simple in-memory data structures with a network frontend, not a distributed storage/replication system.

Sirius lives at a lower level: you could, for example, use Sirius to build the storage system backing a distributed Redis clone.

<comment><USER10> The network front-end is key here, especially since the goal of Redis is -- in spirit and in actuality -- to act as a network front-end to in-memory data structures.

It's damn good at it too, but disassociating that network front-end may make sense in the future.

<comment> comcast-jonm Redis and Sirius target slightly different use cases, although they share the goal of keeping data in memory. For our use case that motivated Sirius' development, we wanted to avoid doing I/O to an external system (even a fast one like Redis) in order to simplify development by having direct access to the data in native datastructures.

Additionally, we found that we needed some custom datastructures to get the performance we needed, so providing application developer control over those datastructures was an important motivation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is it possible to do write through / write back to some other data store?

<comment> comcast-jonm This isn't currently supported, although Sirius has some options that might be helpful. Sirius isn't really a data store per se; it's really a persistent, replicated update stream (transaction log) aimed at letting you build and maintain your own in-process representation of the dataset.

As such, you could set up a separate cluster running in "follower" mode, subscribing to the stream of updates and them writing them out to some other datastore.

<comment><USER5> Thank you for clarifying that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> LSM tree, anyone?</comment>


DEC64 - <AUTHOR> http://dec64.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> I was rather glad when I first encountered DEC64 because I had previously had the displeasure of having to think deep thoughts about IEEE 754. DEC64 seemed simple enough that I could get the gist on a note card, and generally I gravitate towards the simplest possible options whenever possible.

However, reading some of the comments on previous HN discussion of DEC64 are kind of depressing. It sounds kind of like either you get a floating point number representation that's comprehensible or you get one that's fast (or you get neither ... which sounds like it might be the case for DEC64).

Are my options really some sort of symbolic representation OR IEEE 754? Bleh that seems rather unfortunate.

(Side note: someone linked this on the previous discussion ... I was surprised [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal64_floating- point_format](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal64_floating-point_format))

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7365812](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7365812)</comment>


Rubber Room: How NYC Deals With Teachers Who Shouldn't Teach - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/31/090831fa_fact_brill

<comment><AUTHOR> This article should be required reading for discussing education reform in America. It talks about how unions and entrenched work rules have made it such a rigamarole to dismiss a teacher for misconduct or incompetence that NYC spends years paying them to play board games while wending through the complex process of getting them fired.

One such teacher could not be fired for _passing out drunk in class_.

The larger issue, which they touch on, is that obsessive, dogmatic protection of malfeasant teachers creates a culture in which teachers who are merely _bad at their jobs_ are hired, tenured, and given jobs for life with no incentive to improve.</comment>


Tweetvite: An Events Site Dedicated To Tweetups (From Anyvite YC S08) - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/02/tweetvite-an-events-site-dedicated-to-planning-and-finding-tweetups/

<comment><USER2> Great execution, but in terms of the market this strikes me as being 3 degrees separated from profit:

Tweetvite -> Tweetup -> Twitter -> Profit!

</comment><comment><USER3> There's no way anyone will confuse this with <http://twtvite.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a fair comment. The domain name (as much as some of you are going to hate it since it follows the whole twit _, tweet_ , etc. nomenclature) is a pretty good one. The interface is entirely different if you compare the two side by side, so yeah, it's possible that there might be confusion, but we've done everything that we could to differentiate there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice work Jeff. The UI is really clean and the option to not register is useful.

</comment><comment><USER5> The post says spin-off. Is it a new startup or a new app?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a new app. Our startup is called Simpletastic Inc. and created both Anyvite and now Tweetvite.</comment></comment>


Euler's formula with introductory group theory - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvmuCPvRoWQ <comment><USER2> e^i(pi)=-1 is a truly beautiful formula.</comment>


SAP agrees to buy expense software maker Concur for $7.3B - <AUTHOR> http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/09/19/concur-tech-sap-se-ma-idINL6N0RJ5G020140919 <comment><USER2> I use Concur as part of my job.

It is stunningly, stupefyingly awful.

However, it is popular with the kind of hyperglobocom companies that SAP deals with.

I can submit expense reports (which take about as long as it would to scratch them into clay tablets) and I can book travel. That's about it.

I imagine that -- for the anonymous finance dept folk who delight in taking weeks to examine my reports while I am legally on the hook for the credit card bill -- it is very featuresome and powerful. As an end user I hate it with the power of a thousand exploding suns.

The mobile app for capturing receipts makes it slightly, _slightly_ more tolerable. Slightly. But half the time it doesn't work. And I still have to go into Concur and manually line up about half of the receipts anyway.

In conclusion, somebody please put these guys out of business with a post-1998 web app. You will be both billionaires and heroes.

<comment><USER3> Try out Expensify - it's a post-2000 expense web and mobile app (already way above your expectations right?)

Seriously though, Expensify is an expense reporting solution that simplifies the process for all users invoved - employees, submitters, administrators, finance departments, HR, and the companies themselves (tax reporting, etc). Our goal is to completely change the way people do expense reports (for how we work, check out: [http://blog.expensify.com/2014/07/29/how-do-you-expensify- fo...](http://blog.expensify.com/2014/07/29/how-do-you-expensify-forming- habits-with-expense-reporting/)).

PS - If it's not obvious yet, I currently work at Expensify and am totally drinking the kool aid. BUT, our vision for the space is completely user driven and goes beyond a simple expense reporting solution, which makes things trés exciting around here.

On @martijn_himself's point, Expensify's business model employs a bottom-up approach. We offer a free version of Expensify for individual users to try out first, and we have found that many individual users like our product enough to introduce it into their company; in fact, that's how we've been able to fill our pipeline since we launched. User feedback actually helps us figure out what features to build next.

Take a look, try us out! use.expensify.com

PPS - we're hiring engineers if you're into this sort of thing [http://we.are.expensify.com/who-we-need/](http://we.are.expensify.com/who-we- need/)

<comment><USER4> I do realise I am quite cynical in my comments but FWIW I do like the look of your product- it seems to be 'leaner' and more targeted towards usability.

<comment><USER3> ha, thank you! I wasn't offended by your comment, and in fact agree with you that most products in this space aren't really keeping the user in mind.

Just wanted to show you that we're not ALL user unfriendly :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wonder how IBM feels about this development. From May: "IBM will cease operating Global Expense Reporting Solutions as a standalone product, effective March 31, 2016, and instead will refer customers to Concur."

[http://www.businesstravelnews.com/More-News/IBM-will- cease-o...](http://www.businesstravelnews.com/More-News/IBM-will-cease- operating-Global-Expense-Reporting-Solutions-as-a-standalone- product,-effective-March-31,-2016/?ib=Technology&a=mgmt)

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm using it at work on a daily basis almost. Their expense + flight / hotel booking system is surprisingly OK relative to enterprise software, they also have a mobile app which is pretty great.

It's quite a complex topic, lot's of corporate policies to enforce, and basically they had to develop all the tech facade that Kayak, Expedia etc have (flight and hotel booking) as well as a lot of financial logic for expenses.

There is a lot of money in enterprise software... I wish more YC startups would tackle that area...

<comment><USER7> So I wonder why Concur Government edition is so awful. I mean really, really, unusable.

<comment><USER8> Agreed. My agency just switched over, and it is 100% awful.

<comment><USER9> Sounds like it will fit in fine with SAP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was trying to investigate what Concur was about and went to their website. They don't show any screenshots of the program (programs?). You have to give contact details to try out their program (so their sales team can contact you I guess). You have to give contact details to download any brochures about their products. Ugh.

<comment><USER11> This is entirely unsurprising if you've spent time around enterprise software. I once worked in a very large, global (non-IT) company that was interested in software made by a very well-known, large, global IT company. We wanted to see a demo of their product. They pushed back saying "we don't need to do a demo, we're XYZ company you know we can do it. A demo isn't worth our time. If you want a demo, we will have to charge you $XX,000 of professional services". My employer at the time paid it.

<comment><USER12> _we don 't need to do a demo, we're XYZ company you know we can do it_

I think this just made my day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Everyone here is complaining about Concur and how horrible it is... but it's all relative. If you think Concur is horrible, you should have seen the process before with in-house solutions which were both digital and analog.

It might not be perfect, but dayum is it better than where things used to be.

<comment><USER14> I worked at a large consultancy (who creates custom expense systems amongst other things) and their internal system was beyond awful, so I understand that other alternatives are pretty bad.

That said, my (small) company uses Excel, and the experience is much better than Concur.

Perhaps it's a case of a large customer base on a high margin business being more important than a good product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It is likely that SAP will bring Concur in as a SuccessFactors module, which means it will get integrated to the rest of the suite over their HANA Cloud Platform. In the long term, this is likely to result in much better integration to their cloud based systems than they would have had in their legacy/on-premises systems. It is also likely that it will take significant time for them to fully integrate it with their existing solutions, and to be able to sell it. Ultimately, this acquisition will bolster short-term cloud revenues, and help give its existing enterprise clients a reason to move toward HANA.

</comment><comment><USER16> I can see the email from HR right now: "To access Concur, go to the SAP Portal"

Nnnnooooooo!

<comment><USER17> ...and type /SCNCCX

I really believe corporates only put up with such a shitty UI because 'we spent soooo much money on it, we'd better use it'.

/Hates every minute of working with our SAP system

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Ok so this is the third time I've drafted a comment about SAP and the enterprise landscape to try explain this and all I can now think of is GRRRRR!!!

To avoid a the down votes, I should probably mention that you have to experience the enterprise landscape firsthand to be able to comprehend why it is. (That's it, 'why it is').

<comment><USER19> To give a brief impression, two things:

\- parts of the server side SAP components communicate via telnet

\- the user interface of SAP requires users to navigate between different dialogs/forms by manually entering a so-called transaction code (p.e. [http://www.tcodesearch.com/](http://www.tcodesearch.com/))

<comment><USER20> I really, really do not understand that website you linked to. I feel like enterprise software is so far out of the realm of my experience that it may as well be another planet. It makes me feel like I don't understand computers anymore or what they're meant to _do_. I don't understand why it's necessary?

<comment><USER21> I wouldn't necessarily equate SAP and "enterprise software" so much. My experience with SAP's systems is a summer internship for them and 2 years at an employer where I entered time-tracking and expense info into one of their programs. The entire system is basically a database engine developed a long time ago and impossible to re-engineer now so what you're seeing is an artifact of the past. That might be why SAP and their tcodes seem so bizarre.

Enterprise software suffers from its own problems but not all enterprise software looks and feels like SAP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder what will happen with TripIt. Can anyone comment on this?</comment>


Ask HN: Pro-Internet Party? - <AUTHOR>

It seems every few months there's new legislation that can destroy the freedom of the internet as we know it.<p>What are the pro-internet activist groups / political parties that are dedicated to keeping the internet free, fair & neutral? <comment><USER2> There's a few Digital Rights Advocacy groups, the EFF, Access Now, TechFreedom, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> They have the Pirate Party in Europe.

Maybe we could have the Alabama Porn Party here in the US. Making sure no on infringes on your right to look at nekid!</comment>


Gravity to Save 90% Energy When Using a Fridge - onreact-com http://www.homedesignfind.com/appliances/green-fridge-invention-uses-almost-no-electricity/

<comment><AUTHOR> From the article:"I wonder why no company has thought of this easy way to cut energy use in fridges?"

I suspect they probably have thought of this. But to me, this is one of those ideas that looks good on paper. The obvious main problem here is usability. Freezers work in this configuration because everything you put in them roughly turns into bricks that stack on each other without damage. This fridge would need all kinds of little compartments and shelves to keep things like produce from going to the bottom and getting squashed.

In order to have a fridge with the same capacity as an upright fridge, I suspect you would need quite a bit of floor space. There are practical limits on how deep you can make a fridge without it being difficult to use. It's probably fine if you're a single person and don't have a lot of stuff. But what about for a family? Finally, many kitchens have a "spot" for a fridge, and anything that doesn't fit there, needs to go somewhere else. It's likely there likely isn't going to be enough floor space.

<comment><USER2> I'd think of a design like a file cabinet with every drawer being its own fridge. This way you can even set different temperatures. The stacking is variable so suitable models for every kitchen should be possible.

<comment><USER3> That's a smart idea, but wouldn't that require several compressors instead of one? (one per fridge)

<comment> a-priori You could probably get away with one if you duct the cold air into each compartment, with a valve on each one. The valves would be opened and closed as needed to maintain the temperature in each compartment. When at least one is open, the compressor turns on; when all are closed, it shuts off.

<comment><USER3> Here's a crazy idea: could you design a house this way?

Perhaps, for very hot climates, houses should be designed so that the air can only escape upwards, which would severely reduce cooling costs?

(most likely, they already are...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's a converted chest type freezer. Freezers also have a lot thicker insulation on the walls that also helps improve the efficiency a lot.

It also takes a lot of floor space. On the other hand it could be usable as a secondary refridgerator to hold cold drinks, vegetables etc. that you don't want taking space in your main fridge.

And btw where is my aerogel-insulated fridge? I want one for my flying car!

</comment><comment><USER5> Am I the only one who sees a usability problem with this? With freezers this layout is acceptable, as you don't browse around for stuff many times a day, just dump them in the box and forget about it till next spring.

Even if it has shelves, just by thinking about how one gets the jar of jelly out from the back of lowest shelf makes my back hurt.

<comment><USER6> What it needs is a rotating shelf, it would be less space efficient, but then you could just spin the wheel to get something at the bottom.

Also, it doesn't have to be a wheel, maybe just a bunch of hanging shelves on a movable track. If it were a track, you also wouldn't need such a large cover, you could get by with a cover just large enough to access 1 compartment on the movable shelf. Advanced fridge shelves could operate like tape backup systems -- type in "milk" and it rotates the milk compartment to the access cover.

With the microcomputer, it could also keep track of access times of each compartment and ping you when it thinks a compartment has food past the expiration date. With the rotating fridge compartments, you could also have weird fridge layouts that still maintain energy efficiency -- maybe a tall and skinny one, but there is a loading bay at the user's height level.

Maybe I'm overthinking this...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why not just add those plastic strip drapes they use in super markets to your existing fridge? That would do a lot to minimize the cold air dumping out when you opened the door wouldn't it?

</comment><comment><USER8> "I wonder why no company has thought of this easy way to cut energy use in fridges?"

<http://www.prisjakt.nu/kategori.php?k=533>

The link is in Swedish, but it's a list of freezers just like his readily available for purchase. Mouse-over an item in the list to see an image. The columns: divide the price by ten to get an approximate USD price; energy use per year; freezing capacity per 24h; volume.

[edit] My in-laws have a freezer like this and use it for long term storage. And yes, there are usability problems.

[edit2] Freezer != fride, of course. I shouldn't comment with a baby on my lap, and I also blame it on language barriers! :)

</comment><comment><USER9> Usability and shape is the biggest problem with this idea. However, if you had something in the fridge that would minimize the amount of air in the fridge that could work i.e a spring loaded mechanism of some sort that pushes back to allow for goods to be inserted in the fridge. If no goods are on the shelf then the spring pushes to the front thus allowing less air to be in the fridge. Hey? Can I get VC funding for this?

</comment><comment><USER10> _using only about 100 watts of power a day_

A little confusion in the units there... It would appear the author means 100 watts for one hour, so 0.1 kWh per day or 3 kWh per month. Compared to the regular's fridge 30 kWh/month.

<comment><USER11> I was just about to mention this.

100 Joules per second per day? So it uses more energy as time goes on? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Our new fridge works this way on the bottom, for the freezer. It's a 'pull out' freezer. [http://www.kenmore.com/shc/s/dap_10154_12604_DAP_Large+Capac...](http://www.kenmore.com/shc/s/dap_10154_12604_DAP_Large+Capacity?adCell=W2)

</comment><comment><USER13> Here we have the classic case of a trade-off between energy efficiency and pain in the ass.

Personally, I'll happily pay an extra $2/month in electricity bills not to have to pick the milk up off the floor every single morning.

</comment><comment> onreact-com Hey, for all those who complain about the poor usability: This is a low budget DIY hack!

In case you want to solve the same problem with a usable product on a big budget you can too, using horizontal compartments:

[http://www.appliancist.com/appliance_trends_2008/electrolux-...](http://www.appliancist.com/appliance_trends_2008/electrolux- design-lab-2008-winners-finalists.html)

[http://www.yankodesign.com/2008/04/09/your-fridge-sucks- this...](http://www.yankodesign.com/2008/04/09/your-fridge-sucks-this-ones- better/)</comment>


Firefox 75 overhauls the browser's address bar - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/firefox-75-overhauls-the-browsers-address-bar/ <comment><USER2> For extra links etc. this is being extensively discussed on Reddit at the moment [0]. As another comment pointed out, so far it seems reversible by setting browser.urlbar.update1 to false in about:config (requires browser restart) but it is apparently unlikely this will persist as an option.

[0]: [https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/fwhlva/address_bar...](https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/fwhlva/address_barawesomebar_design_update_in_firefox_75/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't have enough F-words to explain how I feel about the new address bar.

@Mozilla: Can you at least not remove about:config entries to disable it, in the later releases, please.</comment>


Plain English Programming (2006) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.osmosian.com/instructions.pdf <comment><USER2> Date: 2006

Program appears to be Windows only: [http://www.osmosian.com/](http://www.osmosian.com/)

<comment><USER3> Yes, our compiler is Windows only and generates native machine code for Intel x86 architecture. It looks and feels the same on any Windows version from XP to 10.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> VirusTotal analysis: [http://bit.ly/1OEYYW9](http://bit.ly/1OEYYW9)

<comment><USER3> The false positives that some virus programs return are typically due to the fact that our executable is different that what they expect. Specifically, it doesn't have all the unnecessary crap that typical compilers churn out -- only what's essential, and nothing more. Some programs also object to files with no extension (like .txt or .src). We left these off since they're not very English-like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> An interesting discussion of the concept can be found here:

[http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2358744](http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2358744)</comment>


Ask HN: Can Wikipedia's method of citing sources be improved? Has it been? - <AUTHOR> In short, i'd like to build a locally hosted (and maybe hosted alternative) fact aggregating system. My primary focus is to make sense of all the BS in the world, and live my life as informed as possible. I have poor memory, and i want to augment that with meaningful data. However, this project is not what i'm seeking information about, but specifically citing sources.
With that said, i dislike citing big articles as a "source" of information as the article often contains much more than the specific blurb. I want a better way to isolate the source, to know the fact.
Has anyone done this? In what ways do you think Wikipedia gets citing sources wrong? In what ways to they get it right?
Any comments appreciated :) <comment><AUTHOR> To start it off, it seems that copying the source material (whatever you consider the fact / context) seems crucial[1]. Like StackOverflow, you run into an issue where the source material may move, be removed, or be altered.

[1]: Note that this may only apply to locally hosted versions, which is my primary focus. Copying source material on a public site would be stealing i'm sure.</comment>