The Real Product Market Fit - <AUTHOR> http://themacro.com/articles/2016/06/the-real-product-market-fit/ <comment><USER4> Makes me think of something I say occasionally... you need a problem so compelling that customers will pay for a buggy, incomplete solution, because a buggy, incomplete solution is what you're building.

<comment><USER5> And then we wonder why the world is full of buggy, incomplete solutions!

<comment><USER4> It's the dream of every engineer to get to _make something that doesn 't suck_, right? But the 80/20 rule applies. Getting through that last 20% that is suboptimal is 80% of the work. Every hour you spend polishing your way to perfection is an hour you _don 't_ spend adding new features or creating new products. Every bug fix is paid for with opportunity cost - at a very high compound interest rate, if you're in a startup.

I've come to the conclusion that if your code doesn't kinda suck, you're doing something wrong. You're wasting effort. Actually, I came to a much harsher conclusion than that - I've concluded that _all software sucks_. That all software hovers near the line between "barely works" and "doesn't work". Why? Because by the time you get to feature-complete, if it still works, it's so riddled with compromise and bad decisions that you never want to look at that code again. You want to start something fresh and new, and THIS time, you won't make all those stupid mistakes! This time, it won't suck!

It always sucks, in the end.

<comment><USER5> I think it's possible to write good software, but I agree that it's difficult to do at a startup. At the very least, there are kinds of software (aerospace and medical software for example) where hovering between "barely works" and "doesn't work" isn't acceptable, and the people responsible found ways to improve their software beyond that point.

<comment><USER4> It's not really making software that more than barely works... it's changing the definition of "barely works". I've spent most of my career in banking and health care, stuff under heavy regulation. The regulations become part of the requirements. And within those bounds, banking and health care software barely work. Avionic software barely works. The software that keeps your pacemaker going? Barely works.

Remember, a pacemaker that doesn't work 1% of the time doesn't work. Specs are different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's the most important lesson...

This kind of starving crowd is rare and you should expecting it to be rare. That's why people are willing to pay you millions of dollars if you find one.

If you find a truly hot market, it can be worth billions and most any idiot can make a lot of money in a hot market. If you are good, all the better.

But remember, it's rare and hard to find. Assume that 99.5% of all businesses aren't in that kind of market situation.

</comment><comment><USER7> I like the idea of someone hitting themselves on the head with a brick to put out a fire, and a brick salesman getting excited

</comment><comment><USER8> Hey folks - this is Michael from YC - happy to hear your thoughts on the post

<comment><USER9> It's a charming ideal that I think is vanishingly rare in real life. I also can't see how the hair on fire thing fits with any of the top startups and ex startups I know. In fact I dare say the rapidly rising user count is a separate story from the hair on fire story. The hair on fire tends to be a specialty business problem and still, against all reason, tends to require a pretty rigorous sales cycle. The problems I work on, making the medical record discrete data is of this kind. The other kind is more like Google, Facebook, Uber, AirBnB and those were surprises because no one's hari was on fire. We didn;t know we wanted that stuff until we saw it and then we wanted more and more.

In summary, I guess I disagree with the whole thing

<comment><USER8> I know about Airbnb personally and it started with a hair on fire problem - <USER2> design conference where all the hotel rooms in the city where sold out. Brian and Joe hosted attendees in their apartment on air beds. That sounds like a hair on fire problem and a brick solution :)

<comment><USER9> I see your point but that implies that on rare occasions hotels are sold out at a specific time and place. I don't think that is the problem AirBnB solves

<comment><USER10> I'm wondering if this may dovetail with another piece of common YC advice, "start by going narrow & deep".

I didn't start using AirBnB until 2013, and I used them because they were remarkably polished and made the experience super-easy. They weren't at all a "hair on fire" problem _for me_.

But I could imagine that at some point in time, there was a group of people who were so desperate for a place to stay that they'd crash on a couple of airbeds at a stranger's place. And that gave those strangers the idea that maybe this was something worth looking into and investing time into perfecting.

The importance of that initial core group of users may be _feedback_. I've had to give up startup ideas because I launch them and then there is literally nobody who cares. And then with no users, there are no guideposts as to which direction to improve the product in. It's all guesswork, and random ideas don't have a particularly high chance of success.

This may also dovetail with the known advantage that you get from solving your own problem. If it's your own problem, then you know at least one person wants it, and you can use yourself for feedback on improving the product. Then hopefully once it's good enough for you, you can find some other folks that'll find it good enough to try out, and use their feedback to evolve the product.

<comment><USER11> Great write up. You hear many times the advice of getting MVP out and then "just" listen to your customers and the data. A lot of times, as you said, there is virtually nobody that cares and few feedback. You are just treading through a desert without nothing to guide you...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hey Michael, awesome piece! When I started my first company [that made serious revenue relative to other projects], I didn't spend any money until we actually had sales. Getting to product-market fit took awhile for us, as growing the brand and reputation just took time, but now it's an awesome machine that churns well with some spurts of oil here and there.

I think you're spot on with the half-baked, v1, imperfect solution. Currently trying to do the same with a new startup ([https://getbeau.com](https://getbeau.com)). Our v1 didn't do it for us, but we listened to the recurring feedback and just relaunched our v2 and are continuing to validate that the problem we solve for our customers is a serious (albeit first-world) problem.

</comment><comment><USER13> Incase of enterprise tech - finding repeatable pain across set of customers is a must. Solving one enterprises "hair on fire" problem is no guarantee of similar pain existing else where.

My observation from being in enterprise mobility market for 10 years - <USER3> one customer realizes hair on fire, many others are diabetic and don't feel the pain.

</comment><comment><USER14> Great article. Another good way we've had this explained is: if someone is in a burning building, you are the option of jumping out of the window.. There may be a 95% chance they will die, but they're in so much pain that they'll make the jump (even though they normally never would).

Do you think this is more geared for entry strategy (getting the tip of the spear in)? In an ideal world, you could find something where building a small quantum converges with solving this degree of pain.. though of course the stars do not always align that easily...

</comment><comment><USER15> I'd like to find more resources / books (I love audio books these days) that answer some of the questions at the bottom of Marc Andreesen's original post:

\- How exactly do you go about getting to product/market fit if you don't hit it right out of the gate

\- How do you know when to change strategy and go after a different market or build a different product?

Anyone have books on some of these mechanics?</comment>


Wi-Vi: See Through Walls with Wi-Fi Signals - <AUTHOR> http://people.csail.mit.edu/fadel/wivi/

<comment><USER2> Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5824286](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5824286)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4334264](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4334264)

I'm still waiting for someone to make an app that does this -- would it require linking 2 phones?

<comment><USER3> From what I recall when I skimmed the original paper, you would need more general hardware than the wifi chipset in a phone. Actually, that this says it uses wifi at all is a bit misleading. It happens to work on the same frequency bands that wifi uses, but their experiments did not actually use wifi hardware at all and actually used USRPs. Getting off the shelf wifi hardware to do the same would require firmware and drivers that allow raw access to the radio signals, which no cards I know of come even close to.

Additionally for their experiments they needed at least five antenna, so even if it were going to happen with phones you'd probably need more than just two.

<comment><USER2> So it's like how Xbee radios use the Wifi radio frequency range, but use their own protocols and are actually 1-2 MHz off from Wifi?

Xbee hardware can be co-opted into Wifi transmission by an Arduino or more powerful processor: [https://github.com/cjbearman/xbee-wifi-spi- arduino](https://github.com/cjbearman/xbee-wifi-spi-arduino)

I wonder if Xbee devices would be more suitable to this task.

<comment><USER4> Actually that driver is specifically for 802.11 (wifi) XBee modules like these: [http://www.digikey.com/product-highlights/us/en/digi- interna...](http://www.digikey.com/product-highlights/us/en/digi- international-xbee-wi-fi/108)

It does not cause 2.4Ghz 802.15.4 XBee modules to act like a normal wifi (802.11) chipset.

Just an FYI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Combating reflections (hence multipath) from moving objects is precisely the reason Wireless LANs use orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (implemented with an FFT). The environment leaves its imprint on the received signal and depending on your point of view: communications or radar, that imprint is either information to be retrieved (radar) or eliminated (communications).

If you look at one of the early WLAN papers [1] (I'm an author), Figure 1(b) shows a frequency selective fade, meaning there is a dip, or null, in the received signal and some of the frequencies are missing. The way we created that null was by a person walking through the room. With a change of emphasis in the signal processing, a WLAN is a very good person detector.

[1] [http://wireless.ece.ufl.edu/twong/Preprints/00566198.pdf](http://wireless.ece.ufl.edu/twong/Preprints/00566198.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER6> RF and EE here. This is nothing new. Or at least a motivated junior/senior in college would stumble upon this simple application of wave propagation theory pretty early on.

<comment><USER7> This is notable because it's an actual implemented system. Yes it works in theory, on the exact same principle that a radar speed gun works, but these researchers have shown that it is possible to implement in the 2.4GHz band. That's the first step to making it smaller and cheaper.

<comment><USER6> If you think this hasn't been cheaply implemented before then you're behind research in wave propagation brother. Search on IEEE if you're interested.

<comment><USER8> I know there has been tons of see-thru-the-walls work done over many years... But that used UWB and required specialized equipment and antennas, IIRC, whereas this uses "commodity" USRPs. Could you provide examples of the type of work you're talking about?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This looks like it would make an excellent spying tool, if there isn't already a similar device available.

<comment><USER10> Great, now the NSA not only can snoop on my emails but use my wifi hotspot to watch me too.

<comment><USER11> Given that secure buildings typically lack windows or have RF shielding on the windows, I'm sure this sort of capability has been around for a long time.

Example: [https://www.astic.com/sdfilms.php](https://www.astic.com/sdfilms.php)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I can see this being used for security. Imagine replacing passive IR motion detectors in the home with this!

<comment><USER7> The only advantage I can think of for this is that it could be concealed in the wall, where a passive IR motion detector requires a clear field-of-view of a room. The downside is that this is actively emitting microwave radiation, so it would be easy to detect, while a passive IR sensor would not be emitting any discernible radiation (assuming its internal electronics are properly shielded)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> why can it detect humans and not other moving objects?

knowing how many people on the other side of the wall will change our sense of privacy

<comment><USER7> The linked article and video never said that it wouldn't work on non-human moving objects, just that it _would_ work on moving humans (as it is a wireless relative-motion detector)

It is possible that this tech is especially effective at tracking humans due to the fact that we're bags of mostly water and the specific frequency used interacts with water more than other nearby frequencies. (I'm not a microwave engineer, so I don't know this for sure)

<comment><USER6> You are correct. We can determine what an object is made out of or at least behaves like based on the reflected EM waves. Every piece of matter has an associated electric permittivity and permeability. These can, and often do, change with temperature and the other environmental variables.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> seems like something the CIA science directorate could have come up with, but never released to the public

</comment><comment><USER15> Put a SICP tent in your room (:</comment>


Tricks That Can Outsmart Deepfake Videos for Now - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/these-new-tricks-can-outsmart-deepfake-videosfor-now/ <comment><USER2> It's really silly how people are worried about this like it's a looming legal crisis. Have you seen the types of videos that are used in courts? They're grainy, CCTV footage with a trusted chain of custody. It's not like they take footage from some random guy that shows a convincing, perfectly clear face.

Deepfakes will have the same impact on law enforcement as convincing photoshopped pictures before. Which is to say absolutely no impact.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure why the below comment is dead - it's a valid point. My worry regarding deepfake videos is their political and social consequences

<comment><USER4> Exactly -- many assertions fall very far from being prosecutable but can be enormously disruptive socially.

See the recent SCOTUS nominations for an example.

... and that's in a modern well-educated society.

In countries that are riven by sectarian and tribal rivalries, a convincing video can result in the deaths of millions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One technique I haven't seen mentioned would be to take advantage of the fact that the world is 3D but neural networks that make fake videos are somewhat fundamentally 2D. Making good 3D computer graphics is hard and involves a lot of lighting calculations that are very different from what neural networks do. It seems like it should be possible to detect the errors that a neural network will introduce that will make the scene unphysical, at least in cases where more is modified than just small bits of geometry like the position of someone's lips and other facial features.

<comment><USER6> If you can write a function to quantify those errors, then you can use it to train the neural networks that produce the deepfakes. The better your error function, the better the deepfakes.

<comment><USER7> Is that always true ? I know nothing about AI whatsoever but wouldn't the function have to satisfy certain properties for a NN to be able to learn from it? Properties that the discussed "3D verifier function " wouldn't necessarily have?

It sounds very much like complexity theory, where you definitely have problems that are easier to verify than solve (see NP hard).

(Otherwise I could do stuff like use a hash function to train a NN to compute input for hashes , for example, no?)

<comment><USER6> _It sounds very much like complexity theory, where you definitely have problems that are easier to verify than solve (see NP hard)._

I think you mean NP. NP hard includes problems that are not in NP, such as the halting problem.

I'm not aware of any proof that photorealistic 3D rendering is in NP. If it is not, then verifying 3D cannot be said to be _easy_.

<comment><USER8> Nitpicking on your nitpick: you mean NP-complete, not NP (for instance, any P problem is an NP problem, but NP-complete problems are probably not P)

<comment><USER9> You're correct, but I'm gonna have to nitpick your nitpick and say that NP- complete problems have not been proven (or disproven) to be in P. "Probably not" is an opinion.

<comment><USER10> It's a well-informed opinion that is based on the fact that what we do know indicates[1] that, probably, P≠NP.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem#Reasons_to...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem#Reasons_to_believe_P_%E2%89%A0_NP)

<comment><USER9> Publish a paper with the mathematical proof. "probably not" is neither here nor there.

The main argument from your link is nobody has found an efficient algorithm for any of the 3,000+ studied problems after all this time.

And yet it's also true that in the same span of time, nobody has been able to prove the that it's not, either. No matter how hard they have tried.

"probably not" is just an opinion. I'll wait for the formal proof. Till then it simply is not known whether or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What about using the video magnification technique to detect fakes? I'm guessing, in the same vain that the training dataset doesn't have blinking, it probably doesn't have a regular heartbeat.

This is the technique I'm thinking about [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9ASH8IBJ2U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9ASH8IBJ2U)

Perhaps you need a high framerate in order for this to work?

<comment><USER12> Extracting heart beats from video with this technique only works reliably if the target is almost stationary, so a high framerate would help. However, high framerate requires bright lighting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > MediFor started in 2016 when the agency saw the fakery game leveling up. The > project aims to create an automated system that looks at three levels of > tells, fuses them, and comes up with an "integrity score" for an image or > video.

That seems iffy. The problem with any automated system is that it can be used as an input into the training process. Things like matching weather reports to lighting sound more promising, because they'd require the manipulator to be more detailed in the data they collect, but that kind of thing also sounds a lot less reliable as an indicator.

</comment><comment><USER14> If one wants the content of this article in podcast format, the researcher was interviewed in one of the latest episodes of Data Skeptic (an excellent pod cast, by the way): [https://dataskeptic.com/blog/episodes/2018/deepfakes](https://dataskeptic.com/blog/episodes/2018/deepfakes)

</comment><comment><USER15> The thing about video authentication is that any algorithm that can classify videos into "real" and "fake" categories can serve as an input to a GAN that makes more convincing videos. Any fake-detection oracle is in fact a valuable training apparatus, and distributing the things will quickly backfire.

"So", you might suggest, "let's keep the classifiers secret and only reveal specific classifications to the public! The learning rate at one example of day would be terrible." Sure, this approach would stop adversarial classifiers acting as training aides, but such a thing would be socially useless, since nobody would have a reason to trust your pronouncements.

I don't think there's a way anyone wins here. The end game is that we return to an almost 19th century model in which recorded media takes on a faded secondary role relative to in-person experience and trusted commentary. (And don't expect anyone to agree on who's "trusted".)

<comment><USER16> > don't expect anyone to agree on who's 'trusted'

This has always been the case. I personally have issues with almost every major news outlet recently. Not just bias but blatant one-sided partisan reporting by nearly every actor. Not taking a side (nobody even remotely spoke to my values or concience) this election really opened my eyes. Both sides hatefully attacking each other for being hateful, and using that to justify further hate (of hate, so its cool, we arent all bigots right? Right!?) of the other 'side'. Neither side will even give the benefit of a doubt that what the other side does is in good faith with their values. It was kinda funny when drunk sports fans duked it out over forgone alegences to groups that don't know they exist, but its happening in casual social situations more and more. How much more of this before our own beerhall putsch moments begin? I digress...

Trust is already a fickle beast. Bloomberg is wrestling with it now, no matter their rigour. Personally, I think it might be a choice, by prompting either a culture of verification and lockdown (modern china), or implied common trust in an ideal but uncertainty (i.e. early usa). Both have huge advantages, injustices, and liabilities. It seems we have approached a middle ground with few of the perks of either and many of the disadvantages to both. Perhaps there is a better way moving forward. I am personally partial to 'dangerous' freedom, over 'safe' subjugation, in all cases. As such, my values my differ may from the mean. Such a system implies personal agency, which is rejected by the popular dogmatic fatalism of 'post-meritocracy'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> How long until we get a deepfake filter option when shooting video, that then gives you plausible deniability should your sex tape leak..

<comment><USER18> That sounds useful for making porn to sell, but what is the point of making your _own_ sextape if you can't tell it's you on it? There is already loads of porn...

<comment><USER19> I suspect GP means a filter that makes the video appear to have the hallmarks of a deep fake without actually changing the apparent participants.

<comment><USER17> Exactly

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Photoshop has been around forever but I can't remember a time any forgery caused an issue publically.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, this is why I'm not worried one iota about deepfakes. Say what you will about fake news, but blantant lies like a faked video or image generally does not get through journalistic filters. Something big like a fake video of a celebrity or a president would very unlikely be published (and if it grew viral through some disingenuous source, its spread would be severely dampened by trusted newssites warning the public not to believe it). I mean just look at the subsequent backlash after oobah butler's pranks. Sure, his prank fooled the news, but it's effects were totally nil in the long-term steady state.

<comment><USER22> Depends how good the journalistic filters are. Would these deepfakes get through the ones for the New York Times or BBC or Telegraph? Maybe not, but I have no doubt they'd fool the tabloid papers, especially given how low the standards are for stuff like the Sun/Daily Mirror/Daily Star/etc. They'd also likely fool quite a few specialist sites too, especially given the likes of the gaming press have very low standards for credible sources or evidence. People on Twitter have fooled them with blurry cellphone photos on a semi regular basis.

But it definitely depends on the news source and how thorough they are with verifying stories.

<comment><USER21> Sure, but I still don't see why we should be hysterically scared about its development since I think photoshopped images would have made the same damage a long time ago if the system was really that fragile. The fact that photoshopped images aren't nearly as big a threat as what we're expecting deepfakes to be makes me think that however the set of amplifiers and filters are configured (and I'll admit that I don't have a full understanding of it all), it's likely that they're sufficient to not make society collapse once the technology has matured.

Photoshopped images are a sort of "trial balloon" which has already proven that the system is pretty dang robust, that's my thesis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I have a feeling there will always be a way to detect trace footprints of a 'fake' but assuming the technology is perfected, what is the best way to verify that a Deepfake video is not you without analyzing the video?

Thinking on this I feel like the future might require that we record our every move via some sort of verified GPS service so that you can corroborate your whereabouts. Maybe their service comes with a video recording device that can show no, 'at this date + time client was at a McDonalds drive through at 41°24'12.2"N 2°10'26.5"E here is a 452 second video of their engagement' which would overlap the supposed Deepfake timeline/video

Thoughts?

I imagine if the service is publicly trusted/credible then it would not need to expose the actual details of the client's whereabouts, it could just issue a true/false verification on a Deepfake based on the data held privately.

<comment><USER24> I imagine it would work the same as any other information today, like press releases. Who is the source? Where did they get it from? Do I have any reason to doubt them?

Ie, the end of "trusting" videos from unknown sources with unknown reputations and agendas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The obvious worry about this technology is disinformation being spread, misrepresenting who people are and what they have done or said. But it also gives everyone deniability. If someone catches a powerful person assaulting someone, and actually has a video of it, they can just say it was a really good fake. How can we know?

<comment><USER8> Trust journalists with a good track record, which is the way we as a society decide whether whistle blowers are to be believed. I get that we tech people dislike relying on humans, and the libertarian among us feel particularly uncomfortable trusting the media, but there are professional investigative journalists that have dedicated their lives to making the world a better place by uncovering the truth. And they have had to deal with similar issues since forever (other types of forgeries have existed for a while).

We fight this by having less partisanship and stronger free press.

<comment><USER25> I would love this to be the case. My problem with this approach is that every single news report that I have actually had personal knowledge of has been ridiculously flawed. I just can't bring myself to believe that there is some protected elite cadre of journalists I should trust when 100% of my actual experience has been the opposite.

Their direct incentives are getting sales (and now clicks), which doesn't appear to be highly correlated with accuracy. Additionally, my experience in college was that it wasn't the best and the brightest going into that field, though I deeply hope that it was a skewed sample, and believe that there are many deeply intelligent people working there.

However, I think it likely that many people are not drawn to the field for the pursuit of pure objective truth, but because they have a particular agenda and want to enlighten the world with it.

There is a quote about a logical fallacy that I can't quite remember, it goes along the lines of the following: You read an article about something with which you are deeply familiar. You laugh to yourself at the childish misconceptions of the journalist. You then turn the page to something you know little about, and assume that everything that is written is true. That doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER8> You are talking about this anecdote [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell- Mann_amnesia_effect](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect)

And I partially agree! But do not throw out the baby with the bathwater! I am a physicist myself and have seen how the Gell-Mann effect has become less problematic over time, especially in respected journals that want to be taken seriously by scientists: Just make a decisive effort to 1) go out of your bubble and 2) learn about logical fallacies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This reminds me of the Star Trek episode where Data figures out his "mom" is an android because her blinking follows some mathematical pattern.

</comment><comment><USER27> Could not oursmart the non-clickable-on-smartphone subscription notification.

<comment><USER28> I used the Brave browser. No issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Why not cryptographically sign videos from officials?

<comment><USER15> Because the most politically salient and salacious videos are the ones not officially endorsed by their subjects.

<comment><USER29> They don't have to be. The reporter/agency could sign the video.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I wonder why they choose Obama and Hillary as examples for being deepfaked. Aren't they basically retired now?

</comment><comment><USER31> Couldn't this be solved with Blockchain Watermarking?

</comment><comment><USER32> Combat Deepfakes by doing original things regularly on your paid and/or public mediums that you incorporate randomly into new content. The fakes gotta play catch up due to training process. The more complex, subtle, and human, the better since they'll likely screw it up somehow. Just be an original, spontaneous (or more so) human from a source that people can verify.

The fakes will stand out. We'll all get more interesting celebrities. The celebrities will have more fun. Everybody wins... for a while. :)

</comment><comment><USER33> I get irritated seeing deep fake videos and articles, because my 2004 Master Thesis "Automated Actor Replacement in Filmed Media" details everything about how to make them, how to overcome all their integration with real media issues, as well as how to identify fakes. It further details how to integrate Deep Fake (I called them Personalized Videos) into the existing post production media industry, enabling large scale productions. I acquired a global patent, and tried to create a Personalized Advertising startup. Yet, back then, no one believed, thought it was fraud, and when they got it they hyper-focused on creating porn, which if they read my thesis turned business plan, I detail how porn is economically unprofitable as personalized videos.

I tried to prove my ideas by created a "vfx at the last mile" pipeline with a small investment round, enabling media agencies to create ad with you in the Domino's pizza or rental car advertisement. It worked, feature film quality. Still they did not believe, or hyper-focused on porn.

I went bankrupt, closed, and went to work in Facial Recognition, where my skills are recognized. The personal one-to-one treatment I received when pitching to entertainment studios versus that of silicon valley VCs is worthy of a book; I have zero respect for VC now: of hundreds of personal interactions, one and only one was not a social climbing, rich parents moron.

<comment><USER34> > It worked, feature film quality.

Link to examples, otherwise your comment just reads like crankery.

By the way, I googled "Automated Actor Replacement in Filmed Media" and I couldn't find your Master's thesis. I could only find posts by you on HN, Quora, and other sites.

<comment><USER35> Not the OP but I found this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GnIVWEAPus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GnIVWEAPus)

<comment><USER36> [https://youtu.be/1GnIVWEAPus?t=38](https://youtu.be/1GnIVWEAPus?t=38)

Ah yes, feature film quality. For values of 'feature film' that approximately equal 'late-night comedy show where moving lips are overlaid on a still image'.

<comment><USER33> No, actual feature film VFX quality, which requires a VFX budget and is not created trivially. Any studio or production facility we negotiated vetted the process and understood it's viability. The process was used in dozens of VFX films, but as a one off technique, where the process could just as easily have been used to actor replace anyone. You see, that is somewhat the key the process, because it is successful regardless of who is being inserted into the media, it grants an amount of freedom, or casual attitude for the production artists who used to view actor replacement as a difficult, time consuming challenge.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/09/19/how-harvard-helps-its-richest-and-most-arrogant-students-get-ahead/ <comment><USER3> I was a TA at Yale when I did my PhD there and I contrast that experience to when I was a TA at University of Calgary. Whether it's a higher sense of entitlement or just grinding it out to maximize your official grade the contrast between these two schools was striking. At Yale you'd better think twice about honest grading because if you did there would be an army at your door with pitchforks ready. You then have to spend hours explaining why they didn't deserve a higher grade. At the end of the day you're worn down and there's very little incentive to grade honestly as you get pain nearly nothing and you're really there to finish your PhD.

<comment><USER4> The problem is when the grades given on assignments influence what goes on your final exam papers.

At a university, only the final exam should count. This way you can give honest feedback, and the student doesn't feel obligated to point out every little mistake to try to make you change your decision. It also allows them to misunderstand things at first, but then 'get' it later.

Of course universities don't like this, since they don't consider students mature enough that they do the homework if it doesn't "count".

<comment><USER5> Really? Spreading grades out among various assignments and tests is how I managed to pass university (I coincidentally also attended the University of Calgary, hi rdlecler1!). I would have imploded if it all came down to a single giant exam. Why the heck would you want academic achievement to come down to a handful of hours of actual performance? What goal does that serve? University isn't the Olympics.

<comment><USER6> The true answer is: No grades should matter except the final exam and _you should be able to take the final exam as many times as you want._ (With a reasonable minimum period between retakes, possibly increasing each time.)

If you take AC motors, and fail, and study your ass off and six months later can pass it with 100%, shouldn't that really be... your actual grade? Isn't a grade supposed to represent your ability and understanding of a topic?

And then almost magically: health problems, study problems, (most) test anxiety, and other problems no longer actually matter.

<comment><USER5> A grade is supposed to represent your ability and understanding of a topic, but that's only half the equation. Are exams an adequate proxy for ability and understanding of a topic? They aren't for me. When I want to understand something, I create something which requires and demonstrates that understanding - this could be a Wikipedia article, a piece of software, or a lecture. Nothing of value is demonstrated by sitting down for a few hours under extreme pressure and regurgitating my "understanding".

<comment><USER7> I've never understood how someone could master a topic yet could not answer questions about it. I know from my own personal experience that when I bombed an exam, it's because I simply did not understand the material. When I did well on an exam, I had corresponding confidence that I understood it.

<comment><USER5> It is the difference between knowing "given a task in this knowledge area, I can accomplish it" and uselessly loading up on all that information to perform in a purely artificial situation the likes of which is never seen again.

<comment><USER8> So, good preparation for how interviews work, then?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article ends with:

It's a system that polishes privilege, its byproduct a contempt for earned authority. Many of the people who started with this attitude had it ratified and encouraged by perhaps the most prestigious university in the world — and _now_ they're running the whole show.

Emphasis on _now_ added.

Who in their right mind thinks people who attend Harvard and a handful of other elite universities and prep schools haven't been running the whole show since before the American Revolution?

See for example:

[https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/11/obama- joins-l...](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/11/obama-joins-list- of-seven-presidents-with-harvard-degrees/)

<comment><USER10> Is Harvard really considered more prestigious than Oxford or Cambridge? That doesn't follow my perception.

<comment><USER11> Oxbridge have an average acceptance rate of 18% for undergrads. Harvard is 6%. Assuming similar applicant pools, many who got rejected by Harvard would have been accepted at Oxbridge.

Obviously that's only one measure of prestige.

<comment><USER12> That's a major assumption. Another major assumption overlooked is that those capable of admission don't want to attend these schools.

Low hanging fruit would be diehard applicants to MIT, Caltech, or the Service Academies

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here's a working link: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/0...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/09/19/how- harvard-helps-its-richest-and-most-arrogant-students-get-ahead/)

The article is short, and only uses an anecdote to support its claim. While I can generally agree that places like Harvard work more in connections, networks, and money than intellectual rigor, the article is too short and missing enough detail to fall flat.

<comment><USER14> As a former undergrad, the points about grade inflation are 100% correct, and everything else is garbage.

> Many of the better-off young people at Harvard appeared to require intense > favoritism to reassure them, perhaps because of the less-moneyed achievement > and potential that loomed all around. Though some of the anointed developed > their capabilities to the full, the institutional imperative to establish a > hierarchy between them and us took precedence.

This is just utter nonsense. There are a _lot_ of very legitimate ways that the school favors its privileged students (self selecting social clubs with dues, the disaster that is on campus dining, not subsidizing a whole lot of expenses that they ought to, forcing students on financial aid to work for the school, etc.) but the insinuation that the professors and other teachers at the school systematically favor privileged students in some sort of effort to reaffirm social hierarchy is totally unsubstantiated, and, quite frankly, a disgusting and slanderous accusation. I didn't like all (or even necessarily most) my professors/advisers/TAs that much, but I am honestly outraged on their behalf after reading this.

<comment><USER15> I've heard first hand stories from friends who did their undergrad at Harvard that spoke to favoritism. One is: while playing rugby, a friend tackles another student. The coach pulls my friend aside and tells him to stop "hitting so hard" (my friend is an average to below average sized guy). Puzzled, my friend asks why, to which the coach replies, "think about the kid's name."

He was a Kennedy.

<comment><USER16> Interestingly, I think that story can be interpreted different ways. One interpretation is that the coach knew that if he actually caused an injury, it might come back at him in interesting ways. You can either interpret it as the coach protecting the elite, or the coach protecting the non-elite, depending on your view.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Harvard's graduation rate is 97.5%. Yale 97%. Princeton 96.9%. It's _hard_ to flunk out of the Ivy League.

Non Ivy League highly selective schools: Caltech 92.3%. Stanford 93%. MIT 92.2%. UC Berkeley: 90.9%. Low 90% success rate is normal there.

<comment><USER18> It could also be at least partly related to higher selectivity and more financial aid, and/or rich parents, that make school easier.

But I dont actually know what goes on in ivy and off ivy league elite schools.

Also consider that these may just be better run schools which also provide more and more useful assistance to students.

Edit: I would like to add I think this article title is extremely clickbaity, and plays on the recently resurgent class warfare phenomenon. It pains me that articles like this, from sources like this, are becoming normalized and even acceptable on HN. There's no merit to this biased pile of shit. And I'm not an ivy league graduate having a security crisis. Journalism should be objective.

<comment><USER19> _There 's no merit to this biased pile of shit._

You may no particularly like the author's point of view -- but you looked carefully, you might have noticed it was placed in he "Perspective" section, which as the name implies, is dedicated to expressing what are commonly known as "points of view" \-- otherwise known as "biases". Which, forming the very core of our cognitive processes as they do, are very far from _flaws_ \-- an in fact, when used properly, not just useful, but absolutely crucial to one's survival in this murky, deeply ambiguous and ambivalent world of ours.

And at least the author gave _some_ supporting observations to back up their (clearly labeled as such) point of view. OTOH the sentence you're offering above provides no insights or justifications; it is, quite literally, a pure expletive.

 _Journalism should be objective._

Should it, now?

 _"So much for Objective Journalism. Don 't bother to look for it here--not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms."_

\-- Hunter S Thompson

<comment><USER18> The fact that journalists are inherently biased as humans does not imply that we should not strive toward the opposite.

I dont care either way for the author's point of view. I am bothered by the fact that a news source publishes so much in opinion, and that people end up more polarized after the article, not because of its factual content, but because of its vitriol.

I believe it irresponsible to create and publish content like this, because it amounts to propaganda - I dont care side of our false dichotomy you are on, huff post is up there with breibart.

Opinion pieces should not affect our beliefs as much as they do, but let's be real, communities feed off of opinion pieces. We all do, and I come to HN specifically to minimize my exposure to feel good emotional reinforcement that leads to irrational thinking.

Sorry for the rant.

Edit: your choice of quote may be more effective than you realize, I am a big fan of Thompson's persona. Ironic, I know.

<comment><USER19> I think I get where you're coming from. But I didn't see the piece as 'vitriol', and I don't see HuffPo (while often annoying) as being anything like Breitbart (which puts out nothing but pure drivel and propaganda). Or the WaPo as comparable to either of those two.

 _Sorry for the rant._

Nothing to be sorry for; you're just being honest (both intellectually and in your opinions). And HST himself would probably agree that that's all that matters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The silliness, of course, is that if you are among the "elite" and "privileged" going to an Ivy League school, nobody is going to give a shit about your grades anyway. Your career and success is already pre-ordained. Why on earth would you bother arguing with your professor that your "A-" should be an "A"? You're going to go to work at your daddy's investment bank after you graduate either way! You think big name banks and consulting firms are going to say "Gee.. he's a Kennedy, but his grades are so bad! We can't bring him in." Just party and get C's and D's--you're already set for life.

<comment><USER21> While I didn't go to an Ivy, that's clearly not true. Do you honestly think Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Goldman, law schools, medical schools, etc., are going to accept you if you have poor grades? Not everyone can count on "daddy".

<comment><USER22> Yes, at least for the tech companies. Grades are irrelevant at FB/MS/Google.

<comment><USER21> Again, I have no anecdotal experience, but I have a hard time believing that the new hires for those 3 companies are anything but students from top-tier colleges with near perfect grades. To be fair, I'm sure a couple of years of work experience and they probably don't care as much.

<comment><USER23> You might be surprised. Don't take my word for it, take Laszlo's: [http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/09/technology/google-people- las...](http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/09/technology/google-people-laszlo- bock/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Full Disclosure: I work at an Ivy League institution, but not with undergrads, nor is teaching my primary job.

I also went to another Ivy League school, many years ago. I wasn't well off, but I wasn't struggling to pay for school, either. I can tell you for a fact that the pandering to student complaints described in the article wasn't the case when I was in school, but that was many years ago.

I TA'd while in grad school last century, at the University of Michigan, and I've TA'd recently at my Ivy League university's extension school, where endowments aren't a consideration. I can tell you that we get FAR more requests for grade adjustments now then we got we got decades ago. That seems to me to be as much a function of the change in the students over time as the change in institutional finance. What's surprising to me, though, is that even in an extension school, instructors STILL entertain and indulge what I would consider frivolous student regrade requests, as described in the article - even without the monetary drivers the article's author ascribes to the Harvard instructors.

So, why do professors pander to students' regrading requests, even if there is no apparent monetary motive? I believe that the cause is the rise in "instructor review" websites, and the easy communication between students. If an instructor is rated poorly by students, his class enrollments drop. If an instructor's enrollments drop too far, and they aren't tenured, they may be asked to find employment elsewhere.

So, while the monetary motive may be there, there is also the "popularity" motive. Word about poor or overly strict instructors travels very quickly among a student body. If students don't have to take a class from an instructor they feel is too strict or a poor lecturer, they won't. It's the economics of the instructor market, not the university endowment, that I feel is often the motivating factor behind pandering to students

</comment><comment><USER25> Cultivating this attitude in future leaders does in fact seem to help them gain power. I think it ties in with the need for A) impeccable credentials and B) the ability to cavalierly invite the CEO, world leader, whomever, to play golf.

In some people we call it charisma, in others we call it entitlement. I'm starting to wonder if it's not only the person we describe, but also our own position and personal knowledge of them that influence the decision on which one to call it.

<comment><USER17> _the ability to cavalierly invite the CEO, world leader, whomever, to play golf._

"There is no door in this entire country that cannot be opened by a Choate graduate." \- Choate fund-raising director.[1]

[1] [https://books.google.com/books?id=Fw4nkhf_6lMC&pg=PA109&lpg=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=Fw4nkhf_6lMC&pg=PA109&lpg=PA109)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm working on an edtech startup and with it I've been spending a lot of time at Princeton University. From my experience with Princeton, Ivy League school are VERY overt about promoting elitism within their communities. I understand the thought behind it but a lot of these students are in for a rude awakening when they go work for an investment bank and find out that their Ivy League elitism means nothing if they can't produce in the workplace.

<comment><USER27> Well, I think what's more likely is these people will be fine since most jobs are obtained primarily based on prestige and connections, and keeping an elite job once you have it just requires minimal competence. The more elite your job, the less you are punished when you fail (CEOs, for example, get bonuses when they fail). The people who are in for a rude awakening are those that think working hard and being very smart at a decent school will get them anything close to what C students from ivies waltz into without trying once they hit the working world. Remember, the C business students are the boss, A engineering students are the employees is the general rule of thumb.

<comment><USER28> I agree with you to an extent. It's my experience in engineering that you can start a company alone based on your specialized skills. I'm not sure you can do that on business skills alone. I suppose it depends on what path you want to take.

<comment><USER27> Agreed -- though for many businesses you need capital. Engineering students by and large are far less likely to have it, students rarely go to engineering school and work that hard if they know they will inherit wealth or a business. Software is something of an exception to that rule, though not completely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Do enough people really have a subscription to the Washington Post? Or is this trending purely because a lot of people agree with the opinionated title?

<comment><USER30> I canceled mine because they use outbrain but it hasn't expired yet.

<comment><USER31> What's out brain and what's wrong with it?

<comment><USER32> Outbrain is the source of the "from around the web" advertising links at the bottom of news articles. They're generally just ads for diet pills and the like, disguised as other news stories.

Other similar vendors of the same kind of service are Taboola and Lockerdome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I had a different experience at an Ivy, but I'm not rich. Wouldn't say arrogant either, although I should probably leave that up to others to judge.

My point is that "rich" and "arrogant" are key words here. Such people tend to get preferential treatment in our society, at Harvard and elsewhere. It's hardly specific to Harvard.

</comment><comment><USER34> This calls to mind the amusing Harvey Mansfield, who used to be the only "conservative" (arguable) professor in the government dept. (I missed him in my time there epochs ago.)

He gave two grades, the official, inflated, career-preserving grade, and the real (his true assessment) grade. You could come ask him for the real grade if you wanted to know the awful truth. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER35> Cornell wasn't like this... (at least in the 90s).

3.2 would get you on dean's list.

There were freshman weed-out courses to winnow out dumb and lazies.

I remember getting D+ on a paper that nearly gave me a stroke, and professor stood by it. Asked TA to re-grade it and gave me the same grade.

Some guy in my dorm got a letter from school with threat of expulsion if he didn't improve his 1.7 GPA, after just 1 tough semester.

I once made the mistake of taking a comp sci course as an elective where most of the students were comp sci majors and already new the materials. Never went to so many TA office hours in my life, just to get B+.

</comment><comment><USER36> Likely the intended URL is:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/0...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/09/19/how- harvard-helps-its-richest-and-most-arrogant-students-get-ahead/)

Also important to note is that it's apparently an opinion piece.

</comment><comment><USER24> Full Disclosure: I work at an Ivy League institution, but not with undergrads, nor is teaching my primary job.

I also went to another Ivy League school, many years ago. I wasn't well off, but I wasn't struggling to pay for school, either. I can tell you for a fact that the pandering to student complaints described in the article wasn't the case when I was in school, but that was many years ago.

I TA'd while in grad school last century, at the University of Michigan, and I've TA'd recently at my Ivy League university's extension school, where endowments aren't a consideration. I can tell you that we get FAR more requests for grade adjustments now then we got we got decades ago. That seems to me to be as much a function of the change in the students over time as the change in institutional finance. What's surprising to me, though, is that even in an extension school, instructors STILL entertain and indulge what I would consider frivolous student regrade requests, as described in the article - even without the monetary drivers the article's author ascribes to the Harvard instructors.

So, why do professors pander to students' regrading requests, even if there is no apparent monetary motive? I believe that the cause is the rise in "instructor review" websites, and the easy communication between students. If an instructor is rated poorly by students, his class enrollments drop. If an instructor's enrollments drop too far, and they aren't tenured, they may be asked to find employment elsewhere.

So, while the monetary motive may be there, there is also the "popularity" motive. Word about poor or overly strict instructors travels very quickly among a student body. If students don't have to take a class from an instructor they feel is too strict or a poor lecturer, they won't. It's the economics of the instructor market, not the university endowment, that I feel is often the motivating factor behind pandering to students.

<comment><USER37> dupe

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Link had a bad char at the end:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/0...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/09/19/how- harvard-helps-its-richest-and-most-arrogant-students-get-ahead)

</comment><comment><USER39> There is a recurring theme of incentives becoming out of alignment with purpose. This happens in business, medicine, government...

It's become a real focus for me, and CEOs should consider this very carefully. What are the company's goals, really, and are the incentives offered, all the way from the janitors up to their own compensation, in alignment with those goals?

The professor stated blatantly: The students are paying too much for us to fail them. Said another way: The students bought their grades.

Does anyone have knowledge of incentive structures at universities that they'd defend as being in strong alignment with the goal of turning out the best educated students? What was that incentive structure?

</comment><comment><USER19> The original title was way better. It may have sounded a bit splashy - <USER2> wasn't out of line with the overall narrative of the article.

And there's certainly no need to soft-peddle Harvard's moral and intellectual cowardice, as revealed in this episode.

</comment><comment><USER40> It's an interesting _anecdote_ , but makes conclusions about the _aggregate_. Give me almost any university, and with time I could probably find at least one story like this.

I'm not saying it isn't true, just that this evidence is weak.

</comment><comment><USER41> I didn't go to Harvard and I'll freely admit that when I come across Harvard people, they are as a general pool, stunningly impressive in whatever discipline they are in.

<comment><USER42> A Harvard MBA once told me that going from zero to ten is a 1000% increase. I was not impressed.

Also, George W Bush.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> This article has very little basis in reality based on my experience at Harvard as an undergrad and at Princeton as a grad student and TA.

Yes, students are arrogant and push for grades quite a bit. But I saw zero evidence of systemic catering to them as a whole or to any specific sub- population. I imagine the Development Office (the folks who would cater to the ultra powerful) _may_ get involved in extreme cases? But it would be a huge to-do among the faculty (tenured faculty at Harvard and most elite institutions are incredibly powerful) and I never heard of it happening.

As an undergrad, I pressed for grade changes twice and was denied, reasonably, both times. As a TA at Princeton I was often pressed for grade changes and all were denied.

What almost certainly happened in this person's case is that the Professors either a) weren't tenured and couldn't bother with student push-back given a sea of work and anxiety (or mistakenly thought student perceptions matter), or b) were tenured and didn't care to deal with student push-back.

<comment><USER44> When you say "very little basis in reality", you mean "disagrees with my own experience". The difference between those two phrases isn't subtle. The author is relating their own actual experience teaching at Harvard, and the directly related experiences of other teachers.

<comment><USER45> The parent is relating their own actual experience to you. Which you chose to believe is more a product of confirmation bias than reality. The author of the article, so I'll be generous and suggest she liberally is using poetic license with the truth to make a point. Do you really believe this is how the supposed incident happened? "Then, in front of the student, he pressed me to explain the reason for my poor teaching."

<comment><USER28> If the student was well-connected, and the professor was worried about their position (nontenured) and did not find arguing worth the hassle - then yes, why not? Doesn't sound that surprising.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> First world problems...

</comment><comment><USER47> That was an... interesting read. Some comments:

1\. I imagine the author just became a PNG in terms of faculty hiring at any elite university. There's no way I would hire her due to what I consider her tone deaf response to her experiences.

2\. The only potentially misleading part was the professor talking about grade inflation. Most people know that declarations like this are largely a formality -- grading hard creates nothing but trouble for no benefit but plenty of potential loss. Lost time dealing with complaints, fewer enrolled students/majors, lower ratings, etc.

3\. Most of the real insiders know that a "Harvard A" means nothing. Back it up with a good recommendation, and it starts to mean something. Note that there is a code in recommendation letters so that professors never need to be negative and expose themselves to lawsuits and/or criticism. "[student] took my class [class name] and got an A. All work was completed on time and met the high standards for an A that are set in my classes." translates to "OMG, stay away." On the other hand, the above with added specific examples about how the student exceled or showed exceptional promise are the premium recommendations.

4\. IMHO, fighting grade inflation is something best done in required courses or lower level courses. Grades for third year classes should err on the high side. I have seen this system work a lot. I have seen systems that did not do this founder frequently.

5\. This has nothing to do with privileged students -- they don't need great grades for jobs or grad school. Seriously. This probably does have more to do with arrogant students. My thought? So what? Educating arrogant students is collateral damage for (usually) having great peers and having access to great resources.

6\. There actually _are_ students at Harvard who are smart, humble, and work hard. In fact, there are quite a few of them. I personally would not let a few bad apples rain on my party.

7\. As far as passing someone who scored "in the teens" on a final, the so- called gentlemen's C is a real thing (especially in weeder courses). The best part of said C is that it usually keeps the student out of other courses (e.g., pre-med), so the pain of their presence usually stops there.

8 Lastly, not all students at elite schools are comparable to Guggenheim Fellows like the author. In fact, I usually say that only 20-30% of most students at elite schools would be widely considered impressive, "really smart", or "interesting" (my subjective view, but it is shared by many of my peers). Students at elite schools are not gods. A random individual from an elite school is not likely to be the smartest person you know -- not even close. I strongly suggest that people not kiss the asses of elite school students, and do due diligence just like they do with everyone else. That elite school degree may mean that there is a higher chance that the holder is exceptional, but it is nowhere near a guarantee.

Just my 2 cents....

</comment><comment><USER48> Page not found.</comment>


Facebook urged to pause Libra crypto-currency project - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48688359 <comment><AUTHOR> Just a public comment from Maxine Waters, but she is the chair of the House Financial Services Committee.</comment>


Ask HN: Recommended way to store financial time-series based data for trading? - <AUTHOR> I've been studying and experimenting with this as a hobby and want to get more serious now.
I've been storing using flat files but I now want to experiment with scaling out my ideas and infrastructure to collect my own data raw 24/7 across the globe.
I see various time series databases to use but this doesn't seem clear to me on a winner. I looked at influx, timeseriesdb, and various others. Most of them have material geared towards IoT and not much financial.
I've been considering a stack built entirely on GCP that looks roughly like:
regional injestor (compute) -> pub/sub -> Dataflow -> pub/sub -> firestore and BigQuery
The idea is to allow clients to subscribe to prebuilt aggregation metrics from dataflow/beam and optimize for latency cross-regionally. The automated rules at the most would need to react in seconds not milliseconds. I would be more than happy with a guaranteed rolling window of 5-15 seconds for my most time hungry decisions.
Basic aggregations: OHLC, stdev Advanced aggregations: values based on custom strategies that would be injected into the feed for a client (automated trading app) to consume and act on.
Is it crazy to do all the rolling window / strategy calculations in the airflow piece of the architecture or does that make more sense in comparison trying to compute it per client?
Visually I am imagining various signals/strategies would be separate airflow templates and a client would subscribe to whatever strategy it wants to use.
Thanks. <comment><USER2> As an alternative to rolling your own, you may be able to leverage IEX Cloud. Advantage is access to all high res trading data right on the platform ;)

[https://iexcloud.io/cloud-cache/](https://iexcloud.io/cloud-cache/)

[https://firstname.lastname@example.com/build-your-own-neural-network- sto...](https://email@example.com/build-your-own-neural-network-stock-market- prediction-model-on-gcp-c1fe07b1a87)

<comment><AUTHOR> I do want to roll my own for learning sake, I do fallback to iex when I need it for historical data and backtesting.

Did you write the medium article? I'm curious on the first leg of the architecture - cloud scheduler to cloud functions would only make sense for longer periods between injestion right? Something 24/7 would be most efficient on an instance running 24/7 via compute/kube/app engine since it's not request based right?

<comment><USER3> If you are interested in learning how to roll a timeseries database, and if you're not already familiar with it, I'd second the suggestions to try KDB/Q. Even if only to be inspired and understand what "good" looks like in this space.

I say this as someone who is generally averse to proprietary enterprise software. More often than not, it's a horrible pile of crap that's sold on the golf course, and there's almost always a path through open source and custom build that does an infinitely better job.

But, in the case of KDB, whilst it was pressed upon me in a former role of mine, I found it to be an _extremely_ impressive piece of tech once I got over the initial hurdles (my biases, and basics of Q). It's not without its warts, but the amount of power and expressivity it packs into a small number if chars is quite mind blowing. I watched other teams on flavour of the month tech struggle with queries over "millions" of rows, whilst our stack routinely served complex queries over billions of rows.

<comment><AUTHOR> What's the insertion capability on the freeware version? Does it handle event time ordering well for distributed injestion?

Appreciate the push.

It does look interesting. I like the idea of working with array native type construct as the mental model is very close to analyzing time series data for a strategy.

<comment><USER3> Ingest - the free version as I'm sure you're aware is 32bit only. So it is limited in how much data it can address. But the /rate/ of ingest I'd imagine is close to that of the 64bit, with the caveat that you'll hit the ceiling sooner (untested).

The system I was working with was ingesting in the order of 10s of millions of rows per day from multiple sources. This was obviously the 64bit version.

Also if you do plan on using it for anything beyond tinkering and personal research I'd review the licensing. I'm not too sure what is and isn't allowed.

Time ordering - yes. The typical architecture of a production system in KDB will have something called a Tickerplant (TP), a process through which all updates must traverse. This will stamp its own timestamp on all the updates it receives.

So for time ordering - you can (1) use the TP timestamps, and/or (2) have your source nodes also provide a timestamp in their own column (eg sourceNodeTimestamp), and then you've got some means of detecting skew across your systems with comparisons to the TP timestamps. You could then order your data by whatever timestamp you want to use in your queries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How much data are we talking about here?

<comment><AUTHOR> Inserts would be in the hundreds to thousands max <10k a second tick data spread across <100 symbols. I generally only focus on 10 at a time but upscaling the window there for historical needs.

<comment><USER5> Where is your market data coming from? At that resolution I imagine you're paying for colocation?

<comment><AUTHOR> Coming from either the exchange and using the closest server to it based on latency tests (crypto) or from a provider for tick data (polygon, iex) but trying to move away from the providers and go more direct to source (easier with crypto right now).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> kdb/q

<comment><USER7> This comment might be more helpful if it mentioned why.

KDB is a database (with a query language, Q) written in K by Arthur Whitney. Arthur hails from the fintech sector and specifically designed these technologies to work efficiently on the types of problems described by OP.</comment></comment>


The Bitcoin Blocksize: A Summary - <AUTHOR> http://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=535 <comment><USER2> What's really interesting for me about the Blocksize Debate is what it reveals about Bitcoin's governance. Most of the people involved agree that the blocksize limit should be increased (with the notable exception of Peter Todd) and the main disagreement seems to be about _how_ (and how quickly) and the increase should happen.

There also seems to be a hint of power struggle in the backlash against Gavin's push to increase the limit to 8MB.

I personally believe that Bitcoin will need to evolve if it has any hope of surviving and maintaining its value. The fact that the core community appears to be having a tough time reaching consensus on this particular issue doesn't bode particularly well for the sort of changes that may be required in the future (e.g. changing the proof-of-work mechanism).

<comment><USER3> Read up on the history of Mike Hearn, he has wanted to fork Bitcoin into his own governance for years, this is just an excuse.

In 2011 he was proposing to Satoshi that he should take over the project[0], in 2013 he was trying to pitch the concept that development was stagnant and that a fork was needing to fix it[1][2], and now in 2015 it's again come about that he has found an excuse to attempt it (this time with some mild enthusiasm from part of the community). In the past Mike Hearn has pitched censorship features in Tor[3], attempting to subvert the inclusion of privacy fixes in Tor[4], proposed "redlists" of supposedly undesirable transactions in Bitcoin[5]. The current branch of Bitcoin XT already includes an alarmingly ill advised hardcoded blacklist of supposedly Tor exit nodes which are de- prioritized[6].

The measure of "consensus" has already slipped down to 75% when it become clear that 95% of the hashrate was never going to happen. The solution from Mike Hearn is that if miners don't want to get to 75%, he will simply hardcode his own centralized markers into Bitcoin wallets[7] to make sure it happens regardless. This is unbelievably toxic stuff, and spells certain death of Bitcoin if it goes ahead.

[0]: [http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=3kt5Reeh](http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=3kt5Reeh)

[1]: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/29qafs/circle_ceo_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/29qafs/circle_ceo_issues_thinly_veiled_threat_of_hard/)

[2]: [http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-core-development-falling- beh...](http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-core-development-falling-behind-warns- mike-hearn/)

[3]: [https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor- dev/2014-July/007...](https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor- dev/2014-July/007167.html)

[4]: [https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor- dev/2014-July/007...](https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor- dev/2014-July/007173.html)

[5]: [https://bitcoinfoundation.org/forum/index.php?/topic/505-coi...](https://bitcoinfoundation.org/forum/index.php?/topic/505-coin- tracking/)

[6]: [https://github.com/bitcoinxt/bitcoinxt/blob/73c9efe74c5cc8fa...](https://github.com/bitcoinxt/bitcoinxt/blob/73c9efe74c5cc8faea9c2b2c785a2f5b68aa4c23/src/torips.h)

[7]: [http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/34162353/](http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/34162353/)

<comment><USER4> Oh dear, you have some serious anger issues, don't you?

I have not wanted to fork Bitcoin for years. I still don't - I have many better things to do, like working on Lighthouse or oh .... really anything else. Screwing about with gitian and gcc all day is right at the bottom of my list of "fun things to do on a sunny day".

But the fact that Bitcoin Core was heading for disaster was obvious for a long time now. It has been progressively abandoning things that the user community finds important: SPV wallets, unconfirmed transactions, now even the notion of growing the platform at all have all become "controversial" and therefore untouchable. Anyone who suggests that maybe these things are useful is immediately branded an idiot. Combine with a maintainer who hides any time a decision is needed and you have a recipe for deadlock.

You seem to think I hate Tor. I am actually the maintainer of a full blown Tor implementation (Orchid). I've done a lot of work on integrating it into bitcoinj and I'm basically the only guy who can actually move the needle on Tor/Bitcoin usage, by enabling the use of it by default in consumer wallets that have hundreds of thousands of installs. We're not there yet (it's still too slow) but we're a lot closer than before.

This doesn't change the fact that Tor is heavily abused. It can be useful but it's a frequent source of attacks of all kinds. So finding ways to get the good without the bad involves some tricky coding.

Below, you say "anyone can jam the network with just two IP addresses". Yes, that's unfortunate isn't it. I've been sounding the alarm about Bitcoin Core's poor DoS protection for years. Nobody listened, that's why I have now written a new anti-DoS system that can handle this sort of thing. It starts by clustering and deprioritising Tor because we've seen actual jamming attacks that came through Tor, and because using it is a lot safer and more convenient for an attacker than using your own IP addresses or using a botnet. But it absolutely should be extended to have more advanced heuristics. Instead of whinging that (gasp) loading a file from a web server is "insane", maybe you should be writing code instead.

<comment><USER5> Core has been moving away from failed experiments like unconfirmed transactions. (How that wasn't an obviously flawed idea in the first place is beyond me, but hey, might as well get the data..)

No one in core is saying that growth is a bad thing and must be avoided, the key point that has been repeated is that the approach you and Gavin took with XT was not a good one. It has been poorly thought out from the get go. The initial proposal contended that we had to go to 20MB or we were doomed, remember that?

Bitcoin needs a steady hand at the wheel. Wladimir and co are putting out a solid amount of code with remarkably little disruption.

Your statement re: orchid is a little misleading. You might be a maintainer, but [https://github.com/subgraph/Orchid/commits/develop](https://github.com/subgraph/Orchid/commits/develop) shows that your contributions are minor. [https://github.com/subgraph/Orchid/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/subgraph/Orchid/graphs/contributors)

Why do you continue to cause this degree of public spectacle and unnecessary drama?

<comment><USER4> Orchid is developed in the bitcoinj tree these days, not the subgraph repository. Upstream imported changes one time, but I continue to handle it on a day to day basis.

Unconfirmed transactions are not at all a failure. The data is in - usage of them has been increasing over time, not decreasing. When someone attacked shapeshift.io (an exchange that uses them!) and double spent, their response was "We get significant value from fast payments, we can easily patch the exploit they used, and we're going to continue with our current path".

The initial proposal was not "20mb or we're doomed". It was "we need more space or we're doomed, 20mb seems to work OK based on <reasons>". But lowering it to make the Chinese pools happy is not a problem, as it's an upper limit.

I'm afraid the drama has all been created by others. The limit was always meant to be removed, remember? We're not the ones suddenly trying to change the plan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> An important thing to consider is that, while there probably is an ideal block size for the current set of conditions (risk of centralization, average Bitcoin network latency, rate of transactions), there's no a priori reason that it should be 1 MB. It may well be less than 1 MB, or it may well be more. 1 MB is arbitrary. My best guess is that the optimal current block size is somewhat larger than 1 MB.

<comment><USER7> > My best guess is that the optimal current block size is somewhat larger than > 1 MB.

The optimal current block size is without a doubt smaller than 1MB.

The two most important metrics for block size limit are node count and miner validation.

Node count has been continually dropping for years despite heroic efforts to improve performance in bitcoin core.

Miners have been found to be blindly mining blocks in an attempt to reduce their orphan rates.

<comment><USER8> The optimal block size is obviously 0, as these blocks will propagate through the network the fastest, thus lowering the orphan rate to nearly 0, and will require the least resource usage (bandwidth, hard disk space, CPU cycles) for full node operators.

... see what I did there?

<comment><USER7> The blocksize limit is fundamentally a trade off between capacity and usability.

Too far in either direction is bad.

The evidence strongly supports the argument that the current 1MB limit is too high.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have a question, why not to solve the bitcoin issues another way: by decreasing the amount of transactions by changing the way of paying with bitcoins. I suggest using bitcoin wallets as a cash banknotes and send bitcoin private keys (i.e. the wallet itself) instead of paying from the wallet to transfer money. So everyone should have a set of bitcoin wallets with different bitcoin amounts instead of using one bitcoin wallet. This method has some advantages: instant transactions, zero fees and anonymity. The disadvantage that I can see is the necessity of development the mechanisms of having "the change", probably specialized bitcoin fork, or it can be solved by using hybrid method: usual transaction + bitcoin wallet private keys sending. "The change" is not necessary for some types of payments: like gifts, balance replenish, or periodic payments which bitcoin has lack of support now. It'll definitely help to decrease amount of transactions here.

<comment><USER10> Because no one prevents the sender to keep a copy of that wallet. Wallets are nothing but list of your private keys. Suppose I gave my private keys to you, what prevents me to not use them before you use those keys?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > A large mining pool used their power to double spend and steal thousands of > bitcoin from a gambling service[3]. When it was noticed, they blamed a rogue > employee. No money was returned, _nor any legal action taken._

Wasn't that the point of Bitcoin?

</comment><comment><USER12> Something I haven't seen discussed that I'm curious about is why a larger max block size necessarily means lower transaction fees. Ultimately miners decide which transactions to include in a block or reject so if miners feel they need to get a certain fee per transaction that is their prerogative regardless of the block size.

<comment><USER13> Miners typically include the highest-paying transactions first, naturally. If there is a consistent backlog of transactions waiting to be included, low-fee or no-fee transactions may have to wait a long time, perhaps indefinitely. This creates fee pressure - at least in a scenario where Bitcoin clients are intelligent about fees and are able to add fees to pending transactions so that block space is effectively auctioned out. This is not necessarily today's scenario, but Bitcoin is working towards it.

But if blocks are not consistently full and there's no significant backlog, there is room for cheap transactions. This has been the case up to now. If the block size limit were to be increased, the assumption goes, there would again be room for cheap transactions - until they fill up again.

In practice, we don't know if miners would actually include cheap transactions if it makes their blocks significantly bigger. Their incentives seem to be against it, since bigger blocks have higher orphan rates.

<comment><USER14> > In practice, we don't know if miners would actually include cheap > transactions if it makes their blocks significantly bigger. Their incentives > seem to be against it, since bigger blocks have higher orphan rates.

This is incorrect in fact. The Google search term you'll need is selfish mining. It's a well studied phenomenon that for sufficiently large miner they stand to benefit from having larger blocks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The problem with bitcoin is the idea that it even requires a mining pool or transaction fee.

Bitcoin will die the moment someone figures out how to build a decentralized crypto-currency that doesn't need a stupid idea like "mining" to be functional and secure.

<comment><USER14> > Bitcoin will die the moment someone figures out how to build a decentralized > crypto-currency that doesn't need a stupid idea like "mining" to be > functional and secure.

Yup. But I wouldn't hold my breath. No one has ever created a decentralized consensus algorithm with the properties bitcoin has, before or since. And since bitcoin achieves its unique properties as a result of the economic costs of mining, asking for a mining-less bitcoin is kinda like wishing for a perpetual motion machine.

<comment><USER16> Well there are several altcoins using proof-of-stake. Whether they'll be as secure in the long term is an open question, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it a perpetual motion machine.

<comment><USER7> Proof of Stake does not work.

[https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf](https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Important point about this debate:

* There is not the organic transaction growth for this to even be a problem, and there is no evidence there ever will be. Bitcoin's only real-world use case is illicit goods.

* Even 20MB blocks would be susceptible to a cheap spam attack like the DDOS "stress test" a few weeks ago.

This is the quintessential bikeshed: a fight to the death for insanely low stakes.

<comment><USER14> > Bitcoin's only real-world use case is illicit goods.

Please get up to date with things. Bitcoin is huge in the remittance world, and bitcoin-like technology is being tentatively explored in all realms of financial technology.

<comment><USER17> I really would like you to detail these cases for which Bitcoin is huge in the remittance world, because this would be new and useful information for me to update myself on. If I'm wrong, I'd like to know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For people who are not familiar with the whole blocksize debate which has been raging in the bitcoin community for around three months now, even leading to outright censorship by theymos, perhaps asked to do so by "someone", the author of the post is highly biased and the article is biased too.

It refers for example to an attack by Ghash, and then dismisses their explanation that it was an employee without providing much evidence and without pointing that his dismissal of their explanation was simply speculation. Moreover, it suggests that Ghash gained 50% of hashing power and nothing happened. In fact a lot happened, so much so that Ghash currently has around 2% of the hashing power.

It is hard to present an unbiased view when one is necessarily biased. But as an engineer, one would expect someone like Rusty to present a more complete view of the problems as both sides see them and the solutions as both sides present them. His failure to do so raises questions on his integrity pertinent to his responsibility to present to the community a software which can work and problems are not hidden under the carpet.

Specifically, the Lightning Network which wishes to change bitcoin from a payment system as stated by satoshi to some experimental, uncoded, and conceptually flawed settlement system needs to be openly presented with all its attack vectors laid out as a lot of money could be lost otherwise. I do not see how I can trust such code however when one is extremely biased and makes no attempt whatever to overcome it.

Good enough is not sufficient where money is concerned Rusty. And to suggest that Gavin, or even Satoshi himself, is myopic, seeing only the "user" ui point of view, is slightly idiotic and shows that you do not quite understand the debate or you wish to wilfully mislead.

<comment><USER19> > It refers for example to an attack by Ghash, and then dismisses their > explanation that it was an employee without providing much evidence and > without pointing that his dismissal of their explanation was simply > speculation.

I did not dismiss it, how did you read that?

> Moreover, it suggests that Ghash gained 50% of hashing power and nothing > happened. In fact a lot happened, so much so that Ghash currently has around > 2% of the hashing power.

That doesn't seem to be related: they were close to 50% 4 months after the theft incident, and again 10 months after. Someone else queried that, and I did some digging to ensure that my memory of event order was correct. See: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3fxvbr/blocksize_a...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3fxvbr/blocksize_a_debate_summary/cttdfi4?context=3)

> And to suggest that Gavin, or even Satoshi himself, is myopic, seeing only > the "user" ui point of view

"only"? In my final paragraph I tried to draw the distinction between the priorities of the different views.

You seem to have read things in my article which aren't intended :(</comment></comment>


EU mobile roaming charges scrapped - happy-go-lucky http://www.bbc.com/news/business-40281013 <comment><AUTHOR> Physical borders were brought down long time ago, I don't see why we still keep the virtual ones up.

Great win for EU citizens.</comment>


Ira Glass on killing your startup idea - <AUTHOR> http://www.tawheedkader.com/2010/05/ira-glass-on-killing-your-startup-idea/

<comment><USER2> Make sure you watch the next video in the series. It's about the gap between the ambition of what you want to make and the reality of what you're actually producing, and how the good taste that got you into creating will result in you feeling disappointed with your output while you're honing your craft.</comment>


Ambrosia: Young Blood Treatment - <AUTHOR> https://www.ambrosiaplasma.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> An article about the startup that transfuses younger blood into older people: [https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/06/this-anti-aging- star...](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/06/this-anti-aging-start-up-is- paying-thousands-of-dollars-for-teen-blood)</comment>


Police admitting that FOSTA/SESTA made it harder to catch pimps and traffickers - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180705/01033440176/more-police-admitting-that-fosta-sesta-has-made-it-much-more-difficult-to-catch-pimps-traffickers.shtml <comment><USER2> Backpage had a staff of ~70 people who screened adult advertisements and regularly reported suspicious activity to the police. With escort advertising now being so fragmented it just makes the job of investigators harder.

I think this bill had good intentions but was poorly implemented. ISP safe harbor provisions are really important.

Until there is case law precedent the good site operators are being cautious and shutting down. The sites you see now are likely ran by the shadier people in the industry who don't care as much, if at all, about the law.

Source: I worked IT at a adult company for over a decade.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's a very slanted title.

Its not any "harder" than it used to be pre-legislation. Some cops are just whining that their favorite watering holes got drained and they cant sit around all day filing subpoenas anymore.

All this means is that if you can still find hookers online, rest assured you're two steps ahead of the police. They'll go back to tossing massage parlors in the meantime.

<comment><USER4> Well it is still more work to catch them I would say that qualifies as harder. Still as easy to arrest but tracking them down and proving the case is the hard part. There are files of "known but unproven" careful crooks such as crime family heads.</comment></comment>


How long until .ly domains disappear? - <AUTHOR> http://www.zerigo.com/blog/2011/03/how-long-until-ly-domains-disappear

<comment><USER2> "The only thing that's impossible right now is registering a new .ly domain"

Is www.libyanspider.com not working anymore? It's hanging right now. We got an .ly domain 2 weeks ago.

<comment><AUTHOR> It would seem with nic.ly offline most of the time, that registrations aren't possible. However, Thomas mentioned that there does seem to be periodic activity between the primary and secondaries, so in theory Libyan Spider could connect and push to nic.ly.

Seems like someone, or several someones, are managing this pretty well. I think we're ok, but there is a risk it'll go away if they shut it down.</comment></comment>


Yext Scores a $25M Round from IVP - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/01/the-25-million-demo-yext-scores-a-big-round-from-ivp-after-techcrunch50-debut/

<comment><USER2> Let me try to understand this:

1\. "pay per action" is paying for a qualified lead, as opposed to a raw lead (which could be anything, e.g. even a wrong number).

2\. Doing it with phone calls (as opposed to clicks on online ads, or emails etc), because that is how many businesses and their customers contact each other. e.g. gyms, vets, car repairs.

3\. Doing it for local businesses.

The technical achievement of speech recognition is significant. I like his point that because the speech is interpreted relative to a specific business type, the domain is highly specialized, and so the task of recognizing the particular terms of that domain is much easier. I've been impressed by automatic speech recognition for telephone directory lookup - for me, it works 90% of the time; and that's out of the whole phone book, not restricted to a domain. I guess this is an example of "speech recognition" is still not good enough in general, but it's good enough in specific roles.

The next step after "pay per action" would be "pay per sale", which Google can do when you use both their adwords and their payment facility (I don't know how well that's working).

Anyone care to correct my misunderstandings, or elaborate on these points?

<comment><USER3> That's pretty much correct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I was at TC50 and it's impossible to overstate how dominant this guy's presence was during his demo. No one could believe their eyes or ears that here was this amazing, large, profitable company doing something everyone wants and _no one had ever heard of them_. I would have offered them money on the spot.

<comment><USER4> You weren't kidding, just saw it and they killed:

<http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/2163590>

<comment><USER5> I don't watch TC50 videos, so maybe it's just that I am unaware of the typical presentation quality there, or maybe it doesn't come through on video for me. His presentation was confident and well-rehearsed, and his startup was pretty cool, but I wasn't incredibly impressed by his presence.

<comment><USER3> I doubt the video would be impressive. It was the feeling of everyone in the room going through this process simultaneously:

I don't get it - neat - holy crap - is this real? - Holy Crap!! This is real!?!?! - Wait, did he just say $20 million in revenues? - Why have I never heard of this before? - $20M?!?!

There's a feeling in the air when 500 people all have the same amazed reaction that doesn't come through video.

Particularly fun was watching Marissa Mayer's reaction when he started talking about Pay Per Useful Call.

<comment><AUTHOR> What was her reaction? (that part doesn't come through on the video at all)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting article on a veterinary site in which one person accuses Yext of ripping her off while a few others tout pretty impressive ROI from using it.

<http://news.vin.com/VINNews.aspx?articleId=13851>

"Dr. Randy Wiltshire reported in a VIN discussion that he'd used YextVets for six months, and during that time, was directed 67 new clients from the site, for which he paid Yext a total $2,345 in advertising fees. Those clients, in turn, spent $9,100 in his practice."

So if he paid $2,345 for 67 calls, Yext was charging him $35/call. That's a pretty nifty digit.

</comment><comment><USER7> The real news here seems to be that a company with $20M in revenue (yext) was allowed to pitch at TC50.

<comment><USER8> Well, they got in on the merits. It certainly wasn't like HP demoing a new product (like we saw at DEMO); it was a company coming out for the first time. It certainly qualifies as a startup in my mind. It may be a $20M company, but still, _no one had ever heard of them before_. The look of astonishment on the panelists' faces was awesome.

It may very well have been the greatest gambit to create a competitive bidding process for VC investment in history. Seriously. They presented at TC50, and in less than a month, had a VC firm who they had absolutely no prior relationship with wire $25 million to their account. (Sure, they had previously raised $3.5 million, which marked the IP as safe and the revenues as real, _but still_.)

Hats off to Yext, as far as I'm concerned.

<comment><USER9> I get that they are still a startup, but they are a _funded_ startup. It was a great demo, but still it seems like TC50 should be restricted to companies who have yet to do a series A round.

<comment><USER3> Lots of companies had already raised funds - Clasemovil raised half a million, Clicker has 8 million, lots were self-funded by people with exits under their belt, etc. The only requirement was you had to do your first public release at TC50. The judging criteria were useful demo, attractive, professional, polished design, and useful business, and the first three favor those with funding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm really surprised that they managed to grow so big and stay so low profile for so long.

</comment><comment><USER11> nice to see they treat their engineers well (open plan offices) ~ <http://www.yext.com/recruiting/engineers/>

<comment><USER12> Is that an eMachines under the engineer's desk?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> i dont get it ... how do they help the businesses with the junk calls with transcribing and categorizing them? it seems to me that those junk-callers call anyway.

<comment><USER2> The purpose is to get customers for the businesses. The startup supplies phone calls to the local business (i.e. potential customers). The local business pays for the calls, but they don't have to pay for junk calls.

The purpose of recognizing the nature of the call is to determine whether they need to be paid for; not to protect the business from junk phone calls.

<comment><USER13> ah okay. so instead of paying a fixed price for a yellowpages listing they pay per actual customer calling. thank you.</comment></comment></comment>