How we got to $1,000 in recurring revenue - <AUTHOR> http://blog.idonethis.com/post/59489601294/how-we-got-to-1-000-in-recurring-revenue <comment><USER2> Please take this as constructive: I pay for your system for a team of about 10 people. It works and it's been useful to us - but as soon as I get some free time I'm very likely going to roll my own, because I slightly resent the $5 per user per month price-tag for such a simple service; I think it's pretty expensive for the features compared to other single-purpose cloud tools.

I'm not asking for more features, because I like the fact it does one thing and does it well. I reckon it's probably a fair price around $1-$2 per user per month. I can't help but think you'd get more revenue overall with a lower price-tag.

<comment><USER3> Dear iDoneThis team - do NOT lower your prices [1].

As a fellow subscription revenue biz, we've found that lower priced plans invite customers whose support requirements are much greater. And you won't make it up in volume.

Real businesses that value their time will spent $50/month for a service that saves them time without thinking twice. Your early traction proves this out.

The graphic you had in your post about developer thinking makes me think you guys already know this, but I see the lower price advice a lot on HN, and almost always, I think it is the wrong advice.

[1] - This is obviously 100% opinion, and you know your business 1000x better than I do. BTW, our product's subscription price point is significantly higher $12k per annum at the low end, and we just moved this up from $7500 earlier this year. BEST DECISION WE EVER MADE.

<comment><USER4> > As a fellow subscription revenue biz...

I think it's hard to group all "subscription services" into the same bucket. Selling proprietary data in the financial services market (like CB Insights) is very different from selling a simple tool (like iDoneThis).

Also, it should be noted that price is just one component of a _pricing model_. If you don't look at _how_ you charge, and only consider _how much_ you charge, chances are you're not going to maximize revenue.

$5/user/month looks good on paper, but I wouldn't necessarily assume that the perceived value scales with a flat-fee-per-user (no tiers) model. Example:

1\. If my company has 10 people, sending iDoneThis $50 each month probably isn't a big deal.

2\. If my company has 10 teams of 10 people, iDoneThis is now a $500/month expense. That's $6,000/year. I might not dispute that there's value to the service, but my perception and consideration of its value is likely to change as the total cost increases.

<comment><USER5> If your company has 10 teams of 10 people, your most important action is not saving $500 a month. You're (hopefully) earning a proportionally higher amount for your 100 people and you should continue to focus on that. If the software stack helps, don't fiddle with it to save a few bucks.

The challenge for iDoneThis is not to make it cheaper per user, it's to re- invest the highish costs in order to beat the competitor who is charging 50c per user. Make iDoneThis better at managing the ever-growing complexities of syncing information when you have 100/1000/10k staff members and you have no damned idea what they're doing.

Especially because quite a few hackers are thinking "you know, I could make that app and sell it for a few bucks less." Don't race them to the bottom, because Twitter is at the bottom at $0p/m.

<comment><USER4> > If your company has 10 teams of 10 people, your most important action is not > saving $500 a month. You're (hopefully) earning a proportionally higher > amount for your 100 people and you should continue to focus on that. If the > software stack helps, don't fiddle with it to save a few bucks.

This type of thinking is prevalent on HN, but it's not always realistic. Most companies of a certain size have financial controls, and even if $500/month is not a lot of money in a relative sense, the number of $500/month line items for _nice-to-have_ , _this-helps-a-little_ products and services is reasonably limited.

Getting a budget for something that isn't in a "checklist cost" category can be a real headache, every vendor relationship has overhead, and instituting a new SaaS for 100 people (and getting them to actually use it) may have its own costs (staff time, etc.).

> Make iDoneThis better at managing the ever-growing complexities of syncing > information when you have 100/1000/10k staff members and you have no damned > idea what they're doing.

That's a fundamentally different product than what iDoneThis has today. To support development of that product, it will need substantially more than $1,000/month in recurring revenue, or it will need additional funding.

> Especially because quite a few hackers are thinking "you know, I could make > that app and sell it for a few bucks less." Don't race them to the bottom, > because Twitter is at the bottom at $0p/m.

If you build a business around a simple concept that requires limited functionality, you can refuse to engage in a race to the bottom, but it doesn't change the fact that you will almost certainly be undercut if others see a worthwhile opportunity.

In other words, iDoneThis can keep its $5/user/month price point, but if this is an appealing enough concept, it will have competition, and cheaper competition, before it ever obtains enough revenue to "re-invest the highish costs" as you have suggested.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Louthy in this thread is making a good case for the kind of user that you can afford to lose. If $5 per user does not cause _some_ of your users to go away then you're too cheap. Scale it up an order of magnitude, or even two, watch your competition like a hawk and make sure that you make you users _happy_ , never mind about them resenting to pay. The way to offset that is not to lower your price but to give more for the same price.

best of luck, I feel that "We made $1,000 in recurring revenue" is so much more constructive than 'Show HN'.

<comment><USER7> It's not really a "Show HN", though is it? It's an paid-for extension of an existing product. In that vein, while an informative post I did find the following statement a bit disingenuous:

"As Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail and partner at Y Combinator, says, the correct order of operations is to "sell before you build." When you launch, you want a whole list of people that you can tell to buy it. But more than that, you want to ensure that you're investing all that time building something that people want to buy."

As far as I can tell, they built a product for 40,000 people over a certain period of time without generating a cent in profit or knowing in advance that any of those people would ever consider paying from the product. While some users did claim they wanted a team version they would pay for, this was only after the base product was built _without_ knowing people would pay for it.

This bugs me a bit because I'm working on a project where I'd love to be able to sell before I build, as it's obviously a very sound principle, but in practice I just can't see how to go about it and I was hoping to learn something new from this post.

<comment><USER8> That comment jarred with me too, in reality what they did is the total antithesis of what Paul's quote embodies.

There are a few options for seeing if people will buy before you build. The often quoted one here (and it's also used in the Lean Startup as an example) is have a sales site, have a 'buy now button', but go through to a 'we're currently in beta, email me when it's ready'.

Then buy google ads or whatever your sales pipeline is and see if people click 'buy now'. If no-one does, you've got a problem.

If you've got a big ticket item, you can do something similar but be upfront that it's not built. Talk to clients, see if they want what you're thinking of making and suggest a price to see if they say yes. Again, if you can't find anyone to say yes, you've got a problem.

And for some projects, Kickstarter is another obvious method.

<comment><USER6> Sell before you build: you go through what you could automate by doing it by hand. Automation is optional. If you actually sell automation then that is of course impossible but if you sell a product that you could create by hand just as well as through a computer program then you can sell right away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not enough people say this anymore, but congrats!

That first $1/$1,000/$1,000,000 is the hardest. Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Much appreciated, Allen. That means a lot, especially because I'm a big fan of what you're doing with CircleCI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Some major feedback: send out a "yay, you're signed up" email.

I signed up on my iPad, and forgot about this, assuming an email would remind me. If I hadn't checked hacker news again I would have forgotten about your service entirely.

You can use this email to orient new users too.

Edit: might have been a bug due to a clumsy signup I had on my iPad. Couldnt input well on the keyboard. Just changed my password and instantly got an orientation email.

</comment><comment><USER11> Excellent work!

Our solution was to email daily commit logs at 12AM to the team. The logs are parsed and beautified so they're easier to read, like a report. This only works for the programmers, your solution makes more sense for other departments.

</comment><comment><USER12> When we launched [http://weekdone.com/](http://weekdone.com/) team management and internal communications tool, we decided to take the price out of equation by having the lowest possible price: $1 per employee per month. That has proven to show companies willingness to pay, while at the same time experiment more with the product. At the same time we know we can easily raise the price in the future.

Basically I suggest other startups to consider the price a part of the marketing mix. It's never a standalone thing. You might discount on price to decrease your marketing costs, or vice versa.

The higher you go with the price: $3, $5, $10 per user - the harder it becomes to understand how much is it the price and how much the product that's holding back paying users.

Another option is to have different prices for different team sizes depending on your sweet spot. Eg Atlassian JIRA starts at $10/10 users, then goes up to $2-3, then down again. Asana is free for 30 users, then goes up, then down again. Weekdone now is also $1.5 at lower level, then growing to $2-3, the lower again.

Weekdone has some similarities to iDonethis by the way, although we work with the weekly, not daily paradigm. We actually have many users who use both, or switch between the two.

</comment><comment><USER13> Launching the paid team version was a great idea.

As a personal tool, iDoneThis is neat but it competes with a ton of other tools in a very crowded market. I had already lost interest and stopped using it when they launched the team version and pricing.

...but when I heard about what they were doing with teams it was immediately obvious that this would be great for us. Everyone seemed to like it and get it right away.

Thumbs up to iDoneThis for recognizing their potential as a team product.

</comment><comment><USER10> Well done. Just signed up for personal account, I've been looking for a system to let me track this.

</comment><comment><USER14> Coincidentally, I recently built a similar service as a week-long project to solve the same problem for a client.

I tried idonethis, but found the interface confusing and the pricing prohibitive.

[http://simplestatus.io](http://simplestatus.io)

<comment><USER15> Two quick points of feedback:

First - not a particularly important detail - but please do your site a favor and get rid of the very tacky rocket ship clip art. I don't know why every SaaS MVP decides to abuse that image.

Second, this: "Status reports suck. We make them suck less."

That's not a professional sales pitch. Unless you're trying to sell to college teenagers (who wouldn't buy the product to begin with), it comes across as almost a parody or joke.

Also, saying you make the focus and point of your product suck less, is an extraordinarily bad way to try to sell a customer. It's a sales pitch from a negative. Never do it.

<comment><USER14> Appreciate the feedback. The icons are all stock flatui. As I said, I built it in a week, and launched it two weeks ago. I'm working on a makeover, but prioritized getting the app polished ahead of the marketing site.

I disagree on the tagline, though. I'm not saying that our product sucks less. I'm saying that it makes doing status reports suck less. You may prove me wrong in the long run, and I'd be happy to be wrong on this, but my initial instinct is to keep it the same.

Thanks though! And sorry to the idonethis team. I don't want to hijack your thread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've been an idonethis user for a while, but feel like it is missing some extra features. So I rolled my own and am looking for early alpha testers: [https://teamtracker.io](https://teamtracker.io)

</comment><comment><USER17> First: congratulations!

Second: you say that: "Your privacy and security is our top priority. We take all reasonable precautions to keep your data safe and secure."

Does that mean that you support s/mime and gpg for the emails you send and receive?

</comment><comment><USER18> I wonder, with a product as simple as theirs: how do they differentiate from clones?

I mean, they're targeting developers and teams with a useful service, but also a service so simple that most developers could create a minimal clone that performs their core feature in a few hours.

Either their product needs to have really neat integration into other tools (like time tracking, project planning, etc) or they need to have some magic tricks that I don't see. Anyone care to enlighten me?

<comment><USER19> The domain is pretty unique and memorable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> congrats guys! i love products that leverage email as part of their core workflow/product experience. email is so ingrained in our everyday habits, i hope more startups take advantage of it. email is really the ultimate "dashboard" for knowledge workers.

</comment><comment><USER21> I initially checked out iDoneThis and liked the idea, but $5/user/mo was a little too much for my bootstrapped startup.

Hence, I just created a mashup of Google Calendar + Docs and Gmail to create a solution does the same thing as iDoneThis for zero dollars.

</comment><comment><USER22> Nice work! I've been tracking your product for quite a while. I've been building something similar for myself as well. It's not quite ready yet though. Congratulations on your achievement!

</comment><comment><USER23> Nice. I know how it feels. I'm done with my first 1,000. Going to the next level.

</comment><comment><USER24> Congratulations!</comment>


Show HN: 2ndWind – Find people to work on your unfinished projects - <AUTHOR> https://2ndwind.xyz/ <comment><AUTHOR> It is relatively easy to start a project, but it is really hard to get it done. We all have unfinished projects. How many of your unfinished projects have been tossed into the trash can? One of these days, you are gonna hate yourself over it.

Why not publish your unfinished projects and let someone else work on them? Someone else might share your passion to complete them.

Go to the site and

Follow these steps 1\. Sign up. 2\. Log in. 3\. Publish your unfinished projects. 4\. Wait for potential participants to join. 5\. Chat with them.

I believe the world becomes a better place if more unfinished projects come to fruition.</comment>


Ask HN: What code search tools do you use? - <AUTHOR> One feature I really like about GitHub, which is seldom talked about nearly as much as many of their other features, is the search. Often if I'm trying to find some "real code" as an example to help me with my own work, searching for function definitions on GitHub's search has saved me so much time. Particularly when working with lesser known / used libraries.
Are there any other tools out there that provide a way to search quickly, in the same way GitHub's work, in which their emphasis is on search?
I'd add, that by search I mean cross-repo search. Not just on a single codebase.
EDIT: changed some words <comment><USER2> Sourcegraph ? [https://about.sourcegraph.com/product](https://about.sourcegraph.com/product)

<comment><USER3> Sourcegraph co-founder here, thanks for the mention :)

Doing code search well is basically what Sourcegraph is all about. We support full text and regex search over many repositories. Sourcegraph.com indexes most repositories on GitHub.com and we also have a Docker container that you can spin up to index code on private code hosts.

Our search is fast and our query syntax is powerful: [https://docs.sourcegraph.com/user/search/queries](https://docs.sourcegraph.com/user/search/queries).

Most of our users are daily users and most of our customers deploy us across their entire engineering organization to make all code accessible to all developers (subject to permissions). We view search not as a single feature, but a large collection of related, but distinct use cases:

* Honing in on error messages

* Debugging and resolving production issues faster

* Comparing different packages / libraries

* Figuring out how to use a particular API

* Understanding what a function does

* Detecting patterns and anti-patterns

* Enforcing code quality best practices (saved searches)

* Large-scale code changes (easy find-and-replace across your entire codebase)

* Walking the reference graph in code (i.e., jump-to-def and find-refs, and tooltips as you browse the code)

We were inspired by a lot of the great code search tools that companies like Google and Facebook have built internally for themselves. We're also investing in promulgating new pattern matching languages (e.g., [https://comby.dev/](https://comby.dev/)) that we think will yield huge productivity gains for programmers who find regex has its shortcomings.

We will always be free to use for individual developers. Our code is open- source. We make money off of enterprise. You can try us out on open source ([https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph](https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph)) or spin up your own free instance ([https://docs.sourcegraph.com/admin/install/docker](https://docs.sourcegraph.com/admin/install/docker)). If you end up checking us out, would love to hear your feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find the Github search super frustrating.

I often want an IDE-like search experience. GoTo definition, or other similar browsing tools. Instead I have to think about the exact way to find a literal definition "class Foo"

I realize that's ambitious - but it is Github after all!</comment>


Show HN: Hunter – Lag-free terminal file browser in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rabite0/hunter <comment><USER2> This looks neat, I'll give it a go later today.

One of the features I use Ranger for is to visually select multiple music files and then open them with mpv to play. Would that be something Hunter supports, or would support in the future?

What has been the most challenging aspect you've encountered so far while building this?

Thanks for sharing!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, sorry for the late answer.

Yes, you can select multiple files with space and open them all at once using the exec feature (type "!"). When you press tab it will insert "$s", which will then be substituted with either the normal selection, or when multiple files are selected with those multiple files. This works pretty much like in ranger. It doesn't work when you just open them by "entering" them. I'm not sure if that even makes sense since different file types could be selected and it's not clear what the right thing to do would be. Maybe opening them one after another? I'm not actually sure what ranger does in that case.

The most difficult thing.. That's actually hard to say since I started this to learn more about Rust and it's the largest project I've written so far at >8000 loc, so basically everything. :) But specifically, I guess getting the asynchronous stuff working right was the hardest part. hunter loads everything asynchronously and on demand, like the metadata and directory size. This is to speed up loading times. I'm still not sure it's 100% correct. Rust makes it easy to prevent data races, and it's very strict about what you can share across threads and how you do it, but it doesn't prevent race conditions and logic errors, and reasoning about concurrent programs is still hard.

I actually implemented my own Async type instead of using Futures or something pre-made, because as far as I can tell especially futures come with a pretty heavy binary size cost, which in turn takes time to load, making startup slower on a slow HDD. Other than that just getting the design right was pretty hard. Although the basic foundation is pretty solid I think.

Another reason I started this is to see how usable my TUI widgets are and when I first scrolled through a directory listing at light speed I got somewhat addicted. :) I kept those widgets really generic and they're easy to use in the sense that you can for example get a ListView for your type by just implementing a trait for it and they're very composable so that you can easily get a TabView for your ListView and so on. My plan is to put all that in a library eventually.

Error handling is another problem area. When I started I actually didn't make use of any error handling at all, in the sense that I didn't return errors from my functions, instead handling everything by just returning early, or returning empty strings or whatever made sense. This got problematic after I started heavily using mutexes, channels and other things that return errors, since I couldn't use ? and most of the time there is really nothing to do other than returning early with the error (and logging it), or skipping that operation when it happens in a loop.

I then went the other extreme and started returning Results everywhere. The problem is that right now there is just one single enum with all the dozens of possible errors, so it's hard to say what error can actually happen. Another problem is that I had to remove backtraces after implementing the Async type since backtraces can't be shared between threads for some reason and now the log viewer is pretty crippled. It's actually a "FoldView" and you could fold those backtraces in and out to see what went wrong where, now it's pretty much just a simple list. So yeah, splitting those error types is definitely on my todo list. :)

EDIT: fixed typo</comment></comment>


Why do we find comfort in terrifying stories? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200508-why-depressing-dystopia-stories-are-popular-during-covid-19 <comment><USER2> "Fairytales don't tell children dragons exist - they already know that. Fairytales tell children dragons can be killed." \- G. K. Chesterton

The bigger and more terrifying the monster that gets beaten in the story, the more comforting it is. This is true even if the "monster" is a situation rather than a being, and even if it is merely "lived through" well, rather than "beaten".

<comment><USER3> closely related: names have power. Naming a thing gives you a modicum of psychological control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My simple answer: because most people (myself included) who find terrifying stories to be interesting lead otherwise boring and risk-free lives. Some people like to live vicariously through other people while taking no real risk of their own.

If you drive a 2006 Honda Civic to work (really safe, good mileage, and it's completely paid off!), spend all day writing Java code that someone else scoped, spec'd, and paid for, then drive home to your family and have spaghetti for dinner (we have spaghetti every Thursday, it's our tradition!), of course reading a story about the zombie apocalypse is going to appeal to you. It satisfies a biological need you're not currently fulfilling: to be put in danger and successfully navigate your way out.

It's the same reason people holler at movies/shows telling the characters not to go in that dark room, or yell at the NFL game that the quarterback should have thrown the ball earlier. It's the same reason people play Sim City or The Sims or Football Manager/OOTP/Motorsport Manager or any other "god games". It gives you a feeling of risk, reward, and power you're not likely to find in your real life.

This has been a thing since at least Homer's Odyssey, created in a time where the average person took on a level of risk we'd never even consider. And this thrilling tale of dashing heroes sacrificing their lives to get back home to their boring life only to find out they have to fight and kill even more to protect their boring home life... it's not a new trope.

<comment><USER5> > find terrifying stories to be interesting lead otherwise boring and risk- > free lives

Or maybe our lives are not as boring and risk-free as we would like to think and our collective unconciouses draw us to these stories in order to process the dangers our egos pefer to avoid.

I mean, even if no external danger existed, there are the perennial existential dangers of living a meaningless and empty life. Zombies come up a lot as the symbol of mindless mass action, looking for brains (wisdom?) in life. I don't want this to come across as criticism of the lifestyle you painted but merely as a thought experiment to entertain; when you drive a safe car everyday between home and work, and write code for purposes that other people scoped out for you, and you know there are many others doing the same, maybe there is already a bit of zombie action going on to begin with and that is why the zombie flick is interesting?

Which is not to say these are the only dangers. I mean right now we are in the middle of a pandemic, which doesn't get much more biblical than that. I believe those terrifying stories has helped us do serious information processing and in turn created an adaptive evolutionary advantage in preparing for these eventualities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I figure it's because we want to feel extremes of emotion briefly, in a controlled way. No one actually wants to be scared for their life or suffer a tragedy ... but we enjoy feeling fear and sorrow briefly in a movie or the theatre. Having our emotions amped up makes us feel alive, I think. Afterwards we also feel good that we've avoided a similar fate.

</comment><comment><USER7> Maybe you do. I sure as fuck don't.

<comment><USER8> Same, the people obsessed with horrific crime dramas confuses the hell out of me. That stuff just lives in my head for way too long.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well this is more about Dystopian fiction which is rarely terrifying. I think bleak visions and grim conditions in fiction are satisfying though. I know that whenever I read 1984 I find the very grimness of Winston's life gives me pleasure. The framing of his discussions with O'Brien in the context of torture also is very satisfying. To people who don't read fiction this sounds like sadism but that is not the case. There may be a small pleasure in the simple fact that it is not we ourselves that suffer ("do it to Julia!") but I think that is marginal. More important is the powerful resistance such a world presents to the character which gives it an intense reality and that reality being immersive is the pleasure as it focuses the whole mind on the meaning of what is shown.

About actual terror and horror Thomas Ligotti makes some interesting points about this and principally views it as a way of dealing with the actual horror of life which is all too real.

</comment><comment><USER10> Freud's theory: Why do we have terrible nightmares if our sleeping mind could instead be imagining an Elysium of pleasantries and amazement? We spend our waking hours tormented by our desires, to be healthy, wealthy, beautiful or wise. We are slaves to our emotions, each day wracked by insatiable lusts. Only in the fantasy of our dreams can these desires be resolved: our body decays in the mirror, we find ourselves lost and alone on the streets, we are naked at the office, our lungs are empty but we cannot gasp for air! Finally, our soul is free from torment, the conflict has been resolved. Our human nature is to be ambitious and to rise towards the heavens. The price we pay is the agony of desire. Enough is never enough. We can only fail totally, or continue onward, and onward, and onward ...

<comment><USER11> Got a link to read more about this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hah, my immediate thought was "no, we don't", then I saw the 15-20 Stephen King books on my shelf... Well, simple answer is they are enjoyable and they easily grab and hold your attention.

</comment><comment> 1e-9 It probably confers survival benefit. Those who liked to hear dystopian tales were more likely to survive bad times and reproduce successfully. Thinking through how someone else handled a tough situation prepares one for similar situations in the future.

</comment><comment><USER13> We don't. If they genuinely terrified us we wouldn't enjoy them.

</comment><comment><USER14> because people connect better when they share a tragic experience, I guess.</comment>


Ask HN: Critic as Artist - <AUTHOR>

Playing with Oscar Wilde's essay Critic As Artist:
All fine imaginative work is self-conscious and deliberate. No poet sings because he must sing. At least, no great poet does. A great poet sings because he chooses to sing. It is so now, and it has always been so. We are sometimes apt to think that the voices that sounded at the dawn of poetry were simpler, fresher, and more natural than ours, and that the world which the early poets looked at, and through which they walked, had kind of a poetical quality of its own, and almost without changing could pass into song.
With some license, should you substitute poet for developer and song for program, you end up with a nice description of the art of programming :-) Here's my shot at it:
All fine imaginative work is self-conscious and deliberate. No programmer develops because he must write code. At least, no great programmer does. A great programmer develops because he chooses to write code. It is so now, and it has always been so. We are sometimes apt to think that the code that was written at the dawn of programming was simpler, fresher, and more natural than ours, and that the world which the early programmers looked at, and through which they walked, had kind of a programmable quality of its own, and almost without changing could pass into code <comment><USER2> Perhaps. Although there is, I would suggest, an element of problem solving with programming that doesn't seem to apply with poetry. Most projects I start are chosen because I feel that that particular app needs making, that the problem in question needs solving. I enjoy programming by itself, but whenever I do it there is almost always a sense of purpose, if not of necessity.</comment>


The Smartest Guys in the Room Eerily Describes Tesla - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/RealTesla/comments/bq06lc/the_smartest_guys_in_the_room_eerily_describes/ <comment><AUTHOR> Unrelated to Tesla, but WeWork recently set up a holding company to buy stakes in buildings it rents from. The name is ARK, which the CEO said in an interview stands for Adam, Rebekah, and kids. The company quickly said his answer was a joke and gave a real definition.

This is interesting because at Enron The LJM company set up by Andy Fastow was created to let Enron move assets off their balance sheet, even though Fastow kept his CFO job and control of LJM. Over time this allowed Enron to hide losses and was one of the main reasons the company fell. The funny part is that LJM stood for Lea, Jeffrey, and Matthew, who were Fastow's wife and kids.

You seriously can't make this up.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-15/wework- wa...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-15/wework-wants-to-be- its-own-landlord-it-also-wants-2-8-billion)

<comment><USER2> Yes this was the core of the Enron fraud. I was a bit disappointed this was never touched on as everything else feels superficial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Except - Tesla has a real product that has a real demand. Enron's smart guys transformed the company from a traditional energy company which met that criterion to a financial engineering company that didn't know enough about financial engineering to survive.

<comment><USER4> Tesla is a car company valued like a tech company right now. Unless they solve the problem of self-driving their stock is overvalued. Let's check-in shall we? Uber - self-driving is dead, BMW self-driving is years away, Alphabet - self-driving is in its very early stages, Tesla - We'll have it by the end of the year or I'll eat my hat!

<comment><USER5> Google is _maybe_ the only other company with the capability to collect the data necessary to solve self-driving. But they don't own the car production, they need to partner, and hence are at the whims of traditional automakers' margins and product designs.

Tesla is collecting sensor data from their entire fleet, probably mapped to when the user needs to override autopilot. A really elegant source of training data when you think about it.

[https://electrek.co/2017/06/14/tesla-autopilot-data- floodgat...](https://electrek.co/2017/06/14/tesla-autopilot-data-floodgates/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was expecting an actual analysis in the Reddit post. Perhaps something along the lines of a quantitative analysis with market data. Seems like many companies could "eerily" be described by the collection of passages outlined in the post (Uber? Snapchat? Theranos?). Would be nice if there was a corresponding anecdote from Tesla's company history alongside each quote from the book.

</comment><comment><USER7> Only tangentially related; but if you want to understand the Enron scandal; Kurt Eichenwald's Conspiracy of Fools is a better treatment of the topic.

<comment><USER8> I have that book, but I only got through the first couple of chapters. Is it factually sound? The narration of conversations between Enron people is so descriptive (down to what they were wearing), that I kinda got the feeling that this is a "dramatic re-telling" as opposed to a more investigative review.

I actually found the storytelling style pretty gripping, but again, I wasn't sure how much of it was fact vs. embellishment for narrative purposes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've got to say, I don't find this analysis compelling. I'm not a fan of Tesla, but this analysis doesn't add much new.

</comment><comment><USER9> If you look a little further down in the thread, there are (purported) former Tesla employees talking about what sounds like a really horrible experience working there -- being treated terribly, all the really experienced people leaving, etc.

To me, _if_ those are real former employees telling the truth, that's a lot more meaningful than the comparison to Enron.

<comment><USER10> You can say the same thing about Amazon employees, yet Amazon is not really comparable to Tesla

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Don't worry guys, reddit OP is just a short seller. Buy the dip!</comment>


Averages Can Be Misleading: Try a Percentile (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.elastic.co/blog/averages-can-dangerous-use-percentile <comment><USER2> IMHO plotting the distribution should be the first step before trying to compute its statistics. If you know the shape, you can understand the values - otherwise it's guesswork.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, this is actually demonstrated by Anscombe's quartet, a set of "four datasets that have nearly identical simple descriptive statistics, yet appear very different when graphed" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe%27s_quartet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe%27s_quartet))

<comment> stargazer-3 ... although median and percentiles would be different within the Anscombe's quartet.

<comment><USER4> But there are other datasets that would do the same thing with medians.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This topic always leads me to think about this great talk from Gil Tene on how NOT to measure latencies (basically, don't use averages!).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ8ydIuPFeU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ8ydIuPFeU)

I'm also a huge fan of how Dormando showed latency distributions in one of his recent Memcached Extstore posts. The default is 95th percentile but you can change the percentile to what matters to you (i.e. 99th percentile if you ask me!). Scroll down to see what he did and play with it.

[https://memcached.org/blog/nvm-multidisk/](https://memcached.org/blog/nvm- multidisk/)

<comment><USER6> I felt a major point of his talk was you should also look at your _max_ latency.

<comment><USER5> Yeah good point. Max and the various 9s that matter to your organization.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's a great story on _99% Invisible_ about averages, particularly when used to design cockpits for the average pilot.

[https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/on- average/](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/on-average/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Check out this comic on "Why Not to Trust Statistics" [1]. His book, "Math With Bad Drawings" [2] has a chapter on statistics and why not to trust a single statistical measure only.

[1] [https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2016/07/13/why-not-to- trust-...](https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2016/07/13/why-not-to-trust- statistics/)

[2] [https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2018/05/23/math-with-bad- dra...](https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2018/05/23/math-with-bad-drawings-the- book/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Percentiles can be misleading, try a histogram - [https://www.circonus.com/2018/11/the-problem-with- percentile...](https://www.circonus.com/2018/11/the-problem-with-percentiles- aggregation-brings-aggravation/)

</comment><comment><USER10> My own solution, which might be useful to those using javascript (nodejs or browser):

I use mathjs.quantileSeq() and log 0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%. This seems to be good for "casual metric logs".

I've found that this gives a good shape of the data, as well as the absolute min/max values. If you use 1% or 99% you'll miss the absolute worst performers, and I want to be at least aware of what the worst performance numbers are.

[https://mathjs.org/](https://mathjs.org/)

[https://mathjs.org/docs/reference/functions/quantileSeq.html](https://mathjs.org/docs/reference/functions/quantileSeq.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> Site Reliabilty Engineering goes over this in a lot more detail.

[https://landing.google.com/sre/books/](https://landing.google.com/sre/books/)

<comment><USER12> Specifically Chapter 4, under "Aggregation" [https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/service- lev...](https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/service-level- objectives/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Reminds me of "Don't cross a river if it is four feet deep on average." — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

<comment><USER14> thx.. good summary: [http://greatesthitsblog.com/the-black-swan-nassim- nicholas-t...](http://greatesthitsblog.com/the-black-swan-nassim-nicholas- taleb/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've used Elasticsearch + Kibana for agricultural data and similarly "expanded" the view out from averages to time series.

People in agriculture love averages and it makes a lot of sense in financial data since averages preserve totals e.g.:

50 ton / ha average over 100 ha = 5 000 tons

At the same time summing each individual ha gives you 5 000 tons total.

But once you realise that you can expand on this, things get _really_ interesting. I don't know of other people working on the same problems that I am working on, but they are relevant both economically (in the sense of making money) and environmentally (in the sense of improving efficiency and managing climate).

</comment><comment><USER16> More knowledge is always better, but percentiles are a little misleading as well - the 99% at 867 ms latency makes you have a moment of panic, but when you see that 95% is 60 ms, then you really realize how few of your visitors are experiencing the slow response. Might it be a problem? Possibly, and I has brought awareness to that potential, but it also has the possibility to blow it out of proportion if you don't look at the rest of the data.

Edit: I'm not saying Averages are better, but that Percentiles can be misleading as well.

<comment><USER17> Having multiple percentiles is key, but I can't think of a time when I've ever found average to be useful.

<comment><USER18> The average (or more specifically: arithmetic mean) has a number of key properties that allows for advanced analysis.

If you have two pieces of data: say the average roll of a D6 (6-sided dice) + average roll of D20 (20-sided dice), you wouldn't be able to do anything with percentiles.

The 90% percentile roll of D20 is 18. The 90% percentile roll of D6 is 5(ish). But the sum of these numbers tells us nothing (18 + 5 == 23, which tells us... nothing).

In contrast, the mean / average roll of D20 is 10.5, while the average roll of D6 is 3.5. The average roll of D20 + average of D6 is 14.

You can add and subtract averages just fine, combining separate pieces of data to make a larger conclusion. You cannot do the same with percentages.

\</comment></comment></comment><comment>----

There's nothing "misleading" about averages. Its just that most people are awful at statistics. The real lesson is... learn statistics, so that you can learn to use these tools correctly.

Averages, and standard deviation / variance, are excellent for combining data. Its a blurry picture, but its still mathematically correct. Percentiles / quartiles / graphs are more precise and allow for deeper conclusions... but its not always possible to create a percentile graph, especially if you cannot directly measure some attribute. "Indirect measurement", by way of arithmetic, averages, and standard deviation, is quite useful.

\</comment><comment>----

EDIT: While I'm talking statistics, don't forget about the three kinds of averages: Arithmetic Mean is the most common, but is often meaningless. You have to also understand geometric mean, and harmonic mean.

Multiplicative problems should use a geometric mean. Harmonic Mean is used when comparing speeds (roughly). Going 60MPH for 10 miles, and then going 120MPH for 10 miles is averaged using Harmonic Mean.

Benchmarks should typically use harmonic mean: the arithmetic mean is meaningless in the scope of benchmarks. Etc. etc.

But this is all statistics, that for some reason is rarely taught well in the US High School level. IMO, its an issue with our school system... we really should be teaching more statistics, especially given how common the analysis of data is in today's world.

<comment><USER19> > _There 's nothing "misleading" about averages_

Well, the fact that the average of my wealth and a Bill Gates' wealth is dozens of billions of dollars shows why averages are misleading -- and frequently used to give a false image with statistics.

Misleading doesn't necessarily mean mathematically or factually wrong. Something can be totally true, and still give the false impression, and averages do that.

And saying "people should learn statistics" wont change this. Even knowing statistics, the average doesn't tell me much.

<comment><USER16> > Even knowing statistics, the average doesn't tell me much.

Depends on what you're doing. Bill Gates and my wealth averaged won't tell me anything, but taking my average speed on the highway will give me a good estimate on when I'll get to my destination - in this case the 99th percentile is only interesting to highway patrol, and won't help me estimate when I'll get home. It depends on what you want out of the information.

<comment><USER19> > _but taking my average speed on the highway will give me a good estimate on > when I 'll get to my destination_

Like in the Bill Gates example, if you had a clear highway and went with 100 mph for the first hour, and then hit a busy traffic and are going with 20 mph for the last 5 minutes (with no foreseeable end in sight), the average wont help you much.

It's only really useful for this purpose when there is constant speed (as in school math problems), or few extremities (or when any extremities neatly cancel out).

See how average can be misleading?

<comment><USER16> If the last 5 minutes of a trip are incredibly slow, there's no chance you'll be able to use estimates to determine when you'll get there anyways, as at that point you're not actually estimating, you're now there.

<comment><USER19> Which is neither here, nor there.

This is not about literally seeing into the future, and knowing about unforeseen events.

This is about making the best prediction with the data you already have.

And if (as per example) you had "1000 miles of 100mph and 100 miles of 5mph in some traffic jam" with 500km left to go, the average will be misleading as it will lose too much info to be able to help you give the best prediction.

In that situation I wouldn't reach for the average, to make a prediction to the person waiting for me. Would you?

<comment><USER18> > And if (as per example) you had "1000 miles of 100mph and 100 miles of 5mph > in some traffic jam" with 500km left to go, the average will be misleading > as it will lose too much info to be able to help you give the best > prediction.

This is literally the use case of the harmonic mean, a type of average. Harmonic mean gives you the accurate estimate in this case.

As I stated before: its about using the correct calculation for the correct reasons. It requires an understanding of statistics, and the 5-different-kinds of average (mode, median, arithmetic mean, geometric mean, harmonic mean) to pick the correct one for any particular use case.

The arithmetic mean in this case is simply wrong. Just... wrong. It is meaningless. You have to use the harmonic mean.

\</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment>--

It takes experience and practice to know which "average" to use. But anybody can learn it if they put forth the effort. It is definitely teachable to high school, and even middle-school children. (Its just not commonly taught in America for some reason).

</comment><comment><USER20> One of my favorite (short) talks on this topic. Well worth a few minutes of your time:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coNDCIMH8bk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coNDCIMH8bk)

<comment><USER21> I know it's in the spirit of the talk, but the histogram at 10:45 and the related discussion about how the latency improved for most users but the average latency increasing meaning a worse experience for other users reminds me of the anecdote a Google engineer had when Youtube started rolling out their HTML5 player, the responsiveness of the page had increased but the average latency graphs went up. This wasn't down to it being a bad update, or some users getting a worse experience - not really anyway, but the switch to the HTML5 player allowed a wider audience to start using Youtube where they wouldn't have been able to do this previously. A change increasing average latency, even on a histogram, doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad change. Look at your data indeed.</comment></comment>


Experimenting with a different way to learn linear algebra - <AUTHOR> http://dpearson.me/posts/Experimenting+with+a+different+way+to+learn+linear+algebra.html

<comment><USER2> Ah i like it! The implementations along with the comments are clean are easily comprehended. Lets hope for updates! (was also thinking about delving more into cs so this is perfect)</comment>


The world *has* changed: Why we should be afraid - <AUTHOR> This is a sort of rebuttal to optimists, who believe "it will blow over". I believe the world has fundamentally changed. It is not merely a financial crisis. It is a fundamental economic crisis. The last two weeks brought the crisis to full focus, but we have been building up to it for several years.
Here are a few things that happened in the last 10-20 years that have brought us to this point:
1. Debt became fashionable, even prestigious, world-wide. The most storied names in business became debtaholics. This includes the financial players like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, but industrial-companies-that-became-financial-companies, like GM, Ford, GE and so on. This level of comfort with debt is unprecedented in history, and the historical parallels are dark.
2. The most prestigious nation on earth piled on debt, and other nations copied. US Debt/GDP is at 320%, much higher than even the great depression peak. Derivatives further magnify the leverage - as an example, AIG went down because of the magnified leverage not captured on their balance sheet.
3. US savings rate dropped from 10% in the mid 80s to near zero today, and it even went negative for a period.
History teaches us that such toxic debt episodes are followed by a prolonged hang-over, followed by a social aversion to debt and eventual recovery. The patient has just passed out - the hanger over hasn't even started. It is way too soon to talk about a recovery.
So it is very appropriate to be very concerned and fearful for our collective futures. What can we do as individuals? Swear off debt, live very frugally, lower our expectations.
To paraphrase, just because a lot of people are panicking doesn't mean we shouldn't be really afraid! <comment><USER4> _To paraphrase, just because a lot of people are panicking doesn't mean we shouldn't be really afraid!_

To paraphrase, when a lot of people are panicking it's the ideal time to find some fucking spine and _not_ panic.

What is panicking going to accomplish? What will being afraid gain you? NOT A DAMN THING! What does _not_ panicking get you? Ask the people who aren't. It gets you lots of money and opportunity. Many people have already made hundreds of thousands of dollars by shorting pretty much any stock possible. Many companies are waiting for their competition to start laying off tons of staff and making deep cuts to spending so they can speed ahead by making smart choices and spending money where it can put them ahead.

From: _Economy is booming! Credit is free! Leverage everything! Next quarter will be awesome!_

To: _Economy is destroyed! Take all your money and put it under your pillow! Sell the house! Expect to be poor!_

Just two different forms of compulsory reactions that have a complete lack of foresight.

The act of making good financial decisions has not changed. Minimizing both debt and overspending has always been the _right_ thing to do. I have zero debt and as close to zero excess possessions as is possible without living in a log cabin in the woods. I'm not going to change a damn thing except possibly spend more money because stupid fear-mongering like this will create all sorts of opportunity for people who can see the forest for the trees.

Why something like a recession would inspire _fear_ in anyone is a complete mystery to me. There's nothing you can do about it so stop being afraid and stop spreading fear as a viable option. Instead, sit down, take a deep breath, realize that this isn't the "end of the world as we know it," and move on with your life. Jesus, you people sound like a whining, crying broken fucking record. All this recession has caused me to "feel" is pissed off constantly.

This argument sounds like this, except not hilarious because you're _serious_ : <http://video.yahoo.com/watch/2184997/6808646>

<comment><AUTHOR> You are putting words in my mouth I didn't say. I am in the same position as you: zero debt (no mortgage or car payment even), almost all cash or precious metals and renting my home. So this panic doesn't mean anything personally in terms of drop in assets.

But I do see a fall in my income, so I am tightening my belt - by which I mean things like eating out less, stretching out that laptop for another few months, buying fewer non-essentials, less expensive vacations and so on. That is all I am advocating.

It is a rational, non-panicky response to some fairly dire economic circumstances ahead. If you question whether the economic circumstances will become dire, well, bookmark this thread, come back in 1 year, 2 years and 5 years.

<comment><USER4> I want whatever drugs you are on.

Read your post. You said it's time to be fearful. That we should be really afraid. That a lot of people are panicking and maybe it's time to join them. I'm paraphrasing, but it's in black and white (well, gray and other gray).

Then you come back with this. Essentially, "I'm making less money, so I need to spend less money." So, either you don't believe your own words ("rational, non-panicky response" != "we should be really afraid") or you really believe that a slight decrease in your income warrants advocating dangerous responses like mass-fear and panic.

Presumably, you live in America. This means that by the mere fact of where you were birthed you have been given, free of charge, essentially all the opportunities that this life holds for a human being. I know first hand how horrible life can be for people not handed what we have been. Your inability to financially continue eating steak dinners every night is so far removed from the constant suffering and strife that you could be experiencing that your entire current view is laughable. If you were living on the streets you'd have it better than hundreds of millions of people in this world.

So, no, it's not time to panic. It's not time to be afraid. It's time to survey the landscape, take in the changes, and roll with them. It's time to stop talking about this bullshit. Weather the storm, take advantage of other peoples' fears, and come out on top. It's time to do the same thing any smart, rational, successful person with the right perspective would do.

And, no, I will not bookmark this thread. I don't want to be further reminded of just how much people like you take for granted and what you think we should do when life throws us a little curveball.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are making baseless assumptions. I was born in a very poor country, to parents neither of whom could afford to finish high school. My worldview was shaped by a world where debt was just not an option (think loan sharks & 300%+ annual interest rates when inflation was in the 10% annual range) and mortgages simply didn't exist. If you got into debt that you couldn't repay, you got thugs at the door to collect.

So I am already used to much worse circumstances than the worst that is likely ahead in America. Having said that, what lies ahead for America is going to be very painful economically, even more so because Americans by and large have no recent memory of such economic pain, so lack the "inoculation" that lesser societies have built up due to periodic crises. Deep structural changes are inevitable - and such changes in the economy end up having profound cultural and social impact, some of which is unpredictable.

I would personally do fine both because my personal balance sheet is in fine shape and because I have a lot of inoculation. Can you say that about the average American?

These are the things I said we should be afraid of.

<comment><USER4> Saying we should be afraid of the unpredictable is like saying we should be afraid of a meteor crashing into earth.

(1) We have no idea how likely it is _to_ happen (2) There's nothing we can do to stop something unpredictable (3) If something unpredictable does happen, deal with it then

Despite the fact that I disagree with your level of alarmism in general, I won't even argue the unlikelihood of these profound cultural and social impacts you suggest. I will just continue to stick with my original argument that there's nothing to gain by fear or panic and continue to be right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> SERIOUSLY, you guys need to get off this bandwagon. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the world enconomy. Resources are available, production is huge everywhere and rising, more and more people are entering the rich class, more and more countries are becoming industrialised, there are very few active wars right now.

We live in an unprecendented era of peace and prosperity, and this 'problem' we are observing is just a matter of numbers being pushed from one person to the other. But there is still value being produced, there is still demand for that value.

You should become afraid when you see people withdrawing their savings from the banks, and when a major hostile economic block comes up. What we're observing is just economic readjustment, it's not critical.

If in a year this situation still exists, I'll eat my hat on a webcam. You can hold me to that.

<comment><USER6> Quite right. To put this into concrete terms, we still have all the food we can eat, adequate medical care, enough homes to house everyone, assorted consumer goods that make us happy, and the means to produce all of these as needed.

The crash of the financial markets has not reduced the production capacity of any of these goods or services. There will still be enough of them, only the dollar values attached will be different.

In contrast, during the great depression, lots of _actual physical wealth_ was destroyed. Various other policies reduced production capacity, most notably the NRA and Smoot Hawley.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl>

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Recovery_Administratio...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Recovery_Administration)

<comment><USER7> One way to look at the current crisis is that a whole lot of long term plans, once thought to be sensible, were abruptly shown to be unworkable.

These plans included actual inventories, lines of production, houses and other buildings, and actual people working at actual jobs to support all of these.

Those plans now have to be scrapped. That means inventories wasted, lines of production shut down, and people fired. We cannot just keep building more and more houses as if nothing has changed.

Shutting down production lines and firing people is a real destruction of wealth.

This destruction will have secondary and tertiary effects. We've already seen how the cascade works in the stock market. Over the next year (or more) you will see it in production and employment levels.

> The crash of the financial markets has not reduced the production capacity > of any of these goods or services.

It has, because a considerable fraction of that productive capacity was allocated based on false assumptions.

We have to reallocate that productive capacity to new purposes. We don't yet know exactly what capital and labor needs repurposed, or to what new purposes. The way we find that out is by businesses contracting or going bankrupt and people being thrown out of work. Eventually, other businesses will expand, new ones will start up, and people will find new jobs. It will take a while, and in the meantime, it is going to hurt.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agreed! Thanks for that succinct explanation of the real world connection to all this financial destruction.

A whole lot of capital and labor needs to be repurposed, and it is going to hurt, even without the political system making things worse. History teaches us that the odds aren't very good on that front- it is _not_ a Republican vs Democrat issue, nor for that matter a US vs Europe issue.

<comment><USER5> Nah, the effect will be minimal. A house is either being built or it's not being built. The investment in a house that is not built yet is not that much, for the simple reason that there are not THAT many houses being built.

This economic correction will have an effect, but it will not be terrible - <USER3> only affects very tiny parts of the global trade, and most of what is affected is just U.S based and very local.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 10 years is about the length of a business cycle, which is about the smallest accurately-measurable period in economics. The most frustrating thing about politics today is that before 1980, all we hear about history is vague references to things like the Holocaust and the Great Depression.

The thing about our current situation is that it's not something that caught anyone who was paying any sort of attention by surprise. The Federal Government has been making/encouraging bad loans from the moment they had the power to do so. What started out as federal housing assistance during the Great Depression has become Fannie and Freddie and our current crisis. The ideas of easy money and credit extend as far back into human history as we can go; at the very least they played a hand in the economic collapse of the USSR, Germany, Russia. We even suspect they played a large role in destroying one of the only ancient empires we know much about, Rome.

All of that to say, I know the politicians are running for office and thus have to frame things within the lifetimes of their constituents, but can't we, as intelligent people, construct a slightly wider historical lens for this discussion?

</comment><comment><USER9> 1\. World wide? What source are you referencing? The States sure, but I have no idea about the rest of the world and have never read anything talking about world wide debt rates.

2\. See number 1.

3\. The saving rate statistics are misleading because they don't include 401k and IRAs, which were not nearly as popular 10-20 years ago as they are today.

<comment><USER10> Since the financial system is indeed global, world wide is correct. Sure, it's only in the US, the UK and Spain that a housing bubble has burst (AFAIK, still, that's more world wide than the US alone), but financial institutions are in trouble in Germany, in Belgium and the Netherlands as well (again, AFAIK). In Iceland the collapse of the banking system is so severe the country as a whole (not just the banks!) is effectively bankrupt. And I just read on <http://fistfulofeuros.net/> that Ukraine is pretty close to something similar.

<comment><USER9> Right - markets. What about the debt rates the author referenced in his OP?

<comment><USER10> Good point. Apparently the UK has a situation similar to the US where debt rates are enormous. But you're right in that most of the world is rather more frugal than the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> According to this site (<http://zfacts.com/p/318.html>) our Debt is 70% of our GDP, not 320%. Not that it matters because the two aren't well suited to compare.

Debt is found on a balance sheet. GDP is found on a cash flow statement. A much more appropriate comparison would be debt to the value of the entire nation's assets. According to this site (<http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/how_bad_is_the_national_debt_r/>), the per capita debt is $162k but our per capita WEALTH is $300k.

We're going to be fine.

<comment><USER12> Wow, debt of 50+% assets is 'fine'?! Grab the nearest person who lived in the 50s, and ask them what they think of it. That we've grown accustomed to this sort of debt is the cause of all this mess.

<comment><USER13> Even if you owned nothing else, and had no other debt then a standard 80/20 mortgage has been considered a good deal all around for decades and still is. That's 80% debt to 20% asset at the time you assume the mortgage. Yeah, I'd say a 50:50 debt/asset is OK. The bigger concern is cash flow as shown by Debt to Income ratio because it speaks directly to your ability to service that debt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> From this slideshow, (<http://businessjive.com>) these are other things that also may have caused this:

1) Naked short selling: selling stocks you don't own or haven't even borrowed.

2) SEC not releasing information concerning hedge funds when they should have under the FOI act, because that may have revealed funds' "proprietary trading strategies", which may have been illegal due to their naked shorting.

3) The failure of large derivatives broker Refco in 2005, where in its failure, a significant amount of stock was scattered through the market that wasn't actually capitalizable due to naked shorting.

Since the failure of Lehman, the domino effect has been caused by a lack of trust in the positions of would-be lenders and borrowers: no one believes or can accurately determine another party's viability for a transaction to occur: a lack of commercial grease.

With the US being a central pillar in the global economy, other countries have failed too partly due to their connection to it.

Solutions: greater transparency, perhaps a business organization that companies can join if they reveal more about their actual balance sheets. Members can opt-in to view one another's positions before doing business: like befriending someone on Facebook or Friendfeed.

Also, perhaps from this pillar of transparency, it may be possible to cancel net debt positions computationally rather than let markets gradually build again. Many people may lose out, but others should be held accountable and people can move on.

<comment><USER15> the greater transparency solution would be only avalaible to big companies, who would employ armies of consultants and accountants to be declared "transparent", since a small business needs a minimum of $20k to get their balance sheets audited/certified

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you want to point fingers you only have to look at the federal reserve (1913).

Fractional reserve banking - Hey, let's give out invisible money ten fold (more today) than actually exists! Usury? Yeah, let's add more invisible money to it in the form of interest. We are geniuses!

</comment><comment><USER17> I do think that people panicking, while creating lots of problems, also creates really interesting opportunities because of how people give everything incorrect valuations in the near term and hence a sort of long term arbitrage opportunity is possible

</comment><comment><USER18> A country is not made of land; a country is made of its people. -- G.A.Rao

</comment><comment><USER19> If you're correct that a social aversion to debt will develop, then debt will become cheaper as demand decreases, at least after banks have money to lend again. In that case, it seems like swearing off debt as you suggest would be passing up a bargain.

Debt often makes sense.

</comment><comment><USER20> You could trace the problems back beyond fractional reserve banking and say that axing the Gold Standard and having a fiat currency was the first con.

Certainly, if credit is too cheap, asset prices will rise as borrowers outbid one another to pay more. Greenspan has to shoulder a lot of the blame for the recent boom.

Here in the U.K., our great leader, Gordon Brown, proclaimed "an end to boom and bust" when he became chancellor in 1997. He was right. Instead we had boom-boom-boom lasting ten years and are now going to have a bust to mirror it.

</comment><comment><USER21> "The root cause of this crisis is fractional reserve lending, and micromanagement of interest rates by the Fed in particular and Central Banks in general. The Fed started the party by slashing interest rates to 1%, but Central Banks everywhere drank the same punch to varying degrees." -- [http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2008/10/global- co...](http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2008/10/global-coordinated- rate-cuts-wont-solve.html)

</comment><comment><USER22> The three points above all refer to the financial system. I'm not entirely sold on this "it's not just the financial system it's systemic" argument.

The way I see it, the overall setup looks like this:

[capital] <\--> [financial system] <\--> [projects]

So basically the role of the financial system is to (i) allocate capital and (ii) manage risk. I think it is totally clear that the financial system failed with the latter, but where is the evidence that it failed with the former? With the "subprime loans" were the houses that were built shoddy? It's not like as a world or nation we went out and built some giant white elephant that is now useless. By and large the projects funded remain sound. The problem is that the financial system has seized up.

A few folks have suggested that rather than pumping several trillion of new capital to save the existing disfunctional financial system, we should just pick 20 banks out of bankruptcy, capitalize them and basically replace the existing financial system with a new one (and then distribute the shares in these banks to all citizens so it's not a government run thing).

Bottom line, the financial system is broken, but I'm not sure the fundamental underlying "projects" are themselves broken.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Bottom line, the financial system is broken, but I'm not sure the fundamental underlying "projects" are themselves broken._

In your diagram, you need to complete the loop, to more accurately reflect reality:

[capital] <\--> [financial system] <\--> [projects] <\--> [capital]

It is worth remembering how the financial system itself started breaking - <USER3> started with all those massively overvalued housing "projects" for which they lent money started going bad, which then spread to other credit classes like autos, commercial real estate and so on.

Ultimately, the financial system is choking on debt that became uncollectable, because the underlying projects that the debt financed proved economically unviable. In micro terms, household income could not service the debt on the house. None of the bailout schemes so far address that income issue. If they started mailing out checks to homeowners to help them pay their mortgages, they _can_ stop house prices from falling, but at the cost of hyper-inflation. In chess terms, we are at an economic checkmate scenario - all options are bad. The least bad option may not be politically viable, so we have to consider really bad scenarios too. At this point it is unpredictable which of the bad choices will be made.

Here is a nightmare scenario: start to _really_ worry if trade sanctions on China or outsourcing ban on India become a possibility. Such beggar-they- neighbor policies begot the Great Depression. We are not there yet, but how confident are you it won't happen once the US Congress gets "serious"?

<comment><USER22> I think:

[capital] <\--> [financial system] <\--> [projects]

better reflects reality in that inflows/outflows of capital to/from projects are funneled through the financial system. For example, investors (capital) are trying to take get capital out of hedge funds (who are in-turn invested in companies) and they can't b/c the financial system is "constipated."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> To borrow your analogy the patient is not passed out, he is vomiting all over the room due to credit&leverage intoxication. There is hoping he has coughed up all of that and then some, so he will stop doing that and begin being very sick but conscious, which would be a makred improvement over what we have right now.

Ok, allegories are fun but back to business:

we had some serious issues prior to great depression with stock market - people didn't know how to be moderate. With some education and regulation we got over that (e.g. dot com was not that bad). So now we have a similar problem with leverage - people failed to excersize moderation. They will learn and credit and leverage will assume their natural place as instruments of funds management.

Having said that, I think there are more shoes to drop yet. While there might be a short-term rally, there will be even more drops after that. The size of downturn should be equal to size of run-up (minus the productivity gains over the last decade).

</comment><comment><USER24> It might be your last change to charge up a mountain of debt before its all gone. Might as well do it now if we're all going bankrupt!

</comment><comment><USER25> A depression just means a lot of big companies are going to fail, thus leaving vacuums just begging to be filled.

But, yeah, the whole "hyper-inflation leading to a massively devalued currency, rampant unemployment and poverty, enormous waves of foreclosures, bankruptcies, and bank failures" thing is going to rather suck for a great many people.

Just remember, paradigm shifts = opportunity.

</comment><comment> patrickg-zill If you truly believe what you are saying, then it logically follows that you have bought a great deal of gold, silver, or other precious metals, which for 5000 years have been a measure of value and served as a hedge against inflation.

So, how much gold/silver have you actually purchased? Put your money where your mouth is...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I actually did purchase a meaningful (i.e as a fraction of my net worth) amount of gold, and have been buying for years. And for the rest of my net worth, I went all cash (dollar & yen) or short term treasuries some years ago - other than some small angel investments, which I will likely lose. And I have been renting the place I live. So this 40% stock market crash or the real estate bust hasn't meant anything to me personally. All I am saying is that there were many very smart people warning about these exact issues (examples: Paul Volcker, Warren Buffet, Nouriel Roubini, Steve Roach, Doug Noland ...) for many _years_. Alas, their pessimism, based on facts and logic, has proved entirely justified.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Economic reality: E(t) = A _t

where A is the summation of all current factors.

Average person's view of economic reality:

Dummies(t) = 5A_t + 90

Which means that average people see reality either better or worse than what it is and they're always late to the game.

<comment><USER26> Shameful edit:

Should be Dummies(t) = 5A(t + 90)

This error woke me up in the middle of the night.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Invest in precious metals, Lead and Brass.

<comment><USER27> Invest in soft commodities. World population is still growing and people still need to eat.

Oh yes. Just in case it gets ugly. Attend some MMA classes and load up on ammo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> After only looking at your the title: the world changes every day... go with it and get used to it!

</comment><comment><USER29> When did it ever stop changing?

<comment><USER30> _Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose._

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I do think that people panicking, while creating lots of problems, also creates really interesting opportunities because of how people give everything incorrect valuations in the near term and hence a sort of long term arbitrage opportunity is possible

</comment><comment><USER31> DICTATORSHIPS are like a good many other things in this world. They can be the best, or the worst, form of government. There are some excellent dictatorships, and there are some hateful ones. Nevertheless, be they good or bad, it generally happens that they are imposed by circumstances, and, when this is the case, the people concerned have no choice but to put up with them. Inasmuch as a nation cannot be too strongly urged not to drift into a situation which leaves it no alternative but helpless acquiescence, this brief and cursory survey of dictators as they have displayed themselves at successive stages of the world's history may not be without profit to the French people at this present juncture.

INTRODUCTION WE are constantly deluding ourselves with the notion that things are new, when, in truth, we are but repeating the experiences of former generations and treading the paths which they long since have trod. The dictatorships of our time came into being on the morrow of the day when President Wilson enjoined us to 'make the world safe for democracy. The victory of the Allies was universally hailed as a triumph for the democratic spirit in all its varied forms. Amid the din of falling thrones, three empires came crashing to the ground. The monarchical system, by which the control of the State is vested in one sole person, seemed doomed to extinction. Who would have dreamt that one-man rule would ever come into its own again? _When the first dictator came upon the scene, his advent was greeted with incredulity. A few days, men prophesied, would surely set a term to his dominion. In France, one politician went the length of publicly deriding him as a comic-opera Caesar_. And then, when the fashion seemed to be spreading, people consoled themselves with the belief that, if it was an epidemic, it would assuredly stop short at the frontiers of the Greater Powers, of those countries which had a liberal tradition at the back of them, and a firmly established progressive wing. _As for inflation and debased currencies, these things, though not unknown, were looked upon as evils proper to impoverished, primitive or ill-governed communities. It was not for a moment to be thought of that the wealthier nations, equipped as they were with a well-organized financial system, would fall a prey to such grave disorders. All this turned out to be a grievous miscalculation. The monetary system fell a victim to disease in the very places where it seemed to be flourishing most securely. Dictatorships sprang up in countries where they had long been looked upon as unimaginable_. There they took firm root, despite the fact that, for a long time, the dictators themselves, when still no more than popular sedition- mongers, had never been taken seriously. It is no mere caprice that has led us to connect a disordered currency with the emergence of despotic forms of government. The one precedes, and often begets, the other, because, for the vast majority of people, it is the most obvious symptom of national disintegration. (300 pages later)

CONCLUSION measure pfuncertainty. It is desirable to be sparing of Itfiem7 desirable, that is, not to have need of them, or not to drift into them unwittingly. Eckermann once asked Goethe if the human race would ever see the end of way "Yes" answered the sage of Weimar, provided that governments are always intelligent and the governed always reasonable. We will say the same of dictators. We can do without them on the same condition. But good governments are rare. And Voltaire said that the bulk of the human race always were, and always would be, imbeciles. ps: a bonus from the same author: [http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/bainville_jacques/conse...](http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/bainville_jacques/consequences_pol_paix/consequences_pol_paix.html)

\--- The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. [http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/07/privacy_and_th...](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/07/privacy_and_the.html)

[http://www.defenselink.mil/comptroller/defbudget/fy2009/budg...](http://www.defenselink.mil/comptroller/defbudget/fy2009/budget_justification/pdfs/07_Military_Construction/11_NSA.pdf)

<comment><USER31> This problem will remain for at least as long as you are in denial (and take points away to make the diagnosis fade away and disappear).

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> A few crooks got rich and they want us to panic while they run away unpunished.

After the biggest profits ever in the oil industry I can hardly see this as a recession.

Where is that money now?

</comment><comment><USER33> "Most prestigious nation on earth"? Update: (I had to puke.) You are just 'known'. Known as most militant and most dangerous. You are directly or indirectly responsible for every war in the last 60 years. If you sniff oil, or other form of money, you are ready to kill even civilians or children. You are also ready to send your sons to die for smell of money. You have biggest number of homeless in the world, even children and so we can continue whole day... but I still hope there are some people there who understand this and can do something with that. This is how we perceive you here in Europe, my fellow "Americans". :) or :(

<comment><USER34> This isn't Reddit. A sweeping statement like "[The U.S.] is directly or indirectly responsible for every war in the last 60 years" doesn't even relate to this particular topic. I don't understand what mental state you're in where you feel a strong urge to lash out at "America", but those comments are detrimental to the quality of this discussion, _regardless of whether they're true_.

<comment><USER33> It's morning here, I'm sitting at the desk, drinking coffee and I can assure you I'm OK mentally :) Also I can assure you that short facts in my comment ARE strongly related to current state of the market.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Smoove Text. An inspiration discovery platform - <AUTHOR> https://apps.apple.com/us/app/smoove-text/id1362792811?ign-mpt=uo%3D4 <comment><AUTHOR> Product page with video if you have a droid. [https://farhanf.github.io/smoovelanding/](https://farhanf.github.io/smoovelanding/)</comment>


Ask HN: Why is bufferapp allowed by Facebook? - <AUTHOR> I'm working on app very similiar to bufferapp but I found out that facebook recently revamped their application policies.
If you create a new app in facebook's dev portal, you'll have to ask for the 'publish_actions' permission. Further, you'll also have to provide detail explanation for why you need this and show a screencast of it following their policies. It even asks for a demo account...
Reading, https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/review/prefill
Shows that you may not pre-fill any message content and they are explicit about making sure that the content being shared was manually entered in by the user.
Clear bufferapp violoations.
1. "Pre-fill the user message parameter with any content the user didn't enter themselves, even if they can edit or delete that content before sharing. This applies to posts, comments, photo captions, and photo album captions."
2. "Prompt users to click or tap a button to auto-populate the user message parameter. Your app can suggest content, but the person using your app should choose to manually copy and paste or type that content themselves."
Anyone know on what technicality bufferapp is allowed to do this? <comment><AUTHOR> [https://cl.ly/1t3B1V2g1w3D](https://cl.ly/1t3B1V2g1w3D) is an example of their setup page to request for access to 'publish_action'

</comment><comment><USER2> Doesn't buffer just post content the user entered before, which is explicitly allowed in your first link, or am I missing something?

<comment><AUTHOR> Buffer allows you schedule messages from a feed. Using buffer, you can subscribe to feeds and schedule content from these feeds one by one with a click of a button.

<comment><USER2> Right, forgot about that part. I'd argue the intent is the same as if they typed it into the app? It's still a message they chose, not something modified by buffer. Maybe that's a way, + of course they are big and already exist and Facebook decided they'd rather have them around. Just because there are guidelines doesn't mean they apply to everybody.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea I understand. I just hope they will not reject my app :(

<comment><USER2> Try to make it very clear that you don't modify the content posted, that seems like the best bet to me (assuming that is the case). Good luck!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Case study in community relations and why the GitHub hack happened - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/5228

<comment><AUTHOR> Particularly funny is ([https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/5228#issuecomment-4290...](https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/5228#issuecomment-4290842)).

I'm sure that that is great solace to the GitHub customers, staff, and any other sites affected by this vulnerability.

Developers: we need to do better.</comment>


The Dallas Mavericks were plagued by a toxic culture. She is turning it around - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/30/success/dallas-mavericks-ceo-cynthia-marshall-boss-files/index.html <comment><AUTHOR> Kudos both to Cynthia Marshall for executing and to Mark Cuban for bringing her in. This story shows what can be achieved when change gets a strong mandate.</comment>


Why Every Innovator is in the Toy Business - <AUTHOR> http://blog.inc.com/nolan-bushnell/2009/06/why_every_innovator_is_in_the.html <comment><USER2> Does this mean that google was not an innovator?</comment>


Ford made an electric Mustang with a manual transmission - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/5/20950148/ford-electric-mustang-manual-prototype-stick-shift-lithium-sema-2019 <comment><USER2> This Hacker News link title accurately reflects the headline on the verge.

But when I read it, I thought to myself: "Are they referring to an electric vehicle that Ford made, say, in 1971? Or did they just make this thing?"

The better way of phrasing it would be: Ford has made an electric Mustang with a manual transmission. In fact, the first sentence of the article uses the perfect tense: "Ford has created..."

I suppose journalists think the simple past tense sounds cool -- even though it doesn't communicate as well?</comment>